[ed. And this should be a surprise to anyone?]
This is great news….mostly.
For a long time, I’ve said that I thought the reason journalism was reeling was its own fault. Daily papers had a de facto monopoly — on news, classifieds, movie listing, stock quotes, sports scores, and all types of content. And yes, the Internet destroyed it. But if daily newspapers in aggregate, had been good stewards of that role in the community, people would still have read them. Most daily papers, instead, were like the one from my hometown: more daily than a newspaper. Like paying with the cable company, no one particularly loved reading it, but there wasn’t another option for getting all those things I describe above delivered to you daily.
Simply put: It was easy and cheap for a lot of other players on the Web to outdo daily newspaper journalism for cheap or free. And that lead to a wave of massive commodification of news. But those glimmers of really great storytelling and investigative work that weren’t in the paper every day were ravaged as part of the shift. And there was no clear way to replace it. Good content isn’t free — as anyone who struggles to write it or hire good talent knows.
I’ve always been confident that it would become valued again one day, and the market would figure out a way to pay for it — either by non-page view based ads or subscriptions. But I felt that as an industry we had a period of penance for that abuse of a monopoly position, maybe our own 40 years of wandering in the desert.
Well, that was a short 40 years. It seems good quality work has come raging back into vogue. There are a handful of upstarts the raison d’être of which is reporting, writing, and long form work — we’re part of that, as is NSFWCORP, and even The Verge produces some long spectacularly written stuff. Meanwhile you have companies you’d least expect investing in it. Buzzfeed, which already enjoys a schizophrenic life as a purveyor of cat photos and political scoops, announced it’s going to focus on long-form journalism, and now Tumblr, which isn’t even a content company, is getting in on the act.
So much of this boils down to one big change in the Internet: A lot of companies are being built out of New York. New York loves, will pay for, values, and excels at producing quality content in a way that Silicon Valley never will. And, at least in our experience, audiences are gulping it down like water in a desert.
In our recent reader survey almost every respondent answered why they read PandoDaily with a variation of the following: Long form content that isn’t afraid to call out powerful people. When we asked what could make the site better, I was surprised that several people actually said longer content. And these aren’t just those six hundred people who have time to fill out a survey. Our 2,000-3,000 word stories consistently drive the most traffic, and have for our eight-month existence.
So people want to pay for long form journalism, and readers want to read it. Wow, suddenly journalism isn’t so dead, right? Not so fast. There’s still one big problem here: Who the hell is going to write all this brilliant New Yorker style prose? (...)
Simply put: Without a system that trains people how to do a New Yorker style piece, there are none for Tumblr and Buzzfeed to commission, nothing for those readers who so badly want it to soak up. We’ve got the money and the demand, but a disastrous paucity of supply.
Within 10 years, the industry’s biggest challenge has been totally inverted. Before, we had all this talent and no one to pay for or read it. Now, it’s just the opposite.
by Sarah Lacy, Pando Daily | Read more:
Image via: Wikimedia
