In the end, everything falls off a cliff and dies. So too with the news, where, for the first time ever, newspapers earn more revenue from subscribers than from advertisers.
Media analysts will tell you this is a big shift. Certainly, it’s unprecedented. For as long as it’s been recorded, newspapers not only got more money from ads than subscriptions, they got A LOT more.1
Media analysts like Andrey Mir argue that the dependence on subscribers has led directly to more polarizing content since newspapers have to please their customers—i.e. tell them what they want to hear—or risk driving them away. On this model, advertisers were a moderating influence. They wanted the paper to be “mainstream,” “family friendly,” and “safe for work” so as to cast as wide a net as possible.
I suspect that was true in the broadcast era and that it, more than soft factors like professional ethics, fundamentally accounts for why Walter Cronkite told news “for everyone.” TV networks were expensive and needed economies of scale to function, especially early on. They had to advertise to everyone, to capture as much of the market as possible. That was their business model.
To illustrate, here is the CBS evening news from January 22nd, 1973, the day the Supreme Court made abortion legal. Abortion remains one of the most divisive and controversial subjects in the country, and it was no different then. Yet, Cronkite and his team managed to find a way to make the story utterly bland. They could just as easily be reporting on the major stock moves of the day.
This is a news broadcast designed not to offend, to “stick to the facts,” because under the broadcast model, where advertising dollars constituted the bulk of total available revenue, newsrooms were constantly pulled toward the center. That was where they made a profit, so they didn’t rock the boat, especially with anything divisive (like abortion). They either stuck to the facts or, if the facts were controversial or inconvenient, they omitted them.
That began to change in the 1990s with the rise of cable news, which found it could specifically entice viewers with the controversial by turning news into drama. CNN’s Crossfire pioneered an adversarial style that hid behind the excuse of “presenting both sides.” Modern cable networks take it further. Consider how the abortion story would be covered today—and I don’t mean in color with animations and infographics. Rather, no one even pretends to be impartial. I can’t imagine FOX or MSNBC not openly taking a side.
This, too, was driven by economics. Advertising to everyone is expensive. You waste a lot of money buying the attention of people you know will never purchase your product. But in the old days, that was the only game in town.2
Cable news parsed audiences into smaller segments, which they could only do because cable channels were cheaper to run and didn’t need the same economies of scale as a national network of radio-tower broadcasters. But the real change came when everyone started carrying a surveillance device in their pocket. With the advent of the internet and smart phones, advertisers could target their audience segment directly, which shrunk the one-size-fits-all broadcast market almost overnight, along with the financial incentive to deliver a common news "to everyone."3
Note in the graph above how newspaper ad revenue began to drop almost immediately after the iPhone was introduced in June, 2007. Smart phones not only opened a direct conduit to the public for self-publishers like me. They also opened a direct conduit for advertisers, who could bypass inefficient, mass-market broadcasters.4
As ad revenue began to plummet—you better believe the newspapers saw it coming in their financial statements long before we did—then simply as a matter of survival, newspapers had to cultivate an alternative model.5
The outrage economy, born in the ’90s, came of age on social media. Simply leading with blood and guts is no longer enough. Consumers can get that anywhere. Today, major news organizations literally make money by niche scaremongering, by telling their subscribers that the people they already don't like are a genuine, constant existential threat.
To be clear, this doesn’t require direct intent. I’m not saying there’s some smoke-filled room at the top of NBC headquarters where greedy, sociopathic editors, who got to their position by thriving in a cutthroat corporate environment, decide what stories they’re going to sell to the public. Personally, I suspect something like that does in fact happen, at FOX and the NY Times, too, but the point is, it doesn’t have to. We would get the same result if competent, well-intended editors, desperate to keep their jobs in an era of plummeting earnings, simply reviewed revenue by source and cut whatever story or personality didn’t sell. In either case, the well-intended or the ill-intended, we’re still left with a corps of reporters who are either in on the con, or worse, who are just as duped.
In fact, it behooves both sociopathic and competent editors to hire the latter, since they need the public-facing portions of their organization to appear as genuine as possible. It’s not that your favorite reporter is lying to you. It could be that the reason they’re successful is that they’re genuinely a true believer.
To illustrate how money leads the news, consider the BREAKING NEWS interruption, which, in the days of broadcast television, was a big deal, not just because it meant audiences likely wouldn’t see whatever show was interrupted, but because the network would have to give a refund or credit on scheduled advertising.6 Hence, screens like this meant something really important had happened, like “HOLY SHIT THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT!”
These days, it means “Someone whose name you can’t quite place reacted to someone else’s comments about the leaked existence of an email neither of them has seen.” In short: the drama of innuendo, the news equivalent of the soap opera stare. Dun-dun-dunnnnnn…
Unlike the networks, cable news channels have an incentive to interrupt their broadcasts as often as possible, especially on slow news days when no one is tuning in, and to present every interruption as the biggest development so far in a story that will be dragged out, not as long as it lasts, but as long as people are watching.
If a story doesn’t resonate, it’s simply bombholed and another takes it place.
Thanks to fundamental changes in technology, the news has very little to do with informing you and everything to do with engaging you using the same marketing techniques as any other serial drama, which is why politics looks an awful lot like professional wrestling. Both are a mix of soap opera and professional sport, where the time between regularly scheduled contests builds suspense and every season ends on a cliffhanger.
Everyone from CNN, the NY Times, and FOX to newer players like Vox, Buzzfeed, OANN has strong incentives to double-down on suspense and foreshadowing and to present a parade of shadowy threats looming just around the corner.
Almost like the end of the world.
If you think it doesn’t matter, let me introduce you to the unfortunately named availability heuristic. A heuristic is a shorthand, practical method of problem solving that isn’t intended to be optimal, and may not even be rational, but which yields results that are “good enough” for the problem at hand. A simple one might be “always bet on black.”
It turns out, there are numerous heuristics embedded in the brain. The availability heuristic was first identified by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his long-time partner Amos Tversky, who showed that human beings tend to evaluate the likelihood of an event by how quickly they can bring a similar instance to mind. Of course, in nature, likely events tend to be experienced more commonly, meaning speed of recall is an imperfect but reasonable proxy for frequency in a world without writing where all information is passed by word of mouth.
But we live in a vast, digitally interconnected world where the craziest things that happen anywhere are immediately and deliberately amplified everywhere precisely because they are unlikely and crazy.
If you ask people to estimate complex probabilities—for example, to list causes of death by likelihood—they will generally get it wrong, but what’s interesting is that they’ll get it wrong in nonrandom ways. In the aggregate, their rank will correlate highly not with actual probability but with the frequency with which such things appear in the news.
In other words, our sense of the world beyond our day-to-day experience, which is otherwise unknown to us, is formed by reports of others. This includes word-of-mouth anecdotes as well as news reports, but the latter, as the most regular and information-dense source, plays the leading role in our understanding of anything that we can’t see directly, which is almost everything.
Hence, even on something as important as our own mortality, where we have the ultimate incentive not to be wrong, we dramatically overestimate the risk of high-profile disasters like hurricanes and pandemics but underrate common, unreported killers like stroke, renal failure, or accidents, and we make life choices accordingly. If we can’t get it right on literal matters of life and death, what hope is there for the rest?
If lately it appears to you like the multiverse has come and other people are increasingly inhabiting a different world entirely, it’s because you are. Your mental model of the world, the world you think you inhabit, is a direct result of the information you consume, just as your physical body is a direct result of the foods you consume. Since the ’90s, and increasingly since 2007, that world has become ever more divorced from the actual physical world outside your window, and for specific technological and economic reasons.
As with so many aspects of life here in the future, we’ve now reached the point of paradox, where consuming news actually makes you less informed than consuming no news at all.
To be clear, this is a lagging indicator. It indicates a change has already happened, not that one is coming.
It also put limits on the total number of products that could be effectively mass-marketed, which is part of the reason there used to be so many fewer of them.
Of course, general-market products remain. You see them advertised as sporting events: cars, food, financial services, etc.—things everyone with a little disposable income tend to consume.
A theme of the Almanac is that technology doesn’t make us better—or worse, typically. Like Dr. Erskine’s super-soldier serum, it merely amplifies or accelerates what is already there. Good becomes better. Bad becomes worse.
They also diversified their offerings, such as by offering more lifestyle services, but that’s beside the point.
In truth, the network could often offset the lost revenue from the interruption by the increased viewership for the breaking news. The point is that they had a financial reason to be careful.