Media Roadkill

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Roadkill on the Information Highway.

That’s the title of a 1993 memo written by Microsoft executive Nathan Myrvold. It anticipated the looming economic carnage to be caused by the Internet.

The memo made a series of generally accurate predictions, though none more prescient than how the online world would ravage the media industry.

Myrvold said the loss of advertising combined with printing costs would be catastrophic to newspapers. Books (because they don’t rely on advertising) and magazines (because they are niche focused) would fare slightly better.

He predicted it would happen slowly and then all at once.

“The actual process by which the information highway will displace current businesses will be far more like the start of an ice age rather than instant calamity,” he wrote.

His observations come to mind at the end of a week of record media layoffs. More than 500 journalists were fired during January, and that doesn’t count an additional several hundred let go when The Messenger folded last week.

Publications affected included The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, the Los Angeles Times and Forbes.

The importance of such reporting and the threat of its disappearance was driven home in a piece just published by Sebastian Junger called When Journalism Dies. 

Myrvold’s memo is worth pairing with the recently issued Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report for 2023. One is a chronicle of a death foretold; the other an account of years of terminal illness.

The Reuters’ report suggests the situation is far worse even than it seems. According to the report, the media is on a fast trajectory to losing direct contact with its audience.

The analysis said that 22 percent of readers consume major media directly through a news website or app, down 10 percentage points since 2018. The majority arrive via social media.

The Reuters data looks even worse broken down by age. In the UK, for example, among readers 18 to 24, only 24 percent access news directly, down from 53 percent in 2015.

Legacy media companies are being cut off from their customers and the Reuters data suggests that it is getting worse.

It is this disintermediation more than AI that should be cause for concern.

The paradox is that as the media struggles, we are in the midst of a content Renaissance.

It’s hard to keep up with the volume of information appearing on industry websites or newsletter platforms such as Substack and beehiiv or from users on LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.

One conclusion of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report is that young readers trust celebrities, influencers and social media personalities more than journalists.

That’s probably because those are the people they read.


BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

THE LOTTERY: Size of Jackpot charted against the Powerball tickets. The size of the prize matters.

THE LAST LUNCH: Nixon’s last meal in office was milk, pineapple and cottage cheese. Not the breakfast of champions.

BOYFRIEND WANTED: Short-term, long-distance, low-commitment boyfriend needed for the holidays.

LET IT GO: The incomparable Mary Oliver.

LEGALIZED MARIJUANA: Pop up weed store in northern Manhattan consists of a sign tapped to a bus stop and a chair.