Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event? wonders one Claire Malone in the New Yorker. She catalogues the layoffs & closures that have taken place over the past year or so, recounts the story of the mass media in the internet age, and gives some thought to what might happen next. Strangely absent from all this is any introspection or indeed any evident interest whatsoever in whether the media itself and the choices it made might have played a role.
One particular aspect of this stood out to me: she repeatedly mentions Gawker as a casualty of events. Nowhere does she allude to the fact that Gawker didn't just close; it was sued into insolvency after publishing a sex tape obtained under murky circumstances, a story chronicled at length by Ryan Holiday. It is this sort of selective reporting that drives low trust in the media, which in turn suggests a far simpler explanation than any contained in Malone's lengthy, self-indulgent ruminations: the media simply isn't producing a product that anyone wants to buy.
Update : Huh: How the Atlantic Went From Broke to Profitable in Three Years: "'We believe as an almost ideological and idealistic notion that we make something worth buying,' [their Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Goldberg] said in an interview." He "oversaw an evolving editorial approach… deeply reported stories that appeal to people from across the country and political spectrum." What radical idea.