Product

Notes from a talk, June 2024

This weekend, my friend Alok invited me to a discussion about the future of news at The Goa Project, run by Udhay Shankar, Peter Griffin and friends. This is a version of the speaking notes of my remarks. Thanks to the hosts and to my fellow discussant, the wonderful Prem Panicker.

Hi, I’m Supriya. When we began Fifty Two we intended to publish deeply reported journalism from outside the news cycle and use our narrative format to reveal why these stories mattered to their readers. After we commissioned our first ten or so stories the world went into Covid lockdown, and our writers were at home instead of out in Bundelkhand or near the Assam border or in a national park in Sri Lanka, and that was how the publication acquired the second-draft-of-history character it became known for by some people. We asked our writers what stories they wanted to tell that they could report from their desks, and they reached back into history to re-examine the stories of our past, and to help explain how they had, in some way, shaped the world we lived in. It’s now on hiatus for personal reasons.

I loved what I did, but I’m not ideologically committed to narrative journalism. It is a byproduct of journalism as a service to keep people informed, and as such, is a second-order service to convince people that a given set of information matters. I also don’t like the word “longform” — it imbues a value-neutral description of a work’s format with aesthetic and ethical qualities that do not inhere to it. It takes a high degree of skill to make a readable work of journalism that’s over 5000 words long, and I suppose it takes a certain amount of habituation to be able to read and enjoy something of that length, too. That may be why there was a time in the 2010s that it really felt like “longform journalism” was acquiring an aura of moral virtue that I don’t personally like, and that I also think is irrelevant to its survival.

It’s not the most important point I want to make, but I would like to admit that many of us who think about journalism have a seriousness problem, because it is such a moral issue to us, and that morality means so much, that it feels like the only grounds on which we can justify why this work we love should continue to exist. I acknowledge that journalism as a service cannot be fully decoupled from journalism as entertainment. I think this is important to recognise so that we can move forward with finding effective ways to report on a time when the conflation of these two things has been masterfully executed in a secondary way by our political leaders, who now live and die by the rules of celebrity culture. They are reacting to the primary movers of this conflation, and of the de-productisation of existing forms of culture —  the owners of tech-oriented capital.

Journalists and independent media owners spend so much time on “product,” which in engineering teams means one thing, and for the rest of us means a package that serves the work up in a way that attracts audience and also serves the algorithm that controls that work’s discoverability, shareability, and profitability. Because of productisation, in the last fifteen years journalism has pivoted to video, broken things down into listicles, created micro-targeted subscription channels, disaggregated brands, gone cap in hand to venture capital to get a slice of the pie that’s poisoning us, and other dramatic things.

So, in fact, media owners have actually de-productised journalism and what gives it value. We’ve totally given up control over distribution. We have colluded in the wide-scale dismantling of intellectual property, and currently have no concept of how to get news out to a wide population that really wants and needs it but has no concept of why to trust what is delivered to their phones for free, or how to pay for what they like.

This sounds like a cultural problem, especially because we in India talk a lot about the difficulty of creating a subscription culture, and how we have a problem assigning importance to certain kinds of work. I don’t think that’s restricted to India alone. I also think that this cultural problem is, critically, a labour problem, and it speaks to my fundamental issue with journalism right now. No one has a model that foregrounds longevity. And that’s a people problem, a social problem, and a problem of labour because it is a jobs problem.

Independent journalism has had a jobs issue for a long time. I heard from someone at a journalism conference in Bangalore earlier this year about a panel of eminent editors — Prem was not among them — some of whom are leading the fight in keeping freedom of information and opinion alive in India. Their moderator asked them what they were doing to ensure that the bright young journalists in their employ could hang around for long enough to sustain their work. I didn’t hear that there was a satisfactory answer. I don’t have one myself. But I do know that journalists are on the backfoot when it comes to their survival. Independent media is not thriving in precarity; it is functioning in spite of it.

Journalists are among the most talented people I know, but I believe there is a crisis of talent in Indian journalism today because media owners cannot do more to keep younger people afloat in the profession for long enough to imagine high-level solutions to its problem. We are all without resources to construct a pushback to the total cannibalisation of journalistic work. This problem is exacerbated by what we call “legacy media,” because what legacy there is belongs to owners who have no idea how to stop client servicing Google and Meta and will have absolutely no idea of what to do in the face of LLMs dismantling copyright and intellectual property.

The best we’ve been able to do collectively is think of journalism as product. Apart from the few gigantic establishments that already think of themselves as platforms — Prem mentioned the FT and the WSJ, to which I’d add the New York Times, perhaps the BBC — there’s no real capacity to do something other than shape the work to game the delivery mechanism, which as I said earlier is no longer in our hands. 

Sure, you can say that that’s a version of what journalism always was — first a billboard for billboard owners to rent, then a stool pigeon for print advertising and so on. That history keeps many practitioners afloat: knowing that journalism has always existed at an intersection of competing interests, and the number of people fighting to deliver news of importance, stories that matter, have probably always been quite small, and so has the catchment of consumers who are interested in these things. If we survived the twentieth century, we can probably survive the twenty-first.

But the media businesses that survived the twentieth century are now fifty, seventy, a hundred, 150 years old, and they are the best in the world. The trust and respect that gives them power are not values that can give any investor hockey-stick growth. But they’re not dispensable, either: they are core to the social importance of any journalism. In the twenty-first century, media competes for resources in an economic environment where long-term survival is not considered relevant to success. In its race to the bottom of distribution mechanics, it is shedding its long-term thinkers very quickly. That shedding is not cheap. Especially in a craft-led industry, the work takes years to teach, to build on and to improve on. Without quality long-term thinking, we don’t make innovations that create value for society, and we simply don’t deliver enough work to help create trust and respect. 

So I really think the best thing is to de-productise journalism and start investing in journalists. It’s time to find metrics of long-term productivity and engagement other than the burn rate on cheap, value-less reach, and to teach investors to commit to them. If media owners and institutions start investing in people again, we can have many more ideas that will allow us to preserve the social goods that we believe in, the way we’re trying to preserve rainforests and fresh-water bodies — just a couple of other things that feel like luxuries but turn out to be essential.