Digital Publishing’s Next Evolution — With Brian Morrissey

Brian Morrissey writes The Rebooting on Substack and hosts The Rebooting Show, a podcast. He is the former editor-in-chief of Digiday and digital editor of Adweek. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how digital publishing is evolving from an industry reliant on social media for distribution to one that prioritizes focus and dedicated audiences. Stay tuned for the third segment where we discuss Brian's views on Web3, crypto, and how these new technologies may help the industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, our guest today, Brian Morrissey, writes the Rebooting newsletter and hosts the Rebooting podcasts. It's an excellent read and listen about the future of digital publishing. And I am a pretty intense reader and listener of the stuff that Brian does. A, because I run my own digital publishing business, but B, because I think when the internet changes, you can always see this stuff happening first in the digital publishing world. I think it's kind of like the crimes in courts of the internet. You see the changes happen there first, and then you start talking about how the policies can fix the issues.

• 2:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I'm thrilled to have Brian here today. We're going to have a long discussion about the evolution, the next evolution of digital publishing, and we'll touch on some Web3 and crypto stuff at the end. Brian, welcome to the show.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Alex, thank you. I'm very excited to do this.

• 2:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, thrilled that you're here.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I kept trying to hire you so many times in the last decade.

• 2:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, look, we have worked together on

• 2:24Speaker 01

  I know, we did a little.

• 2:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  occasions, which was awesome. And I will say, like, you know, having been edited by you, I think that like, you're an excellent editor and always made the stuff that I was writing better. So it's actually a thrill to see you writing more at the reboot.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I know. I like came out of retirement. You know, it's harder. It's harder at first, like even though I was a reporter for probably like 15 years. And then, you know, you become an editor and I feel like, you know, you become an editor, you're like, I'm gonna do both. I'm gonna be like a player coach. And then next thing you know, you're in like meeting after meeting after meeting. And I used to, I used to write down what I was spending my time on and the actual product, which is journalism, or we must call it content these days, was like a small sliver. And so it's been good to get back to actually doing the creation myself.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  But it's harder. It's harder than it used to be.

• 3:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  So much harder. I send Big Technology out on Thursday and like Thursday morning I wake up and I'm like, oh no. I don't know if this happens to you also.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  But it always happens. That's the thing.

• 3:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  My wife is always like, you put it to the end and then it happens. So.

• 3:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Yeah. And then eventually it comes together. And I do remember that, you know, we've had lots of conversations over the years. But one of the things that you've said that stuck with me is you talked about like companies and sometimes, you know, you can tell, I think you said that you can look at the health of a company when it comes to the ratio of people writing emails versus doing stuff. And it must be nice to be the person doing this stuff now, even though you're doing it in email format, which is kind of a blend of maybe the two passions.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I was the digital editor at Adweek for many years. I think it was seven. I forget what it was. It was definitely two years too long. And I used to go into meetings and I would mentally sort of, you know, divide people into writes emails or writes stories. And it was vastly vastly outnumbered the number of people who are writing emails versus writing stories. But then I became the guy writing emails rather than writing stories. So I started to value that group of people a lot higher.

• 4:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. And now?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Now I'm back to like saying, oh, what are these people just writing? Although I am writing emails, but like, you know, actually, you know, creating the product. But I do think that there's something to be said that, like, you know, as publishing grew more complicated with its business models, the infrastructure needed to execute on on those things just kept growing. And so the ratio of people who are actually making the product versus people are doing things around the product kind of grew, because I think a lot of publishing business have not been direct business models, right? So they're they're advertising companies or events companies. And so the it was a bit of a shell

• 5:34Speaker 01

  game, right? Like you're creating, you're doing journalism and you're creating content. But really, the business was in in some ways, something else.

• 5:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And we'll get to this, but that's when it when it the business hiccups, then, then it always ends up getting the cost ends up getting borne out by the people creating the content.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  And and that sucks. And and I think it also like it it has created this era. And I mean, yeah, it creates created this era where reporters are like always on unstable footing. They're underpaid. And even though these media businesses could be healthy, you know, you end up getting just a small percentage actually going to the people writing the stories versus writing the emails. And that's why, you know, we're going to get to it. But that's why I'm sort of bullish on this new model of of independent publishing, where, you know, I think one of the things that I've realized doing doing big technology is that when you cut out a lot of the inefficiency, you could actually have, you know, the the output of a single reporter is actually worth something more than what you see inside media companies.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I think a lot of times the people packaging together the content and selling the content were taking a larger slice of the pie, right? The pie is not necessarily growing. But I think how how it's being sliced is different. And there's a lot of economic pressures on publishing. But at the same time, there's a lot of inequality within publishing organizations. And I think that is part of this great resignation and and the ex person to Substack meme is different economics, because once I think what Substack has done, and you're a great example of this, it's a media business in a box, right? You're doing it. You and I are both doing slightly different different models than a lot of Substack. But

• 7:27Speaker 01

  like, I think what Substack has enabled is people to set up a media business in 10 minutes. You can hook up a Stripe account and you have a media business. You you have all the infrastructure there. It doesn't mean you like, you know, this podcast will probably be edited by by someone different. But like, you have very minimal costs. And when you can lower your your your costs, then you have a lot of, you know, a lot of it is is is upside to some degree. It's hard because you have to do everything.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  And I don't think it's for everyone. And I think, you know, a lot of people don't have the privilege to be able to go off on their own and make it work. But for those that do that has some traction or reputation and particularly expertise in an area, it's a very attractive model.

• 8:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And I want to talk about how we got here. And then we'll circle back to the prospects of individual publishing and also the other, the other trends that we're seeing in digital publishing right now, which is this, this sort of, I don't know, you could kind of call it facetiously a pivot to quality, right? But it does seem like maybe just five minutes ago, we were moving from the search engine optimized Huffington Post era of digital publishing to the social media era, where you had the BuzzFeeds of the world where I used to work, but also the Mikes and, you know, other places that all pivoted to video

• 9:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  and then seemed to fall apart. You could maybe put Vox Media in that, in that camp. And so Brian, can you share a little bit about why, why we're evolving away, which I really think is the case, from the social media driven publishing model to something else? But let's talk about why social media driven publishing is on the outs.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Well, I think digital publishing, you know, if you think about when it really started, the idea was it, there was an artificial constraint on the ability to publish. You needed a printing press in many cases. Now, the internet was going to change that and it was going to lead to all kinds of new publications and anyone can create content. There'd be no gatekeepers. And that, in some ways, happened in the early internet. But the problem was it was impossible to find. It was impossible to make money from. And so you ended up having algorithms. The original algorithm was the search algorithm. And so SEO popped up as a way to solve for discoverability. And what happened was that was why everyone

• 10:09Speaker 01

  was writing, what time does the Super Bowl start? They were not writing for people. They were writing for algorithms. Facebook was simply another algorithm. It had different.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  It had different mechanics than than the Google algorithm that that gave us how to boil water from Demand Media. Thank you very much, Demand Media.

• 10:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  But that was an actual article, how to boil water?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry. Okay, continue.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  There's people who search for it like because when you follow, I always say this, like when you follow the data and you your, your, your main thing is optimizing the data, you're going to optimize into some really weird places. Okay. And search was, you know, that ended up leading search. And so when we had, you know, social come, come around with Facebook, what you saw is a lot of people continuing to write for algorithms, which is writing for a different algorithm. So instead of how to boil water, it was more sensationalist content. I mean, the tail was wagging the, the dog in many ways because publications were not writing for people. They were writing for algorithms, right? And that there's a

• 11:17Speaker 01

  difference between the two. So my hope is that we're going to return to like actually writing for people, not algorithms.

• 11:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it also seemed so promising at the time because, you know, these were big platforms that if you did it right, you could deliver large, large amounts of views to your webpages, or you could even like BuzzFeed did, try a distributed publishing model where you build big audiences on these platforms and then run ads to the audiences there or, or use the expertise that you built up working on those platforms to, to basically create content for advertisers who needed that expertise in order to reach people there. So, but it does seem like it almost in the blink of an eye, that went away. And so, so I'm curious,

• 12:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  A, if you think that that's true, that, that we, we, that the publishing, publishing business has digital publishing business is moving away from that sort of model. And if so, why did it disappear so quickly?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, ultimately, you know, this is a game of distribution, right? I mean, it's distribution and monetization are sort of the two poles of publishing. And Facebook, in particular, was a very attractive means of distribution. I can remember, you know, little things going in 18 months, they amassed an audience of 50 million people off of what was originally a pet food website. They just, they turned out they were better at content than pet food delivery. And so, you know, that, that growth was always sort of unnatural. Media doesn't work that way.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  It, it takes a long time to establish credibility. And, you know, we're in it like right now. It's like incremental growth is, is, it sounds nice, but it also means that it takes a really long time. And so, algorithms were a shortcut, in my view, in many ways. It was a shortcut to scale. And like many shortcuts, they're not, they end up, they end up not being worth it in the long term. Like, there's, there's, there's very few shortcuts in life. And maybe when we get to the crypto part of the, of the show, we'll get to shortcuts again. But, you know, publishers were not in control ultimately. I know it's like control of your own destiny, it doesn't make sense.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  But, you know, they were basically in thrall to the vagaries of an algorithm. And it wasn't like, couldn't predict this. Like, I used to cover search marketing in, in this, in the early days. And, you know, the Google dance, that, that was the name they used for any time Google changed its algorithm. And there would be winners and losers. And it would wipe away various people who had gotten really good at the last algorithm change. And this was just how it worked on the internet. And so, I don't think any of that was particularly new, because when you don't have control, you know, you just have to hope for the good graces of whoever is in control.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And Facebook was in control. And Facebook's interests were not the same as publishers' interests. And Facebook proved this time and again. And for whatever reason, publishers chose to bet on

• 14:50Speaker 01

  The fact that this is a juggernaut, it is, it is rising at an incredible rate and we're just gonna ride it.

• 14:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I mean, like, having been in the belly of the beast, like, it was like an unbelievable high when something caught that Facebook algorithm and next thing you know, you were delivering hundreds of thousands of views to your website.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  It was nuts. It almost seemed unbelievable, right?

• 15:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Like, I know, like, just, you know, look, we are, this business-to-business media, which is, is, is what we were in at Digi Day, has different dynamics than, than B2C media, business-to-consumer media, because ultimately with consumer media, you need to, you need to reach very large numbers, whereas in B2B media, you need to reach, reach very specific people. So, large numbers are not as important. At the same time, like, anyone, you know, we were running stories that were designed to, like, sort of catch the, the Facebook algorithm and some of the numbers on these stories, like, it would take, like, 20 minutes, or not 20 minutes, maybe like two hours to, like, write up some post and, for some reason,

• 16:00Speaker 01

  it would catch the, the Google algorithm. You had hundreds of thousands of views and it was like, how is this possible?

• 16:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, yeah, it did, it did feel, feel fake. And then, I guess what happened, well, it's not really a guess, what did happen was, well, anyway, this is a theory, really.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Facebook got a lot of blowback after the 2016 election. And then, I think what happened is it realized that, hey, we probably shouldn't be pushing all this news on our newsfeed, doesn't really seem to benefit us. And then bam, depreciated the value of, of news links in the feed and then all of a sudden, the bottom dropped out for a lot of that. Does that sound right to you?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds exactly what happened. And, you know, publishers got whole, got caught holding the bag, ultimately. You know, they built up operations and they hired people specifically to, to do this thing, which is write to algorithms, right? And so, it became really difficult for these publishers to, to change course, because that's what they were, they were geared to do. Now, like when people are starting new publications, nobody says we're gonna like excel on Facebook, right? Like, I mean, everyone's like saying we're gonna do, we're gonna have direct connections with with our audience, mostly through email. And I think

• 17:26Speaker 01

  that's because we're seeing this this flight to focus, right? And the publications that are starting now are trying to serve specific audiences rather than everyone. Because I think one of the lessons learned from that that era of of algorithmic control is that when you try to, when you try to, when you try to cater to everyone, you become about nothing, right? You're just like doing the same old, same old, because everyone has, pretty soon, everyone had the same playbook, right? I remember getting pitched one of these dashboards that tells you what's trending on Facebook and stuff. And I was like, wow,

• 18:09Speaker 01

  that's like amazing. And I'm like, but here's the thing, aren't you selling this to like every other publisher out there? And they're like, well, I mean, we work with the major publisher. I'm like, so won't I be doing the same stuff everyone else is doing? And how do you build a brand? And how do you build a differentiation and long term enterprise value if you're the 500th outlet who's writing the same Kardashian story or the Game of Thrones recap? It's really difficult to do. It's better to do something that's different.

• 18:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not only that, it shows up in the Facebook news feed in the same format. So NBC News can look the same as Huffington Post, can look the same as Digiday, can look the same as like someone else's basement publisher.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  I think in many ways, you know, publishers really devalued their brands completely because I always felt like the test of a strong publishing brand is if you take off all of the branding, the logos and everything like this, and someone can say, yeah, that's a that's an economist story. Like, you know, the economist, you've got a point of view and stuff. And that's really hard to do when you're catering to algorithms. It's really difficult. You can't have everything and you sacrifice differentiation in the market. And that's why when these, a lot of these publications imploded after Facebook,

• 19:35Speaker 01

  you know, pulled the football back like Charlie, like who was it Lucy? Lucy did it.

• 19:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, Lucy.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, she pulled the football back on Charlie. Although Charlie never learned the lesson. That's why we always use that GIF for the algorithm.

• 19:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's very fitting.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Story because I'm like, Charlie was always like, no, this time.

• 19:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I got it.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Kick the football.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  But that's, uh, yeah, I mean, that's, that's why when these publications went away, people mourned for an afternoon on, um, on Twitter. And look, I don't like losing a job sucks. So this is nothing to do with the people who are, who, who unfortunately would have lost their jobs to that. But a lot of these publications weren't truly missed. And that's because they had no uniqueness that made them, uh, that made them essential to a group of people.

• 20:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, look, I was at one of those publications. Well, I won't say that BuzzFeed wasn't essential. I thought there were some good parts to it. But I do also think that like, I went in eyes wide open saying like this. And BuzzFeed was very clear about it. We were experimental. We're going to experiment and try to figure out what works. And I do think they've built a somewhat sustainable business. And I think that maybe the problems there were, you know, partially just due to the, which always happens, the investor expectations versus reality.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's the other thing. It's like venture capitalist bet. They, they made like both the right and the wrong bet, right? So I, I can remember, you know, everyone used to trot out the Mary Meeker slide. Do you know that one?

• 21:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yes. The amount of time spent versus the dollars spent, the dollars spent and the time spent online and on mobile far exceeded the dollars that were being spent. So the idea behind that slide was that eventually the dollars were going to catch up and the publishers that got ahead would get a windfall. And that's why Andreessen Horowitz of the world invested in BuzzFeed. Because it was an idea that if you were a digital publishing company that cracked this nut, you were going to beat the New York Times in the game.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And get that money.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  So that actually did happen. Those, those lines both met and actually got exceeded. Okay. But the problem is all the money went to Google and Facebook and Amazon.

• 21:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Wah wah.

• 21:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so like you ended up having publications that filled these companies feeds with great content, did exactly what they asked for, but ended up just making the platforms money.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 22:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so, and now we're moving away from that. You know, it's interesting because we've heard less like, I feel like there's been less of a buzz about how Facebook's killing publishing recently because publishers, I think have gotten smart and said, we're not going to depend on that anymore. So I want you, you've written a lot about this. So can you talk a little bit about where we're heading now? Because there does seem to be this move away from, you know, catch all, do everything, publish on social media to, I don't know, maybe you could call it pivot to quality, pivot to scarcity. I'm always afraid about, you know, media, digital publications, doing these pivots to X because we know what usually happens. But where are we going, Brian?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think publishers sort of went through the Kubler Ross stages of grieving. You know, it's like bargaining acceptance.

• 22:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was definitely anger, anger.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  There was anger. They spent a long time on the anger phase. Okay. And look, everyone, you know, everyone's process is different for publishers. The anger phase was a long one. It's like the bargaining phase. Like, yeah, live video didn't work, but now, you know, Facebook is doing the, what was the, the TV like thing? I don't even remember all these pivots. Remember they were, they were doing, anyway.

• 23:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ricky Van Veen, they brought over college humor guy and said, we're going to do produced video. Facebook TV, I even forgot what the name was and I covered this stuff. There's been so many of them.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  There've been so many of them, but like eventually, I mean, it's like Charlie Brown. Like eventually Charlie was like, no.

• 23:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm out of here.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm out of here. In fact, I'm not even playing football anymore. Forget about this kicking stuff. Or maybe he just took up punting. I don't even know because he has full control. I guess that's what publishers, publishers are, are being like, no, we're not going to have you hold the, we're just gonna, we're gonna punt it ourselves or drop kick it. Because I think that's, you know, Publishers spend a lot of time pointing fingers at tech companies for the travails that their businesses are in. But at the same time, they went into these agreements. No one forced them to rely on that. As I said, many publishers, I'm not like, you know, like, I don't hate the player, hate the game. I understand that. But like, you

• 24:18Speaker 01

  know, many publishers went into this eyes wide open. They were making a bet and the bet just didn't pan out, right? And I think now increasingly, you know, publishers want to be able to have a lot more control over how their businesses develop. That means that things are going to take a long time and the numbers are going to be smaller. So I think one of the interesting things that is starting to take place across the entire media ecosystem is a comfort with smaller numbers, right? Like, we've been so, we've been so used to these astronomical numbers. I used to, I used to joke like in

• 25:01Speaker 01

  a podcast, like, I would have people on from like, I would have like Ben Lehrer on from Group Nine and stuff. And he'd be like, now this did like 4.5 billion video views last month. And I would be like, is that good? I'm like, literally, Ben, you could tell me any number. You could have said 4 trillion. And I'd be like, hmm, 4 billion, 4 trillion, it doesn't really matter. We've gotten so used to massive numbers that, you know, the real numbers are going to be a lot smaller. And, and so everyone needs to get more comfortable with that. I would rather have 10,000 email subscribers with like a 60% open rate than

• 25:43Speaker 01

  a million people visiting from Facebook.

• 25:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, it depends on like the category and stuff like this, but but.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Having like, having a close connection with, with an audience, particularly if it's in like a high value area, you can build a sustainable media business around that. And I think it's no mistake that a lot of the new publications that we see springing up are, are really focused on defined audiences.

• 26:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Often, often high value audiences, but defined audiences.

• 26:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, flush that out a bit and name some names.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  You know, if you look at, at, at, at just where some of the like funding is going, I'm like, so take just the, the Washington DC publishing industrial complex, if you will. This used to be a backwater, right? It used to be the Hill and Roll Call were these like little thin newspapers that got dropped off at members' offices and, and hopefully catch the attention of some, some legislative directors and stuff. Small businesses. Politico just exploded that market, right? And it also went along with the growth of, of the government. The government has become far larger. So there's more money at stake.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  What they realized was there's an incredibly high value audience to be reached and the people making legislation and trying to shape legislation, which means all the lobbyists and interests and whatnot. And so, you know, they got bought for a billion dollars and that's why we've seen Axios come out of Politico. We've seen Punchbowl, I just did a podcast with Jake Sherman, they did 10 million in their first year. And Grid, Grid is starting. And again, they're all focused on these influential decision makers, which I think is good and bad. Like, that's just one area of it. And I think that there are a lot of opportunities, you know, both B to B, but also B to C,

• 27:51Speaker 01

  when you're, when you have a focused audience. I mean, what you're doing is, is a perfect example of it, right? You know, it's, it's a big audience because technology is, is a horizontal.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Story, right? But it's a defined one. It's not, it's not general news. I don't think you see a lot of general news startups. We'll see what Ben Smith and Justin Smith end up coming out with, but I, I think it's going to be more focused. I would bet than like a general news. I think we've, we've seen the end of like, you know, refinery 29 telling us that they're going to cover the Ukraine conflict.

• 28:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  That was so insane. I remember that. Sorry. Some of the stuff that's happened in this industry just makes you shake your head.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  I know. It's like parody. Like looking back, you're like, is this, was this real or was this a joke?

• 28:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's crazy. Brian Morrissey is here with us. He writes the rebooting on Substack. You should go subscribe if you haven't yet. He's also the host of the rebooting. It's a podcast. You can find it on your podcast app of choice. We're talking about the next evolution of digital publishing. We'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your

• 29:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. App Point, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to apppoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast.

• 29:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on the Big Technology Podcast with Brian Morrissey. He writes The Rebooting on Substack, former editor in chief of Digiday. He also, that's right, right, Brian?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 30:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and he also was the digital editor, digital editor at Adweek.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  One of the essential reads on the digital publishing world. Been reading Brian for as long as I've been paying attention to this stuff. So for more, well more than a decade now. All right, Brian, so we spoke a little bit about what the next era of publishing is going to look like. So we've zeroed into it a little bit, right? It's going to be publications that are focusing on a niche.

• 30:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's the business model? You know, you mentioned, you gave us like a couple of data points. They're focused on a niche, they're largely email based. That doesn't seem like a business plan to me.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  So that's not.

• 30:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  What is it?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  It's a distribution plan.

• 30:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Distribution, is it subscriptions? Is it high dollar advertising? You know, and then of course, we're like seeing it in politics. We're seeing it in some ways in sports. Is it all Substack? Is it a different version of this? Well, tell me a little bit more about how it works.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I think one of the good things about what's happening right now is that there's a whole diverse menu of ways that you can make money in publishing. Whereas before, I feel like it was mostly advertising was the default, right? And I like advertising. I run advertising in The Rebooting. Please get in touch if you want to sponsor.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  But, you know, it's not the only way to make money. And so I think a lot of times in publishing, people can be dogmatic, right? It's either like, remember like BuzzFeed? BuzzFeed was dogmatic about it. It was like just native advertising. We hate banner ads. We're not doing any of the banner ads and stuff like this. It made no sense, right?

• 31:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it didn't make sense. I'll tell you why.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's marketing, right?

• 32:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's not that there was an aversion. Eventually BuzzFeed did introduce banner ads. It was, it was marketing. You're selling against the standard with a new form of advertising that you were better at than everyone else. And that's why.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but people catch up, right? Like, you know, at the time BuzzFeed started, it's native advertising. And John Steinberg was saying, we'll never run banner ads. Never say never.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  It, you know, whatever. You got it like a lot of, you know, people like Digitator write about it.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  You know, ultimately, the best way to make money is lots of different ways in media. So, you know, if there's a lot of people who say just subscriptions, just ads, you know, ultimately, in the history of media says, you're going to have like a number of different ways that you make money. And I think if you just look at BuzzFeed, you know, like the profile of their business now versus five years ago is quite a bit different. They're making money in a bunch of different ways. I think the challenge ends up being, how many different ways can you, can you make money without just

• 33:06Speaker 01

  eating into your margins with higher infrastructure costs? Because then you end up in that, in that situation where you, you have all of these infrastructure needs and teams needed in order to execute against that, right? And I think nowadays, people are able to choose a bunch of different ways in which they make money that fits their editorial mission in some ways, right? So you can, you have new publications in which the business model is more consulting than it is advertising. Well, I mean, you have, you have people that are doing like, I mean, I do consulting on the side, right?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And the newsletter is, is a good, is a good way to, to have, you know, those kind of assignments. Because it's a way to like, say how you think and stuff like this. There's a lot, there's people who are using this like to invest, right? I think what Paddy McCormick is doing at Not Boring is fascinating, right? And a lot of You know, I understand a lot of capital J journalists are uncomfortable with it, but there is, there is no priesthood or accreditation process as far as I know to be, to be publishing content on, on the internet. So I think that's a good thing overall. I understand the ethical quagmires and the rest of that, and they're very important.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  But ultimately, I think particularly when, when you see this shift from institutions to individuals, you're going to have a lot of different types of business models because people inherently trust other people more than they trust institutions. We're seeing that all across the economy. That's, that's what is powering this creator economy stuff, right? Is, is people are more attached to other people.

• 34:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  So tell me then, what do you think is gonna, do you think that this next evolution is going to be more of these like publications that are going after the opportunity? A few that we spoke about, Ben Smith and Justin Smith's publication.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's going to go after 200 million people, but follow the pattern that we talked about. Largely, they'll probably do a lot of email. They'll probably do, you know, quality over quantity. And then you have the Pucks also, which you and I both, we both work with Puck, which is, you know, subscription based, email driven, quality news. Or do you think that it's going to be more individual based? Like we're doing on Substack or a combination of both?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's going to be all the above, right? I think the, you know, it's, it's often set of media. So this isn't necessarily super original, but it, it goes through phases of, of bundling, unbundling, and then rebundling. I think we're at the start of a rebundling phase. I mean, you see that, you see that in streaming. Obviously, the explosion of, of streaming services was going to be unsustainable. You just simply can't have this many subscriptions, this many streaming.

• 36:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  So. What's the example you gave in your newsletter, like Sundance Live?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  I don't know, someone gave me shit about like, I keep going after Sundance Now. And that's me, like, and someone was like, oh, you know, just wrote me this week. It was like, why, why do you keep going after Sundance Now as an indie film? I'm like, okay. It just, it just hit me, but you know, fine. You know, the reality is people are, and we're seeing this, you know, growth slowing in, in the streaming world is people get subscription fatigue at the end of the day. There's only so many things they can pay for. And so there's a need to rebundle, right? And I think that that is the question about how the rebundling will happen. I pay a lot of attention to what Puck is doing. Companies like every, in some ways what Axios has done.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  And a lot of what they're doing is like, I consider them like collective media companies in which they're trying to have the best of both worlds. They're, they're trying to have the, the institutional benefits, which is like, oh, you have an infrastructure that exists. You have, I don't know, healthcare, things like that, maybe a 401k. But you get upside, right? And, and the individuals are more front and center. If you look at like how the Puck model is, and I think that's really smart. And so I think more publications are going to take the best of like the Substack world and mix it with the best of the existing publishing model.

• 37:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so do you, do you think that, um, you think we've hit a peak though with this individual, individual reporter as a business? I guess we're both doing it. Do you, do you, well, not, yes, we are both.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should warn other people from getting into this, right? So like just less competition.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  No, it's terrible. You should all not do it. It's, it's like the worst in the world.

• 38:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  In all seriousness, it seems pretty promising, but sorry. Yeah. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it's, it's promising for a simple reason. The economics are great, right? If like, If you can have enough demand on the subscription side and/or the sponsorship side, the economics are tremendous. Your costs are extremely low, so your margins are going to be like insane. And there's a lot of drawbacks to that. You know, taking vacations is more difficult when it's just you. I was once told a very smart piece of advice that large organizations cover up for our inefficiencies. We can have bad days. We not, Alex, you and I never have a bad day.

• 38:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it doesn't apply to me. I've had some pretty tough ones and it's definitely shown up. But it is, it is. Sorry, go ahead.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the downside of it. I mean, I think it has, I think it has legs, the individual publications, right? But I think it's going to be itself a niche phenomenon, right? It, I don't know if Substack develops a true middle class. I haven't necessar, and I don't even know what that middle class looks like depending on the sector. Right now, a lot of the, a lot of the success cases are in specific areas. There's what I consider the sort of grievance blogger world. Yeah, outrage, outrage cycle stuff.

• 39:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Always sell, doesn't matter the format, social, email.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you know, like Substack's getting pulled into that over anti-vaxers and all that stuff like this. That's always going to be, you know, outrage will always be good. And particularly, we just have a tribalist society in which people, you know, want to, I don't want to say virtue signal, but they want to signal that they're part of a tribe. And, and that, that is a way. And just to be clear, this isn't unique to newsletters or Substack. I would argue, The New York Times does the exact same thing since it's become a subscription publication. If you look at The New York Times today versus before it went hardcore subscription, a lot has changed in our political front, but like, it's pretty

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Clear like people, people criticize a lot ad models for distorting the incentives. But I think it's pretty clear that the incentives for the New York Times to preach to the choir are there.

• 40:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's very interesting who your customer is. If your customer is your advertiser, you have a certain set of expectations. If your customer is your subscriber, in one hand, on one hand, it's good because you align your, your interests with your readers' interests. But on the other hand, the temptation to preach to the choir and to, I don't know, make the choir mad.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  So they keep.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  I mean, but you also want to align with them. Like you see it anytime the New York Times has like published like a dissenting conservative voice on its opinion page. You know, all of a sudden this cancel New York Times comes up. That has an impact. That has an impact. So no model is, is, is perfect. By any stretch of the imagination. But as I said, like there's different areas. I'm sorry. There was like different areas that are. And they're more like lucrative. For instance, like there's more like around fintech, like success cases in, in the Substack world. Because that's where money is. And I think one of the, one of the realities that I think is good to keep in mind.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  I try not to be Pollyanna ish, but I'm trying to be a little bit more optimistic maybe than I was before. It is that a lot of the innovation happening right now in publishing is geared to the affluent and the powerful. And none of that is new, but, and I think it's just the, I think the focus is more these days in that direction. We have like gaping inequality in this country. I, I went to some like event at Art Basel. Talk about being on the other side of the, the inequality divide. And even like some art dealer is telling me, she was like, we're all courtiers at the end of the day.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  And that's because we have so many mega rich people that there's, you know, the world is sort of, you know, organized to catering around them. There's so many underserved areas that do not have the luxury of being able to have, you know, big subscription businesses. And I think that is obviously a concern. And so I think it's great that we're seeing innovation and I don't believe it's like a zero sum game or anything like this. But at the same time, we need to have sustainable media models for all demographics and not just for the affluent and powerful.

• 43:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're right. The biggest challenges facing societies in the future, climate change, inequality, migration, all disproportionately affect the non-rich. It's hard to see how trust in news can be reversed if much of it is directed towards and caters to the rich.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a big, big point and a worthy issue that it does seem that like a lot of news coverage is geared, or well, yeah, the business models will gear towards the rich. And also, like, you, it's, there's, there's a bubble aspect to it. And, you know, you tend, if you, if, well, we already know that media is as super coastal as newspapers have been kind of falling apart in small towns across the country. How does this, can you reverse this? I mean, this seems like an extremely, this is an extremely serious issue and one that you highlighted. I'm curious if you think

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  there's, there's hope for it.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, like, local is the hardest of the hard problems to solve, right? Axios is not solving it by one person, like in Atlanta, aggregating content. I don't, I don't mean like that as a knock on what Axios is doing. I think it's, it's good. I just wouldn't, I wouldn't PR it as saving journalism because it's not

• 44:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  it's not saving local journalism.

• 44:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. For context, they have like, they're starting to do these local versions where they like throw a reporter in a town, which, okay, glad to have a reporter, but out there, but

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not replacing

• 44:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Like, I mean, I grew up, I grew up in, in Philadelphia and we had the Inquirer, I guess for the first like six or seven years of my life, we had the Bulletin and we had the Daily News, which I believe came out twice a day. There was like an evening edition, right? It was like so much news. Even the Inquirer, Inquirer had a Jerusalem bureau. It was nuts. And you know, now it's completely hollowed out, right? I live in Miami right now and Miami Herald, which has a, an incredibly long and storied tradition. And again, they had, you know, bureaus throughout Latin America.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  You know, looking at the paper today, it's like, it's, it's just a shell of its former self. I don't know what the solution to that is. Benevolent billionaires are only benevolent until, for so long. So I don't know if that's like necessarily a good, a good approach. You go to other countries and you, you know, it's very normal to have publications aligned with political parties or oligarchs. And like, I do have concern that we will become the same, the same thing. Like, I don't.

• 45:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Feels like it's happened already.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny to me. It's like, if you're a billionaire in Ukraine, you're an oligarch. If you're a billionaire here, you're an entrepreneur. Like, I don't know. Like, okay, I don't know. Like, I guess, like, it's somewhat different. But like, you know, the reality is, like, people who are powerful are not funding things out of pure altruism. I just don't believe that as a journalist and stuff.

• 46:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  So I think it's interesting that we're seeing some nonprofit models. I think Capital B just launched this week. Lauren Williams, former editorial director at Vox, started this, focused on, on black issues on a local level. I think they're starting in Atlanta and then, and then building from there. But when I look at local, it's going to be, it's gonna be kind of like how we deal with, like, healthcare, right? There's no one system that we're gonna have. We're just gonna have a bunch of slices of Swiss cheese that we pile on top of one another completely inefficiently and solve part of the problem. But the problem doesn't go away.

• 46:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and we've danced in this conversation a little bit around the topic of trust, but you know, there's, there's such little trust in, in the US media right now. And I wonder if part of that is because the journalist, you used to know your local journalists, right? They would be in towns like Pittsburgh and Toledo. And, and now, you know, as the papers in those areas start to fall apart or be bought by private equity and then torn to shreds, you know, now a lot of journalists live in places like, well, I mean, I'm here in Brooklyn, right? In Brooklyn, California, you're in Miami. Well, you're out of the bubble and

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Brooklyn, South.

• 47:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  In some ways. Yeah. So, but I do think that they, you know, I, I wonder if there's, there's this trust issue where they just, you know, are not, are not going through what the rest, what people in the rest of the country are. And if that's causing some serious disconnect between, you know, mainstream news and, oh, I don't know, we're not mainstream news, but like, between the news and, and the news consumer. And maybe that's

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think that's like, without a doubt, that's true. And like, I think in, and it's, the best cases is that all this like, you know, shifting to, from institutions to individuals is that it rebuilds trust in some ways, right? I mean, we need to rebuild trust in our institutions. I just think it's going to take a long time. I don't know of an institution that has fared well since the pandemic has started, at least in the United States. Every institution has, has suffered in some ways. So I think, you know, the, the rise of individuals is, is similar to that because you just trust people that you, you see and you hear and you know. I mean, I think one of the reasons that newsletters

• 48:46Speaker 01

  and podcasts are interesting is that, I don't know if you've found this, is you have a different connection to, to the people who are reading you or listening. You hear from them more, at least I do. I hear from them more. I have a conversation with them. And I think one of the good things of this sort of flight to focus is it forces people to do stuff that, that, that doesn't scale, right? You gotta be like, In your community and embedded as part of your community, right? And that can be on a local level of going to the, going to the community boards and stuff like this. But it's also like in like a B to B community or like, for instance, I was talking with Jake Sherman.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  He and Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan, they've been on, on the hill, each of them for more than 15 years. Right? Like literally on the hill. They are a part from, but a part of that community. They are at least like visible within that community and that engenders trust. And trust takes a long time to build up. You just don't automatically have it. And so I think it was Jeff Bezos said, there's no compression algorithm for experience. But you know, a lot of this stuff obviously is, is a niche phenomenon just because it's really difficult. It takes a lot of time to build up, to build up trust.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  And I think that's going to be completely critical because it's important for democracy ultimately.

• 50:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I do think that the, the individual journalist model, you know, it's, it's amazing to be experiencing it firsthand.

• 50:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's awesome. And, and I do think that when people know where you're coming from, there's a chance to just have a much, much deeper, much, much more authentic connection with them.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me ask you this, though. I'm going to turn the tables on you. What, what it's been, what's been the hardest part that you didn't expect to be the hardest part?

• 50:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I, I think that there's definitely way more time being spent on stuff that's not journalism.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that does, does take away from the ability to focus completely on reporting. I would love to have, you know, another day in the week that I could use strictly for reporting. So to me, that's, that's been, I mean, I do love doing the business side of it. It's super fun and you know, I went entrepreneurial because I enjoy doing entrepreneurial things.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  But like for me, there's definitely been a challenge in terms of like dedicating the amount of time for reporting.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, you know, I was thrilled to get out on my own and like have a dialogue with with readers and listeners through the newsletter and the pod. But I miss newsrooms. Like, I think there's something to be said when you have the collective

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  group together. And there's, there are moments where like, it's easy to lose focus if you're on your own, in terms of where your north star should be. And so like for me, I think I've made it a practice, and I just did it last night, of spending time just writing, writing about what I'm, what I'm after, how I differentiate myself, what I'm covering, like basically just rewriting the beat memo over and over and doing it for my own good to keep myself focused.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It's so easy to get pulled off course, I feel like, solo, because you don't have, you don't have that structure of a newsroom. You don't have people to tell you that's a terrible idea.

• 52:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Correct.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  And so I think that that makes it, that makes it more difficult. And I think that's why a lot of this is not, is not made for everyone, right? I spoke to like a journalism school class at Penn State earlier this week, and I asked them, there's probably like 20, 20 students in the class, and I asked, and it's hard to do with, over Zoom, first of all, like with show of hands, you know, those show of hands questions are always lame. But, but I pushed ahead, I did it anyway. And I asked them, how many, how many are, expect to work in like institutional newsrooms when they graduate? And two hands went up.

• 52:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  And I asked like, why? And all, and one of them said, you know, was strategic about it. And he said, oh, I want to like work in an institutional newsroom because I know I don't know enough, and then I want to go off and do my own thing. There was much more, and I know it's been like, A sort of cliche to like link to it about how like, you know,

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Gen Z or whatever, like wanna be like influencers and stuff, but they really want to be solo. And I think what was interesting to me was that when I asked why, what I heard was they were smart. They saw what happened to the millennials. They saw that they got like used as cannon fodder and then cast aside. And the Gen Z people were paying attention. They weren't just on TikTok. They had one eye on what was going on. And these kids are savvy. You're not gonna fold them with the free beer and like snacks. They're like, cut the check, CTC.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  But I think it's a major issue for newsrooms, right? And I think it's a major issue for the profession because, you know, like you couldn't have been able to do this 10 years ago, right? I mean, like, right? Because you didn't have the experience.

• 54:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I mean, the reason what what actually gave me confidence to do it was writing always day one. Like, once I wrote the book, the book is a, you know, it's a solo endeavor. And it forced me to, you know, become a much better writer because I looked at this thing as like, this was gonna be my presentation of of my work to the world. And I was gonna, I spent an inordinate amount of time refining the writing and refining the ideas. And I think that once I got there, I said, I said, you know, I can write a newsletter on my own every week that without an editor, because I've been through this process.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And that's what I do worry about when like, you know, this Substack revolution sort of gets oversold in some ways. Because you lose a lot. There's trade offs to everything in life. And you lose a lot being not being part of a newsroom, but you also lose a lot not having like, and this is my bias since I was an editor, of having an editor, right? And, you know, I, I hope. That, you know, cause like, look, we always, um, I know when I was trying to hire you, like that was always like, I was like, we'll let you do things you'll not, you, you, you wouldn't be able to do it, what other, whatever other place that had a better name. Um, and you know, you will grow

• 55:30Speaker 01

  faster here than you will at those places. That was always the, cause like our benefits sucked and the salary was maybe competitive. Um, and like you would have to like, you know, people would mispronounce the name and it didn't sound good at cocktail parties. You get a lot working against you. So you better have a better pitch than that. But I worry that, um, that people will not grow in their craft, cause this is a craft at the end of the day.

• 55:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I, I even know that like, when I showed up to BuzzFeed, like, I couldn't write. Like there was, my writing was, was bad. And just having that for five years hammered out of me, um, you know, it, I could not have done it without that. So however much I hated, and my editors there will, will tell you, I'm sure that me in a Google Doc could be kind of a terror. But however much I hated having my words like changed and stuff like that, being through that process repetitively over five years, definitely changed the way that I approach this stuff.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Were you like a prima donna about it, Ox? Were you like, take my name off this?

• 56:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I was never prima donna. I mean, you've edited me, so you know, but thank you. I appreciate that. But yeah, I definitely would get attached to like certain facts or things in a story and find, find it difficult to let go.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get that. So I hope, I, I hope that there's like some sort of like, I've been thinking about like apprenticeships, right? Like I hate when people call things fellowships, cause it's just like, we're not gonna give you benefits. They're gonna pay you not that much money. And then most likely we'll just like scoot you to the door unless you're really good, then we'll hire you. Um, but like, I do think like, you know, the apprenticeship model would be an interesting one for publishing because I, you know, I, I know the needs for, um, for people to perfect their craft are, are, are still there. That doesn't change. Um, everyone needs to learn. Um, but I just think that it needs to be in a different way than it's been structured before. All this,

• 57:29Speaker 01

  you know, the unionization that is sweeping through newsrooms, I don't even know of a major newsroom at this point that, that hasn't been unionized. I mean, that's a tell. Like, you know, there's a lot of dissatisfaction with how.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Publishing companies have have been organized and and I think that needs to change. I know I wonder if like an apprenticeship model would make more sense for the people who are more entrepreneurially minded.

• 57:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think that could work. And I also think that the stuff that's going on at places like Puck really makes a lot of sense, where you put the journalists front and center, you give them a piece of the action and and you edit them still.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  But I would say this, I think the the I would say the downside of that is that these are people who have already established themselves, right? And I always thought the test of a great publication is being able to nurture, you know, great reporters. And that's the calling card, right? I mean, the thing that I sort of, you know, if there's anything I'm most proud of with Digiday is that how many people who, and I don't pretend that it was because of us, they did it. But how many people who came through ended up going on to do really great things in other places? Like, I think that's the test, like of having a strong alumni network that you are able to,

• 58:51Speaker 01

  again, enable them to grow faster than they would otherwise. So I think it's like a little bit easier to like, it's a little bit of a shortcut itself, to just collect a bunch of people who who have already perfected, not perfected, but come close to perfecting their craft.

• 59:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I agree. You guys were great at that. I thought Ben Smith also just like a master at it. And that's why I'm bullish about what he's going to build. I have no idea what it is. But the way that I saw Ben, you know, pick people from, you know, from untraditional backgrounds often because he was competing, he wasn't going to get the person that The Times was recruiting. He was going to get someone else and then turn them into a star reporter was amazing.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm very interested to see if if new publications can do that because that's the test. Just amassing people who are already really good at like what they do is is nice. But I don't I don't see that as the same as being able to to nurture, you know, talent.

• 59:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Agreed. Do you have 10 more minutes to talk about crypto?

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 59:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. Well, why don't we do that? We'll do 10 more minutes on crypto and then we'll let Brian get back to his day here on Big Technology Podcast. We'll be back right after this.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

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• 1:00:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back for one final segment here on the Big Technology Podcast with Brian Morrissey. The, what do you call yourself? The CEO, founder, editor?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Sole proprietor.

• 1:00:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Rebooting, the sole proprietor of the rebooting. It's a great newsletter on Substack.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Wouldn't it be great if instead of like people like calling themselves like entrepreneurs or just small business owners and stuff like this? I don't know when like everyone became like sort of entrepreneur. Like, I don't know, the people, people who open up a bakery aren't like, I'm an entrepreneur. They're like, no, I opened a bakery.

• 1:01:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I was, I was coming out of JFK last night and the guys, the police officers standing at the exit were like, all right, you know, before you could actually leave to society, they're like, well, what do you do for work? Who do you work for? I was like, I'm a business owner. And they're like, what type of business? What do you sell? And I was like, well, I was like, I sell information on the internet. The guy looked at me weird.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  You get pulled into like a room or something like, we need this guy in secondary.

• 1:01:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, it was close. He was like, I hope it's good information. And I was like, well, if you really need to know. And he's like, just go.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  You know, Alex, I hope, I hope a day very soon arrives that you can come into JFK and you'd be like, I read a newsletter. And they're just like, boom, they stamp your passport and they're like, welcome back to America, sir.

• 1:01:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure that will happen very soon. So let's talk about crypto because you are, from your writing, pretty optimistic about crypto.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  I'm crypto curious.

• 1:02:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Say more about that. Yeah.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Is that a weasel position? I don't know.

• 1:02:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I think that, I think that that's a fair position. I mean, yeah, I think it's, it makes a lot of sense to be curious about it, but not sold. It seems like the right position to me.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's just like for me, like beyond the technical aspects of it, which I don't pretend to fully grasp, although I've tried as much as I could. I mean, I'm like, hey, you and I both like delved into programmatic advertising. So I'm like,

• 1:02:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  I don't mean to be cocky, but like, I know, I know enough to be dangerous with this stuff. But to me, like, it makes a lot of sense. And I like, you know, when you look at, there are so many smart people who, who are going into this field that there needs to be like a lot more fleshing out and a lot more meat on the bones. And I understand that we're in this trough of disillusionment. I believe that's like a key part of the Gartner hype cycle. You go and then it normalizes. And we're, we're in that right now because, you know,

• 1:03:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  You would call it a trough of disillusionment. That's interesting because it seems like there's, it's almost like another polarized thing. There's a bunch of people disillusioned and a bunch of people who are like, this is the next big, next biggest thing after Jesus.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Well, the Ponzi, you know, people like are selling Bitcoin pizza and whatnot. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's just all part of the, the scheme, right? But I think, you know, when you look, it's like every week comes out another about why web three is like a bunch of nonsense and stuff like this. And it's important to, to me, it's like important to pay attention to, you know, both the knowledgeable naysayers, but also like the biggest proponents, but understanding that each has their own.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  They're arriving in with their own point of view, with their own interests, right? Like, I mean, I think a lot of the crypto boosters, they, they obviously have an interest in pumping up the, the prices and this thing has to keep going because it has momentum and you need to keep bringing more people in. And that's why people call it a Ponzi scheme. But I think the underlying principles of it are, are, are very sound. I mean, obviously there's not many people who are very pleased with how the technology industry is set up right now. I think there's, there's very little bipartisan like agreement on anything in Washington.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  One issue that everyone is unhappy with the power of big technology, if I could say.

• 1:04:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  And, you know, that's the same because a lot of the promises that the internet made, you know, have simply been disappointing to, to a large degree, right? Like, we were supposed to have this, this amazing democratization. And, you know, it ended up, it ended up not working out. It ended up just with a couple of gatekeepers. And so I think this is a reaction to a lot of that. Obviously with Bitcoin, it was a reaction to the financial crisis.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  So I think it makes a lot of sense that there, that there would be a reordering. And again, these things all come in cycles. And so I would think that there's a good chance that this is the next cycle of innovation on the internet.

• 1:05:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And one of the things I always keep reminding myself is that the internet is really so young. I mean, high speed, high speed internet is only a few decades old. And if you think about it in the course of humanity, the internet's not going to go away. So we are going to have a lot more innovation from what we have.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  And I guess, I guess, you know, having like sort of lived through a few of these cycles, you know, and, and, and been working during them. Like I'm, I'm, I'm like the la, I'm part of the last generation that grew up analog. And which is an interesting experience because, you know, for those of us who are in Gen X, our, our childhoods and, you know, even in college, you know, were. Internet free. We didn't have the internet. We didn't have, I didn't have email until I graduated from college. So it gives you a slightly different perspective to some degree. And I think it reminds

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  you of, at least it reminds me of how new and weird all this stuff is. But I also, having lived through this, I can remember the over promises of the internet 1.0 era and the silliness of pets.com and pseudo and all these other fly by night entities that went away. And then the NASDAQ crash and everyone wrote off all the stuff that was happening. And they didn't pay attention. They looked at the NASDAQ number. They didn't pay attention to the number of homes getting broadband. And that, that ended up being a more important number. I can remember when, I can remember Google's IPO being a mess, Facebook's IPO being a mess, Facebook not being able to make the

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  transition to mobile and stuff like this. And so boom and bust is part of, of, you know, the internet cycle. I don't think that the development of the technology industry is going to stop all of a sudden, right? Like if you were to go back 20 years ago, it was all about sun microsystems, you know, and things change very quickly. And so, you know, it makes sense for, for this to be, you know, the next cycle of innovation.

• 1:07:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  And do you see any applications for publishing there?

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Like, I mean, I think, you know, one of the principles that I think is, is, is most compelling to me in the web three world is the concept of, of ownership. And so moving, if you think about like, you know, early internet really treated, publishing treated the, the, you know, they talked about audiences and there was a lot of targeting, we want to target the audience, a lot of military metaphors and whatnot. And then web 2.0 kind of introduced the, the idea of community with a lot of nonsense around sharing economy that was really about like getting around local regulations and running unregulated taxi and hotel chains. Be that as it may, I think the

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  next like, I think the idea of, of moving towards a, a better system of ownership in which incentives are better aligned would

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Would serve the internet well. I think, you know, overall, there the internet for some reason has evolved into almost a predatory place, right? It's like a lot of the, you know, the the terrier square, the Twitter, you know, terrier square days are long past. And going on the internet as a as a user is is an almost adversarial experience. You're always worried about like, you know, what is is going to be done to your to your computer or who's collecting data for what purposes and whatnot. And and even the business models.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  I mean, you see a lot of, there's been a lot of predatory behavior by technology companies. You know, don't don't be fooled by the fleece. There's this is some sharp elbows going on.

• 1:09:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  So I think that is really, you know, interesting. Obviously, you know, with with NFTs and having a a new way of of having like a community show their support is is interesting to the point of where they have ownership privileges, you know, because right now, like subscriptions, I think the way subscriptions have been implemented by many publishers is in the same sort of predatory way, right? You see all these, you saw all these dollar a month intro offers that explode to like $300 a year and stuff like this. Now, a lot of that is based off of, you know, people not canceling and then you just whack

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  them and hope they don't hope they don't notice. This is the same kind of stuff that has eroded trust to begin with. So if you can come, if web 3.0, if it's web three, I don't care. If there can be a better alignment of incentives using these technologies between the people creating the content and the people who want that content to exist in the world, then I think that should lead to a healthier digital media ecosystem.

• 1:10:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  An optimistic note to leave it off on. Brian Morrissey, thank you so much for joining. What a great conversation. Appreciate you being here.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.

• 1:11:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, and people can find the rebooting. Why don't you give the shout out?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the rebooting, it's the rebooting.substack.com. There's also the rebooting show, which is my podcast that's on Apple and Spotify. I haven't left Spotify over the Joe Rogan thing just yet.

• 1:11:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, okay, and I can't recommend both properties enough. Some of my favorite stuff, always great to read. Brian, always great to listen to him, and even better to speak with him. So, thanks again. Thank you to Nate Guatney for editing the audio. I know, Nate, we're giving to you last minute, so I appreciate the help. Thanks to Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. Thanks to all of you, the listeners. Appreciate you being here with us every week. I think we're gonna be talking about CRISPR next week. So, if you're into gene editing, why don't you stick around?

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  I'm glad you didn't get the questions mixed up.

• 1:11:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  We'll get you back on talking about CRISPR, man. If it's your first time here, please subscribe if you're here for a while and you like the show. A five-star rating would be much appreciated on Apple. We only have a few of those, so if you're willing to rate us, that would be a big help. Other than that, have a great week. Thanks again for stopping by Big Technology Podcast. We will see you next time.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

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