The Future of Media Is: The State (and The Worker)
The media industry is in such dire straits, that state intervention is, temporarily, a welcome strategy.
This year has seen an upheaval in the media industry as a whole and, this week, a potential turning point for journalism. Governments around the world are taking action against the monopolies built by Big Tech companies, in a series of anti-trust suits and other legislation aimed at improving competition, safe housing data, and restoring a reliable financial base for news media.
After 40 years of relentless deregulation across industries, it’s a sigh of relief to hear that its effects are being acknowledged and the tide may be turning amongst legislators as well as citizens. But will it work?
Though state intervention in media is, in its own way, a dangerous path to walk, Western democracies appear no longer able to support — or ignore — the tyrannical methods by which Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon have been conducting business this century. US legislators are also having to consider their own fallibility, in seeking to reverse former rulings that allowed Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp in a strategic and — arguably, illegal — “squash” of their competition.
At the end of the 2010s, as the ground under media outlets' feet continued to shift many began charging readers a fee to access their content. Commentators were proclaiming the subscription model as the future of publishing. But even in 2020, when people have been consuming more news than ever, subscription revenues have not (yet) become plentiful enough to secure the industry — specifically, to secure journalists’ jobs.
Two years ago the CEO of Medium and co-founder of Twitter, Ev Williams, wrote eloquently and optimistically in favour of the model, and praised “the power of a differentiated, competitive market” for publishers and consumers:
The reason quality — of content and experience — has gone down in publishing, not up, despite the power of competition and technology, is because publishers are competing for advertiser dollars, not audience dollars. Business model is gravity. Once publishers are competing for audience dollars, the product they produce will get dramatically better.
But Williams underestimated the predatory nature of 21st-century plutocrats (surprising, given they probably grill together on the regs). He gave two examples of tech publishers— Texture and Spotify — which provided unparalleled convenience for the reader. I don’t disagree with that charge — I’ve got Spotify playlists like you’ve never seen. But both companies are, or were, troubled in their own way.
Texture was known as the “Netflix of magazines”, a joint venture between several Big Media companies (Conde Nast, Hearst etc.) which allowed subscribers access to a number of their favourite titles such as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. This was a workable, and lucrative, idea. But it became one of the casualties of Big Tech — Apple bought it in 2018 and shut it down, incorporating its titles into the very similar Apple News+.
It was essentially a ‘killer acquisition’.
Spotify may remain just outside the Big Monopoly tent, but has its own unscrupulous deals with Big Music (sorry, even I’m getting sick of these terms now). High-profilemusicians have long criticized the platform for not paying artists fairly, and just last month 34-year-old, Mercury Prize-nominated artist Nadine Shah revealed that she doesn’t even earn enough to pay her rent.
The labels’ overheads for producing and distributing music are “dramatically reduced”, but this hasn’t resulted in a larger share for artists. The Guardian quotes Tom Gray of Gomez, who says:
“This is happening while a few multinational corporations, foreign-based corporations, are making the most money, the best growth, the best profit margins, they have ever made in their history.”
Media is just one industry of many that have seen a rising trend of pay inequity and insecure work in the last few decades. It’s the ultimate repudiation of ‘trickle-down economics’.
It remains to be seen whether the democracies around the world now recognising and setting in motion anti-trust efforts — not simply breaking up the companies, but negotiating codes of conduct and further regulating the use of data — will actually level the playing field.
State intervention in media content is understandably suspect, but regulation is crucial. And in order to really bolster the industry, the focus must be on restoring rights and power to the workers, rather than just the publishers — or that ever-distracting and individualistic epithet, ‘the consumer’.