The Pop Craveification of Breaking News

From now on, news can break into public consciousness without the traditional press weighing in. The news media can end up covering the story *because* something has broken into public consciousness via other means.

Email today is now less a communications medium than a communications compile target. It’s a clearinghouse technology. It’s where conversations-of-record go, where identity verification happens, where service alerts accumulate, and perhaps most importantly for publishers, where push-delivered longform content goes by default. It is distributed and ... See more

The media ecosystem is in crisis because social media has a mental illness and traditional media has a physical illness. Today’s dominant social media platforms might make us angry and dumb, but they have functioning business models and, with the exception of X, financial stability. Today’s largest traditional media companies have the opposite prob... See more

At the end of the day, everyone writing on the internet is still in the business of attracting eyeballs. Subscriptions make this relationship a little more diffuse, but they end up in the same place: what generates money is what draws attention. And individuals, unbound by institutional restraints and implicitly rewarded for sensationalism, are at ... See more

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

This very email is an example of this. This theory is being shared on a private channel sent to 500 people who I know or who have explicitly chosen to receive it. This is the... See more