I’ve learned a lot while working in & on publications. The 1 thing that stands out is that the legacy media companies have formed a Narrative Distribution Monopoly

We need to break the monopoly in order to advance the purpose of journalism, informing ppl https://jfeiwell.com/essays/2020/05/10/narrative-distribution-monopoly.html

Narrative distribution is the means by which narratives are shipped to individuals in a society

Opposed to content distribution, which is any info - an article, a video, tweet, etc. It carries narratives but is not the same. Content goes into the spreadsheet at the end.

Proof of the monopoly? We’re told FB & GOOG have all the power. Yet aren't they constantly under fire? This is the great irony. Narratives such as those about Tech exist because the News Media still has a monopoly on narrative distribution

No matter how powerful platforms such as FB, Google, et al. are, as long as narrative distribution remains monopolized, the highest degree of truth and highest quality of information is restricted from entering the market. I posit the way to do that is with a federated media

The defining feature of narratives is that they lack data. Usually they’re over indexed on one data point and ignore the nuance, history, and context that the entire data set surrounding the issue provides. Here's an example about Airbnb I go into more detail about in the essay

The micro incentives of journalism provide the narrative distribution moat. There are a limited # of jobs and well defined career path. There are no rewards deviating from the mean, which serves as a forcing function creating and distributing narratives

Narrative distribution is just like open-source software, a narrative has no single owner, but many different people add to & support it. In this case, the established outlets with narrative distribution act as the maintainers, overruling anyone who doesn’t get with the program

Narrative distribution has a well defined currency

When someone reads a factually correct bit of information from a non-sanctioned outlet and says “I don’t buy it”, unknowingly they are saying this literally

The Narrative Distribution Monopoly is supported primarily by 3 Noble Myths:

1/ That Information Quality is a Function of Distribution

2/ Criticism of News Media is an Assault on the Freedom of The Press

3/ We Should Spend All Our Time Consuming News

1.a/ Info quality as a function of distro is the most pervasive & undisputed Noble Myth etched into conventional wisdom. It’s also the most pernicious. The quality of information, whether text, image, video, or audio, is not a product of who created it or who distributed it.

1.b/ Covid19 has illuminated some of the best examples of that. As the first person to sound the alarm was not the news media who claim to be gatekeepers, it was technologists like @balajis

1.c/ ZeroHedge was banned for writing about the wuhan lab, weeks later WaPo ran an op-ed coming to the same conclusion - the only logical explanation is a judgement wasn't made not on the information but on the distributor https://twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD/status/1250771308499087364?s=20

1.d/ In today's world we have the ability to hear about medicine from doctors, rockets from scientists, buildings from architects. They can all blog, but they cannot be truly heard - unless a sanctioned outlet publishes their work. This is why we need democratized distribution

2.a/ The freedom of the press is an absolutely incontrovertible bedrock of our republic. Criticism of today's press is often written off wrongly as an assault on the first amendment but the modern concept of reporting didn't surface in American until the mid-19th century

2.b/ The Framers interpretation had to do with journalism at that time. The seminal Zenger, Croswell, & Lyon cases that codified press freedom dealt with what would be known as political figures in today's world. The freedom of the press is about *everyone's* right to publish

3/ Napoleon would wait 3 weeks to open letters sent to him, as most of the issues at hand no longer needed action after that time period. I've personally come to believe that most news I consume isn't actionable & carries a negative trade off against compounding info like books

What does the future hold? Things will ‘go back to normal’, From the Presidency to the local store that receives bad press, the role of the press as an intermediary is officially coming to a close. They are now full fledged actors - but that’s how normal used to be

We will continue to see, the proliferation of D2C political and business outlets. @tedcruz, @DanCrenshawTX , and @JoeBiden all have their own podcasts. On Podbay’s charts, Crenshaw’s podcast is 5th in news. Ahead of MSNBC, CNN, WSJ, BBC, WaPo, and all NPR podcasts sans one

These efforts will allow anyone to build their own audience but it will be hard to break the monopoly unless a new platform or protocol arises to federate media and truly democratize distribution & gatekeeping

Federation would encourage increased supply at decreased speeds. Because it will be easier for ppl to share their knowledge with the world and get narrative distribution within certain communities. Reddit is the closest but still far away. How these communities connect is key

There will be friction at first. When Nupedia, the pre-cursor to Wikipedia, began hosting crowdsourced content instead of peer-reviewed content the academics of Nupedia severed off Wikipedia...we know how that ended; Enabling anyone in the world to access the largest encyclopedia

This thread is just a preview of the essay. I hope you enjoy reading and pls send any and all feedback - I would love to know where I get it wrong. My hope is that this can spark a conversation and new ideas https://jfeiwell.com/essays/2020/05/10/narrative-distribution-monopoly.html