tech-bubble
(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Over the past decade, the mass-ness of media has been kept on life support through social media distribution and private equity investment. Now, those bubbles have burst.

It’s the hard truth behind most media stories floating around at the moment: from the entertaining — such as the Fox implosion — to the conflict in the writers’ strike in Hollywood.

Some go largely unreported, only found deep in corporate reports, like the tapering off of digital subscription growth. Others are just sad (for journalists, at least), like the failure of what we once hoped were the big digital plays for the future, such as Buzzfeed News and Vice.

Stand back and squint a little; now you can see what’s really going on. Mass media — as it’s existed since the invention of the linotype machine — is finished.

We’re at a long-expected moment, predicted by Professor Clay Shirky back in 2008. “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” he asks. “Nothing,” he answers himself. “Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”

Shirky was writing at a time when printed papers were staggering through their last days as the dominant medium for news. Fourteen years on, we can see it’s true, too, of both the traditional media we inherited from the 20th century and the new forms developed by wannabe start-up players.

It’s not for want of trying. We’re coming up to 30 years of mass media trying to colonise the new world of the internet with their understanding of the old. All that effort, held up by the twin pillars of social media and private equity cash, has pushed Shirky’s “nothing” moment to the current era.

Death of the unicorns

Traditional media has enough weight to survive, for the time being at least. It’s the start-ups that are feeling the most pain.

Buzzfeed was an early winner in gaming the Facebook algorithm, commercialising the viral hit (including early cat videos), innovating the listicle, and driving journalism towards the interests of the millennial market. It recognised that piggybacking off the big platforms meant growth had to be global, launching Buzzfeed News in Australia as an early off-shore franchise in early 2014, before closing in 2020 as it withdrew to its US base.

But who was gaming whom? Was Buzzfeed meeting real demand from actual people, or were they just riding the tide of algorithmic choices that Facebook’s programmers designed to boost time spent on the platform?

The giveaway should have been that Buzzfeed’s growth was bought as much as earned, with cashflow drawn from large equity infusions, most famously $50 million from Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz in 2014, which boosted the start-up to the much sought $1 billion “unicorn” status.

It had followed the path of the now near-bankrupt Vice (until recently a key program provider to SBS). which had relied on a $70 million injection from Fox Corp in 2013 to unicorn its value to US$1.4 billion. It gave Fox a 5% stake, and James Murdoch joined the Vice board.

The Fox shareholding was handed on to Disney as part of the sale of the company’s entertainment assets in 2018. Disney wrote the value of its share down to zero, but just the following year, James was back, putting his own money into the company. (Maybe Kerry Packer was wrong: some people do get Alan Bonds twice in their lifetime.)

A new menu

In the streaming wars, Netflix used private equity to build global mass in a steady 20-year rise. Now, traditional studios and broadcast networks reckon they can weaponise against Netflix by drawing on their internal resources and brand strength.

Maybe not. Just last week, Ten-owner Paramount reported a US$511 million loss in the first quarter of the year, largely off the back of the money it’s spending on building its own streaming service, Paramount+.

The streaming wars have spilled onto the industrial front, with the Writers Guild of America striking for a better sharing of revenues.

Fox Corp, meanwhile, is discovering that mass audiences can become remarkably un-mass remarkably quickly. Since the defenestration of Tucker Carlson last month, its after-dark audience has slumped by almost a half, particularly in Carlson’s 8pm timeslot.

So what will replace the void left by mass media’s “nothing” moment? Maybe “everything”: a diverse news ecosystem that lets the reader, viewer, listener pick and choose from a wide menu regarding what — and who — they reward with their attention.