Ben Sasse

And we weren't doing any of that.

But I was in trouble with some of my voters for not being angry enough about something Barack Obama had just done.

But to your point.

The weirdos are crowding everybody else out, right?

I think the professional political activists and consumer class, those who allow it to become a core community, are weird enough that almost all of our channels are narrow but deep.

New York Times obviously still has millions and millions of daily consumers.

You don't have to flatter us.

But there aren't... We have weird, you know, weird subscribers, too.

I believe...

I think there's a ton of fan service that happens in the New York Times.

But all of our outlets have an incentive to go narrow and deep because there isn't any 60% audience that's ever going to exist again post-digital revolution.

My analogous way of thinking about it as the son of a football coach is when we went from three channels to four channels in the 1980s, not Fox News, but Fox Local, when we went from three to four channels, it was pretty great because it meant on Saturday afternoon you got another football game.

When we went from four channels to 500 channels, it seemed pretty great.

When we go from 500 channels to 2,000 channels, it's pretty obvious that every individual can find something that they think they really want to watch.

But it means tomorrow around the water cooler, you don't have anything in common that anybody else watched together.

I Love Lucy wasn't important content, but it was shared content.

And it meant that tomorrow morning, you had a whole bunch of topics you could go to with your neighbor or your coworker.

that was just shared cultural data.

And we don't have any of that anymore.

And so in a world where everybody is incented to go narrow but deep, there's not a lot of need to call out BS and crazy on your own end of the continuum.