Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hell and welcome to Better Offline.
Speaker 3: I'm, of course your host ed zetron as ever, and
Speaker 3: today I am joined by the incredible critic and author
Speaker 3: of the Citation Needed newsletter Molly. Why Molly, thank you
Speaker 3: for joining me, Thanks for having me. So you generally
Speaker 3: seem to this is a strange way to put it.
Speaker 3: Actually love the internet can be like like you're mad
Speaker 3: at what they've done to it, but you actually enjoy
Speaker 3: the computer quite a lot.
Speaker 4: Yes, big fan of the computer over here.
Speaker 3: You wrote this fantastic thing about RSS, and I think
Speaker 3: like a lot of people kind of have the idea
Speaker 3: it's a feed. Can you walk people through exactly what
Speaker 3: our SS is and why you like it so much?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So, RSS is just a protocol. It's sort of
Speaker 4: a system by which websites can make their content available
Speaker 4: to be ingested by programs called feed readers, which are
Speaker 4: websites or applications or you know, can be an app
Speaker 4: on your phone where you can pull together feeds from
Speaker 4: any number of sources, whether it's the newsletters you follow,
Speaker 4: the news organizations that you subscribe to, podcasts, YouTube videos,
Speaker 4: massed on feeds, any sort of feed like structure can
Speaker 4: be pulled into these feed readers, and then you can
Speaker 4: read them anytime you want, on your own time, without
Speaker 4: you know, going to the substack app, opening your massed
Speaker 4: on account, you know, going to wired dot com. And
Speaker 4: it's a really wonderful way to interact with the web
Speaker 4: these days, because it's sort of radically different from how
Speaker 4: a lot of uh are online or actions have become
Speaker 4: this sort of abusive you know, wrestling match with whatever
Speaker 4: it is that you're trying to read. You know, the
Speaker 4: content appears there. There's usually no ads in your RSS feed.
Speaker 4: There's not any goodhead.
Speaker 3: And is it like you could you said, you can
Speaker 3: put Mastodon posts and Bluesky into it, like you can
Speaker 3: have your social feeds in that too.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: A ton of different services provide RSS feeds, sometimes without
Speaker 4: people even realizing it, so pretty much any WordPress site
Speaker 4: will publish an RSS feed. Every ghost blog has an
Speaker 4: RSS feed by default. Substack has RSS on by default.
Speaker 4: There are other you know, content management systems where it's
Speaker 4: either on by default or easily enabled with a click
Speaker 4: or so. And the real benefit to the person using
Speaker 4: an RSS reader is that you don't don't have to
Speaker 4: rely on the sort of algorithmic feeds that we have
Speaker 4: become accustomed to, where you know, if you go to
Speaker 4: Twitter and you just want to see, you know, news
Speaker 4: articles written by the journalists that you chose to follow, there,
Speaker 4: chances are you're not going to see that. You're going
Speaker 4: to see Twitter ads, You're going to see rage bait
Speaker 4: that's being boosted.
Speaker 2: By the algorithm four or five. That kind of yeah, like.
Speaker 4: Elon Musk's posts always show up even though you don't
Speaker 4: follow him, right, and then the journalists that you did
Speaker 4: go out of your way to follow, the chances are
Speaker 4: you're not going to see the news articles they wrote
Speaker 4: because Twitter do downranks links, and so.
Speaker 2: That's the same thing with threats as well, I think.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I mean it's extent Facebook. I mean, a
Speaker 4: lot of social media websites have started down ranking links
Speaker 4: to try to convince people to stay on the platforms
Speaker 4: rather than going to wherever people actually publish their work.
Speaker 4: And it's this horrendous situation for both publishers and readers.
Speaker 4: And so you could sort of opt out of it
Speaker 4: by using RSS to follow these things very directly and
Speaker 4: avoid a lot of the surveillance and a lot of
Speaker 4: the you know, sort of abusive practices that we're increasingly
Speaker 4: seeing on platforms.
Speaker 2: And do they still get the traffic?
Speaker 3: So that was that's the one thing with ours that
Speaker 3: they've really been able to get my hangof, because I know,
Speaker 3: I don't get subscribers like I won't get like reads,
Speaker 3: which is fine, but does this does this not like
Speaker 3: slightly disadvantaged publishers and suppurse they haven't turned it off?
Speaker 4: Well, it depends a lot on how a publisher makes
Speaker 4: their money. So for example, I write a newsletter. People
Speaker 4: can pay to subscribe to my newsletter, and it's really
Speaker 4: no different to me if they read it in their
Speaker 4: email inbox, if they come to my website, or if
Speaker 4: they you know, read it in their RSS reader. You know,
Speaker 4: it's sort of all the same. And then people who
Speaker 4: publish Paywalt's content can an opt to have either excerpts
Speaker 4: of their posts published on their RSS feeds or increasingly
Speaker 4: we're starting to see people create subscriber RSS feeds so
Speaker 4: that if you do yep, and you know, I subscribe
Speaker 4: to four or four media and so I have a
Speaker 4: specific RSS feed that I can follow there that gives
Speaker 4: me the full text articles and so you know that's
Speaker 4: a way in which publishers can still earn money through
Speaker 4: subscriptions while offering RSS feeds. The place where it can
Speaker 4: be challenging is ads supported, you know, publishers where they
Speaker 4: really rely on you visiting the website to get the
Speaker 4: AD traffic. And so you'll often see ads supported publishers
Speaker 4: publishing excerpts from their RSS feeds, but not full text,
Speaker 4: meaning that if you're following them in a feed reader,
Speaker 4: you still have to open the page and it takes
Speaker 4: you to the website and they get the traffic. And
Speaker 4: so that's how a lot of those sites get around it.
Speaker 4: But there are websites that basically decide that it's you know,
Speaker 4: sort of a lost leader. It's like the Costco retissory chicken.
Speaker 4: It gets people in the door, even if they lose
Speaker 4: some AD revenue. You know, you're still seeing their material
Speaker 4: more that you might not otherwise, you're still visiting the site,
Speaker 4: you might sign up for a subscription, whatever it might be,
Speaker 4: And so they sort of decided it's a worthwhile trade off.
Speaker 3: And you use innerader, right I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you mentioned this is a really specific one. But I
Speaker 3: saw on your piece you were saying you no longer
Speaker 3: recommend Feedley. And I've heard Feedley mentioned a few times.
Speaker 2: Why is that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I used to use Feedley, and I used
Speaker 4: to recommend them pretty widely. You know, they were doing
Speaker 4: they had a very nice, full featured RSS reader, and
Speaker 4: then they sort of started to pivot in ways that
Speaker 4: were a little bit uncomfortable, where it was very clear
Speaker 4: that they were targeting you know, cybersecurity recres a lot
Speaker 4: of the time and very like corporate uh you know people. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it was a very odd like subset of traffic where
Speaker 4: they were constantly trying to help me, like follow threats
Speaker 4: online and stuff like that. Yes, they and then so
Speaker 4: but that was fine, you know, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm not the demographic for this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they've just changed their business.
Speaker 4: Yeah, except that once they after they did that for
Speaker 4: a little bit, I started to get promotions about tracking
Speaker 4: strikes and it was all about monitoring where there might
Speaker 4: be strikes happening.
Speaker 2: Oh and it.
Speaker 4: There they they say that they sort of yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: They tried to sort of after I, you know, wrote
Speaker 4: to them a little bit about this, they tried to
Speaker 4: sort of play it off as like bad messaging and
Speaker 4: that they were really just trying to help people protect.
Speaker 2: Their help people strike.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it definitely came off as sort of strike breaking
Speaker 4: as a service, and I decided I was done with
Speaker 4: feed ley finally. Yeah, right, what we've all been waiting for.
Speaker 4: But I mean, the one thing I really love about
Speaker 4: RSS is that you know, it's a protocol, it's not
Speaker 4: a service that you're locked into, and so it's actually
Speaker 4: very easy to switch RSS readers if one of them
Speaker 4: decides that it's going to start surveilling strikes.
Speaker 2: That's a good question.
Speaker 3: How does how do you so if you sit and
Speaker 3: I really I'll be linking to this piece conspicuously or
Speaker 3: excellent rss pace, but how do you move? Was actually
Speaker 3: one of my questions.
Speaker 4: It's incredibly easy. Pretty much every RSS reader allows you
Speaker 4: to export all of the RSS feeds that you follow,
Speaker 4: and it's just a simple XML file. It's the same
Speaker 4: thing that I used to publish my blog role in
Speaker 4: my website. So if you're curious, like what blogs I read,
Speaker 4: I just export those, you know, folders into a PML
Speaker 4: file is with what it's called, and then I put
Speaker 4: in on my website.
Speaker 3: But the same just just open that file in Yeah,
Speaker 3: what inner reader or what have you?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: And it took me probably ten seconds to switch from
Speaker 4: Feebley to my new very readers. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Wow, there is there's some stuff in the Internet that
Speaker 3: works still.
Speaker 2: It's magic.
Speaker 3: And having you want here to talk about RSS was
Speaker 3: important because first of all, people say I complain all
Speaker 3: the time, and they are right, and it's just it's
Speaker 3: nice to see that there are still some functional parts
Speaker 3: of the Internet. Is there other other parts that you
Speaker 3: actually like, other feet things like I don't know, RSS
Speaker 3: that you use regularly that could make make the world's
Speaker 3: make our listeners internet world's a little bit better.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think it's all part of a
Speaker 4: theme of sort of avoiding these intermediaries that have these
Speaker 4: incredibly extractive relationships with both the users and you know
Speaker 4: and off publishers who are on, you know, the other
Speaker 4: side of that relationship. And so I do everything I
Speaker 4: can to sort of avoid those intermediaries where possible, and so,
Speaker 4: you know, for example, I write a newsletter. I use
Speaker 4: the Ghost newsletter software, where you know, the relationship that
Speaker 4: I have with the people who subscribe to me is
Speaker 4: very direct. You know, people are subscribing to Molly White,
Speaker 4: the writer, They're not subscribing to ghost the website that
Speaker 4: then you know, danes to give me a cut of
Speaker 4: whatever they're taking in, which is unlike some of the
Speaker 4: other services out there, for example Patreon, where you know,
Speaker 4: if you set up a Patreon account, everyone is actually
Speaker 4: in a financial relationship with Patreon, not with you, and
Speaker 4: so if you decide to leave, it can be incredibly
Speaker 4: challenging to move people to another service, whereas with Ghosts,
Speaker 4: if I want to leave, I can just set up
Speaker 4: somewhere else, I can export my subscribers. The financial relationships
Speaker 4: are already just directly with me, and so that's a
Speaker 4: very powerful thing, the sort of escape hatch, where now
Speaker 4: if Ghosts decides, you know, hey, maybe we're gonna i
Speaker 4: don't know, slap ads on everyone's newsletter without them agreeing
Speaker 4: to it, they now have this incentive on the other end,
Speaker 4: which is like, well, Molly and all the other people
Speaker 4: who publish with ghost might not like that, and they
Speaker 4: might just leave because they can, whereas other services that
Speaker 4: have more of a locked in relationship can make those
Speaker 4: decisions and take the gamble that well, it's so hard
Speaker 4: to leave that people are probably just going to put
Speaker 4: up with it, and so that's that's one place where
Speaker 4: I do that. You know, there are sort of other
Speaker 4: services throughout the web that you know, are sort of
Speaker 4: similar where I try to keep the intermediaries to a
Speaker 4: bare minimum.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I used Ghost myself when I used outposts from They're
Speaker 3: very good.
Speaker 2: It's basically it's.
Speaker 3: One of the things I actually like about Ghost is
Speaker 3: that you can build a company on top of it,
Speaker 3: and the company is just, hey, we'll provide some of
Speaker 3: those slick little features that you get from a substack
Speaker 3: or what have you, like following up with people if
Speaker 3: their credit cards expired or what have you. But it's
Speaker 3: and it's also for giant babies like me who can't
Speaker 3: do code.
Speaker 2: I didn't vibe coded, I swear.
Speaker 3: But thinking of Substack, I've never seen a company go
Speaker 3: quite as weirdly as them, putting aside on them obvious
Speaker 3: promotions of nazis. It feels as if substack has just
Speaker 3: turned into another dogshit social network.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean substack is a weird platform because they
Speaker 4: do in some ways have that similar ethos of you know,
Speaker 4: your subscribers are subscribing to you, not to substack, and
Speaker 4: so it's easy to leave to some extent, where you know,
Speaker 4: I used to be on Substack. I decided to leave.
Speaker 4: I exported all of my email contacts, you know, I
Speaker 4: moved all of my content to a different website and
Speaker 4: it went fairly smoothly. And that's always been a part
Speaker 4: of substax marketing is you know, this is a very
Speaker 4: direct relationship. You'll be able to leave if you want.
Speaker 4: But I'm getting the impression increasingly that they're almost regretting
Speaker 4: that decision and that they are trying to install ways
Speaker 4: that lock people into the platform without effectively locking people
Speaker 4: in by trying to cut off their you know, escape
Speaker 4: patch essentially. You know, they could say, sorry, you can't
Speaker 4: export your email lists anymore, or we're going to make
Speaker 4: it really challenging for you to get, you know, move
Speaker 4: your content off the platform. And they haven't directly done that,
Speaker 4: but they are.
Speaker 2: They've got this following thing now.
Speaker 4: Well that's that's what I was going to say, is
Speaker 4: they are sort of trying to add in these new
Speaker 4: you know, so called features that make it very challenging
Speaker 4: for people to leave. So there's now followers, which are
Speaker 4: different from subscribers, and the ideas that you know, if
Speaker 4: you attract followers, they may eventually convert into a subscriber,
Speaker 4: and that's very potentially valuable, but you can't take your
Speaker 4: followers with you. They have this sort of network and
Speaker 4: this almost like short form social media platform now where
Speaker 4: you publish these notes and you know, those don't come
Speaker 4: with you when you leave. They are increased. Yeah, they're
Speaker 4: increasingly encouraging people to use the substack app, you know,
Speaker 4: which is the idea then, is that if you leave substack,
Speaker 4: all of these people who've gotten used to reading on
Speaker 4: the substack app will no longer find you, and they won't,
Speaker 4: you know, get access to your writing because you're not
Speaker 4: there anymore. And so you know, we see this sort
Speaker 4: of constant gravitational pull of in sertification to use Cory
Speaker 4: Doctor's word, where you know, platform increasingly are trying to
Speaker 4: keep people locked in so that they can then extract
Speaker 4: more value both from the publisher and and from the
Speaker 4: consumer and while making the experience worse for both.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you're kind of seeing and you've mentioned this
Speaker 3: in your artcle as well. Publishers are moving towards the
Speaker 3: newsletter format as well.
Speaker 2: It's like twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: Again, I don't know, do you remember in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: when you had like The Atlantic and there was that
Speaker 3: weird side channel thing, like all these people were like, oh,
Speaker 3: we're going to build a community. Just gave up on that, right,
Speaker 3: But it's you're seeing everyone starting newsletters again. It's just
Speaker 3: you made the point as words at this point, it's
Speaker 3: just moving stuff into your inbox in a way that
Speaker 3: people probably don't necessarily want or at least find a
Speaker 3: little overwhelming.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So that is sort of the downside of this
Speaker 4: newsletter boom, which is that it's exhausting if you read
Speaker 4: a lot of newsletters, which I do you know to
Speaker 4: get you know, if you follow ten newsletter writers who
Speaker 4: are publishing maybe once a week, twice a week something
Speaker 4: like that, then constantly throughout your workday or your weekend,
Speaker 4: you're getting, you know, a notification in you're in box
Speaker 4: at sort of a random time you need to read
Speaker 4: this email, which maybe you're in the middle of something
Speaker 4: and it's not time, you know, not a good time
Speaker 4: for you to read, and so it's just sort of
Speaker 4: constantly lurking there or waiting for you to read it.
Speaker 4: It's you know, potentially edging out other more time critical
Speaker 4: emails that you need to pay attention to and it's
Speaker 4: just sort of this you know, daly uge of material.
Speaker 4: Whereas it used to be that you know, you would
Speaker 4: go to the websites that you follow, or you know,
Speaker 4: open the physical newsletter or newspaper that you receive in
Speaker 4: your mail, and you know, you could sit down and
Speaker 4: read the news with your morning coffee. And now it's
Speaker 4: sort of a different you know, it's it's more of
Speaker 4: a push relationship than a pull relationship. You're not going
Speaker 4: to read, you are being sort of inundated with the reading.
Speaker 4: And so RSS is a really nice, uh way in
Speaker 4: my opinion, to handle that as a reader, because now
Speaker 4: you know, if I subscribe to your newsletter, I can
Speaker 4: you know, turn off the email notifications, but put the
Speaker 4: RSS feed in my feed reader, and then at my
Speaker 4: leisure when I feel like reading my newsletters or going
Speaker 4: and catching up on the news or whatever it is
Speaker 4: that I'm reading, I can go do that and it's
Speaker 4: all in that one place. And my email in box
Speaker 4: is you know, safe to have just emails and all
Speaker 4: of the stuff that's more suited to that.
Speaker 3: It is funny, we kind of feel like everyone has
Speaker 3: built these obtuse and complex ways of delivering the news
Speaker 3: or selling the news, or getting people news in different forms,
Speaker 3: and for the most part, the thing that keeps working
Speaker 3: is the thing from what twenty thirty years ago, just
Speaker 3: like reading words on a page. It's it's funny as well,
Speaker 3: because looking at this move back to newsletters, like I
Speaker 3: hate to give me like Petel any credit at all,
Speaker 3: but Google zero is a real effect. I think, I
Speaker 3: don't know if it's going to zero, but it's it's
Speaker 3: I'm still getting a ton for my newsletter. But it
Speaker 3: is funny to watch people try and get back to newsletters.
Speaker 3: But it almost feels like they're just treating them as
Speaker 3: the same thing as a regular article, rather than a
Speaker 3: unique way of delivering use.
Speaker 2: Which I guess it is.
Speaker 3: But I feel like that the email format is not
Speaker 3: treated with any any necessary particular respect. It's just almost
Speaker 3: become a dumping ground for these companies. Like it's just like, hey,
Speaker 3: I think I with Washington Post. Let's see if I
Speaker 3: still get them, because I got really pissed off. There
Speaker 3: was a point when I was getting four or five
Speaker 3: emails a day from the rest Word of God. It's
Speaker 3: just its abuse on your inbox. In the same way
Speaker 3: abuses your feed and so one and so forth right.
Speaker 4: I think that's really true, is that especially high volume
Speaker 4: publishers really need to grapple with the strategy when it
Speaker 4: comes to these types of relationships with subscribers, because you know,
Speaker 4: it's one thing to publish twenty articles a day on
Speaker 4: you know, Washington Post dot com. That's not you know,
Speaker 4: that's not a problem for anybody. In fact, people probably
Speaker 4: enjoy all of that choice. But getting twenty separate emails
Speaker 4: is not a viable way to have, you know, a
Speaker 4: respectful relationship with the people who have chosen to subscribe.
Speaker 4: And so I think that, you know, it is incredibly
Speaker 4: important to consider that. As you know, if you're a
Speaker 4: publication that's thinking about creating a newsletter, is like, what
Speaker 4: do people actually have the appetite to read? And how
Speaker 4: can we maintain, you know, a respectful relationship with these
Speaker 4: people who have you know, chosen to receive this material.
Speaker 3: And my answer is ten thousand words, just some ten
Speaker 3: thousand words every week or so. No one ever emails
Speaker 3: me to say my stuff is too long. No one
Speaker 3: has ever complained about it.
Speaker 5: It's great.
Speaker 3: It's kind of depressing on some level though, because the
Speaker 3: way it's going. I don't know how these large publishers can,
Speaker 3: like it's like they don't understand any particular format. They're
Speaker 3: just they're doing newsletters. Don't trying to bag on the
Speaker 3: verge too much.
Speaker 2: But I don't know.
Speaker 3: Suddenly them doing newsletters a lot in the last year
Speaker 3: doesn't feel like it's specific to It doesn't feel like
Speaker 3: it's a specific format. It's just like, please give us
Speaker 3: your emails so that we can continue to email you,
Speaker 3: which is desperate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think there is sort of reasonable desperation.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I must be clear, like I totally understand
Speaker 2: why they.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of publishers have
Speaker 4: realized that relying on intermediaries, whether it's social media platforms
Speaker 4: like Twitter to get your news in front of people,
Speaker 4: or you know, Google search was used to be a
Speaker 4: massive way that you know, news publications received readership. And
Speaker 4: now you know, as people are increasingly using the excerpts
Speaker 4: on Google, they're not clicking through to the page.
Speaker 3: And you say accepts, you mean the AI summaries. It
Speaker 3: depends on the summary.
Speaker 4: Yes, it used to be that Google News would just
Speaker 4: show like a literal excerpt from uh you know, the
Speaker 4: top result, and then people would often not visit the
Speaker 4: underlying website or you know, you see the like Wikipedia
Speaker 4: knowledge panels that that just sort of summarize what you're
Speaker 4: looking for. But now, yeah, more recently there's the AI
Speaker 4: overviews that you know, attempt to do sort of a
Speaker 4: similar thing, but often drawing from multiple sources. And then
Speaker 4: you know, if people are satisfied with what they see there,
Speaker 4: they often don't click through. They don't either see the
Speaker 4: ads that are funding the website, or they don't, you know,
Speaker 4: see the invitations to subscribe, They don't you know, view
Speaker 4: all the other material that might be available to them,
Speaker 4: and so on, and so the traffic is dwindling at
Speaker 4: a sort of alarming rate. And so I think a
Speaker 4: lot of these publishers are trying to get more direct
Speaker 4: relationships with readers, and email newsletters are a way that
Speaker 4: they're doing that, which I think is very reasonable. I mean,
Speaker 4: I think that it is you know, incredibly important as
Speaker 4: a writer to have a very direct relationship with your readers,
Speaker 4: because if you are relying on Twitter or Google Search,
Speaker 4: then the second Twitter or Google Search decides it's more
Speaker 4: profitable for them to twiddle the knobs in a way
Speaker 4: that is going to cut off the you know, flow
Speaker 4: of subscribers to you. They're going to do so, and
Speaker 4: you're going to be up a creek essentially. But I
Speaker 4: do think that, you know, there needs to be some
Speaker 4: thought put into this, especially by high volume publications, so
Speaker 4: that they are not essentially, you know, directing a fire
Speaker 4: hose at their readers and essentially turning them off from
Speaker 4: the publication.
Speaker 3: I think it's also a challenge for a publication versus
Speaker 3: a person, because we were talking about this on the
Speaker 3: last episode, how it's people will gladly pay for a
Speaker 3: person paying for an outlet that's different. I also think
Speaker 3: the other problem is, and I'm not just to be clear,
Speaker 3: I know I bag on the verge. This isn't about
Speaker 3: them specifically, but it's the problem that I've seen with
Speaker 3: legacy media at least, is they're terrified of giving a
Speaker 3: voice to their people. They'll give it to their top columnists,
Speaker 3: but they think, oh no, if we let people develop
Speaker 3: a personal relationship with the writer, then they could leave
Speaker 3: and have some sort of autonomy of their future.
Speaker 2: It's not why we're in this business. But now it's
Speaker 2: going back the other way.
Speaker 3: Where they realized, oh crap, that's the only way in
Speaker 3: which people will have any kind of sticky relationship with us.
Speaker 3: After winning the fil for It Again award eleven times
Speaker 3: in the space of fifteen years, with Google and everyone else,
Speaker 3: even I am actually like I loved substack at the
Speaker 3: beginning because it was free, it was really easy to use.
Speaker 3: It was just a platform. Hamosh would go out and
Speaker 3: do these things about this is the future of media,
Speaker 3: and media is good and we love being free here.
Speaker 3: But I think that just it was everything. It was
Speaker 3: exactly what happens every time. It's oh, right, we need
Speaker 3: to make more money than we spend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how do we do that? Hmmm.
Speaker 3: And it's just it's an inevitable point because it's almost
Speaker 3: I have here is my media theory. I think media
Speaker 3: outlets are just too big. I think if they need
Speaker 3: to cap out at some point, because all of the
Speaker 3: problems we talk about, every single one seems to start
Speaker 3: when they get too large for a company or a
Speaker 3: media outlet, they get too large to have any personality,
Speaker 3: or they get to the point where they're too large
Speaker 3: to have an editor who actually still writes and has
Speaker 3: a personality themselves. So it's like, ah, we can't give
Speaker 3: people too much freedom or anything. It's it's disappointing as well,
Speaker 3: because you've kind of proven this exceedingly well with your
Speaker 3: many successes, where it's like people will pay for someone
Speaker 3: who is themselves, stands for something and gives a shit right,
Speaker 3: and yet they don't want to copy that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think you're totally right on that where you
Speaker 4: newspapers are sort of afraid of letting writers develop their
Speaker 4: own personalities. As you say, I mean, you see this
Speaker 4: with large newspapers, you know, restricting their writers on social
Speaker 4: media for example, where if they say something to opinionated
Speaker 4: on social media, that's you know, against the social media policy.
Speaker 4: And you know, I think that is very contrary to
Speaker 4: what people are looking for. They want to see people
Speaker 4: who have strong opinions and strong beliefs and strong principles
Speaker 4: and stand up for those things. And so I do
Speaker 4: think that, you know, that's a shortcoming. But I also
Speaker 4: agree that newspapers, some some publications seem to be realizing
Speaker 4: that that sort of direct relationship with a writer is
Speaker 4: a valuable thing. You know, I mentioned my piece that
Speaker 4: Wired was also one of the outlets that has recently
Speaker 4: announced a major newsletter push, and their strategy has been,
Speaker 4: you know, here's five or ten options for different newsletters
Speaker 4: that you can read, and they're written by specific people
Speaker 4: at Wired who are you know, seen to be experts
Speaker 4: in a specific area, so you can follow, you know,
Speaker 4: the Kylie Robison Wired newsletter and I was.
Speaker 2: Like, mist Robinson's mudile behavior, I'll put a link in that, right.
Speaker 4: And I saw that, and I was like, oh, hell yeah,
Speaker 4: sign me up because I know that her work is
Speaker 4: incredible and I'm going to read it when it shows
Speaker 4: up in my newsletter or in my my feed reader.
Speaker 4: Whereas you know, I don't read every single article that
Speaker 4: Wired publishes because that's just not feasible. Yeah, And so
Speaker 4: I think that you know, publications would be wise to
Speaker 4: do more of that and to sort of understand that
Speaker 4: people do look at bylines, they do have specific authors
Speaker 4: who they trust or who's writing they enjoy more, or
Speaker 4: whatever it may be, rather than going for the sort
Speaker 4: of faceless you know, we're just the Washington Post or
Speaker 4: we're just the New York Times and the author doesn't
Speaker 4: really matter.
Speaker 3: It's classic, it's honestly, it's NBA Brain is its core
Speaker 3: pro Brain where it's like, well, how do we how
Speaker 3: do do you think that a person like thinks, oh,
Speaker 3: I love my relationship with the New York Times, But
Speaker 3: that's how they're thinking about it, Like, yeah, what is
Speaker 3: the consumer's relationship with the newspulbl There is no relationship
Speaker 3: with the newspaper. There might be a vibe, but there
Speaker 3: is not a relationship. I think the Financial Times is
Speaker 3: actually found, though not in the newsletter era. They've found
Speaker 3: a very good balance between hard news and excellently they've
Speaker 3: got Bryce Elder Skags as well as over a Baron's
Speaker 3: now but you've got Alphaville. They found a way to
Speaker 3: unleash it, and the ft has done very well. It's
Speaker 3: just I don't know, there's some part that feels like
Speaker 3: this is the come upance for fifteen twenty years of
Speaker 3: hubris of follow, Google follow meta follow whoever will send
Speaker 3: us traffic, build build as big as possible on this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and also the sort of view from nowhere news approach,
Speaker 4: where you know, it's the belief was that there shouldn't
Speaker 4: be any sort of opinion, There's wouldn't be any sort
Speaker 4: of you know, principled analysis. It should all just be
Speaker 4: you know, both sides ism and this supposedly objective reporting,
Speaker 4: which does strip out a lot of the personality of
Speaker 4: the writer, and it removes a lot of the you know,
Speaker 4: reason that people identify with or appreciate specific writers. And
Speaker 4: so I think that this was to some extent sort
Speaker 4: of a crisis of their own doing. In that sense
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 3: I also think that I also think that the raw
Speaker 3: economics of media might be completely fucked on some level.
Speaker 3: I think that there's just you see, and I think
Speaker 3: it's because of the Google traffic and the social traffic
Speaker 3: as well. You've got these massive ad stuffs, you've got
Speaker 3: these massive social staffs every and it doesn't seem to
Speaker 3: necessarily connect to anything.
Speaker 2: It doesn't. I don't know if it like drives results
Speaker 2: or not. I truly don't know.
Speaker 3: But it's the way that every single media outlet at
Speaker 3: some point in the last few years has act like
Speaker 3: it's been acted like it's been pecked to death by birds.
Speaker 3: Just acted like the verge added their pay well, and
Speaker 3: I get it, by the way things cost money, but
Speaker 3: it's it almost feels as if these castles have been
Speaker 3: built for a land that no longer exists anymore.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think that the news landscape is
Speaker 4: incredibly challenging right now for a number of reasons. You know,
Speaker 4: there's the traffic issues, there's the AI scraping issues that
Speaker 4: are you know, causing a lot of news outlets to
Speaker 4: put up paywalls that are then you know, blocking people
Speaker 4: who previously like real people, not scrapers, who might previously
Speaker 4: have you know, visited their sites and enjoyed their work.
Speaker 4: And you know, now you see this double edged sword
Speaker 4: whereas people paywall news media, you know, they might block
Speaker 4: scrapers to some extent, but they're also blocking people from
Speaker 4: reading the material that might then incentive them to subscribe.
Speaker 4: You know, if every article is paywall, there is no
Speaker 4: way to know if you're going to like what's behind
Speaker 4: the paywall, right And so I think that, you know,
Speaker 4: this is sort of an incredibly challenging moment for a
Speaker 4: lot of news organizations that are really struggling to figure
Speaker 4: out how to deal with it, you know, how to
Speaker 4: maintain a sustainable news business when you're facing those types
Speaker 4: of threats. You're also facing political threats, increasingly, especially in
Speaker 4: the United States, for publishing any sort of controversial material
Speaker 4: about the administration or you know, there's you're seeing an
Speaker 4: incredible unwillingness by a lot of major publications to have
Speaker 4: strong opinions or to say anything that is you know,
Speaker 4: not supported by ten separate sources, you know, any kind
Speaker 4: of speculation, that type of thing, because of the legal
Speaker 4: environment that we're in. And so, you know, I have
Speaker 4: some sympathy I think for a lot of these publications
Speaker 4: that are trying to navigate it. But I also think
Speaker 4: that the ways in which they have been navigating it
Speaker 4: have often been pretty misguided.
Speaker 3: So to wrap us up, is there anything giving you
Speaker 3: any hope online right now, anything that like genuinely is
Speaker 3: like thinking things can be okay, even in a different form.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I would say so, I do think
Speaker 4: that there. You know, one thing that has been made
Speaker 4: very clear to me is that people still care a
Speaker 4: lot about good writing and people who have you know,
Speaker 4: new or interesting analysis. You know a lot of people
Speaker 4: sort of look at the way that I do my newsletter,
Speaker 4: which is, you know, everything is free. There's no paywall.
Speaker 4: You don't have to even sign up, much less subscribe,
Speaker 4: and I have a pay what you want model, so
Speaker 4: you could pay you know, dollar a month, you can
Speaker 4: pay ten dollars a month, whatever you want. And people
Speaker 4: look at that and they're like, that can't work. You know,
Speaker 4: they're like, no one's going.
Speaker 2: To do that. And it works great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it works great. And you know, people sort of
Speaker 4: have this belief that, well, if something's free, no one's
Speaker 4: ever going to pay for it, which isn't true. I
Speaker 4: think that people will actually strongly value the work that
Speaker 4: people are doing even if they're not forced to pay
Speaker 4: for it, and they understand that people need support to
Speaker 4: be able to continue to do their work, and they
Speaker 4: will gladly provide that. And so I do think that
Speaker 4: you know, there are models available that will work very
Speaker 4: well that we can try, and different people are trying
Speaker 4: those models. You know, we're seeing it widely throughout the
Speaker 4: media landscape where people are just trying new things, whether
Speaker 4: it's you know, the four or four medias and the
Speaker 4: defectors and those folks who are doing you know, worker
Speaker 4: owned media collectives that are doing incredible work. I mean
Speaker 4: four or four is you know, trailblazing. I think in
Speaker 4: a lot of ways their reporting is incredible and there
Speaker 4: you know, their sort of model is incredible. You know,
Speaker 4: we're seeing people very proactively setting up ways in which
Speaker 4: they can create sustainable media that does not rely on ads,
Speaker 4: that does not require paywalls, that does not you know,
Speaker 4: rely on clickbait through social media websites, and so I
Speaker 4: am very optimistic in some ways, even though the sort
Speaker 4: of landscape is also fairly terrifying.
Speaker 3: And on that that note will end it there, Molly,
Speaker 3: where can people find you?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 4: You can find my newsletter at Citation needed dot news.
Speaker 4: And then I am also at Mollywhite dot net, which
Speaker 4: has links to all my social media and everything else.
Speaker 3: And you can find me on this podcast better offline
Speaker 3: dot com as well. And yeah, you can catch us
Speaker 3: on the monologue this week. Molly, thank you so much
Speaker 3: for joining us, and this has been Better Offline.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 6: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 6: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 6: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 6: T O S O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 6: can email me at easy at better offline dot com,
Speaker 6: or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 6: links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 6: you go to Chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to
Speaker 6: visit the discord, and go to our slash Better.
Speaker 2: Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for listening.
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