Climateer Investing: Recode to Vox and Journalist As Brand

Monday, June 1, 2015

Recode to Vox and Journalist As Brand

From Bob Lefsetz at The Big Picture:

They couldn’t make it on their own.

Walt Mossberg, one of America’s two most famous tech columnists, shot himself in the foot. He left the “Wall Street Journal.” They’re finding out in news what we already know in music, you can go it alone, the internet allows you to do this, but in a chaotic world he with the established presence wins, the major record labels figured out the internet and the big news sites still rule.

What about BuzzFeed, and the “Huffington Post”?

The HuffPo is in decline. You can read about it in the “New York Review Of Books,” which no one opens except for intellectuals, but at least enough to keep the publication going. If you were gonna try and start a new printed book review today…FUHGETTABOUTIT!

But once upon a time the HuffPo was new and different. It focused on left wing news and link-bait, before link-bait littered every webpage you went to.

And BuzzFeed invented the listicle.

What did ReCode invent?

Absolutely nothing.

We don’t need me-too, we need new and different. And unless you’re gonna do new and different, stay where you are.

Ezra Klein left the “Washington Post.” He said his Vox site was gonna be different, and it is, a bit, but not significantly enough to gain traction.

Nate Silver left the “New York Times” for obscurity. The election prognosticator, our national data interpreter, put a stake in his heart and keeled right over. He started a whole website, 538, for data-driven articles, but the “Times” just doubled down with data and created the Upshot. Even worse, Silver didn’t realize if you’re starting from scratch you’ve got to have stars. And he’s the only star on his site. He’s earned my attention. But the rest of the writers on his site parsing the numbers…WHO ARE THEY?

And then you’ve got David Pogue, Mossberg’s nemesis, who left the “Times” for Yahoo and was promptly buried in the tsunami of bogus information on that site. He went from being one of the two experts to a nobody.

So what have we learned…

Just because you’re a star don’t think you’re bigger than the enterprise.

That’s what the film business has learned. They don’t pay stars as handsomely as they used to. As for these same stars funding their own movies… They have the twin hurdles of raising capital and distribution. Never mind having no ongoing catalog to keep them flush. That’s the movie studios’ greatest asset, as it is the record labels’, their historical product. It gives them guaranteed cash flow and bargaining power. That’s why the labels got favorable deals with Spotify…their copyrighted material!...MORE