Medium vs. The New Yorker

May 132013
 

new yorkerThe New Yorker is special. I grew up with it around and was a subscriber until about a year ago; lots of my friends and family are addicts. There’s a sense that if you make it through the magazine every week you’re up to speed on a sort of bare minimum of intellectual life. (I have one friend who literally reads every issue cover to cover, and so is over a year behind. Right how he’s probably reading an issue from early 2012.) You don’t have to devote hours a week to following the news because The New Yorker will filter it all for you and provide smart analysis, packaged alongside cultural coverage and fiction.

So NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson’s explanation of the brand’s recent success online made sense to me:

The Internet wants to read smart takes on what’s in the news right now.

Let the news addicts wade through every break in every story. The New Yorker will figure out what’s important and give you something intelligent to chew on. They’re just doing it more often and a bit quicker in recognition of the way the web operates.

But will it work?

Someone pointed out on Twitter that this is basically The Atlantic’s online strategy, and it’s worked very well there. I’m optimistic about both publications’ odds, given such strong brands. But if I were in charge of either, the competitor I’d be watching most closely is Medium.

While I and many others like to read smart news analysis online, it doesn’t all need to come from professional journalists. In venture capital, which I cover, it’s the VC’s who frequently write the best analysis. In economics, it’s often tenured professors whose blogs are indispensable. And so the idea of aggregating smart writing from a diverse contributor base is a powerful one. That’s what Medium is doing, combining a beautiful writing tool with the network of Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone to great effect.

Here’s how Williams recently described the project:

“The magazine is the analog for what we’re doing.” … “We’re not focused on news,” he said. “We’re focused on ideas and stories that have a longer shelf life, [whether it's] short opinion pieces or long-form investigative journalism. We want that to thrive.”

Remember that with this model, not every post on Medium has to be New Yorker quality. The publish then filter model allows you to get a lot of solid contributors on board, writing mostly for free, then filter out the occasionally great stuff and push it out.

I buy that there’s room for a slower, more considered publication to thrive online, purposely contrasting itself to the cacophony of online news. But I have real doubts about it as a business. Amateurs will never fully replace pros – there are many indispensable VC and economics reporters – but there will be some crowding out. The New Yorker may survive on the strength of its brand and the superiority of its writers, but any publication that pursues the same strategy will have to compete – and indeed already is competing – against the amateurization of “smart take.”

Share

In defense of wonk-journalism

Apr 162013
 

UPDATE: I originally posted the only lightly edited email from which this post originated. Later, I decided to tighten it up and post it to Medium. That edited version now appears below. 

One of the more bizarre responses to the ongoing Reinhart-Rogoff controversy is this one by sociologist Peter Frase, who takes the opportunity to “use it as a cudgel against the pernicious rise of the ‘policy wonk’ as a model for journalism.” In other words, this whole thing is kind of Ezra Klein’s fault. Here’s the gist:

the wonk is a new iteration of American journalism’s obsession with “objectivity”, in this case filtered through the predilections of the “technocrat, obsessed with policy details, bereft of politics, earnestly searching for solutions to the world’s problems through the dialectic of an Excel spreadsheet.” The Reinhart-Rogoff revelations do more than just reveal the folly of relying on the wrong spreadsheets—they expose the shallowness and dishonesty that pervades much of the wonk-journalist milieu.

Though I don’t cover policy, the merits of wonk journalism are a favorite topic of mine. So I feel compelled to defend it. The easy reply to the critique is, “Fine, but what’s the alternative? Oh, that’s right. Better wonk journalism.”

But it’s worth getting a bit more specific to highlight why this line of argument is misguided. I read Frase as having two basic complaints:

  1. Wonk journalists hide their ideologies
  2. Wonk journalists don’t know as much as they let on, and so end up appealing a lot to expertise

Those two criticisms blend together in the piece, as Frase sort of seems to think that acknowledging one’s ideology lets you solve #2 by just admitting you don’t know what you’re talking about and falling back on first principles.He cites Matt Yglesias of Slate admiringly for doing as much:

In contrast to the wonky preoccupation with empirical studies and pretty graphs, Yglesias has argued that “evidence is overrated”, and he often offers positions based on his own ideological predilections and reasoning from first principles.)

But that’s not really what Yglesias is saying, as he clarified in a post about R-R and evidence. His point is more nuanced, that empirical evidence has to be weighed in light of other evidence, and in light of relevant theory:

In the absence of a plausible account of why a high debt:GDP ratio would cause slow real growth even in the absence of high interest rates, you would want to see overwhelming empirical evidence for the existence of such an effect before you believed it.

This doesn’t have much if anything to do with ideology. It’s simply a thoughtful point (that Ezra endorsed) about the weighting of evidence.

To the extent that ‘evidence is overrated’, it’s theory, not ideology, that’s underrated. And so I think Frase is wrong to conflate his concerns about wonk ideology with wonk expertise. Instead, let’s consider them in turn.

Wonk Ideology

I don’t know Ezra or most of the other wonk journalists in question. And those I do know, I’ve not asked about their moral philosophies. And yet I really don’t think this is that hard.

Here’s my guess: Yes, Ezra has an ideology in the sense that you have to have one to reason about politics. Fine, but boring. As I’ve written, that no one can be free of philosophy doesn’t mean people are all equally ideological. That post of mine gets into it in more detail, but you can sum it up like this:

The wonk class holds a conception of the good that is agnostic about the optimal size of government and which does not weight negative liberty higher than positive liberty. Done. If Frase thinks every Ezra post needs to come with some kind of technocrat disclaimer, or that he and others need to be more careful when they makes claims about “what the data say” then OK, fine. But it doesn’t really bother me.

Wonk Expertise

As for the critique that wonk journalists don’t know as much about the topics they cover as would be ideal, true! I and every other journalist can sympathize. But these folks clearly know much more than many beltway journalists who prefer not to wade into the stuff. Would you rather have a he-said/she-said insider type cover, say, the stimulus? Or would you prefer to read the wonk journalist? For me, the answer is clear.

Here we should pause and note some realities about media.

  1. Journalists have always been overstretched and unable to be true experts in their fields. We work around that because…
  2. You can think of the public sphere like a stack, with academics filtering info on to policy analysts, filtering info on to journalists, filtering info on to the public. Is some signal lost in that transmission process? Yes. But it works OK, and besides, what’s the alternative?
  3. Before answering that, remember: the public will NEVER read academic work directly with any regularity.

And so if Frase thinks the Ezra’s of the world need to know more, fine. But acknowledge that they know more than many, and answer the questions of a) what’s the business model? and b) how will you attract significant interest for this new uber-wonkiness from the public?

(I’ll note quickly that I think Frase underweights deference to expertise. But I’m familiar enough with the work of people like Philip Tetlock to recognize that topic deserves its own post.)

Conclusion

That an Excel error in an academic economics paper has gotten so much attention in the (digital) pages of outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, and others seems to me like a great point in defense of wonk journalism.

Is it perfect? No. But it’s worlds better than the alternative.

In closing, I’d urge everyone to read this Matt O’Brien post at The Atlantic before criticizing the wonk journalists’ role in the R-R controversy. Talk about not taking experts at face value; he ran his own regressions to question the idea of a debt tipping point. Pretty solid for a journalist.

Share

Politics, Ideology, and Journalism

Mar 142013
 

Conor Friedersdorf has a very smart piece at The Atlantic calling out The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein for characterizing himself as data-driven and Paul Ryan as ideological. It’s impossible to disagree with the central claim of the piece:

I’ll never demand that Klein self-identify as a movement liberal or progressive. But he is deeply mistaken when he avers that policy can be grounded in no more than currents of data, or that his writerly output is divorced from disputed value judgments and philosophical foundations. As Will Wilkinson once told him, “There’s no avoiding the fact that, if you’re doing anything with policy at all, you’re trying to achieve some goal. If you think that the goal is one that’s worth having, you have to have some rational justification for why that’s the end that we ought to be aiming at.” Following facts where they lead is smart and necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Yep. And frankly I’d love to read a post by Ezra outlining for his readers his moral philosophy. But I still think there’s a very real sense in which Klein’s manner of analysis is in fact pragmatic and Ryan’s is, at least arguably, more ideological.

That sense is one I’ve thought about a lot in the context of similar debates about Obama, who loves to claim that he’s just a pragmatist. Conservatives happily point out essentially just what Friedersdorf did here: that it’s impossible to advance policies without some ideology pointing the way.

But in the context of today’s American politics, I consider “pragmatism” to mean, simply, that one’s ideology is agnostic on the proper role of government. Take the example of the utilitarian. Her ideology seeks to maximize happiness. She’s certainly not valueless, she holds an ideology, yet her ideology says nothing specific about one of the biggest questions in U.S. politics. When asked what the proper role of government is, she looks to the evidence to see which policies optimize happiness.

Even a Rawlsian, for whom justice is specifically about the role of social institutions, consults the evidence to determine whether government should be bigger, smaller, more or less active.

Contrast that to small government conservatism, in which a central value is that, all else equal, less government is better. Sure, the most sophisticated conservatives, particularly those who work in think tanks and the like, aren’t likely to hold such a principled view. They’d rather couch their support of small government relative to values like liberty, self-reliance, or welfare. But it’s hard to deny that the principle that less government is better plays a serious role in conservative politics.

It’s in this sense that I think Klein is in fact data driven in a way that Ryan probably is not. Sure, Klein’s not a blank slate when he considers the proper role of government in the healthcare system, but nor does he place moral weight on one side of the scales. I doubt the same can be said of Ryan; it certainly can’t be said of many conservatives.

None of this detracts from Friedersdorf’s point. It’s possible to take the ‘driven by data’ perspective so far as to fall into the same traps as the ‘view from nowhere.’ But once all the ideological disclosures are on the table, I suspect the difference outlined above would still remain. Political pragmatism, to me, does mean something. Everyone has values, but some of us hold values that directly answer the policy questions we’re asking, before evidence is ever brought to bear.

Share

Yes, Open Matters

Mar 092013
 

I’ve been following a very interesting back and forth kicked off by legal scholar and author Tim Wu in The New Yorker on the merits of open vs. closed, and countered by author John Gruber. To catch you up…

Wu: 

Accuse me of overreading, but I propose a revision of the old adage: closed can beat open, but you have to be genius. Under normal conditions, in an unpredictable industry, and given regular levels of human error, open still beats closed. Stated a different way, a firm gets to be closed in exact proportion to its vision and design talent.

Gruber:

Allow me to start by putting forth an alternative rule of thumb for commercial success in any market: better and earlier tend to beat worse and later. That is to say, successful products and services tend to be those that are superior qualitatively and which hit the market sooner.

I liked Gruber’s response quite a bit, if only because my bias is strongly with Wu, and Gruber’s arguments were well formulated. But Wu responded today, and I think ultimately his response captures why the value of open systems can’t be underestimated:

The study of centralized and decentralized decision structures in an economic system is hardly my invention.   It goes back to classic economic debates between Oskar R. Lange and Fredrick Hayek in the 1940s.  Lange was an advocate of centralized planning, and argued that closed, state-run economies would be more efficient than open / decentralized market economies.   Hayek, responding in 1945, argued that the advantage of an open system was largely informational.  A theoretically perfect central planner would, Hayek conceded, outperform an open system, but in a reality of imperfect information, the open market system could usually be expected to perform better.   There’s been much economic thought on the issue since that time, but I’ll skip it: the bottom line is simply that open and closed systems perform differently under different conditions and have differently strengths and weaknesses.  I should add that this kind of analysis is relevant for any system and any product ecosystem, not just tech — it is really the study of institutional design.

(It’s worth noting that one of the points of Wu’s book is that often when closed systems do win, it’s at the expense of innovation.)

Zooming out like this is helpful to illustrate the relevant intellectual history; on the other hand, the case that open beats closed is strongest where the scope of he task is largest, because of the related uncertainty. Designing an economy is beyond the ability of any planner; designing a toothbrush is not.

In what follows, I’m referring to this particular formulation of “open” which Wu offers in his original piece:

First, “open” and “closed” can refer to how permissive a tech firm is, with respect to who can partner with or interconnect with its products to reach consumers. We say an operating system like Linux is “open” because anyone can design a device that runs Linux.

These questions get very complicated quickly, and “openness” not only becomes a matter of extent, but its merits will also differ layer to layer. How much control the maker of a piece of hardware exerts over what software can be run on it is separate from how much control an OS exerts over what applications can run on it is separate from how much control those applications have over what plugins can be added and which 3rd party apps can be integrated.

My intuition is that as the scope of the activity governed by the piece of the tech stack in question gets smaller, the case for (relatively more) closed technologies becomes stronger. In other words, the interoperabiltiy of an OS matters more than the interoperability of Snapchat. The complexity and uncertainty surrounding the latter should be less than in the case of the former, meaning the latter is more amenable to the closed planning model.

All of this is to say, I agree basically with Wu’s conclusion:

as Michael Arrington points out, you really can’t pretend to understand what has happened over the last twenty years without some understanding the relative advantages of open and closed systems  (or if you prefer, decentralized and centralized decision hierarchies.)

Share

Suffering Fools is OK. At First.

Jan 042013
 

David Brooks has a quirky column today saying we should do better at suffering fools:

Smart people who’ve thought about this usually understand that the habits we put in practice end up shaping the people we are within. “Manners are of more importance than laws,” Edmund Burke wrote.

All I can think of is the political application and I have to object. How long are you supposed to be polite and respond in good faith to, say, a pundit who demonstrates zero concern for facts? For a politician who dismisses science? Perhaps rudeness isn’t the answer, but you certainly shouldn’t dignify those people by taking them seriously.

That doesn’t mean his column is worthless. I think we should do a better job of treating interlocutors politely and talking to them in good faith. But as the evidence mounts that they’re not worth taking seriously, or that they’re not operating in good faith, they ought to be accorded less respect. Here’s my theory in graph form:

Share

Psychic benefit and the economics of content

Nov 242012
 

Pitchfork has an interesting post by a musician complaining about the stingy payments made by companies like Pandora and Spotify, even though in Pandora’s case, at least, those payments are rendering the company borderline unsustainable. Here’s the gist:

When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can. It was industrial capitalism, on a 7″ scale. The model now seems closer to financial speculation. Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access, a piece of the action.

He’s right that the two services are in the access business, but I want to make a quick but important point about the economics of content. Put simply: if you do something that people generally like to do just for fun, you’re in a lot of trouble.

The economic term here is psychic cost/benefit, which is a sort of catch-all for non-monetary changes to your quality of life. If you’re in an industry where workers mostly receive psychic benefits from your work, and if the transaction costs for amateurs to get in on the game are low, that’s a bad combination. This is especially true in areas where amateurs are only a bit worse than professionals, including areas like music and writing. People like to play music, they like to write, and lots of amateurs are pretty darn good at it. Now that it costs very little to produce music and writing and share it, the price paid to professionals naturally decreases.

I’m keenly aware of this as I’m paid to write. I’d prefer to make a lucrative career out of it, but I don’t pretend that what’s best for my career is necessarily best for consumers of news and opinion. A world in which terrific commentary is produced for free (as I’m doing in the case of this post) might be better for readers than one where the content is marginally better but significantly more expensive.

So if you have a job where you reap psychic rewards, and if the barriers to entry are low, consider whether the internet might significantly lower the market rate for your labor. If it hasn’t already.

Share

Would I Pay to Keep the NYT Afloat?

Nov 032012
 

It’s been a year and a half since the New York Times introduced its paywall (I criticized it on day one at The Atlantic) and my feelings about it have largely stayed the same. I don’t see myself paying for it. And it really does pain me to say that, as I love the Times.

But via the Nieman Lab I came across a fascinating study about readers willingness to pay for access to the paper:

“When participants were provided with a compelling justification for the paywall — that The New York Times was likely to go bankrupt without it — their support and willingness to pay increased,” Cook and Attari concluded.

I believe it. I feel a twinge of pain thinking about the paper going under. But my view is still basically the same as it was before the paywall went up.

There are two reasons I won’t pay for The New York Times.

1. I don’t need it, and therefore would rather be asked to give rather than required to pay.

2. If I am going to give, I don’t want to subsidize the Sytle section. I want my dollars going directly to civic journalism.

Much of what the Times does, while compelling and of high quality, isn’t essential. And if I’m just reading features for pleasure, in this day and age I can get lots of great stuff for free. The reason to pay is to preserve international reporting, war reporting, non-horse-race political reporting, etc.

If I’m going to make a donation for that kind of thing, right now I’m more likely to give to someplace like ProPublica that is both structured as a nonprofit and narrowly focused on civic journalism.

Share

Why Rush Limbaugh Should Tell the Truth

Oct 132012
 

I’m catching up on my RSS reader today and found myself on this Reddit AMA with Matt Yglesias. Here’s an abridged version of a fascinating question and answer:

localtaxpayer 15 points  ago

What, if any, solution could there possibly be to the current media and cultural environment in which there are basically two separate realities in which half of the population chooses to live?

…

[–]myglesias[S] 28 points  ago

Unfortunately, I think narrowcasting is an inevitable feature of some positive technological trends. When we only had three TV stations, the smart strategy was lowest common denominator programming. Thanks to the internet, we have an infinity of distribution channels so now it makes sense to target and specialize. One of my favorite things about Slate is that we’re an old-fashioned general interest publication but it’s still true that in practice we reach a pretty specific demographic.

What I wish is that more writers and hosts would take this reality seriously. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t need to try to persuade people to vote Republican—only Republicans are listening! When he misinforms his audience, he’s not really helping the conservative cause he’s just confusing conservatives.

Everyone should realize that their audience is mostly people “on their side” and so it makes sense to subject that side to scrutiny. Swing voters aren’t listening!

Is it possible that the polarization of media could make it easier, not harder, to tell the truth? I doubt it, but it’s a very interesting argument.

A couple thoughts… Yglesias’ model assumes that partisans primarily spout falsehoods to be more persuasive; another model would argue they spout them mostly because that’s what they believe. And you can argue (as Cass Sunstein I believe does) that people will end up going unchallenged and therefore believing wrong things when they’re not exposed to other perspectives.

Second, just like Mitt Romney has to be careful what he says even when he speaks to a group of loyal followers, so does Rush. Media can be duplicated in an instant, and so you have to care not only about what your impact on the audience is, but whether someone might grab a clip and share it elsewhere. That’s what would happen if Rush ever said “listen, Obama is totally right about X, but all of us who believe on principle in policy Y should lie about it to convince independent voters to join us.”

Share

Partisan Fact-checkers: Motivated But Counterproductive

Sep 222012
 

This past week I got a pitch in my inbox about a group that would be fact-checking half of the Scott Brown / Elizabeth Warren Senate debate. And by half of it I mean the Scott Brown half, because the organization pitching me was a progressive advocacy group. Of course, when I tweeted about how partisans are the wrong group to be fact-checking a friend replied with the hashtag #NoShit, but hey, I never claimed to be insightful. Just correct.

It’d be nice if partisans worked as fact-checkers because, after all, they’re quite motivated. Yes, they’ll only check the opposing side, but get enough partisans from various sides and the whole thing might work. Except it doesn’t. And not even because partisan fact-checkers bend the truth, although that happens too. Even partisan fact-checkers like Media Matters that have built up some reputation for accuracy while being forthcoming about the selective nature of what they fact-check ultimately can’t replace genuine nonpartisan, independent fact-checking.

A New York Times op-ed by Cass Sunstein this past week explained why: because the speaker matters.

People tend to dismiss information that would falsify their convictions. But they may reconsider if the information comes from a source they cannot dismiss. People are most likely to find a source credible if they closely identify with it or begin in essential agreement with it. In such cases, their reaction is not, “how predictable and uninformative that someone like that would think something so evil and foolish,” but instead, “if someone like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.”

What does this mean for fact-checkers? I’m not sure. But what if Factcheck.org and Politifact signed on figures from left and right who would be alerted when their party’s candidate had uttered a false or misleading statement, and urged them to share it with their networks? Could that make a dent?

Who knows. But we do know that partisans stepping into the fact-checking arena are no substitute for the real thing.

Share

The return of bundling and the indirect value of ‘serious’ journalism

Sep 152012
 

In the past, I’ve argued that serious journalism isn’t becoming less profitable, so much as being exposed as having never profitable in the first place. In doing so, I’ve leaned on Clay Shirky who argued the same in 2009:

Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been subsidized. For the last century, newspaper journalism had direct subsidy from advertisement and cross-subsidy from sports fans and coupon clippers who never really cared about the city council or the coup in Madagascar. The packages containing news have been so bundled and cross-funded that we’ve never really known precisely the size of the audience for actual civic-minded reporting, or how much direct fees from that audience would amount to. We do know, however, that the rough answers are “Small” and “Not much,”

Today I want to put forward an argument that he and I are wrong. I’m not sure I believe this, but I think recent trends in media make it necessary to consider. Back in February I laid out what I think of as the best argument against Shirky’s:

In my mind, the best retort to Shirky’s point that the news was always subsidized is to argue that papers like NYT gain an indirect benefit with their credible reporting. Sure, when readers got the paper they looked at sports and lighter stuff, but they chose to buy such a premier paper in the first place in part to associate themselves with the seriousness of the brand.

These days, I see evidence in favor of this rebuttal everywhere I look.

(Quick note: There’s a lack of clarity around what actually should count as serious and not, as I discuss here. That’s not what I’m interested in now. For the purposes of this post, by ‘serious’ I just mean in terms of reader perceptions.)

There’s been a lot already written about ‘unbundling’ in media, meaning that the unit of media that we buy/consume has narrowed. We don’t subscribe to one paper; we sample articles from many sources via Twitter, Facebook, RSS, etc. Likewise, with geography less of a factor, we saw from the early days of the blogosphere on a strong move towards niche coverage. Blogs and websites could dive into a particular domain and cover it better than general journalists could ever dream.

The problem, then, was that the international reporter no longer got subsidized by the style columnist. In an age of declining media profitability, why would anyone bother to pay someone to cover Africa? The trend was toward narrow and deep, and better to go narrow in the niches that lots of readers really cared about.

Except this theory just does not do a good job of describing today’s landscape. It can’t explain why The Huffington Post would spend money hiring NYT reporters to do investigative reporting. Or why Buzzfeed would poach Ben Smith. Why worry about having a respected financial reporter at Business Insider rather than just being a slideshow shop heavy on aggregation? Even Gawker is taking pageview pressure off its stable of writers by hiring Daily What’s founder to go gung-ho after pageviews. None of these, to me, square with the basic logic of unbundling. What’s going on here?

I don’t get no respect!

The media economics answer here is CPMs, the rate at which advertisers pay media properties per eyeball. Some eyeballs are more valuable than others. That’s why advertisers will pay more to advertise next to content targeted at “the global business elite” than it will  for, well, almost anything else.

That alone isn’t at odds with the unbundling thesis. Niche business sites could collect those limited eyeballs at higher rates, while other sites could rack up the pageviews at a lower rate.

But what I see in the various re-bundling efforts above is a possible confirmation of the indirect value of serious journalism. Because the dirty little secret is that the ‘serious’ wealthy, educated person picking up the New York Times is still more likely to read about the best coffee in Manhattan than about the politics of Libya. But they wouldn’t pick up the paper if that Libya content weren’t there. Because they pride themselves on being a very serious person.

Translated to the online world, some readers who garner high CPMs based on income or other factors love the same click crack that everyone else does. But they’re more likely to read it at a ‘respectable’ outlet that also employs Ben Smith or Joe Weisenthal.

All of this is just a very long-winded way of saying that brand matters. And that ‘serious’ or civic-minded journalism may have some business value. It’s just indirect.

Share
 Older Entries