What’s happened to media companies in the last decade or so — and what continues to happen to them even now — is like a more boring, digital version of the Trials of Job. He’s the Biblical character who got hit with boils and **, all to test his belief in God.
For traditional media companies, there’s no hail of frogs — just a steady decline in print subscriptions and TV viewership, then lower ad revenue, then the move to mobile and even lower ad revenue, and now the dominance of Facebook and other platforms.
All of these things have one underlying theme: Namely, a complete and total loss of control over the audience, or what Dan Gillmor has called “the people formerly known as the audience.” In some cases, media companies may have only had an illusion of control, but those kinds of illusions can be even more powerful than the real thing in some ways.
It was so much easier back in the good old days, in the 1970s and 1980s. Media companies controlled not only most of the news and entertainment that got produced, but also the channels through which it got distributed — newspapers and magazines and radio stations and TV networks. And that scarcity generated huge revenues via advertising.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Now, the media world is basically in total chaos. The old channels have been blown up or torn down, or are in various states of disrepair, like an old car that needs a new engine, but where the parts have been discontinued. Print is dying, TV is being disrupted, and almost anyone can be a publisher — including the brands and celebrities and important people who used to rely on media companies as a way of getting their message out.
In a way, it was probably easier to be Job, because at least he knew who was trying to test his faith. All traditional media companies know is that the world they used to rely on is crumbling, and there’s no one to blame. It’s just evolution, which is messy and mean.
Much of the media has become like a cargo cult, a World War II phenomenon in which natives would create pseudo-runways and airplanes made out of grass, in the hopes of luring back the gods who had brought so many wonderful things to their villages. Except in this case, it’s media executives who are going through the motions, mimicking the past behavior that used to result in huge profits but now brings only heartache and pain.
It would be nice to think that we’ve seen the worst of it, but there’s no real reason to believe that, unfortunately. If anything, the loss of control that media companies have seen in the past few years is starting to accelerate.
Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram are the platforms that matter for distribution now, and there are becoming more powerful rather than less. Publishers are rushing headlong into Facebook’s embrace because they basically have no choice and can’t think of a better option, and the long-term repercussions of this surrender are unclear.
Meanwhile, ad blocking is taking care of what’s left of the media’s ambitions to continue as standalone entities. And brands are creating their own media portals and content efforts, some of which are drawing audiences larger than the ones they gave up when they stopped using mainstream media as an outlet.
I’m sorry this sounds like such a gloomy forecast, but it is what it is. And there are rays of hope in the darkness: For example, some media companies — like ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, De Correspondent in the Netherlands, Politico, Quartz — have shown that if you are intensely focused on a community, you can thrive. Not everyone can be worth $4 billion like Vice Media, but there is a living to be made. Onward!