Factually! with Adam Conover - Journalism is Collapsing with Matt Pearce

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

The profession of journalism is facing a crisis. Recent years have brought devastating layoffs to nearly every major news outlet, with local newspapers shuttering daily. As these institutions crumble, we're faced with a question: what does a world without journalism even look like? This week, Adam is joined by journalist Matt Pearce, who recently experienced large-scale layoffs at the LA Times. Together, they discuss the industry's apparent demise, the irreplaceable role of boots-on-the-ground reporting, and speculate on journalism's future.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me on the show again. You know, the profession of journalism has been in trouble for a while, but in the last couple of weeks, we've started to see it collapse before our eyes. Not a single outlet has been spared, whether it's NPR, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, Adweek, or even the hallowed halls of Vice Media and Sports Illustrated, both of which had their entire staffs eliminated in just the past few months.

And my local paper is no exception. The LA Times just laid off 115 people, about 20% of its entire newsroom. It seems kind of ridiculous to me that no one has cracked the code for making a successful newspaper in the most populous county in the country. But that's what's happening. So something is clearly fucked. I mean, the numbers are bleak. Since 2005, we have lost one third of all newspapers in the country and two thirds of newspaper journalists.

That's right. Two thirds of all newspaper journalism jobs have disappeared in under 20 years. 2.5 local newspapers closed every single week last year. That means the newspaper in your city where you live. And you know what? People are cynical about this. They say, ah, who cares? We've got social media. Who needs those lazy, biased reporters anyway? Well, guess what? I do. And so do you, because I think people misunderstand what it is that journalists actually do. News doesn't just appear on your Twitter or Facebook feed. Somebody needs to find it by discovering and gathering facts that no one has seen before, verifying them and then writing them down into a coherent form that we can understand. I mean, my entire career as a comedy explainer guy would have been impossible without all

the facts found and validated by journalists that I later repeated into cameras like this one. When there are less people discovering and producing the news, we as a society know less about the world around us. The less reporters in your city working full time, the easier it is for bad actors to do bad things, for corporations to manipulate public policy and for corruption to run rampant in your city government. I mean, somebody needs to actually go to those boring ass board of supervisor meetings because it sure isn't going

to be me or you. So where journalism dies, the rich and powerful win. So we have to ask ourselves, what is causing the collapse of journalism and what can we do about it? Well, one way to fight back is unionization. And luckily there has been a wave of newsroom unionization in recent years. And today we have one of the absolute leaders of that fight.

I am so excited to introduce you to him. But before we get to it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you week in and week out, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every single one of these episodes ad free. We have a lot of other wonderful community features as well. And if you like standup comedy, I hope you will come see me perform in a city near you. I got a couple tour dates for you from April 18th through 20th.

I'll be in Indianapolis, Indiana. From April 26th through 28th, I'll be in La Jolla, California. And on May 1st, I will be in San Jose, California. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now, let's get to this week's incredible guest. Matt Pierce was, until just a few days ago, a reporter at the LA Times, and he's also the president of the Media Guild of the West, a union which represents journalists. He is one of the absolute leaders in the fight

to save journalism, and I am so thrilled to have him on the show. Please welcome Matt Pierce. Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. It's so good to be here. So why don't we start by you telling me what recently went down at the L.A. Times and how that connects to what's going on in journalism nationally. So I was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times for more than 11 years, was there from 2012 until earlier this week, took a buyout. And I was one of the leaders of our newsroom guild. We're organized with the news guild CWA. It represents a lot of newspaper workers in America. I was part of the group that unionized the LA Times in 2018.

And what happened at the LA Times was something that's been happening at a lot of newsrooms across the country, outlets that probably you read and like, everything from Vice to the Washington Post, LA Times included in this. There's been massive reductions in force of journalists in these newsrooms. And it's a lot of things. It's a decline of print advertising for the news product. It's the failure of the digital advertising market to materialize for news outlets like Vice or like the LA Times is trying to convert from print to digital. And we can't get paying subscribers to sign up fast enough to convert from print to digital. And, you know, we can't get

paying subscribers to sign up fast enough to account for all the losses. So we had a layoff of more than 100 of our colleagues at the Los Angeles Times. And this follows another almost as large layoff last summer in June of, I believe, more than 60 colleagues. So the L.A. Times has just shrunk, like many news organizations, really dramatically here. We had a peak of about 480 people in our newsroom guild in 2019, and we are now down to close to 300. Okay, so it's like a 40% reduction in the amount of journalism that the newspaper is doing, which is its only product is that it makes journalism. And so it's a little bit, I mean, look, we're here in Los Angeles.

I've subscribed to the LA Times since I moved here. And it's a little weird for me to be like, oh, the paper's having trouble, so we're gonna have less journalism. That's the reason I subscribe. Why would I keep, you're trying to attract subscribers. Why are you making less of the thing keep you're trying to attract subscribers? Why are you making less of the thing that you are selling to the subscribers?

Well, I would say as a labor leader, I agree that it's a bad idea to cut journalism jobs because I am also a news consumer, like, you know, a subscriber like everybody else. And one of the things that I know as a consumer and not just as a journalist, which is that if you're paying a bunch of money for something and it gets worse at some point, you're going to be inclined to stop paying for it. And for the journalists who are left behind, it's not as if the city of Los Angeles got 40% smaller in the same period of time. It's not as if somehow homelessness was solved in that same time period. It's not as if we figured out how to deal with air pollution. You know, all the same problems that we used to cover are still there. It's not as though our city government is any less corrupt than it was.

We have famously, famously corrupt or at least very, very dirty city politics here that could have needs to have a lot of light shed on it. And now there's less light being shed than ever in what I want to point out is like the biggest, most populous county in the country. More people are living here. More things are happening than anywhere else. And yet there's suddenly 50 percent as much serious journalism coming out of the coming out of the city. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredibly hard for the journalists who are doing the work. It's not so great for the people who are counting on the L.A. Times to Yeah. Yeah. It's incredibly hard for the journalists who are doing the work. It's not so great for the people who are counting on the LA Times to provide their news. It's also bad for city government, of course, because the less coverage you have of

politicians or various officials or lobbyists or whoever who are going around doing whatever it is that they're doing, they're less likely to get costs. There are actually a lot of academic studies that have shown that when you have newspaper closers in a certain region or area, that all sorts of bad things happen. You have fewer candidates running for office. You have higher instances of corporate malfeasance. People just don't know who their elected representatives are. And I have to say that, like, even here in Los Angeles, where it's an extremely wealthy city, wealthy county, there's obviously extraordinary poverty here too, but there's a lot of money here

and there are a lot of people who hypothetically could pay and in the past have paid for journalism over the past century and made the LA Times a huge newspaper in the past. We're struggling now because of economic forces and cultural forces that are so much bigger than our newsroom. And I have to say with all that considered, like LA times is still in a lucky position compared to rural places in America that have no news organizations at all, let alone smaller ones. Yeah. I mean, I've always felt, you know know the la times for many years has been a diminished paper but i felt lucky to have it i go visit my girlfriend's

relatives in the bay area and you know her her dad reads the san francisco chronicle i'm like this looks like one of the papers they hand out for free on the new york city subway it's like eight pages long with like a page of comics you know um you um, you, and you go, that's, they're lucky to have that in that other extremely populous city. Cause you go to so many other cities that have just, there's nothing, there's no newspaper whatsoever. There's local TV news, maybe which reports, I don't know, four or five stories a day, three of which are murders. Um, and you've got what NPR is. I don't know how healthy it is, but that at least is a local journalism outlet. That's like across the country, but that's about it.

Right. Um, yeah. And I have something I would add to about newspapers in particular is that like, if you go walk around, uh, in public, or if you go on a subway or a bus here in LA, as I do, um, you look around, like you don't see people like on the subway, uh, or the bus reading the print edition. Like that's not something that especially happens so much anymore. It did in the old days.

Yeah. But not that old days. Not that old days, actually. Literally 20 years ago. Less than that. I mean, when I moved to New York City, I remember I would like pick up a copy of the Daily News for like 50 cents or a quarter or whatever to like have something to do on the subway. You leave through it.

You read about what happened in the Mets game and then you leave it on the seat and someone else picks it up and reads it. It was like a whole, there was a whole life to it, right? That, yeah, was obviously killed to some degree by technology, but also by other forces as well. But even with newspapers facing these forces

and like the rise of technology and social media and all these things that have happened over the last 20 years, but even going back further with the rise of technology and social media and all these things that have happened over the last 20 years. But even going back further with the rise of radio and television, those have also been disruptive forces for newspapers. What's been true this entire time through the modern history of American media is that nonetheless, even with these proliferating forms of media, different mediums that people consume journalism on, newspapers have long been one of the primary drivers of original reporting.

And so you mentioned TV stations, local radio. A lot of times there's this ecosystem effect where the original reporting and inquiry that happens in a newsroom appears in the newspaper. Maybe you have a lot of people who don't subscribe to that newspaper, but other journalists in the city do, and they follow up on those leads or they chase those stories or they feature it on the radio or on television. And we see a more modernized version of that now with social media and with influencers and content creators, where if you're on TikTok scrolling, like you'll see the person who's just like a regular person on your TikTok feed, but they have the like Washington Post or LA Times

story behind them. That's what I do. I take a screenshot and I stick it up there and I'm like, in the camera, you know, but I'm like pointing at an article in the LA Times, the New York Times, whatever else it is. Yeah. And so people who are watching you because you're really engaging and you're such a great communicator. Oh, gee, thank you.

But, you know, they don't have to have read the LA Times to have benefited from this social good that these reporters elsewhere were producing. And that's part of the economic problem, which is that the costs of paying newspaper reporters are concentrated with whoever is running the LA Times, but the benefits of it are so much bigger. And especially now with social media and search engines, it can be anyone, which I will say, I will say, you know, as a journalist, like I like that, like as, as a citizen, as a member of the public, as like a human being out in the world, like you don't want your stuff to be behind a paywall. You don't want your stuff to be hard to find. You want everyone to be reading your beautiful words so that they can see that beautiful public

record that you dug up. And you got that really great quote from somebody and you caught somebody doing something bad because then people do something with it and the world's a little bit better. Yeah. You don't want to just make some money. You want to change the world in whatever way you can via your work and your work often does. And it's a funny thing about the journalistic work product, which is that unlike what I do, where everything I do is copywritten and, uh, you know, nobody can like take it from me. Exactly.

The interesting thing about journalism is facts are not copyrightable. That's right. So I just get to, whenever you write something, I just get to take it, screenshot it. You know, maybe someone might get mad at my screenshot if they really wanted to make a federal case out of it. But like the fact itself, no, once you deliver that, it's free for everybody to use. And you're right. That's sort of an odd thing for a capitalist company to want to make. Normally they want to own everything they create, right? Yeah, no, I mean, newspaper companies and a lot of sort of journalistic companies are just really strange animals because what they're doing is they're producing a public good in the private sector.

And that's even something that's kind of unique about the United States as well, because if you look at most other advanced democracies around the world, they are going to have a pretty well-funded, large, robust public media system, which we don't really have in the U.S. The BBC or etc. large, robust public media system, which we don't really have in the US. Like, you know, we have- The BBC or et cetera. The BBC, the CBC. So my union, the News Guild CWA, also represents journalists in Canada. And I've been up to Toronto and met some of the folks who work for the CBC who are also in the Guild and talked to them. And one of the things that really blew my mind that put our current situation in context for me is that the News Guild has, I think, something

like 4,000 Guild members at the CBC alone. Now, Canada has a pretty similar size population as California. Imagine just the state of California having 4,000 publicly funded journalists running around everywhere, covering every single corner of the state in the public interest. And Canada's not even one of the best funded public media systems in the world. Social democracies for many decades had recognized the importance of having a public option for journalism. And they also have, of course, like a private sector for journalism, which is also really important because you don't only want to have, you know, state funded media. But if you can construct a public option that's

pretty well insulated and has stable revenue sources, then, you know, that is something that other countries who care about democracy and see the importance of journalism in sustaining and upholding those democracies, they have those public options. And we kind of don't really have that here. I mean, we have public radio stations and they get grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But one of the trends that's also happened in media and in public media over the last few decades is that, you know, that funding became from Congress kind of unreliable. And so what we call public media has had to look for things like corporate sponsorships and philanthropy and finding other ways of generating revenue. And an affluent donor base that is chipping in 10 bucks a month because, oh, we really

value what we get from the NPR station. And that like really changes the coverage as well, you know? Yeah, because they become, and this is the thing that I feel like I personally as a That like really changes the coverage as well, you know? What we know of as a sort of nonprofit or public media newsrooms face a lot of the same market pressures that commercial newsrooms like the LA Times do. If you're relying in any way on advertising or corporate grants, and you're also trying to fight for the same eyeballs that everyone else is fighting with, these are all ultimately firms and they're all firms that are competing, not just with each other for attention, but Netflix and Fortnite. And like, we're all on this little black glass box, fighting each other all the time. And so, you know, now an increasingly

large percent of the news guild is made up of nonprofit newsrooms and nonprofit workers who, you know, will tell you quite candidly that nonprofit media is not exactly a paradise when it comes to producing journalism. Maybe you separate yourself from some of the more crass market incentives, and maybe you can get a little bit more separated from clickbait. Everyone faces the same problem, whether you work for a for-profit company or a nonprofit newsroom, which is that we all work for the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with the revenues and expenses columns and everybody's trying to make payroll.

And the biggest example of this to me, when I realized what's a little bit weird about NPR, as much as I have loved NPR throughout my entire life, is when I realized we have two very high profile NPR affiliates here in Los Angeles. Neither one of them, as far as I know, has a Spanish language, you know, station, which in a county like Los Angeles, where so much of the population is Spanish speaking, if you're actually serving the public interest, obviously you would have to have a Spanish language. Like what do you talk like the fucking, I don't know, the subway talks to you in Spanish, like there's Spanish everywhere, but they're not doing that. Why? Because the money isn't there or the money isn't perceived as being there because that's not where their donors are.

It's not where the corporate sponsors are, et cetera. Just a big example of how there's a gap between, in my opinion, you know, it's public. Sure, it's nonprofit. It's publicly funded to some degree. And yet it's not really in the public interest the way you might expect. Yeah. And I do want to say that there actually there are like a lot of ethnic media outlets out there. And some of the most interesting policy discussions and activity that's going on is finding ways

to like if we're going to have some sort of intervention to try to resuscitate journalism in some form for the modern age, that like, it's also going to support ethnic media so that we don't just recreate the newsrooms of the past. Or if you look at the photos of the LA times from the 1960s, when they're covering the Watts uprising, it's like 95% white guys. Like those are the old days. We are never going back to the old days, nor should we like some people want to go there. Some people, some very high profile people say, Hey, let's go back. Let's go back.

Let's make America great again. We are never going back. I'm just saying that some people are trying to pull us there. And, you know, I don't know who's going to win the tug of war yet. But go on. Many of us do not want to go back. But there are many people who are trying to make a go of it. And, and this is one of the other challenges that I have found as somebody who started

out as just a regular reporter who is just keeping my head down, trying to do my job, doing my stories, file my records requests, do my interviews, get really good at my craft. And it is a craft, um, and one that you work on for many years and sometimes take on student debt, uh, to train for. When I became a union organizer with my coworkers back in 2018, we're like, oh, my God, the company changed our time off policy. And that's really dumb. And we haven't gotten raises in three years.

And there's just all the stuff that's going on. And then as I continue through time, organizing with my newsroom and now organizing with a bunch of other journalists and a bunch of other newsrooms from Southern California all the way down to Texas where my local now represents seven Texas newsrooms, the problems are just so much bigger. And one of the weird dynamics that we have is that there are basically two ways right now almost to survive as a newsroom, which is that like you can be part of a massive chain, possibly owned by like a hedge fund or some asset management company or somebody horrible. Or you can be the New York Times and just be standalone and huge and be the big premium media product.

Or you can be really, really tiny. And there's a lot of stuff that's really interesting and promising that happens in the tiny space. Yeah. And that's a lot of times like the really small outlets are the things that make people feel good and they're really excited about. But like life in very small media is extremely hard. Yeah. You're doing every job.

You are competing again with much larger companies with more resources. You don't every job. You are competing, again, with much larger companies with more resources. You don't have a division of labor. You don't have an economy of scale. And so you'll see a lot of small publications pop up and it's really interesting, exciting, and everybody wants good things to happen with it, but then they become hard to sustain. And it's almost like an analogy that people on social media might see is if you like start a sub stack, you're like, I'm going to be making a go of like my sub stack newsletter and I'm going to try to get subscriptions. But like a lot of freaking work, like you're you're you have to write all the time to keep your subscribers happy and people keep paying. And like it is it is really hard to sustain that without the advantages that you

have of a larger newsroom, which gets to the next really huge problem, which is that, you know, as unionists, we're fighting all the time with, you know, the Gannetts and the Alden Global Capitals and, you know, the LA Times and the New York Times company and like every big media brand that you could think of. And, you know, we're yelling at them and sometimes think they're stupid or horrible, but like they're fighting us and sometimes busting our unions, but then they turn around and they're like looking to deal with like meta. Yeah. And they're getting fucked by Google. Yes. Which means that we're getting fucked by Google because publishers

don't create journalism. Journalists do. I create journalism. I just happened to sell it to the LA times. Yeah. And so if, um, you know, Google's exploiting the LA times, that means they're exploiting me because when I go to the bargaining table and I'm trying to negotiate for my next contract, I personally had not gotten a raise for more than two years when I had left earlier this week, because you know, that's how ugly things have gotten. Um, you know, I can go on strike against the LA times, you know, we can walk out, we can pick at the building, we can like go pick it outside our owner's mansion or whatever, but like, um, you know, we can walk out, we can picket the building, we can like go picket outside our owner's mansion or whatever. But like, you know, we're not going to be picketing Google or Meta.

And Patrick Soon-Shong, he's like the wealthiest man in Los Angeles, but he's the owner of the LA Times, owner of the LA Times. But in terms of wealth, he's just like a drop in the bucket compared to what Google and Meta bring in and what they've been able to harvest from everyone. Well, let's talk about what these companies have done to journalism, because I think this is one of those areas where everyone wants to blame technology first.

When I told the story about, hey, we all used to read the daily news on the subway, and then a couple of years later, everyone's on their phones. You say, oh, the phones came along and that killed the newspaper. And like, oh, well, you know, that technology did it and we got to come up with something new. But then I think, hold on, what's everyone doing on their phones?

They're all reading shit that happened that day, right? A lot of them are reading the news. A lot of them are looking at social media. Social media is full of a lot of news, right? So people are still sitting there reading something. There's still a desire for all the things the newspaper used to give them but now it gives it to them better right um for instance like phones didn't kill music but the music industry you know and spotify conspired to make sure artists make less than ever even though everyone's listening to more music than ever right so i feel like something similar must have happened to the news where it's not the technology itself. It's the capitalist malfeasance.

All right. That that did something to it. How did this happen? Well, I want to be clear about this, you know, because I'm I'm a journalist and now I run around, you know, rattling my saber at, you know, big tech. But like, I'm not an anti-technology person. Like, I own a smartphone made by Apple. I have a Gmail account. You know, it's like I use what used to be Twitter.

You know, I have a Gmail account, you know, it's like I use what used to be Twitter. You know, I have Instagram, you know, it's like there are all these things, these products that these companies have made. And they're made by engineers who are like really brilliant people who like want to make stuff that people really like. And like a lot of times people really do like it. Like it does something for people. And like I was somebody who was like a huge Twitter power user, especially between like, you know does something for people. And I was somebody who was a huge Twitter power user, especially between 2012 and 2020. And so I was somebody who saw what the possibilities of having

this incredibly vibrant public square and this gathering place for really smart and interesting and often overlooked people. I was one of the first national reporters who arrived in Ferguson in 2014 after Michael Brown got shot by a white police officer. And that was one of the places where Twitter sort of showed everybody its revolutionary potential because you had a lot of activists in the streets there who were using social media to get their own message out. Yeah, not through traditional media or not through reporters necessarily like me who are white and who are not from Northern St. Louis and can talk about the racism in the community and policing. And, you know, so there are these, there's this like storming of the Bastille that happened

with technology where you had all these old gatekeepers and these like, you know, old predominantly white media companies with predominantly white newsrooms that kind of represented older ways of disseminating news and speaking to the public. And over time, the old newsrooms and the old way of disseminating information and informing the public has slowly been dismantled and displaced by this new material reality. And this has always been the case with media, right? From Gutenberg's printing press all the way up through radio and television, like journalists have always adapted with new developments in technology. And I think, you know, we want to because ultimately, like, we want to be where the people are, like we want to, we want to be where people are looking

at things and talking about the things that people want to talk about. But what has happened isn't necessarily a consequence of the technology, but it's a collection and a consolidation of power that has happened around the technology. And so, you know, fast forward, we're in sort of like the Napoleonic phase of the French Revolution here in social media where we have dynastic sort of individuals. Right. After the French Revolution, right. Napoleon comes in and establishes a dictatorship. Yeah. And Napoleon comes in like, you know what? We're going to have an empire.

We're going to consolidate this thing into an empire. And so you have individuals. And I think it's important to emphasize that there are individuals where you have someone like Elon Musk, who's incredibly wealthy, who's able to purchase wholesale this big piece of infrastructure, Twitter, that a lot of people were using for a variety of reasons. And a lot of people had not been happy with Twitter for a while. So I don't want to paint it with, I don't know if you paint rose- rose tinted glasses, but whatever you do to tint glasses rose, you know, that wasn't Twitter. But we're in a position where you can have this, you know, infrastructure that can be bought by an individual.

You have newsrooms that have now been accumulated by people like Jeff Bezos, Washington Post. The New York Times is like an important organ for liberalism around the world. And that's owned again by a family. Right. And, you know, you look at Facebook, which is still dominated by Mark Zuckerberg. You look at Google, which has like dual class shares that, you know, it's just there. There's there's all this power and wealth that kind of got concentrated among a very small number of people on one hand.

And they can kind of do whatever they want. And like within the constraints of the market, of course, but I guess with Elon, maybe not within the constraints of the market because I don't know how much money new Twitter is making. is making. But it's a problem of political economy and a problem of power because when you have, and I mentioned the New York Times, you can have a union at the New York Times that will occasionally go into an uprising or give people labor protections to sort of push back on decisions that people don't like. And that's something that happens in that newsroom quite a bit. And obviously, a lot of people have criticisms or praise for things that the New York Times does. But there's sort of this, there's a little bit of a countervailing force in the newsroom

when you have a workforce that's unionized and pushed back. And that's something that I felt like we had at the Los Angeles Times as well, which is that when you have organized employees with a strong personal professional code of ethics, you're able to push back against stuff that is especially crass. So for example, one of the things that LA Times introduced at the bargaining table last year was that they wanted to have a pay-per-clicks proposal. They wanted to tie our compensation or our raises to how much traffic or subscription conversions that our stories would get.

And as journalists, we're like, no way. Professional journalists for much of the past century have been trying to disentangle ourselves from the commercial facing side of the business because we want our work to be not completely informed by what market forces want from us. You know, if you're reporting on bombing in Gaza, you don't want your pay to be tied to like how sensational you can make a story. You know, I just want to focus on doing the best, most ethical, professional job that you can do. But if you look at a lot of these giant tech companies, they have this concentrated power that allows them to push around smaller companies like news publishers. Their own workforces are not unionized. They don't even have really other shareholders who will scare the shit out of them

if they're running the business poorly, like Elon. And so we work in this space that is dominated by a dwindling number of players. And it's something that happens both inside of tech platforms, and it happens both inside of our news industry where also we've had a dwindling number of employers and a lot of consolidation happening. So if there is a trend to be drawn out here, is that there's a concentration of power that's happening where there hasn't been a corresponding increase in countervailing power, which is one of the principles that I think that I hold close to as a unionist and a journalist, which is that we need to have checks and balances in society. It's not that I want to abolish the

machines. It's that I want machines to work for people. You want people to be able to push back against this very concentrated power, which is like the point of a union is a union is a lot of less powerful people get together, gather their power together. And it's interesting because I think we are seeing a rise of unions that are not just fighting for the wages and working conditions of their members, which is of course the most important job of a union, but are also fighting for other ethical principles like in the, you know, writer's guild and the screen actors guild. Like there, there was primarily, it was about our own compensation, but it was also, uh, you could tell the spirit of it. We're trying to save the industry from itself. We're trying to say, no,

no, no, don't, don't like crank out AI shit. Right. And that's part of the reason the public was on our side because the public also cares about that more than the bosses do. Um, and I, you know, cause we actually take pride in our work. Our work is commercial art, but it is art. And we are artists and we have values as artists that, you know, we can all agree upon. And I can see why the same thing would be true of journalists. Let's talk, though, about what these giant, powerful platforms and people have done to eviscerate journalism. done to eviscerate journalism. I mean, I think of something as simple as, you know, Elon Musk took away the link previews on Twitter. So for a long time, it was just like, you'd see an image and like buzzfeed.com at the bottom or whatever in tiny type. So it looked like someone had just

posted a photo and it looked like the whole point of this was he was like, I want people to leave the website even less often. So I will make the links non-obvious. So people click them even less. That was my interpretation of it, but that sort of, you know, I'm going to privilege my own platform at the expense of everyone else in the ecosystem. What are some other examples of these companies doing that? Oh my God. I mean, I mean, a lot of platforms and larger companies like that are just moving in a direction of getting away from you know, when newspapers were extremely profitable, you know, in a city, uh, the newspaper would have like an advertising monopoly on the local advertising market, which was extremely lucrative as you can imagine. Yeah. Craigslist comes along,

internet starts stripping those pieces of, uh, advertising dominance away from newspapers. And now Google and Meta, I think both through acquisitions, have consolidated into a duopoly in the digital advertising market. And so what they're doing now is developing, at, uh, generative AI models that are trained on a lot of the stuff that me and many other humans have produced and written for the internet to produce sort of human sounding generative AI models where, um, if you, I was in, I think the barred beta for Google, but like, you know, the way that Google would work is that, you know, you type in a question or like look for something or a piece of news and, you know, you spit it in the prompt and then it would spit out a bunch of results and you would have hyperlinks. And ideally,

the most relevant stories would be on top of the landing page. You know, what it's starting to do now is to have like generative AI responses where it's kind of more of like a chat bot where maybe you don't have to click out and go to the website who's hyperlinked that Google used to serve you. Maybe you can just chat with Google and chat with Google's large language model, and it will sort of just give you a basic sense of an answer to what's going on with this earthquake in Turkey. And you don't have to follow through and you don't have to go to the publisher's website.

If you're not going to the publisher's website, the publisher is not getting digital advertising dollars through Google's widgets that are also on the publisher's website. Yeah. You're also not getting potential digital subscriptions or other ways that you could build like a direct economic relationship with readers. So everything has become mediated through these platforms already because, you know, we're all we were all working in this kind of open web environment where you would hyperlink stuff. And for a long

time, journalism didn't have paywalls online. It was like anyone could read anything, which was cool, by the way, if you were a consumer, like if you were just a random person, you know, from the 2000s on, you could just like look at a bunch of newspaper articles from all over the place for free, which is awesome. And like, you know, in a sort of well-functioning world, like that would be what we could all do is have professional knowledge that's accurate everywhere at our fingertips for free. And like, that was the dream for a while. And the hotline was like, information wants to be free. Right.

Well, information isn't free because it's produced by professionals who need health insurance. And so, you know, paywalls. And so now we're sort of moving from this kind of open web environment to this more enclosed web where, you know, Elon's going to strip out, you know, the preview links and it doesn't want to. I think he tried to like block Substack. He tried to block links to Instagram when, you know, the preview links and it doesn't want to. Like, I think he tried to, like, block Substack. He tried to block links to Instagram when he first took over the place. Like, they do a lot of these little infrastructural tweaks on their own services to try to prevent people from leaving. Like, they become the casino. They're trying to, like, block out the windows and leave the clocks off the wall.

So you don't even know what time it is. A lot of which seems like very clear anti-competitive behavior and is something that you know look the regulators in dc have a lot of fucking antitrust issues right now but it it seems like something that that one should take a look at if you're like oh i don't i don't want people to go look at other websites just at mine so i'm going to arbitrarily penalize their links in all these uh negative ways sounds like a crime to me but i'm not uh fully an expert. But returning to AI, now that all these companies are trying to build AI models

that are going to systematically harvest, digest, and repeat your work back to people instead of those people going to the site to make sure that you get paid. This seems so obviously self-defeating because like someone at Google must know that the AI algorithm needs to read something in order to repeat it. And if they starve you out, there will be nothing for it to repeat.

If nobody reports on the thing thing like there's this fundamental misunderstanding where like the executives seem to think that all you guys do is produce text and the algorithm can make text too like no they don't they call people on the phone you call people on the phone you like learn things you go to a place and look at it with your human fucking eyes like chat gpt can't do that shit so like what are they thinking well i mean this is one of the elements of monopoly and monopoly theory which is that um if unconstrained monopolies will destroy the market and themselves i mean go no i mean like go use google search yeah like it's shitty right now. And I, you know, apologies to anyone who's working on Google, but like Google search,

like no apologies. Your product sucks. You, you go there and, um, uh, the results on a lot of the prompts that you'll, um, pop in are stuff that's obviously been, um, uh, you know, SEO optimized to within an inch of its life. So a lot of the content that spits back to you, like looks kind of identical to each other. And it's from a bunch of different websites.

And you're like, I've never heard of these websites before. Like, I have no idea if any of this stuff is reputable, but it's kind of like formatted in a similar way because it seems to be what Google search algorithms really like. And then now with the rise of generative AI models that have been popularized anyway, some of this content is not even necessarily written fully or partially by humans who have some sort of judgment over what's being put on these websites. It's like you kind of don't know that stuff that you're looking at on Google is any good.

And so like this is this is one of the contradictions that I think, you know, I feel like it has to be coming to a head or something because like normal competition theory would say that like, you know, when somebody gets too big for their britches and their product starts lacking, like a competitor is going to come along and eat their lunch. And like, you know, Bing, like, like Bing is the same thing. Yeah. You know, it's like people are now looking for new search engines in a way where they weren't before. They're saying, how do I, what's a different one? Yeah. Yeah.

People, people want stuff that works, but like, if you see where a lot of the investment is going, it's into like a lot of generative ai technology or large language models and and um you know the concept for what might come after the sort of spammy like hyperlink landing page it's just the chatbot like maybe maybe you don't need to be so confused by all these like different kind of confusing publishers and you don't know what they are if they're any good. What if there's this really reliable looking bot that instead will replace all this and you can just ask it a question and it'll give you a reliable sounding answer? And it seems to be where the industry, that's what a lot of the excitement and energy is looking at.

And I just know as a reporter, to use the the analogy of like Plato's cave in a way, it's like a large language model is like, it's like down in the cave, like chain to the wall, looking at the like reflection of a fire in the past. It's like the shadows coming down. And it's like, and journalists like, we're actually kind of, you know, not to toot our horn, but like we're up there on the surface, like looking at the sunlight. And, you know, it's like, no, this is, this is what that person said. Um, here's the date on when they said it, I was there. Um, here's the exact quote, you know, here are two other people who

saw it and, you know, can verify it. You know, you had professionals who generated this original inquiry and original knowledge and, you know, it, it identified the source of the quote. If it's in quotation marks, it's supposed to be an accurate, precise quote. If you have a news story that is professionally produced by a trained journalist, it's probably going to have multiple sources if people are able to do their jobs well. There's just a lot of hard work that goes into like producing professional knowledge. And that's not even something that's just true of journalism. It's just true of cognition and knowledge work in America generally. And so like what you see right now is crazy is that you have these knowledge professions where it costs real money to do the inefficient work of obtaining and producing what looks to be like knowledge.

I'm just citing a little David Hume here. It's like, you never really know. It's like, maybe it's Kant. Ooh, philosophy BA. Yes, but large language models, they're just always looking in the past and they're not human. They don't use reason.

It's like they're statistical guessing machines. It's just fancy auto-correct. When I think about a big story, like one of the most important stories the LA Times put out in the last couple of years like they're statistical guessing machines. It's just fancy. Well, when I think about a big story, like, you know, one of the, one of the most important stories, the LA times put it in the last couple of years was the, you know,

the racist tapes from the LA city council that, you know, became a national news story, completely under upended LA politics. The only reason that story got out is because a reporter or a couple of reporters, the LA times heard the tape wrote down, here's, here's a crazy thing I heard on a tape and then published it for everybody. An AI cannot do that. Like an AI cannot listen. I mean,

an AI could listen to a tape and transcribe it, couldn't understand the political impact of this, couldn't like, if we don't have journalists, we don't know that those things happen at all. They just happen invisibly, secretly, silently. I would even go back one step further on the L.A. Tapes story, which is that the actual origin of those tapes was that someone anonymously posted them to a Reddit forum. I saw the Reddit post. It was on a Reddit post, and it was weird. It looked like maybe the text as part of the Reddit post had been like copy pasted or something. It like wasn't clear if the person who posted it had written it or not.

It was like a Reddit post with like one upvote. Like no one was reading this thing. Right. And so like the stuff in the Reddit post, you know, whoever recognized that, you know, these tapes, you know, it's inside the Los Angeles Federation of Labor. It's with these important L.A. City Council people. And, you know, the person who posted on Reddit, and this is the part of the story that I think is really relevant for professional journalism. You know, they're talking about like, ooh, look at the Los Angeles Federation of Labor.

You know, the union being like really cozy with these like city council people. And we had like professional journalists who are in our city hall bureau, like listen to those tapes. And like, there were multiple things that like quickly became apparent in terms of like, what is this stuff and why is it important? And why should the public care about it? They were talking about redistricting. Um, it was a closed door meeting to talk about, you know, how, um, Los Angeles city council districts should be drawn. And it was, you know, power brokers on city council with a very powerful Federation of Labor.

And they were gerrymandering. And they were just talking about like, yeah, how should these districts be drawn? And the other thing is that there was some racially inflammatory commentary in those tapes, which, you know, people might not have picked up on if they were a bot and not a person. But, you know, we have like Spanish language speakers who recognize that Nuri Martinez is one of the city council people on there had used a Spanish language term to refer to a fellow city council member's child who was black as a monkey.

Yeah. And so it was like this human subjectivity, which is so interesting because like, you know, we have all these arguments all the times about journalist objectivity and like writing about the truth and like not kind of like letting our opinions and our biases influence like what we're producing to people. But still, the single most valuable thing that journalists bring to the process in a situation like that is their subjectivity. is their subjectivity. It's their judgment. And they're looking at the world and be like, actually, that little strange piece is kind of interesting. And we need to tell people about it. And there's something about, I almost relate it to art, but it's human judgment. It's not objectivity. It's like a judgment in there. And that judgment is what people pay for. And it's like what gets people paying attention to news, which is that you have these specific human beings with consciences somewhere who said, I think this is really important and people should know about it.

But like a generative AI model, it's never going to think that way. It's just it's going to kind of like try to guess that something is important, but it's not going to have an opinion of its own. It's just going to say, oh, well stuff like this in the past has been kind of interesting, but like it doesn't reason or sort of think semantically the same way that a journalist does. And this is one of the gaps between like how AI plays out in like a Hollywood union versus a journalism union. I mean, I talked to so many reporters during the writer's strike and they would all say, are you worried that AI is going to replace you? Because that was sort of the naive version of the fight,

right, that people would repeat. And I would say them over and over again, no, AI cannot replace the work of a television writer because the work of a television writer is not simply to output text, even though an ignorant person might think so. It's to A a use my human faculties to come up with something brand new that no one has thought of before. B it's to do a bunch

of shit in the physical world that an AI cannot do. It's to go to set. It's to have phone calls. It's to work with other people. That's the actual job of a writer. And I would say to those journalists, you know, that B because you threat of being, quote, replaced with AI, except that an AI cannot do what we're doing right now, which is you calling me on the phone. You had an idea and a take and an angle. And you said, who knows about this? Let me call Adam Conover. And here we are having a conversation. And now you're going to write something as a result of that because you're a fucking person and the job requires a person. And so the job cannot actually be done by AI, but an executive who is ignorant and rapacious

and criminally corrupt might say, you know what, let me try to get rid of all these people doing this job and replace them with a cut rate algorithm that can't do shit and see if I can make a little bit more money for a little bit less cost. Yeah, and I think this is one of the distinctions why it's important to separate publishers from journalists and studio heads from actors, which is that the act of labor,

work itself is transformative. It transforms the worker, and it's the worker who transforms the world with their work. And I don't know if you have a similar experience, but I have this very specific experience with generative AI technology. Whenever there's like a new model that comes out and people are really excited about it because it's like really technically impressive. And last year was ChatGPT and now I think it's Sona, which is able to sort of produce sort of realistic. Sora. Sora. Able to produce a realistic looking video based off of prompts.

And, you know, so like technologically, it's really impressive. So like as a as a feat of engineering, this stuff is like just amazing. But I have this experience when I look at this technology and when I use it for the first time, you know, I kind of have this like fight that happens with the machine where I like go to chat GBT and I enter enter a prompt that sends me back something that sounds like really really kind of human and it's kind of like interesting and sometimes like this seems it's just I don't know it's like wow this is this is actually kind of impressive but like the more that I dig in with the technology the flaws start appearing and then like I have this like emotional reaction where I realized that like you know I kind of was encountering this technology wanting to believe that like it would really truly be astounding or almost be like a person that I'm talking to or that I'm interacting with or some sort of consciousness on the other side.

It's just, it's just like, it's got six fingers on the guy, you know? And it's like, it's saying something that a person wouldn't say if you were actually talking to them. And they ask it to give you something different and it gives you basically the same thing again. And you're like, but could you do it like this? And you realize it doesn't understand you and its hollowness reveals itself. Yeah. And there's something that's really empty to me in that. And it's like versus like if you for an artist, like if I'm like reading Chekhov and like Uncle Vanya or something like I can like somewhere through the mist there.

I know that there was a person who made this and it makes the work so much more powerful. Yeah, because it was somebody who had something to say or as a group of people who had something to say, and they made these decisions to produce this work that I'm reading like all this time later. And there's like there's something I don't know. It's like very human in that where you're being spoken spoken to through the technology of writing or through the technology of a printed book. That's also technology. But like, when I'm dealing with AI, I just kind of like, you know, it's like, it's amusing and it's kind of interesting and maybe promising, but I just,

it's just dehumanizing. And, and humanity is what people want from all media. You know, this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Like, why do people go to the movies? They like to look at people. They like to see people do things. You know, why do people read the news? They want to know what people are doing.

Why do people go on social media? They want to look at pictures of people or see posts from people. People don't want to look at AI output. I just fundamentally don't think they want to do it. Even in the movie industry, an executive, why do they hire me? Because they want a human to yell at. They want someone to say, I don't like it, make a new one. And they want someone to get on the phone with and say, we didn't like the last version

of the script. It needs to be more like this. And they want a person to go, yes, yes, of course, I'll change it. I'll change it, you know, or whatever. Like it's human life is nothing but people all the way down. And the idea that we're going to automate people. Well, would you want to read or watch media that had no human at anywhere in the chain? I think transparently not. And you know, it doesn't mean that there is no room for artificiality, right? You can look at music going from human played instruments to the synthesizer, right? But at the end of the day, you're still like, oh, I like Daft Punk.

I like there's guys underneath those robot helmets, even though they're playing synthesizers. And what do they look like? Aren't you just thinking that the entire time? What do they look like? What do they look like? What do they look like? Yeah, you're constantly looking on Google Images to try to find it, right? Yeah.

Constantly looking on Google images to try to find it, right? Yeah. But so this takes me to a question I have about how tech and journalism interact. I've had for a little while, which is that the tech industry clearly needs journalism, right? Even if it's just as grist for the AI mill. But, you know, I mean mean when you do any google search they put new shit at the top because they know you're likely looking for something that happened that day yeah you know um one thing i find interesting is that tech companies realize that they needed uh entertainment products and they started making their own you know amazon

netflix all these tech companies are like pumping out extremely expensive movies. They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars hiring, you know, Apple, Apple, you know, hires the most expensive talent, the most expensive directors spend so much money on their projects to make something that they're basically giving away every time you buy an iPhone. Yeah. Um, why aren't these companies starting news divisions? Like Apple News directs people to different publishers, but why aren't they just staffing up with journalists since they clearly need the product? I mean, news most of the time or very often is just fundamentally not profitable, which is one of the other problems here. I mean, there are versions of it that are

profitable and can be quite profitable, but journalism or professional journalism has usually been profitable because it's been attached to something else. And so, you know, it's kind of, it's great at like arousing the public's attention, you know, and it's like, you know, journalists are doing interesting things and you're like talking about politics and current events. You're like bringing sort of, you're bringing the newness of the world to people. And that's something that's just inherently attractive. And what media executives have been trying to figure out forever is just like, well, journalists are great at whipping up people's attention. How do we monetize that? And monetize was not a word I'm sure that they were using when they were creating colonial newspapers back in the early days of the U.S. But, you know, journalism had long been sustained

by commercial advertising or being attached to like, you know, if you're the New York Times, like they have Wordle and they have the cooking app. And also, you know, it's not just like hard news about politics. We're also going to cover sports. We're also going to cover entertainment.

Like a lot of this, a lot of kind of like investigative reporting or hard reporting, like sort of democracy journalism is bundled together with all this other stuff um tech and sort of the fragmentation of the media system has broken all that stuff apart and i mean like i guess if you're an apple executive you know i mean god think about it it's like you've got you know the donald Glover TV show and it's like on your streaming service and, you know, people can watch it on their iPhones and they're even like listening to it through their Apple produced AirPods and you can charge your device with your Apple charger. It's like you they own everything that's like between the product and the people in the product and the technology that's being transmitted through to you. It's just amazing integration, but like none of them want to freaking pay for journalism.

And part of that's just because journalism's incredibly hard and subsidized by everything else. And part of it is just that, like, I think in some ways they kind of just don't give a shit. They want to make money. Like if, if you're getting into journalism these days, it's because you really, really want to do it and to kind of hurl yourself into the fight.

Yeah. And you may lose a lot of money, as a lot of media executives do. You kind of have to get into it these days for the love of the game. And it's just the part that scares me. I mean, there are many things that scare me. I could go on for three hours about what scares me right now. But one of the things that really scares me is on the other side of this, sort of outside of the companies and out of the C-suites and outside of our newsrooms, one of the basic

realities of American life, and I think life in a lot of sort of westernized countries, is journalism has been playing a sort of decreasing role in public life. Bob Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, kind of famous book about declining communities and disintegrating social groups. This is the book I've heard about the most that I've never read. It comes up like once a week for me. social group. This is the book I've heard about the most that I've never read. It comes up like once a week for me. I think like go, go read that book. And there are maybe pieces of it that don't completely hold up, but like there are so many observations that I think are really important

right now. And which I think especially people in unions or who are thinking about unionizing should be thinking about because that book is basically about the decline of social groups in the U.S. and kind of close personal ties and the community in the U.S. And what we have in its place is like a much more hyper individualized, kind of a hyper modular, very like micro targeted society. Like we no longer have this like ultra conformist, like, you know, 1950s Stepford Wives Society. Elks Club for age. Go to church on Sunday and community group based life. Yeah. And you may have people who like you see them on church and then you see them at church and then you see them at your workplace and you're in the Elks Club and you have the same union.

And like you have all these like really thick social bonds. And like we kind of like a lot of those have just corroded. And one of the things that Robert Putnam found in his book specifically about journalism, because newspapers were and for a long time were one of the ways that communities were sort of glued together, right? Kind of outside of these groups, you help construct a public when you're creating a publication, you're creating an imagined public that you're trying to bring together. That there has been a generational decline in the people who consume journalism. And by that, it means older people were consuming a lot more journalism than younger people. And it wasn't one of those things where it's like, oh, well, when you get older and you're not just kind of like this dumb kid anymore,

like you buy a house and like you start paying attention to the news and voting in elections more. No, like what he saw in the data is just that like news consumption was a generational thing that was like dying out with generations. And so there was a smaller and smaller number of people who were news hawks by which he defined not just people who read newspapers, the nerds, but like, you know, people who are like watching TV news as well. Like it was becoming a smaller and smaller share of society. And I feel like I see that today. And like the sort of trendy, the trendy phrase that's being batted around in the journalism community right now is news fatigue, especially over the last couple of years. Like we have felt people kind of pulling away from wanting to read a lot of hard

journalism. It's like, it makes them feel sad. They just like, they don't want to worry about it. Like we just had a hard decade. And so people like just want to look at Instagram. And I feel that myself because like, you know, I don't want to read about famine. You know, I don't want to be sad all the time, even if the journalism's excellent. Yeah. And so without the public sort of there, we're kind of like Tinkerbell in the jar, like fading a little bit. Because I think if we woke up tomorrow and like 50% of Angelenos were like, oh my God,

I'm ready to pay for news the same way that I pay for Netflix. And like, we'd be all right. Yeah. But there are larger social forces at play. And I think it's going to be the work of decades to reverse that atomization of society. Because what are we doing when we're putting out stories about corruption in City Hall or about any election or corporate corruption? What are people supposed to do with that information?

corporate corruption, like what are people supposed to do with that information? For, I don't know, like a lot of the last century, and especially in the sort of modern commercial media, we've been oriented toward readers as consumers. Like there are people that we're selling ads to. There are people who, you know, we want to give restaurant guides to. And, you know, we don't say this, but a lot of times they're middle or upper middle class or higher and they have money to spend, which makes them more attractive to advertisers and they're more able and willing to buy subscriptions. But we hand them this like critical information about something horrible going on in the world. Like, what are they

supposed to do about that? Yeah. Like, like, like what, what is their power to actually like act on that information? And for me as somebody who, you know, all this time that I've been doing journalism have also been like organizing my workplace and not only organizing my workplace, but helping a ton of other journalists organize their workplaces over the last five years. Um, you know, I see that like the credible effect that bringing it like a union into your newsroom can have on your life. And not just on your life, but creating social bonds between coworkers who didn't think that they had a lot of stuff in common before. We're suddenly looking out for each other or fundraising for each other. When somebody's hit a financial shortfall or they need some help, you're recreating social bonds. And we kind of don't have a lot of modern analogs for unions

because a union is something that you build with the people who have the same job. But a lot of how we organize our social groups these days, whether it's a certain political group or a movement group, or even just a club, is that it's kind of self-selecting people who already agree on stuff. But when you're organizing a union, you're like organizing people who by definition from the beginning, don't agree with you on the need for a union. You know, it's like, that's the start of a long conversation where you're trying to persuade people. It's like, no, we actually have more in common than we don't. And we're actually going to be better off if we kind of like link arms and like pick a fight with our boss, which

is like incredibly scary to the individual worker who in like, I don't know, 90% of private sector workplaces doesn't have a union. And if you make trouble, you get fired. So I just look at all of this and the experiences that I've had organizing a union and also being a journalist and trying to communicate with the public and trying to make the public care about important stuff is that like, I want to do work that is important for our democracy, but I also want people to be able to do something with the information that I gave them. And in the old days, like there were a lot of civic organizations and unions and groups that like, where people could sort of participate more meaningfully in democracy because they weren't just one vote among millions. They were part of something where they could meaningfully engage with democracy.

So I think Bowling Alone is an interesting book that people should revisit. And he actually wrote an update on that book a couple of years ago, I think called The Upswing. He wrote it with one of the Romneys. But it was basically like he was kind of calling for like a new progressive era, capital P progressive era, where it's like, no, actually, we had a similar period in American life in the early 20th century where it was massive economic inequality. People were really fragmented.

Membership organizations were really low. A lot of people were really downcast about democracy. And a lot of people got together and said, no, actually, one of the opportunities of democracy is that you can associate and you can change your world if you work together with other people. I mean, if you look at the late 19th century, one of the dark periods in American life and then, you know, the progressive era where people tried to pull themselves out of it, the Great Depression that led to the New Deal. Right. That's sort of early again, capital P progressive at the time. Just people who are like, let's build a fucking swimming pool. Let's build a park.

God damn it. Like, let's, let's have a home so that like the poor orphan girls have a place to live. Like that kind of basic thing. People that really, you know, America sort of pulled itself out of the, you know, gilded age chaos, um, by doing that. So that's a wonderful vision that you raise about, you know, needing to create community bonds so that then when there is news, it can be useful to people because it's sort of about the bond that they have. I guess, I guess what are the first steps there? Because, um, one thing that struck me, we had Dave Weigel on the show, uh, recently, uh, political reporter for semaphore. And that's the one area of journalism that seems to be doing pretty well, is there's a kind of journalism that is for a certain type of person who needs it. I think about Bloomberg, Axios, Semaphore, the Hollywood trades. Right. There's they're envisioning there's a particular executive somewhere who actually really needs the information today because it is going to affect whether they buy or sell whatever it is they're buying or selling.

Or if they work in politics, Politico is an example, right? They need to know actually what happened on the House floor today. And so it's really aimed at those people. You can get them to buy the product, right? It needs to be reliable. They make relationships with the reporters because they read them every week. And like, it seems like there's actually a self-sustaining sort of flywheel there in a niche.

The challenge seems to be, how do you make news for the general public that maybe doesn't necessarily need to know anything in particular today? Actually, what they need to know is how do I get to work? How do I get back? You know, et cetera. How do we how do we create news for those folks? That is the I don't know, trillion dollar. Yeah, like that. No, that is that to me is the, I don't know, trillion dollar question. Like that, no, that is, that to me is the question of like, whatever our democracy is going to look like next, because look, you're never really going to be at huge risk of going out of business, delivering journalism to powerful, wealthy people who have decision making ability over large parts of society.

Those people are in need of high quality information all the time and are willing to pay for it because they can actually do something with it. Yeah. And I'm one of those people because I need to turn that into more media, right? Like I'll go read something in a paper and okay, I'm going to turn that into another piece for my YouTube channel. And so I'm, therefore I'm willing to pay for it. Yeah. So I think what you're probably going to see in this next period is a lot of small scale experiments with more tightly focused community organizations. I mean, back in the old days, unions used to have their own newspapers. You know, you would have the church newsletter, like you would have a lot of organizations that would find ways to communicate

with themselves because it's all just a version of like community construction. Like you're trying to find ways to have this like large body of people talk to each other and to like have a mutual point of agreement on like, all right, what are the issues that we're all looking at? And like, what are the various elements of that debate? I think what's likely for a variety of reasons is that like this next stage of media is that if nothing changes, like it'll be a lot of like very small, closely focused, um, community oriented, um, media. And the thing is, is like, I don't know if that's going to work necessarily. I mean, technology has disrupted a lot of our relationships with readers. Um, you know, like if you were doing a restaurant review, um, it's great to have a really skilled restaurant

critic. And we've had many over the years at the LA Times. But a lot of people just go to Yelp because they don't want to aggregate. So part of it is this tension between do people really care for having high quality subjective opinions about consumer choices and individual choices that game make? And it seems like a lot of people are saying, no, we'd rather just like kind of like have rotten tomatoes rather than a film critic necessarily. But I don't know. I part of my argument is that we shouldn't give up on the mass media experiment completely yet.

And that's kind of a controversial position that not everyone agrees with, because I think larger publishers now, even though a lot of times they're doing things that deeply annoy us, they're one of the few forces out there that are willing to pick fights with the even larger tech monopolies that I think need to be taken on. Our conversation about journalism not being profitable and the digital advertising market being broken, we're kind of operating from the theory that if that's not fixed, then what is professional journalism now is just going to be much smaller and everyone's either going to be working for tiny DC publications pointed at Mitch McConnell's deputy or a Hollywood newsletter or something, or it's all going to be bundled together in like, you know, Jay Penske's like Hollywood trades, where it's just like, you got one large company that like controls coverage of Hollywood for some reason.

I think I would like to see the publishers take on and pick a fight with big tech, and they are trying to. And I would like to see some of the value. The New York Times is like suing Google right now. New York Times is suing OpenAI. OpenAI, excuse me. Over generative AI models being trained off of their journals. There's a lot of litigation going on with news publishers and tech companies over OpenAI, over generative AI, and also over the advertising duopoly.

There's legislative efforts both in Congress and at the state level to force the platforms to pay publishers for their journalism. And if that's successful, which it has been in a couple of other countries, Canada, just the government of Canada just reached a settlement with Google for Google to pay $100 million to news publishers in Canada for their journalism. Australia passed a bargaining code that generated a lot of settlements between Meta and Google, between news publishers and them to pay journalists, and that's generated some journalist hiring. So we've seen that government interventions to try to rebalance these markets are something that can bring money back to newsrooms and generate journalism jobs.

It's entirely likely still that the future is going to be smaller. I don't know if we should give up on the mainstream newsroom experiment yet, because I also like, I've worked in a mainstream newsroom and I know a lot of people don't like them and have their criticisms, but like, I'm just saying that like, there's a lot of amazing people who still work in these newsrooms who produce journalism that is incredibly important and generates a lot of legislation in the state house, gets laws changed, gets people out of prison, puts crooks in prison, in public office.

And even if people aren't reading the LA Times or another newsroom directly, someone else is and they're putting it on TikTok or they're talking about it on their podcast. There's still an enormous amount of social positive benefits that come from these classic newsrooms. I think that's worth supporting at the same time that I also want to see what the experiments do too. There are a lot of really talented people who want to hang out the shingle and try to go out on their own. I think that's really interesting. It's really hard, but everything great starts somewhere small. I guess unless you're an eventual capitalist and you're going to light a trillion dollars on fire. But I think everyone's going to need to experiment. But I also, I really think that there needs to be regulator intervention in the media markets to

preserve some semblance of journalism and preserve the good parts. We don't need to keep everything, but I think that there is a great tradition of professional journalism in this country that, um, should carry on. Like we should just not give up on it yet. I think as journalists, we should advocate for ourselves and not be so anxious about like not inserting ourselves into the story, um, to say that like, I'm going to take the radical position that journalists should be employed. that like, I'm going to take the radical position that journalists should be employed. Yeah. I love that.

And what can we do as consumers, if anything? I mean, I thought I was doing my bit by subscribing to the LA Times. Didn't seem to help. Well, this is where I try to support local journalism. I tried to fucking support and now there's less of it. I mean, this is this is my bowling alone answer. And this is this is my counterintuitive answer to that question, which is that, look, yes, please subscribe to your local news outlet. Please donate, etc. I actually reversed this call and I bring it back to journalists like me and my fellow journalists in the industry and my fellow unions, which is that people are asking us, how can we help?

And I think it's been clear that just asking people to subscribe has not been enough. Like there actually needs to be something bigger and collective that has to be done. And I think that's where regulation comes in. I think that's where public policy comes in. It could be anything from antitrust interventions to try to rebalance the relationship between big tech and publishers. I think it could be um payroll tax credits that makes it um more affordable to hire and employ journalists um there are interesting

like subscription voucher experiments and um being suggested in various places i think washington dc has floated this where um you know members of the public can just pick a news outlet that they like to like give money to to basically show what kind of outlet that they like to give money to, to basically show what kind of journalism that they want to support. Some people are talking about having state advertising agencies give a certain percentage of their budgets over to advertising and local media. Not all of these policies may necessarily work for everyone or may make sense in the end.

Not all of them may be supportable by everybody because people have a lot of feelings about this stuff. And it's always important to try to be careful about government regulation just because in a lot of autocracies we see around the world, one of the things that autocracies often do is they pick and choose winners and losers among newsrooms because the party in power will use the apparatus of the state to support their party's media or to take over the state media to reflect the party's agenda. And that's bad. And so I don't think we should do that in the US.

There may be public policies that just shouldn't be suggested in a place like Florida, where Ron DeSantis has had a very combative relationship with his local media. But in a place like California, there's a lot of willpower, actually, very earnest support from lawmakers to explore some of these solutions. And so I think state houses are going to be a place where the public can, I don't know, tell their lawmakers that they support policy intervention. That makes sense and that are not going to create opportunities for corruption to support local journalism jobs because regulating media markets is actually something that this country has done for a long time. We had postal subsidies back in the days of the founding fathers.

They wanted to make it really easy to send newspapers to the public because newspapers were really important in our young democracy. Well, it wasn't quite a democracy yet, but the earliest version of it, they're like, actually, we need these party newspapers to sort of tell people, how do you think about this new constitution thing that we're attempting? You know, there's been regulation by the FCC over the years, over like broadcast. And I think there's just there's been policy interventions in the past. This country has done in recognition that having journalism and publishing of information is very important to the public and that it's

proper to ensure that that happens. It's the only profession that's mentioned in the constitution. I love that. The only profession that's mentioned in the constitution. Absolutely it is. And I love that you mentioned like broadcast news, because the fact that ABC, CBS, NBC have news divisions is virtually simply because of the federal government forcing them to decades ago. And like they want to keep their licenses. So the fact that I love someone who I ask you, what can the consumer do? And you say pressure the government to take to take mass action. I think what the public should do, I think, is support journalism unions when we're unionizing our newsroom, because I actually I actually think think right this second the most important thing isn't what the public should do it's what

journalists should do which is that like we need to unionize our newsrooms at least the ones that aren't unionized yet we need to start developing um sort of mature and sophisticated analyses of like what our problems are and also like what our communities need. And then I think we need to be generating ideas that make sense for policymakers to evaluate. Because I think we've had, we've, we've tried asking the public to subscribe a lot and sort of pleading our case. And I think it's important for people to, you know, subscribe, but like, I think it's actually kind of on us as workers and not just as journalists, but now I'm like

the labor leader talking. It's like, I think it's kind of important for us to make our case to the public that like there's actually something more serious that needs to be done a little bit more collaboratively and intentionally in the public policy arena that is going to make sense for us and that aligns with our values. Because I, you know, I just, I hate this idea that like we're going to somehow individually solve the journalism crisis in this country. We've seen that that doesn't work.

Well, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you on the internet? So I am what used to be called Twitter, at Matt D. Pierce. I still haven't severed the cord yet. I also just started up a sub stack. I'm not asking people to pay me money. I've got severance from the LA Times. I'm just going to float on for a little while.

You know what? My work's been behind a paywall long enough, but also at Matt D. Pierce at Substack. I just, you know, I want people to just know about the problems that journalists are facing right now because I think knowledge is the first step to actually getting something done about it. Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

Well, thank you once again to Matt for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. If you want to support the show and all the amazing conversations we bring you every week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free, as you know, but 15 bucks a month, I will read your name at the end of this podcast and put it at the end of all my video monologues. This week, I want to thank AAK193, Jasmine Andrade, April Nicole, Tsuchi Su, and Solar Yeti. Thank you so much for your support.

All of you head to patreon.com slash adamconover if you want to join them. I want to thank my amazing producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making this show possible. Once again, my tickets and tour dates are at adamconover.net. If you want to come see me at Indianapolis, Indiana,

La Jolla, California, San Jose, California, any other dates I have in the future are going to be added there. ASAP, adamconover.net for those tickets. And until next week, I'll see you on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.