As we survey the rubble that once was the U.S. journalism industry, a common refrain involves lamenting that “online journalism just isn’t profitable.” But as the recent collapse of outlets like Sports Illustrated and The Messenger illustrate, the real culprit often isn’t that journalism isn’t profitable, it’s that U.S. media is predominantly run by utterly incompetent individuals who fail upward into positions of power.
Last week’s collapse of Vice media came as no surprise given years of stories about waste and excess by a rotating crop of terrible management. Also unsurprising is that most of the postmortems (usually written by people employed in the U.S. media sector who would like to remain so and don’t want to offend ownership by being honest) involve lots of vagaries as to responsibility.
There was a lot of ambiguous finger pointing at the supposed inherent impossibility of making money in online journalism. Most breakdowns just parroted the soulless, AI-esque memo to staff by CEO Bruce Dixon without context, blaming ambiguous externalities and the supposedly unavoidable unprofitability of running a silly old website in the TikTok and Twitch era:
that headline goes hard
As is usually the case with TechDirt. Here’s another recent example:
That’s a great article with relevant links to good sources of news, thanks
