This is a follow-up to my Substack And Medium: The Difficult Battle For A Future In Journalism essay from this weekend.
“After the better part of a decade chasing audiences from platform to platform, I set out to build a strong, direct connection to an audience that wants to hear from me, and that I can reliably reach no matter how many likes, upvotes, or retweets any individual post happens to get.”
— Casey Newton, The Verge
I wrote my column on Thursday night not knowing that The Ringer would be publishing a feature with a similar theme. Actually, several others have as well. For me, the idea had more to do with where I stood currently with regards to both media platforms and how they aimed to help journalists such as myself and why their best intentions left me wanting more. My conclusion in that story was that both are flawed, Medium more so than Substack and that a new system for journalism needed to be built. Government’s have to step in and view media as an integral part of helping to inform society at large. Will this happen? I doubt it. The arts are always neglected or they’re controlled by massive media conglomerations whose sole purpose is to bend information how they see fit. Rupert Murdoch anyone? Post Media here in Canada isn’t much better. In the hands of a few, we’re left with minimal opportunity and way too much manipulation.
All this leads me to Justin Charity’s column.
From The Ringer:
For more than a decade, Facebook and Twitter have hosted a series of revolutions in mass media. The former wrecked the old business model for newsroom journalism and stoked global panic about political misinformation in the process. The latter corralled journalists, activists, and consumers onto a raucous liveblogging platform which has, for better or worse, laid bare the biases, processes, and pressures which drive so much editorial judgment at media institutions beholden to the favor of an algorithm.
These tech companies helped turn reporters into personalities, and they’ve empowered those…
