"The death of media is greatly exaggerated”: Insights from media maven Simon Owens

At a time when Google, Facebook and Amazon capture up to 70% of all ad dollars generated in the US and newspapers across the country have shed half their journalism jobs since 2008, you may think only a masochist would make a career in ad-supported media right now.

One argument is that pre-internet, journalists had a more reliable source of revenue, enabling them to do more investigative work, and the business model shift to online advertising meant they'd now have to produce popular pieces more frequently.

Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.

This is one of the key reasons we started Substack. We’re attempting to build an alternative media economy that gives journalists autonomy. If you don’t rely on ads for your revenue, you don’t have to be a pawn in the attention economy – which means you don’t have to compete with Facebook and Google. If you’re not playing the ads game, you can stop... See more

In recent months, two macro trends have rocked the media industry: publications have pivoted hard to a subscription-first model, and thousands of journalists have been laid off.

Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making... See more