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There *are* aspects of growth that attract me. Reading about Murdoch empire had me salivating at the thought of that much authoritah to boss the world around. Money per se is not that interesting, though it's nice to have a lot rather than a little.
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This 3-part big read on the Murdoch empire is educational. Don’t @ me, but the phrase “Death Star of shit” crossed my mind reading it. nytimes.com/interactive/20
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But doing it the Murdoch way, by creating zombie armies of Fox News watchers... that's not that interesting.
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I like to keep an eye open for media properties that are at the next tier of scale relative to ribbonfarm, AND interesting AND sustainable in ways I'd like to keep things interesting and sustainable. I honestly haven't found any.
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Sadly, *every single time* I get inspired by a larger site, either some shitty financial breakdown happens, or the site turns into a pandering, axe-grinding tool for some unsavory political or economic agenda. Overleveraged or deal-with-devil for growth.
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(Apologies to anyone bored by one of my occasional inside-baseball think-out-loud threads... hopefully a few newer media ventures will get some good ideas/cues out of it)
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Whenever I tweet about this stuff, people invariably misunderstand it as a prompt seeking money-making ideas. No. Money is a) easy if that's what you want to solve for b) not what's worth solving for if you enjoy writing c) primarily useful as a way to monitor your own vanity.
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Actually, one reason I think about this stuff a lot is not for strategizing the future of my own sites, but trying to grok what sometimes strikes me as the completely bizarre decisions made by other, much bigger commercial scale media properties, like say Fox or NYT or Vox.
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Basically, writing is pure ideas. There's nothing else there. No product, nothing to eat, nothing to use/do materially. So it is a real mystery to me how/why people can choose to grow without any clear ideas driving the growth. It's like empty growth.
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