Publishers have a strong grip on content. Writers, as a class, are wildly underpaid and usually struggling. Publishers have no trouble hiring, firing, retaining

Publishers have a strong grip on content. Writers, as a class, are wildly underpaid and usually struggling. Publishers have no trouble hiring, firing, retaining, and generally replacing journalists. Rockstar journalists with big followings are flight risks, sure, but they are not disproportionately responsible for content output. And at the end of the day, the content business is a volume game. By contrast, publishers have a very weak grip on us, the end users. We prefer to consume our content on platforms like FB and Snapchat and Twitter, or linked on boards like Reddit and HN. Very few of us are actually direct-navigating to publishers' sites and apps to consume content at the source. And we have decreasing loyalty to any particular publishing brand. Ultimately this may lead to a weaker grip on content. If anyone can make the economics of publishing work while retaining a smaller staff of better compensated journalists, they will be able to have their pick of the best journalists in the world. The compensation bar is really really low these days, and anyone who pays journalists a comfortable living wage in 2017 can clear that bar and win a ton of goodwill. It's the revenue side of the equation that's tricky to make work.