Thread by @Noahpinion

I think people naturally trust big media outlets less when there are more small outlets (incl. Twitter accounts) to argue with them. Before, people naturally trusted the NYT because they didn't read 100 people shouting "The NYT sucks!" in response to every article.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1319681631750393856

I also think that in a highly fragmented, nationalized media marketplace, each outlet has an incentive to serve a narrow but loyal customer base, and that's probably going to make them less trustworthy to the people outside that narrow customer base.

Happily, this doesn't apply to Bloomberg nearly as much, because our terminal business insulates us to a large degree from the market incentive to cater to a narrow slice of society. (Yay my company! The most trusted name in news! Hehe)

In practice it just seems very hard for a purely subscription-based media business to survive as a broad-based, general-audience outlet, when there are 1000 highly specialized outlets competing directly for people's eyeballs.

Anyway, in general, my opinion is that we emphasize EDITORIAL CHOICE way too much when analyzing changes in the media landscape, and we underemphasize ECONOMIC INCENTIVES.

Editorial choice is a luxury of market power. A ruthlessly competitive market = customer is king.