Distribution Is King

Heard from David Pogue recently?

Actually he's still doing some TV work, I read his tweets, but if you're under the age of 45, you've probably never heard of him. But he and Walt Mossberg were the kings of tech reporting...

Until Pogue left "The New York Times" for Yahoo Finance, for freedom and money.

Just like Nate Silver. You know, the numbers guru who called the election right for the "Times" and then decamped to follow his passion of not only politics, but sports, over at his own site FiveThirtyEight. They've got a staff of reporters over there, but I don't trust a single one, they've got no CV. The last time anybody talked about Silver was when he got the 2016 election wrong and said he didn't. Now nobody trusts pollsters.

So Kara Swisher made her bones over at "The Wall Street Journal." She teamed with Mossberg to break stories and become the authoritative source on mainstream tech news. Pogue was the more entertaining writer, but he left for greener pastures and then...

So did the "Wall Street Journal" tech crew, not only Mossberg and Swisher, but Peter Kafka and more. They called their new site "Recode," but as time passed it turned out all the good will remained with the "Journal," whose conferences did better than Recode's. And then Recode ended up as part of Vox and like that old Dave Edmunds song, Swisher crawled from the wreckage into a brand new car, in this case "The New York Times."

She was the tech ace. Which is better than most of their new opinion writers. Headscratchers. Don't promote people from within, find those from without, experts in the field. I don't care what Farhad Manjoo has to say about anything other than tech, and I don't care much about that either.

So then time goes by and Swisher's purview is expanded. She appears in the paper more and gets her own podcast, "Sway."

The number one difficulty of anybody in media today is reach, it's the number one problem of anybody trying to spread the word. Increasing your audience? Nearly impossible. Train wrecks gain momentary attention, but people have even moved on from Uvalde, never mind Buffalo and Roe v. Wade. There's so much in the channel, people are looking for fewer options, they want to be fed less information from trusted sources. And they want to live their lives outside the information sphere too.

So, you take yourself out of the game at your peril.

So, Swisher's decamping back to Vox, where she has a podcast cohosted by Scott Galloway. The NYU Business Professor has made a fortune in tech investments, maybe now that she's 60 Swisher wants some of that same money too. Look at Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, they're all about the Benjamins. Their images? Certainly Phil's is irretrievably trashed. You don't want to overlook human rights, then again Biden is interfacing with the Saudis. And if you've got no idea what I'm talking about, that's just the point. The new Saudi tour is the talk of golf. I'm not sure most Americans even know who Khashoggi was, but those dealing with Saudi Arabia certainly do. You see it's that hard to reach people, especially if they don't care.

The "New York Times" is the king of subscriptions, far eclipsing the WSJ and WaPo. The "Times" has over 10 million subscribers, and the number, unlike Netflix's, is growing prodigiously. Sure, some are for games and other verticals, but the cross-promotion opportunities? HUGE!

The "Times" was promoting "Sway" everywhere, trying to build a podcast portfolio beyond "The Daily." And Swisher hit her stride on "Sway," making it less about her and more about the guests.

But now that's history.

Most people have no idea what Vox is. They don't have it bookmarked.

And today being great is only part of the puzzle. Sure, word might spread, but very slowly... And Swisher is already 60, how much time does she want to invest in building?

And she's got a conference with Galloway, but she had the imprimatur of the "Times," with that gone, do we have another Recode situation on our hands? Fading conference numbers, to the point the whole enterprise goes down the drain?

Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh?

That's right, why should this night be different from any other night?

There are ever fewer tech titans, the FAANG companies. Yes, you can try and push that rock up the hill, but good luck, if you achieve anything the big companies will compete with you, doggedly, they'll do their best to undercut you and steal your audience or just buy you. But the irony is that the "Times" already "bought" Swisher.

The devil is in the details. Maybe the "Times" deal was too constricting. Maybe Swisher has personal issues. Who knows. But on the surface, this appears to be a dumb deed. Akin to Ben Smith ankling the Gray Lady for his new news enterprise...SEMAFOR? That's what it will be like, waving flags, trying to get people's attention.

Let me see, Al Jazeera couldn't make it in the U.S.

But that's TV.

Heard of Grid? Most people haven't, it's a recent news startup.

BuzzFeed News, where Smith made his bones? The stock and whatever gravitas BuzzFeed might have had has been fading into irrelevance, just like the HuffPo. Stunting only takes you so far, you can't read BuzzFeed for all the detritus. Smith finally gains traction, has his head above water, but he enters a sphere everybody else is in, never mind Axios and Politico, and expects to win? Hell, Ezra Klein STARTED Vox and decamped for the "Times" after realizing he wasn't reaching as many people as he had at the WaPo previously. He woke up and smelled the coffee. Maybe because he worked at the "Post" first, and saw how much he lost. Whereas those who haven't lost don't see how far they can fall. Then again, Swisher did see what happened with Recode.

Sasha Frere-Jones left "The New Yorker" for Genius.com, and then got there and realized there was no there there, that all the promises were going to go unfulfilled, turns out Genius is just a lyrics site, no more.

Swisher shouldn't have given up her power base, she should have stayed at the "Times."

Why are journalists so dumb when it comes to their own business?


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