𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗰 𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴

Two counterpoints brought this into focus for me this week:
1. I’m reading “it must’ve been something I ate” which is a collection of food writings by a Vogue writer from the 90’s. He was talking about flying business to Japan, and chartering tuna boats for $20k/day to write an article for Vogue about eating tuna. A good article, but monster expense to get it done.
2. In the last six months; 15% of Time Magazine’s journalists have been laid off, 115 from the LA times last week and the Washington Post losing 240 people. Despite being owned by billionaires they can’t sustain themselves.

It’s not like publishers haven’t been trying:
– Clickbait (whatever you or I might think of it)
– smaller teams on big budget investigative journalism
– paywalls, sponsored content, events
They’re trying to mix it up and slowly find new business models and ways of approaching clients.

The future seems bright in a limited number of publications (e.g. NYT and Guardian), but it’ll be interesting to see what the next 20 years looks like for these large publishers.