As I wrote a year ago in The Rot Economy (and as I argued on the first episode of my podcast Better Offline), I believe that both public and private markets have become decoupled from the concept of "good business," ruled instead by a hunger for the eternal growth of

This is from ten months ago, and as such is a fascinating time machine of what was going on when trump was going to go to jail and AI might still figure out something to do before faceplanting an industry that shouldn’t exist.

Most of the horrifying layoffs you’ve seen in journalism are a result of rot economics borne of the ideas of people who can’t write and don’t read. The news industry has spent a decade building itself on foundations made of sand, with executives desperate to change content strategies to match the constantly-shifting whims of social networks and search engines.

If you’re looking for somebody to blame, you can start with Cory Haik, Vice’s Chief Operating Officer. Before joining Vice, she co-led Mic, a publication she drove into the ground by forcing it to move from producing beloved written journalism to dancing to the beat of Facebook’s "pivot to video,” leading to the company laying off most of its staff and selling its intellectual property to Bustle. Haik is an example of the media world’s failure to police itself - a career failure that has now driven two great publications into the ground because she doesn’t understand what the fuck she is doing, as evidenced by her 2017 op-ed claiming that we were “in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism.” Cory Haik isn’t a journalist, or an editor, or a creative — she’s a parasite.

. . . And few network effects have damaged the news more than Search Engine Optimization, where the allure of traffic from search engines like Google has led publishers to create content not with the goal of serving their audience, but attracting the spurious traffic that one might get from those searching “when does the Super Bowl start.”

The result is a media industry in crisis. Desperate executives and disconnected editors twist their reporters’ coverage to please Google’s algorithms as a means of improving traffic to please advertisers’ algorithms, creating content that looks and sounds the same as other outlets, which in turn leads to layoffs as profits fail to increase, which in turn normalizes and weakens the content created by the outlet. This is largely a result of those in power not actually consuming or producing any of the product that makes the outlet money, only understanding the business as a series of symbols that at some point create revenue, ostensibly from the written word and video.

The obvious connection between billionaires-have-destroyed-the-media isn’t explicitly made, but the case for it is.