Media: The shift from ad revenue to digital subscriptions polarized us. By Andrey Mir, the author of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers.
Throughout the twentieth century, journalism relied for its funding predominantly on advertising. In the early 2010s, as ad money fled the industry, publications sought to earn revenue through subscriptions instead of advertising. In the process, they became dependent on digital audiences — especially their most vocal representatives. The shift from advertising to digital subscriptions invalidated old standards of journalism and led to the emergence of post-journalism.
Advertising allowed high quality journalism:
Everything we once knew about journalism depended on the model of the ad-funded news media. Advertising accounted for most of the news industry’s revenue during the twentieth century.
This business model provided a selective advantage to certain kinds of media. …. The mass media that oriented themselves around the “buying audience” — the affluent middle class — received money from growing advertising and thrived. …
By the end of the twentieth century, the news media had reached the apex of their 500-year history. Even regional newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun possessed several well-staffed foreign bureaus. Never were the media as rich and influential as in their golden age, just 25 years ago. Plenty of journalists still on the job remember those glorious days. …
Professional standards were elaborated to protect journalism from advertisers and establish the credibility of news coverage. … Ad money determined the allegiance of mainstream media to corporate elites (hence, “corporate media”) but also sustained high-quality journalism. Newsroom autonomy was protected by the standards of objectivity, nonpartisan and unbiased reporting, attention to the arguments of all parties involved, investigative rigor, the separation of fact from opinion, and other guarantees enshrined in the ethical and professional codes of news organizations. …
Journalism evolved in the twentieth century as the “watchdog of democracy,” positioning itself above partisan party struggle.
Finally, the media’s dependence on advertising determined their attitude toward their readers. If the audience was supposed to be affluent, mature, and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment when reporting — they were to present the naked facts and the positions of both political sides to the public to judge. … Leaving judgment to readers (or at least pretending to do so) was one of the fundamental virtues of ad-funded journalism. And since publications wanted to broaden their audience, not narrow it, they served reader preferences by downplaying, rather than emphasizing, potentially divisive issues. …
The Internet changed everything:
It turned out that the ad-based model relied not on the content attracting an affluent audience but on the monopoly over ad delivery that the Internet simply destroyed. …
The collapse started with the classifieds. … Google and Facebook delivered the fatal blow. It became obvious to advertisers that old media had offered them a costly and inefficient method of carpet-bombing their targeted audiences. By contrast, Google and Facebook knew the preferences of billions of individuals and provided personally customized delivery of ads to each of them. … The Google-Facebook duopoly surpassed 60 percent of the share in the U.S. digital ad market in 2018. …
Today, advertising contracts in the media often resemble charity from ideologically aligned businesses. …
The news media returned to their natural and only remaining source of revenue — selling content — at a time when subsisting on print subscriptions and newsstand copies was no longer viable. Losing ad business and having no support from the printed word, news organizations turned to their last hope: digital subscriptions. …
The balance between the liberalism of the newsrooms and the business necessity to appeal to the “vast middle” for better advertising maintained both the market value and cultural power of journalism. … Yet the essential ingredient of that recipe — the advertising-dictated necessity to appeal to the median American — had disappeared by the early 2010s. The inherent liberal predisposition of the newsrooms was suddenly unchecked by any financial imperative. …
Quantitative studies cited by Ungar-Sargon indicate that the use of terminology associated with woke politics, such as “racism,” “people of color,” “slavery,” “white supremacy,” and “oppression,” has skyrocketed in the American mainstream media precisely since 2011.
The principles of news coverage also changed significantly. Coverage was determined by focusing on pressing social issues highlighted by the progressive Twitterati. …
By 2016, digital conservatives represented the new “cloud.” As their younger predecessors had done years earlier, they became a socially significant force. Soon enough, they discovered that the agenda that the mainstream media imposed clashed with their views — and their sense of losing ground and losing country grew sharp. The power of social media lies not so much in exposing mainstream bias but in revealing that so many other people see these biases, too. …
By providing access to information and self-expression, social media enabled the materialization of indignation. …
The news media wooed the digital progressives, but it was not until the conservative demographic — and Trump — arrived as forces on social media that the news media started raking in digital subscriptions. Until then, the mainstream media did not have any commodity to offer their newly chosen referential group. Trump helped fix that. He became that missing commodity immediately after his shocking victory. The mainstream media understood the signal, upgraded Trump from amusement to existential danger, and started selling the Trump scare as a new commodity.
The media quickly learned to solicit subscriptions as support for a noble effort — the protection of democracy from “dying in darkness,” as the Washington Post put it. A new business model emerged, soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause. Donations required triggers that the love-hate alliance of Trump and the media readily supplied. The crucial part of the new business model was not just Trump himself but the significant number of his supporters. The most terrifying thing was that fully half the electorate supported such a “monster” (in the view of the other half).
By no means were the media interested in mitigating this divide. They needed to maintain frustration and instigate polarization to keep donors scared, outraged, and engaged. …
Both ends of the political spectrum were involved. Right-wing outlets also tried to sell scare instead of news — the scare of losing ground and country. The new business model made the media the agents of polarization. …
Some mainstream media grew their digital subscriptions severalfold during Trump’s tenure.
What comes next for the media industry? The validation of disturbing news within certain value systems has finally become a viable business model. But this business model has stratified the press, bringing meaningful results only to large, nationally concerned media outlets. News validation creates a swarming effect: people want to have disturbing news validated by an authoritative notary with a greater followership. … Most subscription money flows to a few behemoths. The new subscription model has led not only to media polarization but also to media concentration.
The biggest loss, however, is the mutation of journalism into post-journalism. The death of those newspapers that shut down before this mutation was at least honorable.
Journalism wanted its picture to fit the world. Post-journalism wants the world to fit its picture, which is a definition of propaganda. Post-journalism has turned the media into the crowdfunded Ministries of Truth.
The worst part for journalists is that only a few enterprises can succeed in this new business model. The worst part for society is that all legacy media need to pursue digital subscriptions or viewership as their last hope for survival, and thus must join the race of post-journalism.
