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Ed Zitron Profile picture
@edzitron
May 4 • 9 tweets • 6 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap…
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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… Image
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*.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… ImageImage
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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… ImageImage
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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… ImageImage
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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… Image
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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… Image
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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… Image
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.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… ImageImage

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More from @edzitron

Ed Zitron Profile picture
Apr 27
Today's newsletter is about the grim truth that Elon Musk is killing Twitter through his desperation for validation and attention, and a lack of understanding of the basic human concepts of likeability and popularity.
ez.substack.com/p/checked-out
Wanting to be popular is natural, but requires either appealing to the masses or finding your niche of people. Twitter, for all its faults, lets you grow an audience even within a relatively small niche - but you do, on some level, have to earn it.
ez.substack.com/p/checked-out ImageImageImage
When Musk culled legacy checkmarks, the Blue Tick became a digital dunce cap - a sign that you were desperate for popularity, but also believed that your content already earned it - it just wasn't seen by enough people.
ez.substack.com/p/checked-out ImageImageImage
Read 8 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Apr 20
Today's newsletter: Mark Zuckerberg needs to be replaced at Meta. He's a liar, and an ineffective, incompetent and directionless executive that cannot innovate or even ship successful products. He's going to run this company into the ground.

ez.substack.com/p/fire-mark-zu…
Despite saying for years that the metaverse was the future of the company, Mark Zuckerberg has now diverted his energies to AI - he is a complete liar, and every single person who went along with his metaverse sham should be ashamed of themselves.
ez.substack.com/p/fire-mark-zu… ImageImage
In the last 10 years, Zuckerberg has succeeded in making Instagram and Facebook worse, creating political divides, destroying the lives of journalists, and failing to ship products that people actually enjoy using. Outside of ad revenue, Meta *sucks.*
ez.substack.com/p/fire-mark-zu… ImageImage
Read 7 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Mar 21
In today's newsletter, I explain why everybody is so angry at tech - because the tech industry's contributions to society are becoming increasingly harder to see for the average person, and tech's loudest voices are increasingly noxious and reactionary.

ez.substack.com/p/the-uncanny-…
It's important to understand how deeply unfair the SVB situation seemed to the average person that has spent 3 years being told that any amount of government intervention to improve your life is undeserved - unless, of course, you are a business or a bank.
ez.substack.com/p/the-uncanny-…
While regular people were told that $600 a month was too much for unemployment or that student loan forgiveness was ridiculous, tech experienced a historic bull run. The rich got richer - especially in tech - and it left a bad taste in people's mouths.
ez.substack.com/p/the-uncanny-…
Read 7 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Feb 16
Today's Substack is about the outright recklessness of Google and Microsoft integrating experimental conversational AI into real search engines, and how the ramifications of doing so could genuinely get people hurt or killed.
ez.substack.com/p/degenerative…
In an attempt to catch up with Google, Microsoft plowed a further $10bn into OpenAI, makers of generative AI ChatGPT, and then created BingAI, a GPT-powered search engine that has different answers each time, getting things wrong and misleading users.
ez.substack.com/p/degenerative… ImageImage
The danger of an AI-powered search engine is that people *trust* these results - and the companies previously never purported to have "answers" - just suggestions. One can't blame "the algorithm" when your search engine says "I think XYZ"
ez.substack.com/p/degenerative… ImageImage
Read 7 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Feb 9
Today's newsletter is about the problem at the center of everything I've written -that private and public markets have become entirely focused on company growth over all else, stagnating innovation and creating a constant binge and purge of human capital.

ez.substack.com/p/the-rot-econ…
When Meta went all-in on the metaverse, Wall St. savaged them for it, but once Zuckerberg fired 10,000 people, Meta's stock pumped, because the street saw this as a "cost-cutting measure" that would boost revenue, despite the company fundamentally *worse*
ez.substack.com/p/the-rot-econ… ImageImage
Google ruined Google Search by monetizing every single facet of the product, they lose money on the cloud, and they have regularly trailed almost every industry they're in. But Sundar Pichai won't be fired, because he's making stockholders and CNBC happy.
ez.substack.com/p/the-rot-econ… ImageImage
Read 14 tweets
Ed Zitron Profile picture
Feb 9
It has been hours and this website that cost $44 billion remains half broken. It is absolutely incredible. Musk took the world’s digital town square and turned it into an Escher painting of broken features and half-baked policies that he invented to save 47 dollars
He fired thousands of people and said 🤣🤣🤣 epic we don’t need them and now the site is broken before the biggest sporting event of the year. The master of business is playing his symphony for us. This is the exact thing everyone said would happen and the day is here
Not saying twitter is dead he’ll fix this eventually, but imagine if Instagram and Facebook stopped rendering. Can you imagine what Mark Zuckerberg would do to the families of those responsible
Read 7 tweets

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