This is something I’ve been writing about for a while.
The media is dying.
1. Print is dying rapidly in a haze of consolidations, mergers, bankruptcies, buyouts and major cuts wiping out thousands of jobs.
2. Cable news doesn’t exactly have a bright future as the cord cutting commences. Network news programs and cable news programs are in the basements of giant mega-corps like AT&T and Disney and Comcast where they’re a very low priority because they don’t bring in the money.
3. Digital media began collapsing when its business model did. Here’s the latest developments on that front.
A. Huffington Post was bought out by BuzzFeed in a desperate attempt to expand. This follows previous attempts to round up the ragged ends of the fallen Gawker empire with disastrous results.
B. BuzzFeed and Vox are losing their top people. The New York Times has brought in Ben Smith from BuzzFeed and now Ezra Klein of Vox. Other BuzzFeed veterans want to CNN. Matthew Yglesias, after being purged for wrongthink, set up his own newsletter, joining the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan.
Beyond the woke epidemic, the obvious issue here is that digital media’s business model is busted. Its biggest stars are either fleeing to their own monetization setups or finding a secure home in old-line media.
That means that the lefty digital media infrastructure is sputtering out. The rats are jumping ship. The media is dying. Irreversibly.
The big question is what comes next.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
