Creating High-Value Media
How to Realign Media
The most constructive type of criticism is building an alternative. Yes, deconstruct the establishment. Use every verbal, technical, and monetary weapon we have. That is extremely important. But build something better. It is incumbent on us to build something better.
We need a different form of media all about relevance and skill building, an optimal information diet. What skills do you actually want to build?
The media you consume changes the decisions you make.
The technology you have changes the decisions you can make.
Creating High-Value Media
Technology has recently been focused on software, but we should focus more on how media can increase people’s skills and abilities. One path is creating media to help people create wealth. DIY YouTube videos are simple examples. The entire West Coast media ecosystem getting created now is implicitly focused on this. It's all about technology, building your business, and improving yourself.
Maybe the new local news is by intellectual vertical, rather than geographic area.
This is not about monetizing a large mass of people. It is about serving people who really need to understand and comprehend an idea.
Imagine a site maintaining up-to-date information on 3D printing technology and all the companies in the industry, almost like an investment research report. A reader’s goal may be to make an investment, join a company, or download a new program to start something or build something. This is a production-versus-consumption focus.
In reading this new type of media, you do not care about the headline, because reading the headline alone is not enough to do something. The real question is, what is the intent of people looking at this media? People who are consuming media just to be entertained do not have the incentive to actually understand something deeply.
The kind of media you want to consume when you consider your own performance is going to have a different business model than legacy media.
Journalist Gautham Nagesh said, "Content is a lousy business to be in, unless you've got information worth paying for." Put mathematically: differential profits from acting on an article must routinely exceed the differential cost of purchasing that information.
When you sell articles as entertainment, no action is expected. Articles to spur action are quite different. As a society, we've explored the depths of clickbait sites monetized by pageviews. But actionable information for different professions have not yet been fully explored.
Twitter is a dispatch mechanism for our attention, in the same way Uber dispatches drivers to riders. You could imagine a very different dispatcher that maximizes long-term wealth creation.
Typically people will put war reporting and reporting on Kim Kardashian at opposite ends of the media spectrum: “This is super serious, Pulitzer-prize stuff” versus “This is fun infotainment.” I argue they’re actually both infotainment at the same end of the spectrum, and the other end is news-you-can-use and tutorials. The difference is whether a piece of information is directly relevant to your life. To identify at which end of the spectrum information belongs, consider: are you going to spend the effort to confirm and apply every line of this information?
Coding tutorials have built-in fact checking because you have the tutorial on the left and your terminal on the right, and you’re typing code line by line, verifying that it works. A YouTube video showing you how to sew something or how to build a table works the same way. You’re applying every line or every frame as you build.
Tutorials can’t “lie” to you, not that they would want to. They can’t misrepresent anything. They can’t understate the complexity or overstate outcomes. Because they are instructional, you’re learning and you’re also fact checking as you use them, which is not obvious. People don’t think about that part.
Other news-you-can-use is the weather or a stock price. This information determines an action. If it’s rainy, I grab an umbrella. If the stock price is high, maybe I sell. If the stock price is low, maybe I buy. This information guides decisions. It’s right next to tutorials on our new spectrum of media utility.
On the other end of the spectrum is reading about some issue in a distant country. Unless I have relatives, businesses, or operations there, it’s not relevant to me on a daily basis. People might say, “You should be concerned about these things.” The problem is there are seven billion people on the planet.
As a kind of toy experiment, think about this. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. In 12 days, if you learn one of those seven billion people’s names per second, you could learn the names of a million people. It would take you 120 days for 10 million people; 1,200 days for a hundred million people; and 12,000 days for a billion people. Basically, it would take your whole life to even learn the names of the seven billion people on the planet. You cannot possibly care about them all equally. You have to triage or somehow prioritize. You have to rank-order what you’re paying attention to.
Infotainment should be filtered out of your information diet. Returning to the analogy between your nutritional diet and your information diet…having a cookie from time to time is fine, but if you’re eating only cookies and you’re not eating healthy food, your health is going to be messed up. Your life is going to get worse.
I’m not saying never have fun. But Twitter and other social media are like restaurants that have learned to secretly put sugar in their food. Social media and streaming services are optimized to consume as many minutes of your day as possible. They are literally addictive.
