Platforms need the news, but they're killing it
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. If you're a Decoder listener, you'll recognize this as a theme that we come back to a lot. The idea that the way we distribute media directly influences the media we make. The influential media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously summed this up as the medium is the message. It's a big idea that shapes the entire world around us. Without question, our medium and our messages are now dominated by these big platforms, which distribute the vast majority of information to the public. And over the past decade, publishers of journalism have mostly ceded all of their distribution to Facebook and Google search, and now short-form video platforms like TikTok. That means a lot of our media ecosystem is driven by algorithmic recommendation systems, which tend to favor quantity over quality. And that's created a news ecosystem that allows a lot of influencers and aggregators to take the value created by original journalism and maximize it for an algorithmic audience that doesn't really know where the information first came from and probably doesn't care.
Last month, in the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, media critic and union president Matt Pierce, who represents the Media Guild of the West, wrote a particularly good blog post laying this all out. It's called Lessons on Media Policy at the Slaughter Bench of History. And in it, Matt laid out pretty succinctly why, quote, America's information economy is rotten from top to bottom, starting with the digital infrastructure that stands between quality journalism and the public. Yeah, that's the quote. I read it and I thought, all right, we got to get Matt on the show. We talked about that piece, the evolution of journalism in the digital age and what, if anything, can be done in the future to ensure reliable news outlets can still inform the public and importantly, survive financially.
We also got into what mechanisms can and should be used to fund independent journalism and how building a direct audience and exercising control over distribution is more important today than it's ever been. We also talked about the internet and whether the giant platform companies that dominate the internet have any interest in prioritizing journalism and truth, especially in a world where the billionaires who own the newspapers also own the tech companies. There's a lot going on in this one. One really interesting dynamic in this conversation is that Matt is literally a union president. He represents reporters in the Media Guild of the West. I am the head of the Verge's newsroom. By definition, I'm management. I'm not part of the Vox Media Union, which represents most of the folks on our team. But as you'll hear in the episode, Matt and I agree more than we disagree. And we're both interested in solving the problems that came up at the seams.
I think you're going to like this one. Okay, Matt Pierce on the future of media in the age of platforms. Here we go. Matt Pierce, you are the president of Media Guild of the West, which is a union on the west coast of the country for newspaper reporters. You're also a former Los Angeles Times reporter. And you are very good at social media, which is really the reason I wanted to talk to you about the future of media. Thank you. So you recently wrote a blog post after the election. It has a great title, Lessons on Media Policy at the Slaughter Bench of History.
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