danah boydI've been thinking a lot about Twitter and failure lately. And the absurdist Gladiator spectacle that we're all watching. I decided to turn it into a blog post: https://zephoria.medium.com/what-if-failure-is-the-plan-2f219ea1cd62
Adam Gurri@zephoria Thank you for this, fascinating read. To debate a point made in passing, I don't think I can agree with you on local news. Factually you're clearly right about the trajectory of those specific orgs and the investors. But if there was a business model that could support local journalism, we wouldn't have to rely on the old ones still being around to start/support new ones. Both are true, but Craigslist/the nationalization of news is the more important factors IMO
@adamgurri I think it's important to separate out what it takes to make news sustainable NOW vs. how we got here. The 60s/70s saw a huge surge of ad revenue, prompting companies to engage investors and go public. From this point on, it wasn't about sustainable business; it was about ROI to investors. Financiers took over the board seats, pushed to sell the land, forcing news co's to pay rent (which kept rising).
@zephoria Agree with you. Also agree that because of conflation between the two question (what it takes now vs what happened) people have read back answers to one question as being explanations of the history, which they are not.
@adamgurri News co's were able to be sustainable with no rent. But they couldn't do hockey stick ROI. And that's what the financiers expect. So that's why they squeeze. TODAY, news co's are in a worse place. They need investors, they don't own valuable property, advertising is especially cheap, etc. But I would argue that if financiers hadn't taken over these companies (and these co's hadn't gone public), we'd be having a VERY different convo.
@zephoria From an ecological point of view, even if the long term trajectory was still failure for those businesses, they might have lasted years or even decades longer, or places that went to 0 local outlets might have kept 1 or 2
@adamgurri This is indeed possible, although I still think that regulation of Gannett and Alden Global Capital and other such financiers would've done more to enable news futures than the historical erasure of Craigslist.
@zephoria Craigslist is more a stand-in though, no question the loss of classifieds would’ve rocked the industry and that was going to happen with the internet no matter what
Mark W. Alexander@zephoria @adamgurri
We got there when the networks'corporate masters decided the #FourthEstate produced Jack shit to the bottom line and factual information as a public service (even as a loss leader) didn't pull in as much ad $s as drama so why, the fuck, should they care?
The #FCC didn't seem to think the #Corporations owed citizens anything for the public airwaves anyway, so why bother.
News is now a profit center because we were stupid enough to allow it.