Thread by @eriktorenberg

Some of my favorite takeaways from interviews & conversations w/ Robert Cottrell of The Browser (thebrowser.com) on journalism & publishing:

"Everything should last an hour, whether it's a film or a play or a dinner party. And the ideal length for a novel is 194 pages."

Publishing industry made following errors:

1/ Ad-based business model

2/ Quantity over quality

Simply transposing current model to subscription won't work en masse b/c people don't want 30 subscriptions.

The only solution is unbundling individual pieces from the magazine.

Just like music has unbundled "the single", publishing too should unbundle "the article".

Publishers are hesitant about this b/c then the stars will have more leverage over them.

Right now the stars stay b/c they think they need the publishers.

But soon it'll become apparent who's carrying the weight, and who's just dead weight.

Readers want this—they want to bond w/ writers more so than publishers.

Technology will enable individual writers to have the tools & back-office only previously accessible to publications

A top journalist at a publication creates more value than they capture, & so they'll break off

Many publications will suffer & even disappear b/c they aren't bringing enough value relative to the value they capture, & some of that value will become value will become commoditized

In conclusion: In the future, readers will be able to directly pay writers for their work without any middleman.

Already seeing this happen with Substack

This will enable writers to charge a lot more for individual pieces.

Quality writing is the most under-valued and under-priced form of creative work today

The best journalists earn $5-10 per word, or a few thousand dollars for a week’s worth of work, which is quite low when you compare it to the pay of top creatives in the music & art industries

Only $5?

For writing that could teach you something useful about life, even make you a better person?

We don't even want to pay more for a piece than we pay for the coffee we drink while reading it.

There might be 10,000 writers in the world who can command a following of between 10,000 & 100,000 people of whom a significant number would be happy to pay one to $5 per piece.

It’s possible that, in the future, there’ll be a one-person media company worth $1 billion+

You have to differentiate btw 2 kinds of writing: one which is being weaponized to trick people into clicking on pre roll ads. And the other which conforms to the traditional definition of writing worth reading—& paying for. Clickbait should be free—they should pay you to read it

On reading: If a piece doesn't start well, then the chances are vanishingly small that it'll improve later

So, if you're faced with a really bad first paragraph, give it up. It's not worth your time to go deeper into it

Also only read things that'll be relevant years from now

Other reading tips:

- When viewing a publication, it’s important to examine their business model (be careful of websites that make money by keeping you addicted to their site)

- If a book can be summarized, it shouldn’t be a book.

Global publications will gain more readers as translation technology advances. 

Eventually, translation tech will reach a point where people will be able to read an article and not tell which language it was originally written in.

We'll have airpods translating instantaneously.

Audiobook sales will overtake ebooks

One thing facilitating this: The massive popularization of wireless Bluetooth headphones

With audiobooks, authors are able to convey more emotion, include bonus content, & add background music, all of which can’t be done through static text

Long audio: When we get really good machine summarization, then the most efficient imaginable use of your time for consume consuming information is to have summaries delivered to you as audio while you're doing something else.

Kindle wasn't super disruptive—about as much as paperback books, but not movable type.

Our basic idea of what a book is our basic idea of who writes a book, what you get from a book, what the economic model of a book is, those things have remained intact

Check out & subscribe to The Browser (thebrowser.com)—writing worth reading. I've been a reader for nearly a decade.

Podcasts here:

perell.com/podcast/robert…

player.fm/series/venture…

a16z.com/2020/01/26/wri…