Why Mashable flamed out

Yup I'm aware. But you can't really fundamentally change the core value of your company no matter how you try.

I've seen a lot of "investigative journalism" pieces written by Buzzfeed designed to be controversial. There's a fine line between "let's investigate to let the public know what they really need to know" and "let's investigate to find all the dirty secrets of some successful organization or a person so that the public can publicly shame them and feel good about themselves while doing it".

To be fair, a lot of formerly reputable journalistic sources are doing the same thing, but Buzzfeed is the spiritual leader of this trend.

Which brings back to my main point--it's not a single publication, the entire media industry is rotting and eventually there will come a crash, which is a good thing, since from the ashes will arise quality.

You're thinking from the founder's perspective.

I was talking from the company valuation point of view.

More importantly, the whole point of my comment has nothing to do with who made how much. It's that everyone lost.

Risking an opinion here, since I am in no way expert on that area, I'd say you have to change advertising first.

Maybe pay walls work long term, but it is certainly hard to get out of the ground with one. There is no way to become known without publishing on the open. There is a Linux development bulletin that has a mixed model of a pay wall, but anybody with a direct link gets to see the article. I don't think it's viable to start with such model anymore either.

Intuitively, it feels like there is some advertising value that can only be delivered by quality oriented journalists. If that is the case, you will have to detect that niche and run after the advertisers one by one. Since there is practically no quality-oriented journalism out there (and there haven't been for a long time) it is hard to point at any model, or even to discover if that niche in fact exists.

As the saying goes, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes.

Which means this won't be exactly the same of course, but something will change.

People liking trash content is nothing new. It used to be TV in the old days, but now replaced with the Internet. If you compare the two, the stupid internet memes may actually be "better" than the passive consumption of TV content, since nowadays you're consuming AND creating content, so it's not 100% passive anymore.

That said, human nature won't change, so we will keep consuming shit content no matter what happens. And this is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about organizations that capitalize on this will die off.

Lastly, if you look around it's not so difficult to find "quality" content nowadays. Just go to Youtube and search for whatever niche topic you're interested in learning more about and you'll find at least a few good quality video.

> what do you imagine are the next steps?

At the moment, its very difficult for people to disassociate "brands" of the parent company with the writers.

For example, I've seen John Kasich write for the Washington Post Opinion pages. But most people expect Washington Post to be a liberal outlet.

Moving forward, a journalism outpost needs to recognize what their power is:

1. The ability to collect opinions from people that matter. Celebrities are a safer testbed: she said / he said gossip columns are necessary to develop the techniques and hierarchy of the brand... but such drivel is often times seen as "non-intelligent". The brand needs to disassociate itself from "drivel" yet still allow it.

"Twitter", for all its faults, manages to do this perfectly. No one blames Twitter for specific viewpoints. Other networks (such as Reddit, 4chan, or Facebook even) have accusations of bias levied regularly against them.

2. People attach themselves to Journalists and Editors these days. Not to papers or organizations. People don't respect "The Washington Post" so much as they respect "Robert Costa". Similarly, no one says they trust "Fox News", but a lot of people trust "Chris Wallace". See the difference?

3. This suggests that a Patreon model which champions specific journalists would work out better in this day and age. The journalists need to create personalities so that the readers can feel like they're connected with them more.

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It means that moving forward: "Journalists" become personalities who deliver the news. These personalities are collected by a neutral-feeling entity and people are willing to funnel money directly to the personality (see Patreon).

> Is this the stage where all of the "shallow" players fall while "quality" players begin to rise?

I think this is super-optimistic. I think the result of this stage will be further consolidation, demands for even higher margins due to a lack of competition, and even lower quality content.

Applies to a lot of industries and areas. I suspect the reason is the constant endevour to increase profits every quarter and year eventually leads to a saturation stage where the only way to increase the bottom line is to start producing cheap crap and shove it down the users throats. Superficial low quality garbage actually is what the market wants too. Check out the top ten list of Netflix most watched shows. You wont find much critically acclaimed content there. Whats the highest selling Kindle book of all time? Fifty Shades of Gray. The only channel which has been really consistent in quality over the years has been HBO.

Agreed.

"This Is My Next" had more quality articles in its short run than The Verge has had in any given month.