The thing that’s maybe most grim about this article is how much of a non-story this is. “New-media outlet can’t raise more VC funding, goes bust with no warning, leaves nothing but ashes” — yeah, it’s a Wednesday alright.
It’s obviously cliche at this point, but I do really worry about the future of publicly available, long-form writing. Investigative journalism in particular.
Obviously, I’m sympathetic to the writer and I am aware of the plight of the modern newsroom.
What’s surprising here is that this all sounds like something I — as a software developer — have been through with like 70% of the places I’ve ever done contract work at. The stress of external VC cash, the loose interconnectedness of employees, and the vague indifference towards pulling the plug. These are, to me, cultural artifacts specific to software startups. Why does a media company need to run this way? Software is eating the world, but maybe not in ways that are immediately apparent.
I'm surprised that any VC firms were even willing to invest in a fairly generic mass-media startup at all. Going forward such organizations will probably have to bootstrap, or operate as non-profits with donations to support public interest reporting, or find a wealthy patron who wants to own a media company as a vanity project. There's just no way that media companies like The Messenger can scale up to generate the type of outsize returns that VC firms have to target.
There is this idea that there is money to be made in publishing, but the old models are failing. Find the right model (ie. market fit) and you could reap respectable profits, e.g. The Economist Group. This sounds a lot like VC territory, but like anything worth doing it is going to be hard.
Because no one other than tech VCs will touch media with a 10 foot pole. And tech VCs aren't going to change their entire investing mindset/philosophy for a deeply unprofitable niche with no chance to hit it big.
There's been multiple waves of VCs to invest in traditional media. Out of both economic opportunism, as well as a desire to at least save a bit of the industry that died because of digital advertising.
Every single one failed, not one large success. Hiring rooms of journalists to publish articles is very high cost and risk without any economies of scale that software people have.
> I do really worry about the future of publicly available, long-form writing. Investigative journalism in particular.
I’m proud of much of the work I did there, like a career-spanning chat with Godfrey Reggio, a very funny back-and-forth with Cord Jefferson, and a review of Barbie that included extra commentary from Amy Taubin, which went a bit viral.
I wouldn't worry about that too much at this place. There is investigative journalism going on, for example Andrew Callaghan has been doing a lot on the homeless, drugs and the border crisis with his "Channel 5," exposés of the type I haven't seen for quite a while. Investigative journalism is making a resurgence by independent people who have cut out the middle man.
That last line really resonated with me: "It's the only thing I really know how to do," or something about like that.
One of the most terrifying realizations I've had over the past few years is that I've worked myself into a pretty narrow niche, one that I can't probably market outside of a few specialized companies if the need arose. Thankfully I have a law degree, though I let my bar license lapse.
But this is one thing I guess I'd say in favor of the modern job-switching economy: your resume doesn't get stale, it shows new things over and over again. There's only so much people like me, who've stayed / plan to stay with one employer over the long-term, can do about things like layoffs.
What happens if I lose my job? It is very hard to say. I guess I'd either try and pass my resume around, but at this point it's almost as if changing careers entirely (for a second time! Yikes!) would be just as easy...
Generic white collar jobs are far more vulnerable to AI than niche jobs. Niche jobs are hard to automate:
1. Very little public data to train on. So AI is bad at it.
2. Low savings from automation. So no incentive to spend tons of money to make the AI good, such as medicine.
There's always a balance between specialization and genericness. But with AI, I think the balance is heavily tiled to the former.
However, one must pay attention to the little ecosystem they specialise in. If it is trending down, there must be decisive moves to shift away early. Most people however choose to be blissfully unaware of the wider scale trends until it hits them like a truck.
In the article's case, the author's outcome is sad but fully expected.
1. He's a journalist
2. Worse, he's an hollywood journalist
That's a completely economically worthless niche, and there isn't even any 'public good sympathy'. When you go into a worthless niche, all the employers left are the exploitative vulture ones, and thus you get abused again and again. Because no good employer will touch their toe into that industry.
Its possible to make a living as a journalist, you just have to specialise in niches that people are willing to pay for. Financial journalism (There's investigative journalism there because readers care and pay for it), industry vertical journals (Banking, tech etc, the information charges like $600 a year). Or be so good you can get into the NYT, etc.
What if you don't want to? You just want to report on games, anime, hollywood etc? Then either start a youtube channel, or a substack. Directly confront the audience and their willingness to watch and pay. Its risky and probably going to fail, but there's a very comfortable upside if you make it.
Just don't expect someone will hand you a good job in dying niches.
I agree with everything you said here. I mean this guy chose to be a movie critic -- probably the dyingest corner of a dying industry. And of course they can pay people nothing for this, because there are a billion people who would love to do that job, making it hyper competitive.
Your comment about automation also made me reflect on the nature of job competition in the future. Now we compete against each other, but soon, we may be competing with an algorithm that pound for pound we can't beat. What's the value add for a human?
This has been the case already in some sectors, like manufacturing...but it seems we white collar guys are going to be facing the music soon ourselves.
Also it makes me wonder what kind of job kids these days should target. Trades? Manual labor? Areas where regulatory structures will soon work as welfare-esque gatekeeping (medicine and law come to mind)?
There are a lot of jobs available now for young people in building trades, as well as related fields like oil and gas extraction. The USA is re-industrializing at a rapid pace due to concerns over national security and foreign supply chains. And Gen Z is relatively small so there are jobs available for those who want to work and are willing to move.
The down side is that building trade jobs will never pay that well because value generation isn't scalable. And the risk of a crippling injury is much higher than for movie critics.
The trades are certainly not the panacea that some think them to be, and they have significant downsides (you very rarely see a roofer over 40, for example, that work is incredibly damaging).
But there's certainly a demand, and we need to get rid of the stigma that "a plumber" is somehow a dumber/worse person than "a lawyer".
The trades do relatively quickly get into "google salary" range, but they will rarely if ever reach "google stock grant" range. 15 years into being a plumber and you're probably managing multiple plumbers and could easily be netting $250k/yr or more.
> Now we compete against each other, but soon, we may be competing with an algorithm that pound for pound we can't beat.
Welcome to the experience of the blue collar worker over the last few centuries. It doesn't seem like it's going all that well for them.
> According to legend, John Henry's prowess as a steel driver was measured in a race against a steam-powered rock drill, a race that he won only to die in victory with a hammer in hand as his heart gave out from stress.
Being laid off or the company shutting down is bad enough, but what an awful way to handle things. No communication from management, sudden loss of access privileges, and then a blank page with all your work gone.
I hope that the people who ran this company get a hit on their reputation that makes anyone think twice about working with them in the future.
And after 30 years of blogging, it made me finally realize the stark difference of writing for yourself vs writing for an audience. This is a great example of the former.
Movie critics have always been somewhat of a "find one who makes you laugh, and read him". It, like much of journalism's output, is a form of entertainment itself. We like to pretend we read the news to be informed and educated, but it's really just some entertainment before work.
TL;DR: A film critic reflects on their time at The Messenger, a startup that collapsed unexpectedly, leaving employees in uncertainty about their futures.
I understand you're trying to simplify every other job out there in a crass way.
But,
- How many companies out there are tripling revenue? If a majority of the companies are tripling their revenue YoY is it healthy or cancerous to the economy?
- How many times does an industry "reinvent" itself.
- What use are all other software, without CRUD apps pulling money from the "other" economy into software?
famously, computing got its foothold, __because__ lotus 123 was utilitarian.
What I mean by that is, ultimate utility for all software products come from software interacting with the real world somewhere down the line.
it might not be hip or world breaking. But, it is the most important part.
Vastly more powerful systems that are slower. Pretty much the only office tasks that are faster are crunching spreadsheets and sending data to a neighbouring office: everything from booting the machine to keying in data to making phone calls takes longer.
