Journalists should invest in journalism startups, particularly now
businessside.co
businessside.co
Where precisely are the journalists who are paid sufficiently well for their skill that they have liquidity to invest in startups?
edit: alright turns out he's "former chief of staff at the Atlantic" but I still remain convinced he's decently out of touch with everyday journalists' financial situation.
You (we?) are some of the minority of humans that value journalism. Unfortunately.
Wouldn't you like to be in control of it for your troubles?
What did it really cost to start The Intercept, though? Salaries aside - or not.
What can be done with new tech that makes publishing cheaper than ever?
https://pressthink.org/2013/10/why-pierre-omidyar-decided-to...
Nothing. IMO that’s all been done: replacing the printing presses with the internet made it incredibly cheap to publish journalism. Producing journalism, however, remains a solidly human task that resists automation. And every time anyone tries the result is notably inferior.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Plan
Though I’d note The Economist has staff and former staff as minority shareholders.
While there are successes, the total size of the industry has been declining.
If you do then there is a chance you might become rich.
Venture capitalists don’t invest their own money, they raise funds from other people and institutions, and make funding decisions on their behalf.
The idea here is that journalists have skills and domain knowledge that would help them make better than average decisions when it comes to media startups.
So: Raising and directing capital, not necessarily originating it.
I do believe generally-speaking that folks with editorial leadership are probably as good if not better as run-of-the-mill domain VCs at assessing founder quality in a journalism context, as the article suggests.
But really we're talking about asking journalists to consider a career in venture capital, which is...fine I guess?
One great journalism startup that I think is a huge success is Defector. A bunch of journalists, mostly coworkers from a previous media outlet, joined together to create a new company as a worker owned co-op. It's never going to be a unicorn, but it employees a couple dozen people sustainably as they have been profitable every year of their existence. Most importantly, the company is run how the journalists want to run it. They don't chase page views or cover a topic specifically because some businessperson in corporate leadership wants them to cover it. I think we need more of that.
Interesting that they have a rev share with their development vendor, and rely on that vendor for all engineering and product.
edit: Journalism is one of those trades where people care about their craft. They're passionate and emotionally invested in it, and it's been threatened in recent decades, so anyone affected is primed to make misguided decisions in an attempt to preserve that which they care about.
No beak for me, this is going to bankrupt desperate journalists in a massive exit scam.
I think if you've chosen to be a journalist, it's probably because you believe there's money to be made in journalism and/or because you believe that journalism is making the world better, and in either of those cases it seems a worthwhile use of your excess funds/effort. You should probably have a separate rainy day fund that's un- (or ideally anti-) correlated, and an uncorrelated retirement fund. Y'know, with all the extra money journalists tend to have.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstrips
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Brown_(journalist)
Maybe the article title should be “Journalists that have successful exits in non-journalism startups should invest in journalism startups”
At the same time, maybe smaller independent news outfits that are run by at most a handful of people, that cover more local news might be able to make it work if they keep their expenses low.
Even sophisticated people like paulg make comments like "why doesn't someone just make factual news".
It suggests to me that thinking about epistemology and marketing is a learned skill.
What you are referring to is called branding and this particular form appeals to your sensibilities.
All the top media outlets try to use a similar brand. Ultimately you are consuming a second hand synthesis woven into popular narratives, not anything more true.
But there are a great many serious people who take pride in speaking the truth and exposing reality that people don't want to hear. It's beyond cynical to think that every single one of them is fake.
Seriousness and truthfulness are separate axis. Serious branding gives the appearance of authority.
> frauds like all the folks at FOX
You will find they have similar credentials as the outlets you enjoy. In fact, they probably used to work there.
> every single one of them is fake.
It's not they they are fake. It's that nobody has a monopoly on truth or methods of finding it.
Can journalists provide valuable information? Certainly. But they have their own systematic and personal biased. In particular, they are an extremely tight knit community performing for their peers.
Joe's podcast is obviously goofy as can be. But I actually prefer being explicit about your biases, instead of faux objectivity.
That's moving the goal posts into the parking lot. Joe Rogan and James Risen (as an example) are both fallible human beings capable of bias and errors, but one of them is 1000X better at eliciting and distributing truth than the other. And it's not by dint of their relative credentials, it's because one of them is smarter, more dedicated, more moral, has studied their craft, worked at it for decades, puts in hours of legwork, has the courage to risk their personal safety for the good of the reading public and the other is a drug-addled meathead who is interested in making money. Not that you're not allowed to enjoy his show, but it's purely entertainment and if you learn anything that happens to be true it's purely by coincidence.
I don't believe anyone sees Rogan as a journalist or anything along those lines.
There's a reason people prefer listening to the guest to speak instead of being taught to think and live by white journo women.
Yes: it’s confirming their priors and not challenging any preconceived notions.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Rogan is fine but it’s largely an entertainment podcast. The idea that it’s a replacement for hard news doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Are many of these profitable? What would make them investable? This industry doesn’t exactly print money.
I didn’t think the writing was that much of being a journalist - isn’t finding stories (and having ideas) just going to be even more important while AIs regurgitate irrelevant press releases into articles and turn clinical trials into X-gives-you-cures-cancer (in mice) fodder?
- Contentville. Whatever happened to that?
- Brill's Content? Started by the heir to a streetcar manufacturing company.
- Vice Media is in bankruptcy and about to be sold.
- Gawker - crushed by Peter Thiel.
Any big successes?
Politico - Sold for $1 billion to Axel Springer.
Barstool Sports - Sold for $390 million to Penn National Gaming.
The Athletic - Acquired by the New York Times for $550 millio.
- Aging Media (sold yesterday to PE) - Morning Brew (sold for $75M) - Blockworks bootstrapped and just raised first round at $135M valuation with $25M revenue - Skift is a profitable media venture - Industry Dive (sold for $530M) - Politico (sold for $1B)
You also have established companies like Informa.
With the way the world is rushing headfirst into lying LLMs and holding them up as gospel. I don't quite see the world going your way.