Frankly, I think this view is incredibly popular, and misinformed about the state of journalism. There was a time, about a little over a decade ago where ad-sup

Frankly, I think this view is incredibly popular, and misinformed about the state of journalism. There was a time, about a little over a decade ago where ad-supported journalism was considered the future, and companies like Buzzfeed started to emerge. Companies started optimizing for page views to boost their revenue and the explosion in clickbait happened. However, even by 2011 Buzzfeed had started to try to pivot to more long-form content hiring the former editor in cheif of Politico. By 2015 we saw the "Pivot to video" where outlets had identified that this clickbait stuff had really run it's course and were now moving to video as a way to bring in viewers and revenue. Of course that notoriously failed - having cut editorial staff to focus on video production, it was only about 24 months before they were cutting video production too because it produced no revenue. Vox Media cut 5% of their staff at the beginning of 2018. So let's look at what actually is happening in the news media today: The Atlantic, TNR, NYT, WashPo. All of them are marketing themselves as high value premium products that are funded almost exclusively by subscription revenue. The new media companies that are still persisting with an advertising strategy are bringing their ad-networks in house and attempting to hit scale in a way that let's them compete with Facebook. The jury is still very much out on whether that's viable of whether they end up being forced to merge or being bought out by a large player like Spotify. We aren't in the death spiral of chasing views anymore, we're very much back in a stable area where high quality content is available if you're willing to pay for it. The problem is that people are still judging the NYT by what they see on Buzzfeed - because they don't pay for the NYT and assume it's like Buzzfeed. It's going to take a while for the reputations to recover but we do need to actually understand the business as it is today.