Read on Twitter
Super thread from @JeremyLittau. He comes at the fall of newspapers from the circulation side: appealing to the big middle to gain scale. Let me add to this from the ad side: 1/ https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1198255863926075392
What @JeremyLittau describes--the path to scale--was, of course, motivated by the desire to build sufficient audience (mass, scale) for advertisers. This led to what I call the Myth of Mass Media: 'All readers see all ads so we charge all advertisers for all readers.' Thus... 2/
...Thus every reader was equally valuable and so papers crammed their products with, paraphrasing Jeremy, meh stuff (bridge columns!) to retain every possible reader. They served many OK, few superbly. 3/
Here's my chapter from Geeks Bearing Gifts about the Myth of Mass Media: 4/ https://medium.com/geeks-bearing-gifts/advertising-the-myth-of-mass-media-and-the-relationship-strategy-cece3698ba86
So the circulation and advertising rationales for scale fall apart together. But what of Google/Facebook, you ask? Aren't they the epitome of scale? Yes, but only because they don't treat us as an undifferentiated mass. They reach scale through individual service. 5/
We in the news industry have no experience with a service business; we have no technical ability to generate, gather, analyze, and act on individualized user data (and fought to make that difficult for our competitors, the platforms). 6/
So what do we do? @JeremyLittau is right: We must rebuild journalism on a new foundation. It ain't bell curves anymore; it ain't mass either.
