Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing

I like to say that I write about media generally and journalism specifically because the industry is a canary in the coal mine when it comes to the impact of the Internet: text shifted from newsprint to the web seamlessly, completely upending the industry’s business model along the way.Of course I have a vested interest in this shift: for better or... See more

That meant there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human i... See more

I think the New York Times is its own thing, it’s going to keep being successful, but there’s a huge swath of the rest of the publishing industry that is being disrupted and will continue to be disrupted. If you look at publishers that exist in the world, because the Internet lets you reach everything, there’s probably space for the very best publi... See more

The analogy to publishing also point to what will be the long-term trend for any profession affected by these models: relatively undifferentiated creators who depended on the structural bundling of idea creation and substantiation will be reduced to competing with zero marginal cost creators for attention generated and directed from Aggregators; hi... See more