Today's newsletter is about how the pursuit of eternal revenue growth - along with media executives that never take part or interest in the creative process - is destroying creativity and the lives of workers in both the media industry and Hollywood.
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The problem of everything I've been writing about is the pursuit of eternal revenue growth - the quality of a product is now subordinate to shareholder value, meaning that the people at the helm in the media are fully disconnected from production itself.
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The WGA is on strike, fighting the AMPTP for both fairer pay structures for creatives and definitive protections against AI-generated content. Media executives love AI because they don't see media as creative - they just want *more of it to sell*.
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Vice was run into the ground by executives that wanted to sell ads over making a sustainable news outlet. They overstaffed and pushed recklessly into random, unprofitable markets, because they are not creators - they're private equitors by another name.
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The common refrain is that it's hard to make news pay, when the problem is that media execs see news as a commodity to sell ads against. You cannot grow a media organization that makes interesting stuff at the rapid speed that the markets desire.
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Politico (and Axel Springer) never gave Protocol a chance, because they set it up for failure by massively overstaffing the publication and immediately giving it multi-million dollar targets in a crowded tech media market. It's a victim of rot capitalism.
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Buzzfeed had, at one point, one of the best newsrooms in the world. They killed it because Jonah Peretti never tried to run Buzzfeed - let alone Buzzfeed News - as a sustainable enterprise, instead chasing eternal growth and a doomed SPAC IPO. Scummy.
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Media orgs can be profitable if they're built sustainably. Defector is profitable. Platformer is profitable. Newcomer is profitable. All because they sell good content and built sustainable businesses while actually understanding the content itself.
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Every successful media story has been the result of reporters and writers and content creators creating something, and using their knowledge of this process to sell it to an audience. Every failure is a result of executive interference and ignorance.
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