Re:filtered #2: Beyond Extinction

Thank you for subscribing to the second iteration of this newsletter. A month ago, I had sent out some lessons I learned at RFE/RL. Thanks to Anton republishing on The Fix.

If you had sent me a message by replying to the newsletter and haven’t heard back, that’s because I didn’t get them due to a setup error. That's now fixed.

You can reply to this email or reach me on mail@pboehler.net. Either way, I’ll get back to you soonest.

I still have some trepidation about this newsletter: Does my experience resonate? How can I help you in your work? Does the name make sense? 

This newsletter, its name, or its framing are definitely not perfect.

But despite all that, it has led to many great conversations. One constant in them was so much frustration with the state of media right now. 

So that’s helping me narrow down the value proposition to: new civic media opportunities (h/t MDIF friends for the framing); so my job to be done for you going forward:

I will try to give you (and myself) some hope here.

Three examples of views expressed:

1. If only we could leverage technology for greater reach ...
2. If only we could create business models to become truly independent from funders ...
3. If only we could just get platforms to help us get more attention to our reporting ...

Yes. Yes. Yes. But! I found Jeff Jarvis’ point on the much-discussed New Yorker article on the current media crisis helpful: 

“As media always do, The New Yorker tries to externalize, not internalize, the crisis. Journalists must ask: What is wrong with journalism? But they never do.”

In his Sulzberger Program at Columbia (apply!), Corey Ford's framework has three criteria for success of a media offering: feasibility, viability and desirability. That clarity is really helpful. 

Desirability is often the most misunderstood factor. There's no value to the usual lament that people like cat videos more than investigative exposés on big pharma.

It's more helpful to look at desirability not in the sense of what people may want to hear but as an intellectual challenge: what may make them want to listen and engage? Media consumption is a choice (albeit a distorted one). 

That often gets lost, see this by A.G. Sulzberger in an excellent conversation with the Reuters Institute’s Eduardo Suárez:  

“I think it’s really dangerous for an independent general interest news organization to chase a particular audience segment. That mindset leads one to distort coverage, especially in this highly polarized moment. Winning over a group too often means showing deference to that group’s narrative, and if an independent organization does that, it’s the most damaging thing that they can do.”

No doubt countless media executives have been quoting these lines to their teams as excuses to pursue the mediocre, commodified and generic news agenda that the market positions of earlier times had let them get away with. 

If you’re confronted with such arguments, here are some points that may help: 

1. Your publication will never be The New York Times. 
2. He is saying that they seek to compete on quality and depth of news coverage at such a scale. Can you?
3. He laid out the value proposition of the Times' core offering: “a product that is really focused on helping anyone who wants to be an engaged global citizen understand the breadth of the world, and the forces, people and ideas shaping it.” What is your proposition, really? And for whom, really? ("anyone who wants to be an engaged global citizen" is a segment.)  
4. General interest is just a proposition, a pitch, not the reality. They are betting that this framing will resonate with current subscribers and/or potential growth segments. That, again, requires his teams to look at segments (current/future) – notwithstanding the sales pitch. 

Brian Morrissey calls this the "Mechanical Watch Framework", discrete products for specific audience segments that complement each other.

The one overall takeaway from all the conversations is that dreams and aspirations are clashing with the reality of markets and demand. Digital editors of the last decade were perhaps "experts in dying field" of tech-fueled optimization. "RIP blitzscaling and owning the waterfront." – Morrissey in the lasted Rebooting edition.

No one can claim this is new. This is from a 1986 essay by the media critic James W. Carey:  

“Both journalism and education assume the constant student and the constant reader. American journalism assumes the figure who queues up every day for his dose of news and beyond that the commentary, analysis, and evidence that turn the 'news' into knowledge.”... “To rephrase Walter Lippmann, more journalists and scholars have been by self-importance than by liquor.”

You can’t force anyone to read, just like you can’t force anyone to eat at a restaurant, even if it’s free. If you too have worked in the restaurant industry to pay bills or perhaps to pursue your own Bourdain-esque aspirations, you may be reminded of a similar intensity of emotions in that industry around self-expression. 

Chances are we in media fall into the same trap as most failed upscale fusion restaurants do: offering an undifferentiated hybrid concoction that is more a reflection of managerial aspirations than audience desires.

Readers/viewers/listeners may want to experience flavors of another place, to detox and cleanse, or relive hometown memories, for a moment be part of another social class, or enjoy comfort of being social; and we give them an identity-devoid, nutrition-free sushi mozzarella chaat that reflects our (or donors') high-minded aspirations rather than their desires. 

A way out lies in greater awareness of one's identity and service. ("Your job as a leader of these organizations is to beat the sentimentality out of them." – DDM's Neil Vogel.)

A Michelin-starred restaurant succeeds by offering a luxury dining experience – beautiful surroundings, exquisite courses, polished service. They create an aura of exclusivity and indulge cravings of status. A food truck parks on a busy street and dishes out tasty, convenient, affordable meals for hungry passersby. Their offerings fulfill different desires. In analogy, the most socioeconomically diverse places in America are not public institutions, like schools, parks (or newsrooms), but affordable chain restaurants. 

What kind of destination does your newsroom desire to be? What emptiness or anxieties or aspirations are you helping address; for whom? 

Looking outward at human needs and how to fulfill them is something that’s deeply energizing and brings us back to a place where aspirations of self-expression can be validated and fulfilled.

That's how we'll create something truly desirable, and it may also allow us to accept that people may only eat out so often, or spend time with our reporting so much. A major reason for the current correction in media is that we measured growth in parallel to social (and search) platforms' attention optimization, and that may have maxed out. 

New models will have to reset expectations. “Media is mature because time spent with media is so high,” Doug Shapiro wrote in a great series on the future of media. (h/t Ezra Eeman’s great newsletter, Wayfinder.) “Since time isn’t growing, overall value isn’t growing either. The key question is how it will be distributed.” 

That has major civic implications. “We no longer have a commercial market that can support the level of journalism that democracy requires,” argues Victor Pickard, referring to the U.S. “We will have to look outside the market for a structural fix.” It can't be understated that most of humanity anywhere have never benefited from such a market. There has never been a golden age.

Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between market profitability and public funding: (subsidized?) service-oriented media that measure success with realistic expectations on impact and growth. Our job is to become (diverse) restaurants for the mind.

What if: Public Media LLMs

Every month, here’s a definitely unpolished but hopefully inspiring idea for the future of media.

What if ... public media organizations contributed to public media LLMs that could be integrated in all kinds of systems, from education, to gaming, to your alarm clock? 

To continue the F&B analogy, the restaurant would expand to also be a grocer. It could influence language meaningfully in derivative systems that we will increasingly interact with, advancing diversity and addressing bias, and providing the rich body of shared knowledge that they have accumulated in their archives. 

It’s not just a public service, it could also make business sense, as AI agents are becoming the next key distribution channel. Commercial media could strike deals, as some have, or offer their own in markets in which archive, nuance and depth are competitive advantages.  

Picture an AI service kind of like NPR - designed to inform people, not profit-driven or used for government propaganda. It's built to be trustworthy, assess issues broadly, and value diversity of voices.

Now imagine many public media LLMs like this existing alongside corporate ones that have their own advantages. That would help keep information channels more honest and fair, or at least help them address some shortcomings.

There will the next iteration of the risk (among others) of protecting public media (funded by a government but with an editorially independent service mandate) from becoming state media (funded and controlled by a government). Systems need to be open and transparent and never, ever exclusive. 

Schipsted is doing this already, and I’ll be watching it carefully. 

I'm working on a Microsoft Teams guide that made me wonder, What If newsrooms had ephemeral chat systems. There’s opportunity for media in audience engagement and for internal communication, and reduce security risks. Give Convene or Confide a try, and let me know how you'd use them in media.

If you have thoughts, other tools, a better idea or suggestion, hit respond and let me know.

Great Reads

A few reads that made me stop and think. 

Internet Reads

Machines on Paper on AI and the internet: ”We’re building now isn’t as new or innovative as we gas ourselves up to believe. Instead, we may be doing little more than creating a new class of meta rent-seekers.”

The Verge: “For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.” 

Wired: A generative AI experience should be “imaginative,” Sundar Pichai CEO of Google says. “Like a child who doesn’t know what the constraints are when they’re imagining something.” Kind of like the early days of the web.

The Information: Artificial intelligence will spur two fundamental changes in our relationship with technology: voice will become the dominant interface, apps will adapt to us instead of vice versa. 

Cory Doctorow/FT: “We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to co-ordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism.” 

Turquoise Roof Briefings: The use of big data for surveillance in Tibet is altering communication and “having a society-wide ‘chilling effect’ on the way they think, feel and relate to each other.”

Wired: Canada-based Sandvine, which sells deep packet inspection technology to authoritarian regimes, has been sanctioned by the U.S.

404 Media: A single coder has launched an open-source search engine (“Stract”) in part as a response to the internet’s overwhelmingly corporatized and homogenous search ecosystem.

Josh Miller/X: modalities of the post-URL web: 1. Meta tags to give facts to AI tools; 2. Websites/apps within AI interfaces that retain "a creator's soul"; 3. User Agent (browser). (h/t Rishad's Splice Frames) 

Axios: U.S. and allies endorse 6G principles (open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, resilient, and secure) but China will likely dominate the development and rollout, just as it did in 5G. (h/t Mary's a/symetric)

Internet shutdown watch (h/t AccessNow): Russia appears to have tested YouTube and Telegram blocking of its rubber-stamp vote. I mentioned Pakistan last month; it turned into a crystal ball of the future of a degraded internet: generative AI campaigning, internet shutdowns, and website blocks of news sites. Also: India, Togo.

A trend to watch: 36 countries implemented new internet restrictions in 2023, up from 32 in the previous year. 

Platform Reads

Vox: TikTok has seen an explosion of language as creators rush to coin terms.

The Noösphere/Substack: TikTok algorithms appear to be behind the recent rise in misogyny. 

Wired: Bluesky is now open to the public, still needs an identity; (But until it moves to the ActivityPub protocol, it will fail.)  

Arxiv: There is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals for algorithmic amplification, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole. 

The Verge: In the digital duel for metaverse dominance, Fortnite outpaces giant entertainment firms. Explore the global Fortnite vs. Minecraft map.

China Digital Times: Three years after his passing from Covid, the Weibo page of Li Wenliang, the doctor-turned-whistleblower, remains an active “wailing wall” for grievances.  

Rest of the World: Across India, WhatsApp groups have replaced neighborhood parks as the new community centers. The BJP benefits.

MIT Technology Review: At Wikipedia, Selena Deckelmann’s internal AI strategy revolves around supporting contributors with the technology rather than short-circuiting them.

The Sequence/Substack: While open-source LLMs are typically associated with Western, Chinese releases top the charts.

Dazed on objectification on 4chan: “Women who dress modestly are getting unclothed with AI, while those who dress immodestly are getting clothed with AI.”

Techdirt on a victory for privacy: The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia's request to force Telegram to decrypt communications is incompatible with human rights law. This will make it much harder to resurrect the European Commission’s anti-encryption efforts. 

And a PSA: Signal is finally (gradually) rolling out usernames, so you can keep your phone number private. They are also disposable. Changing one stops it from being findable.

Media Reads

Doug Shapiro in the series mentioned above argues that these four tectonic trends will determine the flow of value along the media value chain in coming years: Fragmentation, disintermediation, concentration, virtualization.

Also recommending his thought experiment on the impact of GenAI video like Sora: “The question is not whether we have achieved “peak TV,” but what happens when we have “infinite TV?”

Reuters Institute: By the end of 2023, 48% of the top news sites across ten countries were blocking OpenAI crawlers. 

Semafor: “The thing that people find valuable is authentic personal experiences from people who know what they’re talking about. And those people tend not to be in the creator economy. The whole idea that you have to build an audience to be heard is sort of at odds with the people that are living a life worth talking about.” – Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine.

The Fix Media: Dávid Tvrdoň about building a podcast network when many podcast listeners and podcast creators alike seem to believe there are too many podcasts already.

Simon Owen’s Media Newsletter: It’s now increasingly common for top YouTubers like MrBeast to spend over $1 million per video. Their production capabilities are on par with many mid-level TV studios.

Slate: Vice workers scrambled this week to save their work, just in case. Would keeping it online really cost so much?

Nieman Lab: Instead of asking if readers liked the piece, build your feedback strategy around asking what the journalism helped them do. 

FT Product & Tech/Medium: What does a good news product look like? The five principles at the Financial Times: Be distinct; Become indispensable; Provably brilliant; Products are partnerships; Build on every success (and failure); 

Nieman Lab: Crucial skills for the next generation of media leaders: leaders who think like PMs; who can strategize; who are entrepreneurial; mission-devoted; and who consider themselves stewards. 

Inspiring in Media

Among the many tributes to Alexei Navalny, the folks at OCCRP highlighted his investigative work:

“Though he’s best known outside the country as an opposition politician, his most enduring legacy may be as the producer of an unorthodox, but highly effective, brand of investigative journalism.” 

A survey by Open Minds Institute suggests that 83% of Russians knew about his death the day it happened. Only 25% believed the official narrative that he had been jailed for legitimate crimes.

And three reminders that media >>> a news publishing operation: 

1. Chinese émigrés like Annie Zhang are creating an alternative China through independent book stores.
2. The rise of science fiction as China’s most successful cultural export has been a push-and-pull effort by a community navigating suspicion and censorship to tell its stories. 
3. And a study looks at the positive things that can happen when journalism and comedy intersect: Comedy “should not be seen as a pejorative obstacle to ‘real’ journalism, but as an expansion of journalistic role performances more in tune with contemporary interpretations of journalisms in the plural.”

Thank you for reading. In the next weeks, I have been working on a Microsoft Teams guide for newsrooms, doing some presentations and workshops.

If there's time, reading Tricia Romano’s new book, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” an oral history of The Village Voice, NYC's late alternative weekly. Shouldn't every city have a recurring format that profiles its worst ten landlords? And consider experience expertise, not bias.

I hope I managed to give you some hope. If you want to catch up, here are some meeting slots. And if you’re in New York City, meet me in person at The Audiencers’ Festival, March 14 & 15. Otherwise, see you next month.