Your newspaper of the future doesn’t sound like it covers much local news. What ties it to the community? What differentiates it from McKinsey & Co or Harvard with a Substack/blog? You talk of news deserts and offer a bunch of blogging heads, experts, not shoe leather coverage, which is so badly lacking. I live in Westchester Co., NY, and our local paper, a Gannett monopoly newsletter with like 3 locally generated stories a day is the primary print news outlet for 1 million people. Your solution would hardly tell them what’s happening on a granular basis in their communities.
This seems like a wonderful idea, but what about local news? Maybe there could be local "franchises" for up-and-coming talent--sort of like a minor league for those aspiring to be one of the 100 smartest people?
The problem with 'getting the rich corporations to pay a lot for stuff' is that you now have to produce stuff that the rich corporations want. We already have too much of this -- I want to pay for the hard-hitting investigative journalism that exposes the crimes, lies, and foolishness of the powerful, and these days the corporations are the most powerful of all. How are you going to hold them accountable when they are the ones paying for the operation?
The nice thing about the sort of journalism that is dying is that it was paid for by local advertisers. The customers of Bill's Hardware Store and Gloria's Sandwich Shop want the odd bit of national and international news -- but all the local news and gossip they can consume. Coca-cola and Amazon will never care. You need a plan for the reporting of local news or else this will just be the best funded, and arguably best produced version of the 'news about people who aren't from around here'.
My first thought was that having a solely online news outlet isn't new, they've existed for a very long time, along with 'best in class' contributors, some regular, some rotating. My second thought was that with this model, Watergate would still be the name of a little know hotel somewhere in America.
The model omits capability and capacity for day to day news, the rapid news cycle, and any notion of investigate journalism, which can take months and hundreds of hours of work.
This is a multimedia model for 100 charismatic elite - they'll need to be charismatic, not just smart - designed to earn a large cash flow from each revenue stream. What it's not is a replacement or rescue plan for traditional newspaper as a medium (of which most of us no longer buy the paper component). The annual subscription for users is a good price point, but readerships pick their own poison, and an elite multimedia outlet will attract a smaller audience than needed to sustain the model, unless the other revenue streams subsidize the news part, which is how traditional newspapers have always worked, and still do.
Ted, you're an interesting thinker, but I'm balking. I'm thinking of the Miami Herald reporter, Julie Brown, who got Jeffrey Epstein's case re-opened. How would her reporting ever come to the surface in your model? I doubt Julie Brown would be in your top 100 brainiac club. Plus, anything that proposes "one big, giant" whatever leaves me icy.
It sounded great as I read it - but then all these smart comments... (make me realize how dumb I can be...) - local news? conflicts of interest with the big $$$? conflict reporters??? The money and the energy has to come from the grassroots... this feels far far too top down... I'm not "against experts" in any way, but I think gets the whole structure backwards somehow... community colleges, not elite universities, please.
like the big idea and see many people talking about local news where is it....seems to me you could set up a minor league team for say 50 local areas with the best journalism graduates...give them 75k a year for 2 years and have 100 of them in the 50 areas working on local angles of the areas....see who becomes the next 100 smart people as you lose some that go on there own or just pursue other careers like writing books
Maybe this would slay as a business model. It probably would. But would this be good for the culture? I am not presuming an answer to that, but the local news comments here do feel crucial. In general I have increasing doubts that bigger, richer, and more dominant media are necessarily better.
I like a lot of these concepts, but the idea of taking millions from corporations to get consulting advice from your 100 superstars sounds like a potentially huge conflict of interest. Doing objective reporting on corporate topics is going to be hard if you have to caveat every article with "___ and ___ and ___ are all sponsors of our product."
The local news problem has already been commented on extensively. This is problematic because local (or trade) titles provide a lot of the training that makes good journalists on bigger publications.
Also, while you seem to have taken the publication strategy global, you describe a physical campus which is necessarily local to somebody (not everyone). I'm in the UK. If I subscribe to this digital publication will I ever get the chance to attend events? What if I move to somewhere (even) more remote?
Most troubling to me is "What's the actual point?" As you say, we already have many people flourishing in the various ways you describe. What's the point of gathering them together? What's gained by that? And what would be lost? Would they need to subscribe to some kind of homogenised world view?
Suppose that your plan is executed successfully. Who, really, is any better off than today?
I like your solution - or, at least, am deeply intrigued by it. However, I do take issue with your analysis.
A little background so you understand where I'm coming from: Outside of music (mostly jazz and blues), my other great passion and interest in life is the Computer Revolution. My dad built a kit computer in our basement in '75 or '76, before the Apple II or TRS-80s were released. I was in the local Computer Society in the '80s, and from the '80s until a few years ago wrote a weekly column about being online, first Online San Diego then Hot on the Web. (Briefly, I was nationally syndicated via Copley News Service; it was called Net Sitings there.)
I first ventured online in '77, have been on continuously since '87 or so - first on dial-up BBSs, but also accessing my dad's CompuServe and GEnie accounts - where you could read the news.
I built by hand (hand-coding that is) one of the first online newspaper sites in the country, for the North County Times, in 1998.
I was an early adopter, then an early believer, that online was the future of newspapers.
I was wrong.
Even today, most newspapers that survive make their profit off their print edition. Those that have tried to go on-line only have either failed, or seen their market impact fall dramatically. (I'm looking at you, Rocky Mountain News and Seattle P-E.)
As you mention, the large national accounts are dominated by Google - as well as FB, Amazon, etc.
But reading my local daily, I see they still have the large full-page spreads from the car dealers, the weekend real estate sections, the Sunday ad inserts.
Advertising rates are SOOO very diluted that most newspapers whose online product is profitable make their nut off subscriptions, not advertising (NYT, WSJ).
Newspapers saw the writing on the wall, but the writing on the was a lie.
But I don like your concept of a newspaper as a campus - it's a hell of a lot better than the poison pill of "publicly financed" news - having Congress control your purse strings is a recipe for a compliant, gutless news product. We can't hold the government accountable if the government is paying our bills ....
Great idea as others have stated. There is already a lot of cross pollination of people that are at this level of podcasting/YouTubing: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Andrew D. Huberman, Joe Rogan and Rick Beato where I learned about you! Also some people like Mr. Beast are developing similar studio concepts. Local news would probably not work out well on this type of platform but someone that could aggregate Twitter and a video platform for "micro reporting" that could be monetized might help with local news coverage. Everyone has a cell phone and at an event many people are recording anyway. I don't know if a small town could support very many full time reporters but someone might be willing to record the school board meeting or hurricane aftermath for 10 bucks. A company that aggregates this effort into a true news service instead of a garbage can full of listicles, pop up ads and click bait might be on to something. Maybe this could be achieved with a DAO and cryptocurrency payments?
One thing this leaves out is how much of the newspaper business was always about the technology. First a couple of centuries where it was one guy owning a printing press and setting type by hand. Then the late 19th century shift to high-speed automatic presses, when it became embedded in capitalism — since owning those presses took a major capital investment but was also a source of wealth and power. Along with that went advances in technology, including the printing of photographs of celebrities and the early color processes that gave birth to the Sunday comics, both of which were a major source of sales. The news business in the 1920s was more like Hollywood than anything else. It thrived on scandal and gossip and lurid crime.
Computers and the Internet made both the capital investment and the technological innovations irrelevant, since anyone working out of their basement had access to both. And the coming leap to AI is going to do away with any need for low-level journeyman reporters. Under those circumstances, I could see how a switch to high-level expertise would seem like an attractive option. It might even succeed. But it would be aimed at wealthy elites and not at the rough-and-tumble world of popular entertainment in which early 20th century newspapers thrived.
It would have no coverage of local issues, no room for the triumphs of small town sports teams. It would definitely not be a place where aspiring superheroes like Clark Kent or Peter Parker could keep an eye on street-level crime while snooping on the schemes of crime bosses. It would not create a scenario where eight year olds raced to get their hands on the comics section before starting to wonder about the stories in the headlines.
In short, it would not be populist — in the old, true sense of that word before it was co-opted by neofascists. And a populist press, not a hyper-elitist press, is what we most need today.
Thanks Ted, good creative thinking and I'd probably subscribe, but I had the same reaction as many other commenters about this not addressing the problem of local newspaper decline -- in quality, advertising revenue, and subscribers. I assume that the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. are doing fine (at least in the second and third losses, loss of quality is arguable) and further assume that the severe subscriber decline in the chart represents primarily local papers. My local paper is the SF Chronicle, and over the past 10-20 years it's been painful to watch its continuous withering. I still subscribe to both the print and digital editions mainly out of not wanting the paper to die completely, but it's clearly a shell of its previous self. I have no idea what the answer would be. Again, I appreciate your deep thinking about new approaches and potential solutions, and I look forward to your further ideas on addressing the local paper collapse.
Your newspaper of the future doesn’t sound like it covers much local news. What ties it to the community? What differentiates it from McKinsey & Co or Harvard with a Substack/blog? You talk of news deserts and offer a bunch of blogging heads, experts, not shoe leather coverage, which is so badly lacking. I live in Westchester Co., NY, and our local paper, a Gannett monopoly newsletter with like 3 locally generated stories a day is the primary print news outlet for 1 million people. Your solution would hardly tell them what’s happening on a granular basis in their communities.
This seems like a wonderful idea, but what about local news? Maybe there could be local "franchises" for up-and-coming talent--sort of like a minor league for those aspiring to be one of the 100 smartest people?
The problem with 'getting the rich corporations to pay a lot for stuff' is that you now have to produce stuff that the rich corporations want. We already have too much of this -- I want to pay for the hard-hitting investigative journalism that exposes the crimes, lies, and foolishness of the powerful, and these days the corporations are the most powerful of all. How are you going to hold them accountable when they are the ones paying for the operation?
The nice thing about the sort of journalism that is dying is that it was paid for by local advertisers. The customers of Bill's Hardware Store and Gloria's Sandwich Shop want the odd bit of national and international news -- but all the local news and gossip they can consume. Coca-cola and Amazon will never care. You need a plan for the reporting of local news or else this will just be the best funded, and arguably best produced version of the 'news about people who aren't from around here'.
My first thought was that having a solely online news outlet isn't new, they've existed for a very long time, along with 'best in class' contributors, some regular, some rotating. My second thought was that with this model, Watergate would still be the name of a little know hotel somewhere in America.
The model omits capability and capacity for day to day news, the rapid news cycle, and any notion of investigate journalism, which can take months and hundreds of hours of work.
This is a multimedia model for 100 charismatic elite - they'll need to be charismatic, not just smart - designed to earn a large cash flow from each revenue stream. What it's not is a replacement or rescue plan for traditional newspaper as a medium (of which most of us no longer buy the paper component). The annual subscription for users is a good price point, but readerships pick their own poison, and an elite multimedia outlet will attract a smaller audience than needed to sustain the model, unless the other revenue streams subsidize the news part, which is how traditional newspapers have always worked, and still do.
Ted, you're an interesting thinker, but I'm balking. I'm thinking of the Miami Herald reporter, Julie Brown, who got Jeffrey Epstein's case re-opened. How would her reporting ever come to the surface in your model? I doubt Julie Brown would be in your top 100 brainiac club. Plus, anything that proposes "one big, giant" whatever leaves me icy.
I’m intrigued by these ideas — but inspired even more by how this way of thinking is wholly applicable to creating a Music Platform of the Future.
It sounded great as I read it - but then all these smart comments... (make me realize how dumb I can be...) - local news? conflicts of interest with the big $$$? conflict reporters??? The money and the energy has to come from the grassroots... this feels far far too top down... I'm not "against experts" in any way, but I think gets the whole structure backwards somehow... community colleges, not elite universities, please.
like the big idea and see many people talking about local news where is it....seems to me you could set up a minor league team for say 50 local areas with the best journalism graduates...give them 75k a year for 2 years and have 100 of them in the 50 areas working on local angles of the areas....see who becomes the next 100 smart people as you lose some that go on there own or just pursue other careers like writing books
Maybe this would slay as a business model. It probably would. But would this be good for the culture? I am not presuming an answer to that, but the local news comments here do feel crucial. In general I have increasing doubts that bigger, richer, and more dominant media are necessarily better.
“For just $100 per year readers get access to the publications of all 100 of our smart people”
Well Ted, you got me to commit to $50USD/year to read this article. Probably would have subscribed eventually because I do appreciate your writing.
Looking forward to your follow up article/post on the business model (great idea) to regenerate local newspapers.
I like a lot of these concepts, but the idea of taking millions from corporations to get consulting advice from your 100 superstars sounds like a potentially huge conflict of interest. Doing objective reporting on corporate topics is going to be hard if you have to caveat every article with "___ and ___ and ___ are all sponsors of our product."
Invigorating read, thank you. But...
The local news problem has already been commented on extensively. This is problematic because local (or trade) titles provide a lot of the training that makes good journalists on bigger publications.
Also, while you seem to have taken the publication strategy global, you describe a physical campus which is necessarily local to somebody (not everyone). I'm in the UK. If I subscribe to this digital publication will I ever get the chance to attend events? What if I move to somewhere (even) more remote?
Most troubling to me is "What's the actual point?" As you say, we already have many people flourishing in the various ways you describe. What's the point of gathering them together? What's gained by that? And what would be lost? Would they need to subscribe to some kind of homogenised world view?
Suppose that your plan is executed successfully. Who, really, is any better off than today?
I like your solution - or, at least, am deeply intrigued by it. However, I do take issue with your analysis.
A little background so you understand where I'm coming from: Outside of music (mostly jazz and blues), my other great passion and interest in life is the Computer Revolution. My dad built a kit computer in our basement in '75 or '76, before the Apple II or TRS-80s were released. I was in the local Computer Society in the '80s, and from the '80s until a few years ago wrote a weekly column about being online, first Online San Diego then Hot on the Web. (Briefly, I was nationally syndicated via Copley News Service; it was called Net Sitings there.)
I first ventured online in '77, have been on continuously since '87 or so - first on dial-up BBSs, but also accessing my dad's CompuServe and GEnie accounts - where you could read the news.
I built by hand (hand-coding that is) one of the first online newspaper sites in the country, for the North County Times, in 1998.
I was an early adopter, then an early believer, that online was the future of newspapers.
I was wrong.
Even today, most newspapers that survive make their profit off their print edition. Those that have tried to go on-line only have either failed, or seen their market impact fall dramatically. (I'm looking at you, Rocky Mountain News and Seattle P-E.)
As you mention, the large national accounts are dominated by Google - as well as FB, Amazon, etc.
But reading my local daily, I see they still have the large full-page spreads from the car dealers, the weekend real estate sections, the Sunday ad inserts.
Advertising rates are SOOO very diluted that most newspapers whose online product is profitable make their nut off subscriptions, not advertising (NYT, WSJ).
Newspapers saw the writing on the wall, but the writing on the was a lie.
But I don like your concept of a newspaper as a campus - it's a hell of a lot better than the poison pill of "publicly financed" news - having Congress control your purse strings is a recipe for a compliant, gutless news product. We can't hold the government accountable if the government is paying our bills ....
Great idea as others have stated. There is already a lot of cross pollination of people that are at this level of podcasting/YouTubing: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Andrew D. Huberman, Joe Rogan and Rick Beato where I learned about you! Also some people like Mr. Beast are developing similar studio concepts. Local news would probably not work out well on this type of platform but someone that could aggregate Twitter and a video platform for "micro reporting" that could be monetized might help with local news coverage. Everyone has a cell phone and at an event many people are recording anyway. I don't know if a small town could support very many full time reporters but someone might be willing to record the school board meeting or hurricane aftermath for 10 bucks. A company that aggregates this effort into a true news service instead of a garbage can full of listicles, pop up ads and click bait might be on to something. Maybe this could be achieved with a DAO and cryptocurrency payments?
One thing this leaves out is how much of the newspaper business was always about the technology. First a couple of centuries where it was one guy owning a printing press and setting type by hand. Then the late 19th century shift to high-speed automatic presses, when it became embedded in capitalism — since owning those presses took a major capital investment but was also a source of wealth and power. Along with that went advances in technology, including the printing of photographs of celebrities and the early color processes that gave birth to the Sunday comics, both of which were a major source of sales. The news business in the 1920s was more like Hollywood than anything else. It thrived on scandal and gossip and lurid crime.
Computers and the Internet made both the capital investment and the technological innovations irrelevant, since anyone working out of their basement had access to both. And the coming leap to AI is going to do away with any need for low-level journeyman reporters. Under those circumstances, I could see how a switch to high-level expertise would seem like an attractive option. It might even succeed. But it would be aimed at wealthy elites and not at the rough-and-tumble world of popular entertainment in which early 20th century newspapers thrived.
It would have no coverage of local issues, no room for the triumphs of small town sports teams. It would definitely not be a place where aspiring superheroes like Clark Kent or Peter Parker could keep an eye on street-level crime while snooping on the schemes of crime bosses. It would not create a scenario where eight year olds raced to get their hands on the comics section before starting to wonder about the stories in the headlines.
In short, it would not be populist — in the old, true sense of that word before it was co-opted by neofascists. And a populist press, not a hyper-elitist press, is what we most need today.
Thanks Ted, good creative thinking and I'd probably subscribe, but I had the same reaction as many other commenters about this not addressing the problem of local newspaper decline -- in quality, advertising revenue, and subscribers. I assume that the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. are doing fine (at least in the second and third losses, loss of quality is arguable) and further assume that the severe subscriber decline in the chart represents primarily local papers. My local paper is the SF Chronicle, and over the past 10-20 years it's been painful to watch its continuous withering. I still subscribe to both the print and digital editions mainly out of not wanting the paper to die completely, but it's clearly a shell of its previous self. I have no idea what the answer would be. Again, I appreciate your deep thinking about new approaches and potential solutions, and I look forward to your further ideas on addressing the local paper collapse.