Marc Andreessen: Why I’m Bullish on the News
politico.com
politico.com
But if news consists, in some significant part, of journalism -- of gathering perspectives and verifying facts and giving voice to stories and ultimately serving as an independent check on government and power -- then it is troubling to think giving up on this is the only future Andreessen sees for news.
We'd need to consider far worse attacks against the powerless.
There may well be a lot of bad, boring, or inconsequential journalism out there designed to generate click-throughs -- the push for this is partly why I left the industry -- but you can look up the list of Pulitzer Prize winners, recent and past, if you need a reminder of why we need an independent press that acts as a public service.
Speaking truth to power is not congruent to tearing down the dominant paradigm.
If you oppose the dominant paradigm, it should be because the dominant paradigm is wrong, not because it's dominant.
What is this "check" then? SCOTUS checks legislation by throwing it out. Nobody has elected or consented to "journalists" having a constitional role. That being said, the constitution protects the people to talk amongst themselves, so that the electorate is itself effective, and can check power via the ballot box.
The issue at hand is the role of money in the "talk amongst yourselves" narrative. And its potential corrupting influence (bascially--buying vote for special interests and PR clients).
> Paying attention to the business doesn’t equal warped coverage.
which would be nice if it were true, but it begs the question of why we should believe that there is a business model out there that doesn't grossly warp coverage (worse than what we already have). The news-focused business models I've seen in the wild warp coverage fairly heavily in directions I don't entirely approve of and it seems that the new models are just as bad if not worse than the old ones. Why should I believe this will change?
We should believe that this business model exists if we believe that there is a demand for a truly unbiased, unwarped news outlet. If there is truly a demand, then whatever outlet provides it will be so successful that the business side will have no trouble selling advertisements (or advertorials, which are only a problem to me if not called out - and in many cases just end up functioning as extremely high quality native ads, rather than ruining journalism).
The problem arises if there is not a substantial demand for this, but that is much more of a civic problem than a journalism problem. If someone writes perfect, high quality, objective journalism, but no one reads it or even cares to know it exists, what then?
My read? Some reporters will be out there, gathering news, and the very best will rise. What we call journalism (editorials and investigative pieces) will remain in existence, but will move to personal blogs, websites of what were once traditional newspapers, and new media (places like Grantland, Slate, The Atlantic's website, Vanity Fair's site, etc.). There will also be a major increase in local, citizen generated coverage of news, and what used to be local newspapers and news stations will becoming aggregators of local content. I don't really think much changes about journalism beyond opening it up to more people and changing the medium/deliverer of news.
Journalists irked me. Dangerous people. Arrogant. Flighty. Prone to exploiting social norms of disclosure to get a story. Always in a rush to do the minimum possible to hit the quota by deadline.
And essential to the functioning of a free and open society. Like lawyers, we hate them, but we'd be in deep trouble without them.
We already have the Andressen model of "News". It's called long copy marketing, and it's really annoying. No substantial positive public externalities come from it. Oh, and I guess gossip sites too. A critical bulwark of the yeomanry, gossip sites.
Grantland, to me, has figured this out better than anyone else (at least of the largest journalism endeavors). It helps that Bill Simmons is a pioneer of open subjectivity as a modern journalist, but most of their staff blends some level of subjectivity into their work (even Zach Lowe, who Simmons calls Spock in a reference to his rationality, and who admits to losing his personal team fandom after working as a journalist, has a weekly piece called "10 Things I Like and Don't Like). It also is probably worth noting that, being an ESPN website, they don't really need to worry about breaking news, as they just work closely with the traditional "reporters" of ESPN (although even then, guys like Marc Stein still inject their subjective views a bit).
There's a place for old fashioned, unbiased reporting. However, it may be the case that this style of journalism becomes a supplement, existing on Twitter and in interviews, to Andreesen's proposed "marketplace of ideas." The decentralized nature of the internet makes this much more realistic than it was when television and newspapers controlled access to information.
"There’s a reason so many newer sites are writing with verve and voice: It works."
I think that statement hinges pretty strongly on how we define "working", and I would posit that page views and ad sales should not be the metric by which we measure journalistic success. It's true that technology has made it easier for a lot of people to publish their opinions, and that's fantastic, but there's still enormous merit in having news sources which attempt to present news objectively.
That idea may have some merit, but journalistic success requires investment, which generally requires return, and page views and ad sales (ad sales aren't some new internet thing, either) are generally the fastest ways to generate that.
>>there's still enormous merit in having news sources which attempt to present news objectively.
He never claims otherwise. He explicitly qualifies his excitement over increased subjectivity in journalism with a claim that objectivity isn't the only worthwhile pursuit. He is simply excited that objectivity isn't the only form of journalism being pursued, not advocating its demise.
Right, I just think it's a bit weird to laud the increase of subjective reporting when it realistically also represents a decline in objective reporting; an effect which is decidedly not new and could reasonably be argued to be suboptimal. (Don't get me wrong, I am aware that there was no magical era in the history of journalism where reporters were magically unbiased, but I do think that objective reporting is valued less now than it once was, and I think it's unfortunate.)
Regarding ad sales; it's true that ads have always existed but in the age of subscription newspapers buying an ad in the more reputable ones cost more. Now page views are king, and long-term objectives of maintaining and increasing journalistic standards are no longer economically justified (or less so, at any rate). The new reality is that producing "viral" content (ie. link bait) is the key to making money in news, and I believe that to be at odds with high quality journalism.
This is only true if you believe that the total amount of "reporting" available is static. That is not true. In fact, it's arguably been the reverse, as the factors that have allowed more subjective reporting have also enabled more to go into objective journalism (just Youtube alone has enabled more to provide truly objective journalism in the form of easy filming). The journalism game is not zero sum. It is likely correct that the percentage of journalism that objective-style journalism has gone down, but it's almost certainly not true that objective-style journalism has decreased in a raw sense (for one, investigative journalism has never been more attainable for those not specifically employed to do so - the fact that there are less writers who are specifically employed to do so doesn't mean the amount occurring has decreased).
There is also likely some level of nostalgia-based reasoning here, since prior to the internet, it was substantially easier for those in control of the distribution channels to get away with embellishment, while today, inaccuracies would be caught much faster.
As for nostalgia; people control distribution channels today, too, but that's somewhat orthogonal to my point.
But there's been very little objective reporting through the entire course of history. Humans have biases, preconceptions and filters. History, itself, is the record written by the victors.
w/r/t journalism, this is evidenced via word choices, areas of focus and emphasis, paths followed up or left alone. Read two reports of the same trial testimony. Read coverage of a basketball game by two journalism outfits you respect. They won't be identical. They'll vary widely on some points. Humans are subjective, journalists are humans, their reportage is on a spectrum of subjectivity. Believing otherwise could be harmful.
Statements like this suggest to my mind that we're in a new gilded age, where journalism becomes a marketing channel.
Marc Andreessen, the famous Silicon Valley mogul known for his vehement defense of bigots and assholes, now teaches journalists why they've been doing it all wrong. Another Rupert Murdoch in the making?
> Marc Andreessen is co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
I am sure that to most people here he is is afforded rock-star status because he is the guy that co-founded Netscape (and then went on to do other things like dabble in VC). Interesting how Netscape is no longer the big thing on his resume, he trades his reputation and name on what he does now rather than what he did back then.
By way of an automotive analogy, if someone asked who Lewis Hamilton is, then you could eulogize about how much of a living legend he is, ramble on about his many victories, mention how he is Britain's wealthiest sportsman and so on and so forth.
However, (and particularly to someone who really doesn't know who Lewis Hamilton is), then you could quite reasonably say 'apparently he does a little bit of driving'. That would not be a slight or an insult directed at Lewis Hamilton or the person you are talking to. You could also say that Lewis Hamilton has 'made a bob or two from it'. That would not be 'misrepresentative language' in the pejorative sense, just pure understatement, that is all.
Anyway, who is this 'next sequioa capital' you speak of? Weird how they don't use a capital letter for the word 'capital', but I digress. Do you honestly think that Andreessen gives a damn about being bigger than them?
Andreesen argues: "But the objective approach is only one way to tell stories and get at truth. Many stories don’t have two sides."
First: this is a mischaracterization of objectivity.
Objectivity doesn't mean "consider both or all sides of an argument", it means "judgment based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices" (WordNet 2006). Very often, one (or more) sides of a story is simply wrong. Worse: they're often quite deliberately muddying the waters.
This is a point emphasized by economic historian Philip Mirowski: "[Neoliberals] honestly think that it's OK to pump lots of noise into the marketplace of ideas. That doesn't hurt things."
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7ewn29w-9I @ 39m30s
And this is pursued as a deliberate strategy called "agnotology" by Robert N. Proctor of Stanford: "the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. " More: http://redd.it/2363bo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology
On Andreesen's idea of tearing down the "Chinese wall" between reporting and business: "No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works."
First off, that's not true. Many high-value information-centric activities function in just such a way: publishing, arts and theatrical groups, and more. While they may produce "popular" works, a great deal of effort is put into activities which reach deeper into meaning and understanding than the larger market will generally support. There's a strong level of positive externality associated with these activities -- that is, a public good which market transactions cannot capture for the producer.
And so there's a reason for the Chinese Wall:
The market for news (as opposed to, say, the entertainment content produced by Fox) is one of information itself. And information is a very difficult economic good at the best of times:
• It's nonuniform. One piece of information isn't interchangeable with another, unlike, say, one bottle of water, shipment of grain, unit of lumber, mass-produced garment, or unit of unskilled or semi-skilled labor.
• Fixed and marginal costs are highly disproportionate. Sending someone to where the news is, or digging to the bottom of a complex story, is expensive in labor, time, and other resources. Once produced, words, copy, audio, or video can be reproduced and retransmitted around the world instantly for free. Much as for software.
• There's a very strong time value. For electronic market trading, now measured in miliseconds, and for much else, between minutes and a day or so for breaking stories. The precise same work product after its sell-by date is effectively worthless.
• The potential for bias, accuracy, and relevance in news is profound. Skewed reporting to meet business needs can very, very rapidly incentivize coverage which is not actually useful, informative, or relevant.
There's a strong argument to be made, in my opinion, that news should be strongly sheltered from market forces, and often the news sources which are the most reliable do come from organizations which are not run as well, from a business perspective, as they might be. Two of these, the British Guardian and the American Christian Science Monitor punch well above their weight, and even The New York Times, while profitable, is less so than its operations, size, and influence would seem to dictate.
Yes, there are any number of inefficiencies and obsolete practices within existing news organizations, but I find this set of prescriptions chilling.
If Andreesen's vision is the future of news, then I'm very, very bearish.
Real journalism costs money. A lot of money to produce and a lot of money (is) lost since they don't coddle to say, Exxon, GE, MS or Google.