Conversation

Replying to
In case it isn’t obvious, this is the gradual Fox-ization of all media. The phrase “mainstream media” (MSM) has gone from a lame Fox projection to self-fulfilling industry-wide prophecy We are in a KYT shifting media landscape with “representative editorial democracy” governance
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Apply basic business modeling here. As industries mature they evolve from product-driven (often with a driving auteur-CEO vision, legendary editors in this case) to customer-driven as the market gets too complex for one mind, and further to a basic commodity market.
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The question is: what IS the basic commodity that traditional media delivers? Here is a radical thought: it isn’t the “facts” or basic news. That true commodity level of “dog bit man” already got separated out as wire services (and today twitter trends for pure sentiment news)
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The basic commodity that media sells is a coherent cultural reality bubble. So long as there was sufficient harmony (narrow-band dissent) and a degeneracy (less than full possible complexity/dimensionality) in news coverage expectations, you could do this with a traditional model
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Yes, Prime Minister captured this old media environment perfectly. One newspaper/one reality. In fact things were so degenerate, you could have multiple newspapers/magazines clustering in a single reality, so inhabits could claim to read *gasp* MORE than one perspective.
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This is no longer possible. We are in a HIGHLY non-degenerate regime of news expectations because news discussion leaders in the audience (that’s us here on twitter) routinely see 6 impossibly different perspectives on a single screen before breakfast.
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The only tractable way to serve this kind of audience at scale is to “carve the audience expectations at the joints” so to speak, and basically Pick a Tribe, Know Your Tribe, Create Reality for Tribe. PaT/KYT/CRfT. Then run editorial like you’re an elected rep. What kind of rep?
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When politics is healthy, voters pick politicians. When politics is gerrymandered, politicians pick voters. When media is healthy, editors create audiences. When media is gerrymandered, audiences pick editors. (Maybe we should call the latter tribal reverse-gerrymandering)
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You can’t resist this. You see what happens when you try: the NYT looks increasingly schizophrenic, trying to run a hybrid of an auteur-editorial and tribal mirror platform. Well you can, below a certain scale. Consider the blogosphere
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It is no accident that the sub-critical blogosphere (ie below audience-mass needed for ad-based models) has not one but TWO key institutional forms. The blog itself, and the aggregator/discussion forum. They represent, respectively, the auteur-editorial and tribal mirror forms.
Replying to
This is by the way the reason (subconscious) I’ve never tried to build and attach a true discussion forum to ribbonfarm. It would be a hybrid mess. You can choose to project an auteur reality distortion field, or you can serve as a tribal mirror. Not both.
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If you try to do both, you introduce centripetal forces that pull the property apart. This may not be a bad thing. It is what happened to Less Wrong in a positive way. That started as an auteur blog, morphed into a tribal mirror, then exploded into a little universe of properties
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The only thing that can keep a property together despite such growing centripetal forces? Money? If ad revenues continue collapsing as they are for many properties (not all), property either dies or explodes into the smaller survivable bits.
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The big takeaway from this whole evolutionary trajectory is that the civic function traditionally served by the media, ground-truthing and as a check-and-balance to government, has permanently shifted to the open aggregator/distributor channels.
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The media can no longer serve both functions it once did: create cultural reality bubbles (“and that’s the way it is”) AND ground-truth politics. The industry has chosen to specialize in former function and leave latter to basically open-source efforts on distribution channels.
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