Reaction As A Service

Is journalism still in the business of reporting news?

Knowing when something broke is always easier in the review mirror. In studying the Great Financial Crisis, it’s now easy to see what caught us unaware as we headed over the cliff. Right now, with the AI bubble (or not bubble), people are looking for the clues, trying to determine where we are in a cycle. The signs are always far earlier than people think.

In the spirit of that, while reading Jill Abramson’s The Merchants Of Truth, which looks at the changes in journalism in the late 2010s, I thought of my early days as a pro blogger and realized, unintentionally, the world she chronicles is the one I helped build. Raising, of course, the question of what we are creating now with each AI prompt, each moment we embrace the new so as not to get left behind.

But first, a backtrack and a bit of praise for Jill Abramson, the first woman executive editor of the NY Times, and it must be said, a pioneer and a badass. In the book she chronicles four businesses: Buzzfeed, Vice, the NY Times, and the Washington Post. She deals unflinchingly with her own tenure at the Times, including a feast of the usual double-edged remarks thrown at women who dare speak their minds. Abramson believes in the value of journalism and journalists, but that isn’t what this book is about. Instead, it’s about the business of making the news or making the media, whatever we are calling this slipstream world we have now wrought.

The first part of her book is the world I remember well. When I worked for AOL in the mid-2000s, we lived and died by the welcome screen and traffic numbers. The feedback of views, comments, and forwards felt like a gift at first. Finally, we could know what people wanted and give it to them. The problem was that what they wanted was garbage. A story that took me ten minutes to package up with a slideshow from Getty Images performed as well as an interview and photoshoot that took weeks. That seems perfectly normal now, but then it was a shock, and surprisingly, a hurt. That quest for clicks led me to do things I’m not proud of, especially my coverage of celebrity real estate and some early forays in native advertising (aka sponsored content).

Some quality still connected in that era, the fluff paid the bills for the good stuff. Abramson talks in the book about Snowfall, the NY Times multimedia piece on an avalanche that was so beautiful I later taught it as a case study in a class on digital journalism. However, for the most part, the quickly understood and easily shareable became the order of the day. Buzzfeed didn’t create this phenomenon, but it harnessed it. Legacy media began to adapt, using analytics, slashing newsrooms, and trying to figure out how to monetize this new media, hoping it could keep the old one alive.

Then, the turn: Facebook. Abramson divides her book into chapters on each media outlet, but devotes a single chapter to Facebook, specifically Facebook and the first Trump election, before the last four chapters. The early online editors were mostly from the print world, then there were the curators who spent much of their time sifting the internet to find the interesting bits, finally, there were the technologists for whom the readers aren’t the customers. The last four chapters are the aftermath of that first Trump election and his unique love-hate relationship with the media (and it with him).

Unlike Abramson, I never thought of myself as a journalist. My first media jobs in print were on the advertising side, so I was always a bit of a turncoat. I never had any illusions about the line between advertising and editorial because I spent much of my twenties advocating for the ad side. My thirties in the online editorial arena were about making content to drive clicks either for ads or for site traffic. That world begat this one where there’s less demand for good reporting and more danger in doing it both for reporters and publishers, a hollowed out place where there if too often little human intervention in what is being published.

Abramson published her book in 2019. The situation has only gotten more dire as the media splinters into factions. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have shown their allegiance to the Trump administration, no matter the cost. The AI that companies are throwing billions of dollars at can now generate believable audio and video. We cannot trust our eyes, our ears, or those in power. We are left with our guts and hearts to determine what is real.

One thing that makes me optimistic is that there are still young writers, journalism students, and people driven by curiosity and skepticism. Many of the journalists in the book have now found their home in new places, here on Substack or in their own startups. It is still possible to be a merchant of truth, but I’m increasingly looking to individuals rather than outlets for my news.