Derek Thompson

The news media has undergone several shifts in the last 20 years, and I thought the best person to explain those shifts might be Jim VandeHei, the former Washington Post employee who left the newspaper 20 years ago to start Politico and then left Politico to start Axios.

Jim is going to tell the story of the Post and the state of news media from his perspective, but first I wanted to share my own view.

which is that I think the future of the news business will more than anything resemble the distant past.

If you go back to the 1800s,

Before the internet, before the modern age of national advertising, there was what historians call the party press era of news in the 19th century.

Newspapers of the time often relied on political organizations who handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era's journalism was not fair or balanced.

It was unfair, unbalanced, heavily biased, highly political.

Thousands of newspapers competed for market share and they used sensationalism and often outright lies to grab readers' attention.

As Gerald Baldasti, a professor at the University of Washington, once said to me, quote, these newspapers didn't just want to inform readers.

They wanted to politically galvanize readers, end quote.

And readers were galvanized.

Voting rates in the 19th century were the highest in American history.

But when national advertising emerged in the 20th century, the party press era went away.

Department stores and other marketers wanted their ads placed next to neutral, objective, you could even say boring, or milquetoast reporting.

And so this age of advertising led to a neutered, detached style of journalism, the so-called view from nowhere to avoid offending companies.

In the 21st century, we are back to the past.

Google and social media companies like Facebook and TikTok have gobbled up advertising revenue, and that has forced newspapers to go back to the 1800s, to shift their business models from advertising back to subscriptions.

For example, consider the New York Times.

In the late 1900s and early 2000s, the New York Times advertising revenue exceeded $1 billion every year.