I call March 3 Firing Day.
I lost both my career’s jobs on March 3. In 1983 I was dumped by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. In 1997 I was dumped by CMP Media. Other than those brief periods, I’ve been a freelance all my life.
Had I stayed at ZDNet, a full-time gig I left in 2010, I would have lost my job this Firing Day, as Red Ventures dropped tech journalists from ZDNet and CNet.
I’m told the culprit is ChatGPT, which can deliver conversational text from descriptive inputs. But it’s really Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is designed to attract Google to content, to maximize its audience. If your content is listed first in Google, people will click on it. If it’s on the 5th page of a Google search, they’ll never find it.
This is a fine strategy for mass media. But it sucks for journalism. I know because I still work for people who traffic in SEO.
Journalism is content for a defined audience. You organize people around where they live, their industry, or their lifestyle. You serve that audience, gain its loyalty, advocate for its interests, and thus earn money from them. You capture them and you hold them. Holding them is the key.
The problem in the Internet Age, as my professors at Northwestern warned me in 1978, is that the Internet doesn’t let you sell ads for a defined audience. Google lets you define your target any way you like, then buy those eyeballs at a run-of-network rate. And you can do this by yourself. Whole categories of people go away, not just ad salesmen but (it turns out) writers and editors as well.
The response by the industry has been paywalls, which don’t work. They limit your audience to only those who will buy access by the year. They destroy your reach. No newspaper yet offers a per-day or per-piece rate for their content. It’s a tragedy.
The boomlet in podcasts and e-mail newsletters is all about defining audiences through a free subscription. You then up-sell them into paid subscribers. You justify the cost with guilt (we need your money) and services (member-only). You sell ads for the free versions, which hopefully reach your whole target. You then try to make your living on the memberships.
The brief excitement over Axios lay in their trying to use e-mail to build local newsrooms. That’s why Cox Enterprises paid $250 million for the company. Its defined audiences and uniform style were a platform on which to build local news teams, or teams serving any defined market.
What’s hilarious, to me, is that this is just what people were talking about over 50 years ago, when Walter Cronkite wandered around a “futuristic house” and watched someone pull a printout of headlines. It’s what Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu was about, building depth from hyperlinks. The Web succeeded, while these other things failed, because the design of Tim Berners-Lee wasn’t based on commerce.
Is there a way forward? There is. The audience for any publication defined by a place, an industry or a lifestyle. It’s a community. Build community.
Fediverse services like Mastodon are free. They can be installed on a server at your office, at a service provider, or in the cloud. They use a common protocol. It’s open source.
Instead of leading people to a paywall, publishers should be leading them to a community service. That’s what they should be paying for, safe, structured communication within the community. That service can be connected to other communities, and those connections should be free.
Mastodon, which works like Twitter, is the best known of these community services, but there are others. Create those which best serve your community, create loyalty through your support of these services, and only go to the wider Internet when there’s something you want it to know.
