Thread by @davekarpf

Next up in the #wiredarchive throughlines: journalism!

The tricky piece here is that the journalism story is also a digital advertising/economics of the web story. For brevity's sake, I've put them on separate throughlines.
(1/x)

Early @WIRED was not shy about declaring that technology was going to kill mass media. April 93, Michael Crichton wrote "Mediasaurus." wired.com/1993/04/medias…

"it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace."

It's worth pausing to note just *how* early this is. The World Wide Web barely exists at this point. The Mosaic browser won't be covered in the magazine until 1994. The Net is still BBS message boards.

So Crichton isn't talking about how "everyone is a journalist now."
(3/x)

Instead, he offers an evergreen critique. "People don't trust news... It's all flash/no substance." But he includes a noteworthy error, asserting "The media are an industry, and their product is information."

No, no it isn't. The media's product is storytelling. It's narrative.

(Crichton, of all people, ought to have realized that. The man built one hell of a career out of storytelling and narrative.)

(5/x)

Having misdiagnosed the nature of the news industry, he then argues that the media's problem is "quality." Digital technology, he claims, will wipe out the news media by providing "high quality [information]: comprehensive and factually accurate."

(6/x)

That's how the looming news crisis looked in the earliest days, before Netscape, Geocities, and the Drudge Report.

The broadcast news industry was going to be replaced by an Internet of comprehensive and factually accurate information. (7/x)

By 1997, information on the Web already looks a lot different. From Tom Dowe's "News You Can Abuse." wired.com/1997/01/netize… :

"The Net is opening up new terrain in our collective consciousness, btwn old-fashioned 'news' and what used to be called the grapevine... (contd)" (8/x)

"(...) rumor, gossip, word of mouth. Call it paranews - information that looks and sounds like news, that might even be news. Or a carelessly crafted half-truth."

Dowe is writing about the fake news problem in 1997!

There are 2 big differences between then and now, though. (9)

For comparison, take a look at Sumanth Subramanian's March 2017 article on the Macedonian fake news factories: wired.com/2017/02/veles-…

The two major differences that stand out are (1) Scale and (2) Money. (They are, of course, hopelessly intertwined.) (10/x)

In 97, Dowe writes, "In the most recent election, that electronic grapevine has flourished, even as the much anticipated mainstreaming of Net politics raised barely a ripple."
(11/x)

The '96 election was still just brochureware online. You could find clickable conspiracy theories online, but you had to seek them out. When they spread virally, it was through email forwarding chains. The sheer scale of Facebook in Google in 2016 are unfathomable in 1996. (12/x)

Along with that scale comes the digital advertising economy. Subramanian does a fantastic job reporting out the *business* of fake news.

Fake news in the 90s was a hobby; today it is a career.
The fake news problem on today's internet is not new, but it IS different.
(13/x)

Now let's jump ahead to 2004. During the lean years following the dotcom crash, there isn't much discussion of the future of news industry in the magazine.

(Again, this is because the future-of-news story is also an economics-of-advertising story.) (14/x)

Take a look at 2004 profile of @nicknotned and his emerging Gawker empire, "How Can I Sex Up This Blog Business?" wired.com/2004/06/blog/

"Denton is making a splash that's seriously rattling the media hierarchy."
(15/x)

Notice what's changing here. Blogging is transitioning from hobbyist self-expression and personal journaling to a new publishing platform for journalism. And the *business* of blogging rests on digital advertising.
(16/x)

"Blogging," Denton explains, "[Ha]s revolutionized the business of spotting talent. Forget about someone's resume or how they present themselves at a party. Can they blog or not? The blog doesn't lie."

Blogging has become a form of/a challenge to, industrial journalism. (17)

Three years later, by 2007, the newspaper crisis has struck in earnest. We can see this in Jeff Howe's "To Save Themselves, Newspapers Put Readers To Work." wired.com/2007/07/ff-gan…

Pro-Am journalism has arrived, mixing read contributions and blogs with professional reporting.

Far from the information crisis that Crichton had originally imagined, the newspaper crisis has always been about finances. By 2007, online ads had cut into traditional ad budgets. Craigslist also undercut the classified ad market. Newspapers scrambled to adapt. (19/x)

By 2009, the vicissitudes of the digital advertising economy had become apparent. High-quality reporting and editorial judgment are not built for winning the digital advertising race.

Check out Daniel Roth's "The Answer Factory." wired.com/2009/10/ff_dem…

(20/x)

Roth is describing Demand Media, the dominant clickbait factory of the time.

Demand Media looked, for awhile, like the bleak future of journalism: "Fast, disposable, and profitable as hell."

(side note: I discuss the rise and fall of Demand Media in ch 4 of Analytic Activism)

The future of news in 2009 looked a lot like clickbait factories soaking up all the digital ad money through cheap search engine optimization tricks, while news outlets everywhere laid off reporters.

That was a real threat. Then Google fiddled with its algorithms. (22/x)

And, again, read that Subramanian piece. The Macedonian fake news factories worked under the same economic logic as Demand Media, just optimized for the digital advertising economy of 2016 (social sharing) instead of 2009 (search engines). (23/x)

Bringing the throughlines up-to-date, we have last year's cover story by @gabrielsnyder, "Keeping Up with the Times." wired.com/2017/02/new-yo…

(24/x)

"At stake isn't just the future of a very old newspaper that has seen its advertising revenue cut in half in less than a decade--it's the still unresolved question of whether high-impact, high-cost journalism can thrive in a radically changing landscape." -Snyder (25/x)

For all the bleak trends in paranews, fake news, and clickbait storytelling, the New York Times hasn't gone away. The looming news crisis still looms, but along the way the problems have morphed and been redefined. Paywalls were impossible in the 00s. Now even @WIRED has one! 26

Today's news crises are REAL, and they are DIFFERENT from yesterday's crises, but they are also not NEW.

And, by reading through the years, we can better see which parts of today's journalism crises are load-bearing.

(that's it. Thanks for reading. More throughlines tomorrow.)