Anthony on Nostr: As an outsider to the news/journalism/media industries, it's been horrifying to watch ...
As an outsider to the news/journalism/media industries, it's been horrifying to watch the tech sector progressively eat the media sector's lunch. From the web, digital advertising, the "pivot to video", the metaverse, a bunch I'm probably forgetting, and now generative AI, the media industry seems to fall for and chase every snake oil pitch no matter how bad it turns out to be for them. They've fully lost the plot, it seems to me.
This comment by the author of the Verge article:
> I actually don’t know very much about the terms of our deal, since I’m on the editorial side of the house and there’s a strict firewall between the business side and the editorial side.
says a whole lot. It makes sense there'd be such a firewall, but it allows all the editorial staff to be taken for a ride by a business side of the house that doesn't, at base, care much about what they do for a living beyond the wealth they believe it can generate. It's the same dynamic that turned GE from a stalwart of American manufacturing into a failed bank, it's why the doors are falling off Boeing airplanes mid-flight now, and it'll be why American media turns into the equivalent of slightly glowing people with 15 fingers if all this goes too far.
Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting take on AOL purchasing Time Warner (remember that?). He feels that basically it was tech moguls cashing out their casino chips and converting them into tangible assets (and I suppose influence). You'd think the trajectory that AOL/Time Warner took would stand as a cautionary tale about why media companies shouldn't entertain dangerous deals with tech companies ( https://fortune.com/2015/01/10/15-years-later-lessons-from-the-failed-aol-time-warner-merger/ ), but here we are.
Obviously this isn't a merger, but it feels like another iteration of eating the seed corn: https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1705679109.757852 . Sort of a "business side of media debauches the editorial side of media to make a quick buck from AI, and thereby degrades the organization potentially to the point of inviability" kind of thing.
This comment by the author of the Verge article:
> I actually don’t know very much about the terms of our deal, since I’m on the editorial side of the house and there’s a strict firewall between the business side and the editorial side.
says a whole lot. It makes sense there'd be such a firewall, but it allows all the editorial staff to be taken for a ride by a business side of the house that doesn't, at base, care much about what they do for a living beyond the wealth they believe it can generate. It's the same dynamic that turned GE from a stalwart of American manufacturing into a failed bank, it's why the doors are falling off Boeing airplanes mid-flight now, and it'll be why American media turns into the equivalent of slightly glowing people with 15 fingers if all this goes too far.
Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting take on AOL purchasing Time Warner (remember that?). He feels that basically it was tech moguls cashing out their casino chips and converting them into tangible assets (and I suppose influence). You'd think the trajectory that AOL/Time Warner took would stand as a cautionary tale about why media companies shouldn't entertain dangerous deals with tech companies ( https://fortune.com/2015/01/10/15-years-later-lessons-from-the-failed-aol-time-warner-merger/ ), but here we are.
Obviously this isn't a merger, but it feels like another iteration of eating the seed corn: https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1705679109.757852 . Sort of a "business side of media debauches the editorial side of media to make a quick buck from AI, and thereby degrades the organization potentially to the point of inviability" kind of thing.