The future of journalism? Probably neo-feudalism.

Megan McArdle’s right to be worried:

…advertising dollars are shrinking. We just can’t charge as much for Web advertising as we used to for print advertising. A decade ago, when I entered professional journalism and began earnestly discussing its financial future, there was a reasonable case that, eventually, digital advertising would be worth more than print advertising — you could precisely target it, after all, and measure its effects. As soon as we got better at building digital ad products and educated advertisers, in theory we’d be in better shape than ever.

That theory has, alas, been pretty well destroyed by the last 10 years. Advertisers still won’t pay print rates for digital. Worse, the money that does get spent on digital advertising increasingly isn’t going to news outlets; it’s going to Google and Facebook and Yahoo.

And apparently digital advertising isn’t really cost-effective, either. All of which is nerve-wracking, for people who actually would like to make money at writing: and legitimately so. I’m a writer, and I don’t care where somebody sits on the moonbat/wingnut spectrum: if he or she is worried about getting paid, that’s legitimate. I may not care in specific cases, but I will still admit that it’s a legitimate problem.

As to the answer… well.  People may simply have to learn to accept that all future journalism and punditry outlets are going to be funded by people who aren’t going to worry about getting a tangible return on investment.  This is normally seen as a plus for the Left – they routinely subsidize partisan outlets without expecting them to make a profit – but fortunately there are structural disadvantages to having to cheer-lead for a set of policies and assumptions that are, well, wrong. Besides, eventually people get tired of losing.

Also, for that matter: nothing is stopping people from crowdsourcing support.  This one site has Amazon, Patreon, and of course a PayPal link:





…and while admittedly I don’t even remotely need the money to eat the occasional cash deposit in the tip jar keeps my spirits up and my motivation keen. I imagine that people who actually do need the money would be even more motivated and enlivened by contributions. Bottom line? The Internet actively degrades Big things, precisely because it is a tool, and that is what tools do: make it possible to do more with less. It should not surprise us that the old funding models may not be the most felicitous of fits to the new way of doing things…

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, having an independent system of non-partisan journalism would no doubt be lovely. So would having reliable flying cars, food pills, room-temperature superconductors, cheap fusion power, medical nanobots, and a cure for the common cold. Your point?

5 thoughts on “The future of journalism? Probably neo-feudalism.”

  1. Food pills were over rated. You don’t get the bulk or the pleasure of eating the item.

  2. I think it’s actually more than that, Moe. I suspect that print advertising was never as effective as they thought it was. But it was basically the only game in town, and it wasn’t really measurable.
    .
    That’s the “problem” with accountability – you only get rewarded for results, and there’s a really large class of people who dislike that.

  3. Moe, I think part of it is that the market online has reached a saturation point. Eventually some of the less viewed net-based journalists will probably leave the market, and you’ll see some consolidation.

    I also think a lot of it has to do with the fact too many people try to play ostrich and pretend that if they don’t know about something it won’t hurt them.

  4. Part of the online advertising challenge is it is ‘cheap’ to implement a self-playing video that is way to loud. That leads to ubiquitous advertising and too much advertising.

    But that irritates people and then they willingly install technology, even pay for technology to block and eliminate such annoyances.

    1. Or just disable Flash Auto-Play. The option is only a couple of clicks away.
      .
      The sheer ubiquity of video advertising has gotten bad enough that you pretty much have to do this if you’re going to have multiple tabs open on a regular basis.
      To say nothing of all the bandwidth they suck.
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      I don’t mind advertisements. But the first rule of targeting an advertisement at me is “do not annoy me”. If you break that rule, I am much *less* likely to do business with you.

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