Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

We talk a lot about the economic challenges, not to say cataclysm, that news media has been through in recent decades. Even the most storied brands have found themselves striking advertising deals they’d never have considered a decade before, or scrambling for scraps of revenue in dark corners like Award programs? Branded content?  Paywalls? Today’s guest, Cindi Leive, former editor in chief of Glamour and Self has ridden the media revenue roller coaster from the big-spending peak of women’s glossies through the grueling disruption of the digital era. Now she’s starting over in this new environment leading The Meteor, a feminist-forward for-profit collective focused on storytelling for social change, where she needs every bit of her revenue gathering skills.

In this interview, recorded live at the University of Chicago’s Graham School, Cindi and Eric dive into the unraveling of legacy business models, the rise of programmatic advertising, and the existential question of who owns the future of journalism. As she jokes at the beginning of the session she expected to be talking about easy questions like freedom of expression and the First Amendment. Instead we’re dealing with a much more wicked problem: How media companies can make money today.

 

Transcript

Speaker 2

So let’s talk. Like me, you have kind of ridden this horse up the mountain and back down again. We remember those glory days early in the century when you just couldn’t sell enough, or you couldn’t print enough pages to carry the advertising that people were throwing at us. And then things started to unravel. So I want to talk about the meteor, but first let’s take a step back and back in time and just by comparison, talk about the kind of remarkable changes that have happened in the business models that most people on this call are going to be most familiar with. So it just kind of an impressionistic sense. How did the business environment change? Was there a particular moment when you realized, you know, we have crossed the Rubicon and this is, we’re not going back to 2000. And how did the organization adapt in those as this all began to dawn on them.

Speaker 1 (02:51)
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I’ll just say for purposes of everybody listening here, Eric, you really duped me because here, you you invite me to this class and it’s about the future of media. So I thought we were going to be talking about like press freedom and, you know, how to survive, how to, you know, how journalism survives in an age of authoritarianism. And then you tell me that the topic is actually how to make money in media, which is so much harder than any of those other topics. So.

Speaker 2 (03:21)
Cindy, I have to say you were pretty good at it.

Speaker 1 (03:23)
Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you very much. But it is, you know, as you just sketched out when you showed that, you know, horrifying ⁓ decline in ad dollars, you know, it’s it’s tough in media and you definitely have to, you know, be ready to pivot and pivot again and then, you know, pivot the eight hundred and fifty seventh time to answer your question. I mean, it’s interesting because so much of what the sort of digital revolution brought the media industry was you know, initially and for a very long time, I felt really good. Like as an editor, it was such a pleasure to be able to actually communicate in real time with your readers. And, you know, I can’t, I can’t quite see everybody on the zoom, but, you know, so I’m not sure like generationally where you, where you all are, but, you know, I’m assuming you probably don’t really remember the days when like as an editor, if you wanted to really understand what your reader felt, you had to do these focus groups. And we would like fly the whole team out to like Des Moines or Dallas or wherever it was. And, you know, people who you were basically, you know, paying and feeding free pizza to would sit there on the other side of the, you know, the one way glass and talk about your magazine.

And you would assume that you had a representative group and you try to draw some conclusions by that, you know, and then suddenly you’re in this world where like you could write a piece and throw it up on the website. And even in those days when our websites at Conde Nast were pretty rudimentary, was like such a pleasure to actually be able to get whether the feedback was good feedback or bad feedback. You were in a real time conversation with your audience. And that just felt like such a gift and especially…

…for a magazine like Glamour. And before I was at Glamour, I was at Self Magazine, which had sort of the same orientation as, you know, this wasn’t meant to be some like fancy world that as a reader, you could only press your nose against the glass and kind of dream of the world that the editors were inhabiting. It was meant to be really democratic and we were trying to meet our readers’ needs. And so suddenly to be able to like actually have real-time feedback about that, especially…

…before the real disinformation and misinformation set in. And you felt like, you know, I felt for years that I actually really was getting a true bead on what the audience thought. so, you know, that was great. And it also was a great, you know, from a business standpoint, it was actually very helpful because previously advertisers sort of knew the kinds of content that they wanted to support, you know, and the kinds that they weren’t that interested in…

…and to be able to go to them and say, well, you might think that you’re not that interested in a story about, you know, like this social issue or our readers work lives or something that wasn’t as interesting to advertisers as fashion and beauty content. You might think you’re not interested in that, but like, look at all the people who are reading that content online. That was actually like a real gift from a business standpoint. I think obviously like after the recession in 2008 and then at the beginning of the 2010s, it became obvious that advertisers had a lot more options than they previously had had and you were going to have to fight hard for those dollars. How did you fight?

Speaker 2 (06:54)
And how did you, you what was the strategy in those first days to, to win back the audiences were being drawn to Facebook or, you know, other online competitors.

Speaker 1 (07:05)
Yeah, well, there were sort of two, I mean, if you’re asking about how you win back audiences, I think you just had to go meet them where they were, right? So we had to have a presence on Facebook and every other platform. And, you know, as people started being interested in newsletters, you know, we had to devise those. I think from a business standpoint, it was more challenging though, because advertisers were trained not to want to pay anywhere near as much for digital content as for what we used to be able to charge for print content. I think for us, it was really important to be able to lean into the things that were working, even if they were completely new things. And I know you referenced events. ⁓ One of our real lessons at Glamour was we had started doing

⁓ event called the Women, Glamour Women of the Year. And this started in the 1990s before, know, long before I was editor, but we really were able to grow the franchise. And, you know, it became a big, you know, evening event, but also a big daytime summit with, you know, smaller events happening year round. And at one point, I’ll try to tell this story without naming any names. One of my bosses said, listen, the business side really can’t figure out how to sell this.

Because they weren’t used to selling events, at least not for the women’s brands, maybe a little bit more for like the New Yorker and the New Yorker Festival. They can’t figure out how to sell it. So we’re gonna have to pull the plug on it. And I thought, this is something that our audience is incredibly interested in. And I think I could sell it to advertisers. I was an editor, I wasn’t on the business side. And I said, if I can raise the money for it, it was like, the $2 million price tag at that point, which seemed like a huge and insurmountable amount. But like, you know, if I can, if I can raise the money for it this year, can you know, can we keep it? And, you know, the answer was yes. And I, you know, went out and learned how to like pitch sponsors myself and, did it. And, you know, you ask if there was a moment, I think for me, it was like realizing that the business couldn’t lean fast enough into the things that were really working. It was very, very hard to teach teams that were used to selling print ⁓ and selling these major brand partnerships, teach them a new way of doing things.

Speaker 2 (09:49)
On the journalism side, did things change? mean, one thing that I saw happen was that, and also, you know, when I was the CEO at those two brands, I encouraged it, and that was to follow the traffic. So, you know, we needed to build traffic to drive advertising. And as you noted, you have this instantaneous feedback from what’s working. ⁓ No more… cover line surveys and things like that, or focus groups as you mentioned. You had instantaneous feedback. so whether you were driven from the top as I did, you as a writer would have this kind of gravitational pull towards, well, this works, this gets a lot of attention. Did you see that affect the journalism?

Speaker 1 (10:38)
I really tried when I was at Glamour, and I know we’ll talk about the media later, to let it not affect the journalism and to try to find ways of, you know, taking some advantage of that traffic hamster wheel without totally descending into like, you know, okay, what are the 12 trending topics today and how can we spit out articles about them and, you know, neglecting, neglecting everything else. I think part of the challenge was it just became increasingly difficult to tell what was real traffic and what was not, know, we especially, I would say around, you know, 20 between like 2015 and 2017 on Facebook, we would like, see that something had performed, my God, we’ve gotten 40 million views on this video, let’s immediately do 12 other videos exactly like that. And then Facebook would change the algorithm and you would invest it in all of these things. So like, it just, it’s a very fickle God to try to chase.

I do think for brands, and I think there were probably more digital native brands that were like this than brands that had started as magazines, but for brands that were just in the business of chasing that traffic, it definitely was not good for the journalism.

Speaker 2 (11:56)
It was not good for the journalists. It wasn’t good for the brand of journalism. And in the long run, it wasn’t good for those publications either. They were, as you noted, totally at the mercy of an algorithm that they did not control. And eventually readers catch on that this is meringue. It’s not really making my life better.

Speaker 1 (12:17)
I do like meringue. I would say, you know, I don’t think, I think there’s a place for like great, fun, somewhat fluffy things that like capture the, you know, capture the zeitgeist, but I don’t think that can be sort of entirety of what you’re producing as, you know, as a brand.

Speaker 2 (12:40)
It can’t be if you want to be sustainable. But I think all of us have had the experience of looking up from our phones and scrolling and realizing that 20 minutes, half an hour passed by and you’ll never get those that time back. Let’s talk about the meteor. Tell us about the ownership there. you know, since we’re talking about business models, how does the meteor sustain itself? But also I want to hear about what inspired you.

I mean, I can see the through line from your career to the media orbit, but tell us.

Speaker 1 (13:13)
Yeah, so for those of you who don’t follow us and hopefully you will by the end of this conversation, we’re a media company with I think what you would generally describe as a feminist bent. So we produce all different kinds of content, podcasts, social, video, newsletters, a lot of live events and then partnerships which are part of our business model that I’ll talk about. The genesis of it honestly, I I left Conde Nast in 2018. I was like, I’m never, you I don’t want to work in media again. Like I want to, you know, write. I was like working on a book proposal and then, you know, I want to situate this. was like probably sort of midway through the first Trump presidency, sort of toward the, toward the end, just pre COVID after the Kavanaugh hearings, the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme court.

Nomination hearings. ⁓ It was a couple years after Me Too. There was a lot of political awareness among women. And so many women I knew, even who had not been particularly interested in politics, were starting to really pay attention. And I gathered a group of other women in journalism who I knew in all different fields. Some of them were podcasters, some of them were filmmakers.

in Gloria Steinem’s living room and to kind of talk about this, like what should exist that doesn’t exist. And Gloria is like, this is where we made Ms. Magazine back in the 1970s. What does that look like for today? And I was like, well, it’s not a magazine. I learned my lesson on that one. ⁓ And so the Meteor kind of grew out of that. And our business model, you asked about ownership. We are owned by

some of the co-founders, but then in addition, we’ve done a round of investment. so, you know, there are investors who have minority equity in the company. And our business model to begin with was one part, ⁓ really the biggest part was advertising. So sort of traditional media advertising, people advertising. We don’t really try to drive people to our website. That’s never been part of the MO, but

people advertising on our podcasts, ⁓ supporting our live events with sponsorship. And that piece of it, we launched sort of toward the tail end of the pandemic. That piece of it has really declined over the last couple of years as a share of our revenue. And what has grown, and I don’t know that I would have expected this, is audience revenue. So…

you charging people for events, you know, having audience supported publications. about to launch a, of our content in our newsletters is free, but we’re about to launch a premium tier of content. And then partnerships. And this is something that I didn’t really anticipate, but you know, when you’re doing a startup and you see something that’s working and inbound business, you just kind of follow that. And so we have, we have done that and we have a

piece of the Meteor called the Meteor Studio. And we collaborate with brands and also organizations, including large nonprofit organizations to tell the story of what they’re doing with the talent and editorial expertise of our team. it started when ⁓ we, well, the first couple of partnerships we did were with Gucci. They had a big ⁓ sort of purpose-driven initiative.

supporting women who are working for gender equality around the world. And so we did a series of events with them. ⁓ Then we signed on with the Ford Foundation to produce a series of events. now in our third year with them that really spotlights the issues that they work on around the world. And ⁓ it’s grown really naturally and organically. And we now have a team of

⁓ editors and designers who work specifically on Meteor Studio partnerships. you know, nothing is a sure thing. Like we all, you know, we’re all reading the same papers and you know that anything that has any kind of political content or even, you know, equity and inclusion at its core, which is so much, you know, big part of what we do, you know, there are a lot of eyes on that and a lot of nervousness on the parts of brands. So,

We’re certainly gonna have to be creative about how we do that work over the next couple of years, but it’s been a really good and important and rich source of business for us.

Speaker 2 (18:02)
So that is a political risk, which we will definitely get to, but I want to dig a little deeper on partnerships. Sounds like things that we did at Inc and Fast Company and many other places do the same thing, sponsored content or custom content. And you you did them with events and it sounds like these were topics that were very well aligned with the Meteor’s mission anyway. How did you define the line between, you know, your

saying the way this event should unfold and who the guest should be and say Ford or Gucci saying, you know, we want it to be this way. By the way, we did an event with Fast Company and Gucci and ⁓ they were a persnickety partner, I would say.

Speaker 1 (18:46)
I might have been from years of working with fashion advertisers. might be, yeah, I might be used to that brand. But yeah, anybody. So how did you got all of that? We can tell you. Yeah, I mean, you definitely do have to have some lines. think it fundamentally, if people just want to work with like a consultant or an agency, they will go.

somewhere else if what they want is sort of like an editorial eye and a bit of a public facing partner as well, because in most of these, you know, in most of these partnerships, our brand is also on it. We’re not just sort of quietly behind the scenes. You know, it’s a it’s a partnership between the Meteor and Gucci or the Meteor and the Ford Foundation. ⁓ You know, so I think in in those cases.

we are able, you know, usually to make the case that we have certain, you know, certain either guardrails or standards, you know, but, but it is definitely, it’s different than just running the media company because we are working with these people as clients and we want to keep them happy. So I think I like to think I might be kidding myself, but because I’ve been, you know, I spent so much of my career as an editor, I feel like I am pretty sensitive to

what are the lines you shouldn’t go over? What are the things that your audience is really gonna have a huge issue with? It’ll be a reputational black eye. But if it’s just about kind of like needing to treat someone like a client and service them that way, that’s okay too.

Speaker 2 (20:27)
In our events that we did in partnership with ⁓ advertisers like that, where we were hosting their content or collaborating on their content, we would often have it be on a different stage from the stuff that was purely editorial. Whether that was lost on the audience or whether the audience understood what was going on, I don’t know. We would definitely walk up to the line, I think, and that was the nature of the business.

you had to bring in the revenue. And like you, I was surprised that that is basically where advertising went ⁓ when it went away from display. We talked a little bit before ⁓ this about programmatic advertising, which is, it might not have been a very large part of the business for Glamour, and it sounds like it’s not at all part of the business at the Meteor. But in terms of snuffling up programmatic

digital advertising dollars in the vast universe of the digital media world, it’s quite a huge phenomenon. Was it, did it, I mean, maybe I’m assuming, did it play a role and did it have any effect on your business?

Speaker 1 (21:38)
It didn’t, it didn’t really. mean, we did a bit of it at Conde Nast. ⁓ And at the Meteor, we made a concerted decision to not, you know, we really are not cultivating ⁓ a website model. so programmatic advertising was never, you know, was never a goal. And also additionally, unlike Glamour, which had always been a really big brand. And, you know, even in the digital age was still for a time, a pretty big brand.

even by digital eyeball standards. The Meteor, although I think, you know, there’s, we’ve grown tremendously, there’s huge growth ahead of us, but we are not trying to be the absolute biggest in terms of like appealing to every single person. have a, we have an incredibly engaged audience and the last few years have shown that advertisers and partners will pay to be in front of those people who are

Attuned to whatever song that advertiser wants to sing, like, you know, programmatic is just about the numbers and that was never going to be a game that we were going to.

Speaker 2 (22:48)
Right,

right. Yeah, I’ve read about the numbers and the data. Yeah. The Meteor is owned by its investors and the investors. So it is a for-profit company, you know, which is daring these days. So many are starting in the not-for-profit world. What went into your decision there? Why not follow the line of, say, the Texas Tribune?

Speaker 1 (23:11)
Yeah, mean, partly, you know, I think you’ve got to just make a decision and do what you think you’re best at. And my entire career had been in like, you know, working at commercial brands, talking to advertisers about, you know, what I was editing and why, you know, they should want a piece of it. And that just, it felt like at some point, there are arguments to be made on both sides. And we talked to a lot of people about, you know, about those. We do. ⁓

have, and it’s grown over the last couple of years, we do have a nonprofit affiliate, the Meteor Fund, which is a, we work through a fiscal sponsor for those of you who know about nonprofits. not, you know, we didn’t set it up ourselves. We are overseen by something called the Social Impact Fund, but that allows us both to accept donations from our readership that then can be tax deductible for them and

more importantly, to be supported by foundations. So we have received quite a bit of foundation support and ⁓ nonprofit support that way. ⁓ But you have to really keep it separate. You have to make sure that those dollars that come in because they’re 501c3 aren’t going to support anything that could be construed as political content. It adds a layer of complexity, but it’s been worth it for us. ⁓

You know, I totally hear what you’re saying about, you know, so many, so many publications have launched with a nonprofit model and, you know, love what the Texas Tribune does. I love the 19th. think they’re, you know, for those of you who read and follow them, think they’re tremendous and there’s so much great local nonprofit journalism that’s happening right now.

I think for us, we’ve had enough success on the for-profit side that I think keeping that as a really important piece of the pie, I think is the right thing.

Speaker 2 (25:09)
Could I ask you to just weigh in on not-for-profits since they’re such a large part of the landscape at the moment? I mean, I think that many, the movement started in many people’s minds as a bridge between sort of a failing model to another island of kind of media sustainability and profitability. And then I think a number of organizations decided that

actually the bridge was the next island and that not-for-profit is just an enduring business model. Do you have a thought about that or is your belief that this can only be a stopgap?

Speaker 1 (25:55)
No, no, no. think, you know, I think, listen, the most important thing about nonprofits, I think, is the argument that they are making, which is that great journalism is a public service. is something that if you care about this country, if you care about whatever is your issue, democracy, climate change, know, gender equality, all of the above, because they’re all intertwined, that you need to fund journalism.

I fundamentally believe that. think nonprofit versus for-profit, like those are just structures. And I do think that a lot of, like local journalism where it’s harder to maintain a for-profit model, think, straight political journalism where again, a lot of advertisers don’t necessarily want to face that.

face that meaning like, you know, be adjacent to it or connected to it in any way. They still think it’s dangerous, even though it’s of course so, you know, so popular and well read. ⁓ You know, I think for certain publications like that, that nonprofit structure can make a lot of sense. ⁓ I kind of feel like, you know, I remember

when we were starting this, I interviewed so many people, really smart people in like the worlds of journalism and media business and should we be for-profit, should we be not for-profit? And in the end, like quite a few of them said, and I came to believe, they’re just two ways of getting at the media you wanna create. Just pick one and do it, which is what we did. And we, even as a for-profit company, very…

passionately make the same argument that I think a lot of these nonprofits are making, which is like, this is in the public interest. This needs to exist. I mean, we just interviewed not to go too far down the political road, but we just did a story ⁓ at the Meteor about where we interviewed activists from countries that had gone from democracy to autocracy. the activist from Hungary said, my one piece of advice is

If you know left-leaning billionaires, get them to invest in media because we did not do that in Hungary and our public discourse paid the price. The right was investing in all of their media outlets and the left was not. And of course, I immediately took that quote and put it in all of our fundraising decks. that’s an argument whether you are an impact investor who wants to invest in a for-profit company or a nonprofit.

investor. know, it’s just it’s an argument for why this needs to exist.

Speaker 2 (28:42)
Well, let’s go down that political rabbit hole that let’s start with the media and then branch out to kind of the wider political spectrum. Every news organization faces a reluctance on the part of many advertisers to appear next to news content, because news content often is about conflict. Sometimes it’s about violence and in.

Especially today, it means that a large portion of your audience is going to be turned off perhaps by the news. With the media, which has a very strong point of view about gender equality in this particular environment, that only intensifies that problem that every media organization has. How do you handle it and what does it look like to you right now? Have you been getting the kind of worrisome pushback that I can

imagine might be happening right now.

Speaker 1 (29:38)
Meaning pushback from advertisers specific.

Speaker 2 (29:41)
saying,

yes, this is radioactive. I want to see I don’t want to get on the wrong side of the administration, for example.

Speaker 1 (29:47)
I mean, it happens a bit, but because we had adjusted our business model where advertising of the sort that you’re talking about ⁓ has become a smaller piece of it and audience support. And I guess there’s a couple of different pieces that have grown. Audience support has grown. So then if people are interested in it and they’re willing to pay for it, whether it is an event or a newsletter, that’s…

that’s revenue you don’t have to be as concerned about ⁓ being subject to political pressures. They want to read it enough to pay for it, then you’re good. The partnerships, ⁓ because they are quite specific and we have been able to partner with sort of like mission aligned organizations, it’s not the same kind of pressure. And then we also do, like we’re starting to,

expand into what I would think of as sort of like IP based revenue. So developing ideas and then, you know, either selling them as films, we have our first film that we produced is going to be at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, is exciting, ⁓ you know, or developing an idea and then selling it to, you know, a larger podcast company like, like I heart. And so, you know, just leaning into those other forms of revenue. But yeah, I mean,

I ⁓ think advertisers are absolutely scared. I don’t think that’s new. mean, it happened even when I was at Glamour where the health pages, used to joke that advertisers loved being next to women’s health, but then when you really dug into it, it’s like, couldn’t be cancer. couldn’t be anything reproductive. They definitely didn’t want to be next to anything that was about a miscarriage or something bad happening.

So was basically like they wanted to be against articles about like psoriasis and eczema. That was it. Who used to just like, you know, laugh about it. But anyway, that’s not really a new thing. I think the bigger concern and what I thought you were gonna ask about, especially coming off the nonprofit thing is that, you know, there’s a lot of, ⁓ you know, political concern now at nonprofits because of some of the discussion about the fact that

Trump may try to take aim at the tax exempt status of nonprofits who engage in activities that he or his administration consider to be politically inappropriate. so of course, that’s a very, you know, those are, you know, very, very vague terms. And I think there’s a lot of concern at nonprofits about that. It’s actually one of the reasons that I’m glad that we are not.

wholly a nonprofit that we are mostly a for-profit media company because there’s no tax exempt status to strip us of there. But I do think for the nonprofits that we partner with, there’s going to be some concern there, which I think comes less from them not sharing our politics and more just concern for their own safety.

Speaker 2 (33:02)
Yes. With not-for-profit news in particular, as I understand it, there is no IRS standard for journalism being a not-for-profit. It falls under the umbrella of education, and that is really a norm rather than a law. And norms are, as we’ve seen, very fragile. There are other ⁓ risks to for-profit media companies in this political

political environment and Salzburger and Marty Barron have talked about them following the model ⁓ of places like Hungary, which you brought up in which the government makes the business model so difficult that the business has to sell and then the merger is enabled between right-wing administration or government sympathetic organizations and the news media passes into the hands of people who support the government. Have you, are you concerned about that or is that something that you see on the horizon?

Speaker 1 (34:05)
You’re going to make me wish I had poured myself a drink before joining this Zoom meeting. Yeah, I mean, of course, I’m deeply concerned. I’m on the board of the International Women’s Media Foundation, which works on behalf of press freedom and especially for women journalists around the world. And yes, I mean, in short, everything that you just documented that’s happening, not just in the United States, but in the United States, among other places, is incredibly worrisome.

I mean, the attacks on the press, the noise that the administration has made about the New York Times versus Sullivan decision, which I’m sure you’ve talked about in your class, which underpins some of the basic concepts of how you report and what you can and can’t say that so many of us grew up on. It’s all incredibly worrisome. And I, of course, always see things through the eye of, well, what does this mean?

For women, especially women in this country. And like, you know, we’ve just seen increasing attacks on women journalists, especially like thinking about the thinking about what we see at the IWMF, you know, a majority of American women reporters now say they’ve been, you know, harassed online, ⁓ astonishingly large percent have been.

physically threatened as well. If you report on anything vaguely controversial, the numbers go way up. And that has happened for many, many reasons, not all of them political, but the increasing demonization of the press by this administration, in my view, certainly hasn’t helped. And I think so many women now almost just accept it as a fact of, I mean, women in general, but I’m talking now about women journalists, except it is like a fact of reporting while female that like when you open your laptop, there’s just going to be this like stream of vitriol coming at you.

Speaker 2 (36:11)
Yeah, I’m well aware of that. And I think that people, I mean, a couple names come to mind like Renee DiResta, Brandy Zdrosny, Nina Jankiewicz are, you know, they’re heroes that they can go back to work. I’m kind of in awe and in my journalism career never, I mean, certainly because of my gender, was never exposed to that kind of thing.

And I think the women who worked for me were not either. I think it just wasn’t a thing in those days. now it is very distressing. ⁓ Well,

Speaker 1 (36:48)
Just say, sorry, just in a, a, yes, it is very distressing. I just want to also say to everybody listening that like, it’s another reason that if there’s a publication or a journalist who you support and follow, like visibly vocally support them. Like, yes, that can mean donating or subscribing to their sub stack or, you know, whatever, but it can just be commenting, like just being there kind of for the ratio.

That makes such a big difference, ⁓ you know, I think psychologically and also just, you know, in terms of then how much the algorithm will be surfacing that person’s posts to trolls versus friendly people.

Speaker 2 (37:33)
⁓ I hadn’t thought of that. Thank you for that advice. All right. So ⁓ do you have that drink handy? Because I want to ask you just to step back and answer the question that this whole class, this whole course is about, which is the future. Where are we going to be? Make a prediction of what the media industry will look like in 10 years and then kind of cap it off with whether you’re

optimistic or pessimistic.

Speaker 1 (38:04)
Well, I think I probably like a lot of people that I’m sure this class has talked to, like I tend to be an optimist in general because like, I don’t know if I, journalism is inherently a kind of optimistic profession, right? You’re assuming that the things that you can bring to light are actually going to make a difference in the lives of people and in our shared public life. In terms of

If I were to answer your question about the future, really just thinking about media, like, yes, there are some things that I could tell you I believe will be true, which is that, you you’re never going to go back to the era when there was like, you know, sort of one shared media culture. ⁓ We are fully in the age of sort of these micro communities and micro niches. And that’s how influence happens. It’s how news gets transmitted. And I think that is just, that is sort of what it is. I think AI is going to fundamentally reshape everything we do. We are already so close to the moment where AI can report something out better or as professionally as certainly at least an entry level reporter or writer. And so like, how are we going to adjust to that? I also personally really worry about like the gender gap in AI, because I think, you know, men are using it so much more than women. Multiple studies have shown that, which means that like we are training AI to be more sort of male oriented. And that puts women users as at ⁓ a deficit. But in terms of a prediction, you know, I just think it is journalism is going to be

and media is going to be fundamentally reshaped by AI in ways that are, you know, potentially have some good to them. Like as a small business owner, like there are ways that, you know, AI is incredibly helpful, albeit terrible for the environment, you know, but then also a lot of like terrifying ways and, you know, absolutely does not have sort of sound moral judgment, which I think you need when you’re practicing journalism. But I guess the other thing I want to say is that all of those ⁓ predictions, and just one more thing about the future of media, and this goes to those niche communities. I think one really positive thing that’s happened over the last few years of media is that I do feel like you’ve seen more reporting happen by people who are closer to the communities that that reporting serves…

…thinking about some of, a lot of these are nonprofit, not all enterprises, but like capital B media, which is black owned and black oriented and kind of is coming at the puzzle of journalism through with the assumption that reporting will be better. used to be told that like, you can’t be too close to what you’re reporting on because like, then you’re not gonna be able to do it objectively. like, think the fact that that is gone and we understand now that like…

…people who are from the communities that they’re serving are actually gonna do, they’re gonna gain trust, they’re gonna have more access to good stories and that is all positive. that will only continue. However, I do feel like just with regard to the political moment we’re in, a lot of things could happen to this country and our world over the next five years, let alone 10. That I can’t possibly begin to predict and those will have a huge effect on media. So I don’t think I could truly predict ⁓ where we will be because of that.

Speaker 2 (42:04)
That is the smart way out and also the journalistic way out if you don’t know. So you don’t know. So Cindy, thank you.

And that’s a wrap. Thanks to Cindy for joining us. One takeaway from me was how thoroughly the old divide between editorial and advertising has eroded under the hard scrabble economics of media today. So much now depends on the goodwill of editors and brands to keep contents away from undue advertising influence. And for anyone navigating the information environment, it’s something to keep in mind.

This episode was produced by Tom Platts of Sound Sapien. Thanks to Tom and thanks to our intern Meg Talikoff of the Alliance for Trust in Media. And thanks to you for spending some of your day with us. If you like these conversations and you believe that truth is a real thing worth fighting for, subscribe to In Reality on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a positive review. That helps more people find out about our work here and at the Alliance for Trust in Media. And thanks again for joining me in reality.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Jun 12 2025

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