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Hi 👋 

This special Thursday edition of The Lazy Reader is supported by the 1440 Media! Which I think is the best fit for our newsletter out of all ad placements in beehiiv’s network.

I’m really excited to be working with another media company, especially one that shares my mission of promoting independent, nuanced and deep thinking through expansive and diverse reading.

Like The Lazy Reader, 1440 Media provides an intelligently curated reading list, giving you a well-rounded, holistic view of current affairs. They focus on news, which makes them a great complement to TLR’s longform offerings. I’ve grown to rely on 1440’s daily emails as a way to keep afloat of what’s happening around the world. It’s really making my Twitter (now X, but I refuse to call it that) feed feel obsolete.

I’m sure you’ll find as much value in 1440 as I do. Definitely, definitely worth a sub.

Show them (and me) some love by clicking on the ad below. It’s free and super quick and a really effective way of supporting the newsletter! 🙏

In celebration of 1440’s support, we’re running a themed reading list about the Media—an immensely powerful but troubled industry that, in recent years, has been on a cruel and seemingly inevitable downward spiral.

Happy reading! 🤓

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Information Inc. Imperiled

You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads? Welcome to the Hellhole of Programmatic Advertising | WIRED, $

For a brief moment during the pandemic, when I was lost and locked down, I spent a few months dabbling in marketing and advertising. That’s how I came to learn about programmatic advertising—a largely opaque and very concerning system by which ads make their way onto webpages.

It’s a bit too much to explain here (plus I want you to read this article), but I guess suffice it to say that nothing on the Internet is free. We are the products.

And to a certain extent, the ads you see are sort of a mirror, reflecting back to you the ways in which the Algorithm (as it were) sees you as a commodity. If you keep that in mind, browsing the Web will start to become a more disconcerting experience.

But I think the discomfort is a small price to pay. It’s important to be aware of how our online behaviors are being perceived by the algorithm so we know how we can exert the tiny bit of agency that we still have.

Another thing; equally important: Programmatic advertising, as it currently is, is gutting the Media. The article explains this much better than I can, but by applying exceedingly broad filters (using key words and phrases), companies end up inadvertently withholding their ads from legitimate news websites.

In turn, publishers miss out on valuable ad dollars, partly explaining the lethal contraction that the Media industry has been suffering from in the last few years.

Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event? | The New Yorker, $

Speaking of lethal contraction… the Media industry earlier this year saw one of the most brutal round of layoffs, possibly in its entire history. Okay—I haven’t done enough research to back that, but it was so bad that writer Clare Malone thought it to be a prelude to an “extinction-level event.”

And I’m not sure that she’s incorrect.

The breathless coverage of the layoffs has calmed down a bit, but the layoffs themselves have not. It seems like there’s not a day without a tearful termination announcement on my LinkedIn feed.

It’s been said a million times before, but the ultimate losers in this scenario are local communities. Unable to bankroll their operations, small outlets—those that cover council meetings or pressing neighborhood concerns—are quickly going belly-up. And without the watchful eye of a skeptical reporter, local leaders will be mostly free to do whatever they want, with their constituents none the wiser.

And not to be a doomsayer, but these hyperlocal ramifications will quickly spin out of control and threaten whatever it is that we consider to be democracy.

I know that sounds a bit too self-important (as someone in the Media myself)—and we’re not 100% sure that this is a foregone conclusion—but the risks truly are too big to underestimate.

Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls | The Atlantic, $

Striking at the heart of the Media crisis is the lack of a viable financing model.

Before the digital revolution, newspapers and magazines relied on ad placements, which at the time was a very lucrative source of income. But the Internet cracked that wide open, with blogs and social media offering companies a better way to target and get in front of their customers.

By the time this happened, though, Media execs (both the businesspeople and career journalists) had grown complacent and were essentially caught with their pants down. For years, the industry tried to cling desperately to ad money. Clearly, that didn’t work out in its favor, and it’s only recently that there have been earnest attempts to rethink the business model of news.

One of the most mainstream solutions is to offer memberships and subscriptions, putting the most valuable and entertaining content behind paywalls.

I’ll concede—of all the Media business innovations I’ve seen, this one seems to be at least among the most promising. Many start-up companies that I have high hopes for use this model.

But, as Richard Stengel points out in this essay, that poses a big problem to capital-D Democracy. This effect is admittedly indirect. Paywalls by themselves do not threaten democracy, but they increase the overall ratio of freely available but incorrect or out-of-context articles. The end result is even greater disinformation.

And in what is potentially the most important year for Democracy (lots of elections going on worldwide, not just in the U.S.), the industry will be forced to make difficult choices.

Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry | Futurism, Free

As if the Media environment wasn’t complicated enough, now AI has muddled the picture even more.

Companies are using AI to lower their expenditure, which I guess could help with the survivability of these companies, but I think the costs of using AI are still too steep. What’s at stake is integrity.

As this story outlines, even the topmost tiers of mainstream Media have dipped their proverbial toes into AI. Some have even used AI-produced content and have employed AI personas as authors. And to me, that feels very dishonest.

It also poses a very existential challenge to the legacy Media’s claim of superiority. If these supposedly trustworthy outlets knowingly publish algorithm-penned articles, then what sets them apart from the biased or radical or right-wing or Russian or what-have-you outlets that they so aggressively deride?

The AI wave is still young, too. Tech companies always boast that their models are increasingly becoming more sophisticated, better-coded. And sure, some Media moguls could see that as something to be hopeful about. Maybe one day, AI could produce factual and reliable articles—ones that won’t harm the papers’ reputations.

But I’m not so optimistic.

A If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would Be Worth $10,000 | Longreads, Free

Often lost in the discussions of how to keep Media profitable are the individual writers, especially freelancers.

But I guess that’s true for almost all industries. Employees are often dispensable, just another lever that executive leadership can move to ensure a clean balance sheet.

I can’t speak for the U.S. (I didn’t do enough research), but in my part of the world, pay has stagnated even as commodities have become more expensive. Number of posts have stayed largely the same, if not dwindled, which has inflated the number of unemployed Media workers.

Freelancers have it extra tough. There are so many of us fighting over fewer and fewer posts, worse and worse contract terms. I can’t even keep track anymore of prospective clients who insist on paying me a pitiful fraction of what a U.S. counterpart of mine would receive just because I live abroad.

That, of course, is the ugly flip side of this entire thing. As Soraya Roberts argues in her essay, we are continually being told that there just isn’t enough money to go around anymore. Meanwhile, there continues to be an exclusive class of capital-W Writers—typically white, well-connected, living in or around New York, alums of the popular, most expensive universities—who bring in an unfair number of dollars per word.

Are we supposed to believe that these Writers are just innately better than we are?

Inside the Crisis at NPR | The New York Times, $

Of course, money is just one of the problems plaguing the Media industry right now.

Another—arguably just as big, just as crucial—is the wider culture war.

And it’s not as if any of this is new. There’s always been some form of tension between the conservative thinkers in America and those who inhabit more liberal ways of life. This opposition, while occasionally annoying if not infuriating, is arguably a valuable part of society. A healthy plurality of viewpoints makes for more critically minded people.

But for NPR, this tension came to a disastrous head a couple of weeks ago, when former senior editor Uri Berliner left the broadcaster and attacked, in a public essay, its allegedly extreme liberal bias. Both the editorial direction and hiring priorities suffered from this bias, according to Berliner.

And he isn’t completely wrong. NPR in recent years has made a strong commitment toward diversity—both in content and in manpower. The company has hired people that supposedly better reflected the demography of its listeners, in hopes of producing content that would resonate more strongly with a broader audience.

That, unfortunately, hasn’t turned out well for NPR. Listenership is down. Sponsorships have slowed. And though it has tried to join the podcast boom, the broadcaster has failed to keep apace with other studios.

Of course, the Right (as it were) has quickly weaponized Berliner’s words, seeing an opportunity to pounce on what it often derides as the liberal Media. The saga is ongoing, as far as I’m aware, and a clean resolution is unlikely to arrive anytime soon.

Meanwhile, NPR continues to struggle to stay afloat and relevant.

Held Together | The Atavist, Free

This one is a nice break-of-pace from all this industry speak we’ve been doing. And I also wanted to end the story on something hopeful—and what better way to do that than show the wonderful possibilities of journalism.

The Atavist never misses. And that remains true here. This is a heart-rending and heart-warming story about the complex relationship between father and daughter—and the depth of love between them, as revealed and tested by crisis.

When the father (a “newsman”) is kidnapped on a reporting trip abroad, the daughter (a documentary filmmaker) is forced to find comfort in her work and in their shared history and vocation.

The emotional colors in this story are made even more vivid by the way it’s told—in alternating first-person POVs between the father and the daughter.

I’ve been sitting here trying to do the story justice in this small summary of mine, but I’m afraid that’s impossible. Please just set aside some time to read this story. Trust me.

Hey there! 👋

This is a sponsored edition of The Lazy Reader, but it’s also somewhat of a dry run of something that I’ve been cooking up—weeky themed reading lists.

Basically, it’ll be about five or so reading recommendations about a specific subject (say, the money matters behind our medicines or the crisis in journalism). Plus I’ll be flexing my writing muscle a bit more, too: The longform list will be headlined by a short essay-type intro to ease you into the recommendations.

The idea is to eventually make this a weekly thing, sent out on Thursdays to supplement our Monday reading lists. But of course, since The Lazy Reader is a one-man show, that’s going to be impossible right off the bat, especially since I’m also running a freelance business full-time. So we’ll start with putting it out every other week, then build up the cadence to eventually hit a weekly pattern.

How’s that sound?

No, really. Please let me know what you think 🙏

I want your feedback on this before I roll it out. Is that something that you guys would even enjoy? What types of themes would you want to see? Let me know in the form below, or reply your feedback to this email.

Oh and just to clarify: The launch date for this is still TBD, but it’s going to be in the near future. I’m excited!

Until next time! 👋