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Many media outlets are responding to current economic challenges in a self-defeating way. As advertising revenue falls, outlets struggle, and journalist jobs disappear, the economically rational thing for outlets to do is try to expand their audience and differentiate 1/6
their product. Yet many outlets are doing the opposite, tailoring content to one slice of the country: Cosmopolitan college-educated people with a particular political/cultural outlook. I like this audience too! It wants and deserves good journalism, but it can’t financially 2/6
support the entire journalism industry. It’s as if eating out were in decline and most restaurants responded by becoming vegetarian to reach that subset of possible customers. Vegetarians eat out, but not 10 times a day, so a restaurant industry that did this would collapse. 3/6
With The Titantic sinking, why is everyone jumping into the same lifeboat, leaving other (revenue generating) lifeboats empty? Journalists themselves increasingly come from the same narrow slice of the population and many want their employers to reflect only their views. 4/6
To those who see journalism as a movement, it makes sense that all outlets speak with one voice on cultural/political issues. But journalism is a business, it has to sell product to exist. If 100 outlets make the same product for a narrow audience, 90+ of them go bankrupt. 5/6
And bankrupt outlets don’t give a platform to anyone. People outside and inside media organizations should recognize that by pressuring outlets to not stray outside narrow lines, they are promoting the economic destruction of newspapers, magazines, and websites they love. 6/6
