The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)
from 404 Media
The 404 Media Year in Review
Episode Notes
/Transcript
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/t5RuHgk52MM
Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we're doing something a little bit different. I'm not even gonna read the intro. We're gonna talk about the previous year. We're not gonna be talking about our stories that we've just published because this is coming out during the holidays. Hopefully, you're all relaxing, chilling, and now you're going to listen to us reflect on the year, especially when it comes to AI and journalism and all of that.
Joseph:No subscriber section, this week, but it's still gonna be ad free for paying subscribers. We did want to give free listeners a preview of the sort of conversations that you can get access to, when you do become a paying 4 0 4 Media subscriber as well. So first of all, I'll just introduce everybody. Of course, the other 4 0 4 Media cofounders are with me. The first being Sam Cole.
Joseph:Yo. Jason Kebler.
Jason:Oh, I get to go in the middle this time.
Emanuel:And Emmanuel Mayberg. Best for laugh, baby. Here
Jason:I am. Dude, that you've really switched it up. Come on. Like, yeah, I was not ready. I was not ready.
Joseph:Honestly, I'm a little tired and hungover. So that's
Jason:Oh, wow. Very interesting. So people know we're recording this, like, from the past. You're listening to this in the future. So, if anything, like, crazy happens, we're recording this December 16th, just so you know.
Sam:I hope nothing crazy happens. I need to, like, not have anything chaotic happen at the end of the year. There was one year where, like, Pornhub changed its entire terms and, like, wiped its sight of all of its content at the end of the year, and that was my worst year yet.
Joseph:Like, you had to jump on and Yeah.
Sam:It was, like, major breaking news.
Jason:It was,
Sam:like, we were gonna break that news and, like, it was, like, the very end of December. It's like, Jesus Christ. I was fully checked out.
Jason:If the if the singularity is achieved in the next week, that will not be incorporated into our talk about AI.
Sam:We're gonna pretend we don't see that.
Joseph:Yeah. I think so. So right now, the plan is that we'll be airing an episode about how we cover AI. That was for paying subscribers a long time ago, basically, at the time we launched. So if things go to according to the schedule that we have right now, you would have already heard that.
Joseph:You would have already listened to it. But here, we're gonna talk a little bit more about AI, and I think much more of the sort of current criticism, around it and all of that sort of thing. Jason, do you wanna start? Like, how do we get into this in how people are covering AI now and sort of the current debate around that? I know you and Emmanuel have a lot to say about this.
Jason:Yeah. I mean, we've talked about AI almost every episode of this podcast for the full year, and I think that we wanted to try to say, like, here's the current state of things, I guess. I think that we have tried to focus on how AI is is actually being used right now. We've done a few articles about sort of, like, where things are going and the actual, like, technology and and how that all works. But I think that we've been quite interested not in covering every update to, you know, OpenAI's large language models or, you know, different models that have been released or what their use cases are, but but covering how they filter down into the real world and how they're used, and then also focusing on, like, where the data is coming from, like, governance of of them and and that sort of thing.
Jason:But there's been, like, a a big debate about whether generative AI is useful at all, sort of like what is gonna happen to it, as they run out of data, to train on. Like, Ilya Sutsgiver, who is one of the founders of Open Eye AI recently said at NeurIPS, which is the industry's biggest conference, that they're pretty much out of data. They're out of human data to train on, and there's different schools of thought as to what happens after the data the data is gone. The the large language models are gonna have to be trained in different ways. The AI is gonna have to be trained in different ways.
Jason:The leaps forward might not get as good. You know, you might have AI training itself on other AI and having, like, this recursive situation where, you know, AI models are trained on AI slop more or less, and that has been, like, a big topic of conversation. I think, we'll probably talk about it a fair bit, in this podcast, but there has been a lot of discussion about a column that Casey Newton wrote about, about sort of, like, whether
Joseph:AI is real of platformer, which is Platformer. Yeah. Depends on the publication. Yeah.
Jason:Yeah. So I don't know. Do we wanna talk about that debate now, or do we wanna talk more about how we cover AI and what changed this year and then get into it?
Joseph:I I think we can go into the debate. All I would say is that we I think it's quite obvious to anybody who has read our website in that well, arguably, we cover well, we cover AI not just skeptically. I just think realistically in the way that we're not we we don't go out and say, oh, AI is never gonna take off. This is complete rubbish or anything like that. It's more, as you said at the top, it's much more about the harms and the impacts that are happening on humans right now, whether that's, you know, all of our work on Nudify apps or deepfakes or nonconsensual, imagery.
Joseph:I haven't done any anywhere to the near near the same quality that you've all done on that. But, you know, I'm trying to look at more military uses of UI and, AI, and I'm especially interested in that. We the tone of our stuff is, I would say, more realistic than anything. But, yeah, what is this, column exactly? And why is it triggered so much, I would say, conversation around how people are even framing AI?
Jason:So Casey Newton, a platformer, longtime Verge reporter, started, you know, a newsletter called Platformer that initially covered content moderation on the Internet and has grown to prominence. Casey is, like, very well respected, has a podcast called Hard Fork at the New York Times. And so I think when he writes things, people pay attention to them. And last, well, earlier this month, he did an article called the phony comforts of AI skepticism, and the subhead of that was, it's fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks, but evidence is mounting that it's real and dangerous. And I'm trying to think how to say this, but but, basically, the argument that Casey made was that the people who have a knee jerk reaction to say that generative AI is not going to change everything are wrong in his view and that this is, like, a naive perspective more or less.
Jason:This has started, like, a massive conversation about the state of AI, I guess. And my personal opinion is that the way that we cover AI has not been really addressed in Casey's pieces nor in the rebuttals to Casey's pieces of which there's been, like, various back and forth, and I don't think we're gonna I haven't read every single back and forth because I find it a little bit exhausting. There's, like, 20 different blogs about the blogs that go back and forth. But Casey sort of argues that the people who are saying generative AI isn't gonna change things because it's just not good enough are wrong and sort of says that people in the industry believe that it's gonna change things. And then there are a lot of rebuttals to that saying, like, Casey, you don't know what you're talking about, blah blah blah.
Jason:You've you've covered this, and then we can talk about where I come down on it. But, like, how would you frame the debate, I guess?
Emanuel:So I would say that I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with, Casey's column. He's just describing kind of the far ends of the spectrum, which in his framing is there's a group of people who think AI is like a giant hoax much like, I don't know, the NFT boom and, Web 3 scams that seem very real and people in tech swore up and down are gonna change the world, and then have just, like, completely disappeared. And then on the other end of the spectrum are people who are like, you don't understand. We are inches away from general intelligence, and this is gonna change everything. And we need to take this very seriously because AI is all too real.
Emanuel:And I think it is correct that that is what the too far ends of the spectrum are saying, but, obviously, it's a spectrum and there's a whole lot of variety in between. I think the best rebuttal to this that I've read is from our former colleague at motherboard, Edward Unguysso junior, who wrote on his substack. And the gist of his argument is that Casey's taxonomy is bad, which is it's not the case that AI is either fake or real and dangerous. It can be all of those things. It could be a mix of those things at once, and that certainly is something that we've seen as true in our reporting.
Emanuel:Right? So that an AI technology can not work at all but still be implemented and be dangerous. Right? If you think about some AI software that is very faulty but is actually being used to filter job applications. Right?
Emanuel:That's a case of AI being, quote, unquote, fake, but it is actually being used and it is actually having real world impact, and it's dangerous. And the opposite combination of things can be true also. I think that's a really good argument. People should go read that. Ed, to complicate the the take factory even more, Ed quotes a blog from, this guy called I'm probably mispronouncing his name, but Ali Al Khatib, I think it is.
Emanuel:And he says, quote, AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individual towards centralized structures of power. And I think the idea that AI has always been kind of a loose term that can mean a whole bunch of things. And to think of that more as a political project is a pretty useful idea. Right? So, again, to take, like, the job application example, you can kind of shift the responsibility of discriminatory hiring practices to an AI model that isn't really doing anything that fundamentally different than a bunch of automated systems that are already in place to filter through applications.
Emanuel:But but by calling it AI and putting all the power on this system, you're kind of perpetuating discriminatory hiring practices, but you've shifted the power and the blame and the responsibility to this AI system rather than, like, the HR department or the CEO or whatever. And that's something we see happen with AI a lot. So I thought that was a really good idea. And that blog, Ed's blog, and I think the whole discussion has been, like, pretty useful, like, definitely annoying to see a bunch of blogs about blogs, but I think it's, like, a necessary conversation. I would say that having said all of that, 2 things.
Emanuel:1 is I do think that our perspective is kind of outside of the debate because we don't normally have these type of, like, super zoomed out conversations about AI and what it all means. We did have it at some point earlier. No. It was almost a year ago, at this point, but it's like, we did that because we realized that we didn't plan for it, but basically every story that we were writing was about AI. So we did take a step back to address that because that's not something that we historically have done as writers or as a publication at Motherboard.
Emanuel:Right? It's like we've never been on one beat for that long. Usually, things change and, a technology fades or a new technology comes along and, we all shift with it. But we were, like, focusing on generative AI so much that we wanted to address it. And I think what we said then remains true and it's kind of, outside of this debate, which is, like, we're focused on, like, what people are actually doing.
Emanuel:Right? And that is what we continue to focus on going forward. And that's just kind of a little bit removed from, like, this more Zoom dot conversation about, like, is AI gonna destroy the world or not? I don't know. But what I do know is that it's fucking up Google search results, that it's being used to make nonconsensual porn, that it's fucking up Google Books and all this stuff.
Emanuel:And and and I think that is where our reporting is most useful and has the most impact, so that's where we remain. The other thing I wanna say is, when we had that conversation last year about AI, I kind of laid out the ideological battle that was taking place, in AI, which is, like I think back then they were calling it, like, the AI safetyism versus the AI
Jason:Accelerationist. Right?
Emanuel:Accelerationist. Right. Yeah. And the accelerationist have definitely won, the debate. Like, the Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk of the world are in power.
Emanuel:They're controlling these companies. They're leading this technology. They're definitely they've definitely won that conversation. And Marc Andreessen, who is, like, one of the biggest figures in this debate, he put out this manifesto that he called, the techno optimist manifesto. And all I would say to that is that I think it is weird that, it's like there is the AI as powerful and dangerous perspective, and there's the AI as fake and a scam perspective.
Emanuel:But I'm not hearing a whole lot of, like, AI could be powerful and maybe it can be good. Like, there's, like, no one in the conversation that is like, what is technology but good? You know? And I think, like, if when we zoom out and we talk about technology in terms of these big ideas, that is our perspective. Right?
Emanuel:That's what we have to keep explaining to people who say that we hate technology. It's not that we hate technology. It's that we focus on what it actually does. And when you focus on what you actually and what it actually does, you see a lot of bad examples and that is what we wanna shed light on because we wanna have positive impact. But if you were to ask me, like, where do you see it all going or, like, where do you wanna see it going?
Emanuel:Then it's like, there's some cool tech. It has some potential, and I would like it to be used for good rather than bad. And it just like, if there was a robot that was able to, like, do all my chores around the house and, like, take the that burden off of me, that would be great. And the fact that there's just, like, no one in this conversation that, is staking that position, really, is I find to be just kind of a bummer. I don't know.
Emanuel:So that that's just like the only thing that I would add to that, like, whole debate is that the, like, the the people who are optimistic about the future are, like, Marc Andreessen, and there's no one from like, I don't know, the Edward side of the conversation which is saying like, what if we had some kind of technology that was like good for people rather than bad?
Joseph:Well, do you think there is nobody taking that position because there aren't those good use cases or because taking that position is just not worth it for them?
Emanuel:I think it's 2 things. 1 is since Marc Andreessen and co have staked that position, then, like, you're in opposition to them. So naturally, you're like, well, he's full of shit, and it's like he's lying, which is certainly true a lot of the time. And then I don't know. There isn't, like, a ton of good examples.
Emanuel:Once again, right, like, when we when we look at what people actually use this for, it's like, it sucks. Like, a lot of the time, it just sucks. And that's not me being negative. That's just like me opening my eyes and, like, looking what at what people do with AI image generators. It's not good, guys.
Emanuel:It's like, you know, it's like, I've I've I've looked at the evidence. It's not good.
Jason:Right. So that that is the position that I feel like is not super represented in this debate, which is that, let's say like, I think I talked about this in my TCL AI generated shorts, article a bit where, let's say, you imagine the greatest, like, use of AI in Hollywood, and it, you know, improves special effects. It's used responsibly by people who care, who by people who know what they're doing, and it makes cool movies. Like, AI is going to be used in Hollywood. It is already being used in Hollywood.
Jason:It is being used probably in ways that are, like, mostly fine. Also, ways that are not fine, but, like, there are there are things that have been done using AI in big movies that it's like, cool. You couldn't do that 3 years ago, and now it's in a commercially released film and people like it.
Joseph:De aging Tom Hanks or aging Tom Hanks very quickly and very much cheaper. I mean, that's the example that all comes in New York Times articles. Yeah. Thinking about AI in Hollywood. Yeah.
Jason:But then you look at, like, the this tool is being released widely, and I think it has to be released widely. It's there's no way of, like, keeping these things from being used by anyone. And the ways that it's being used are to spam the Internet and the and to make better, more convincing spam and everything that comes alongside of that, nonconsensual pornography, disinformation, blah blah blah, blah, like, all of that stuff. And there are far fewer people who are using artificial intelligence in its, like, utopian, hey. Let's use this for to make cool stuff earnestly use like, to augment human creative capabilities.
Jason:And there's far more people using it to spam shitty books on Amazon, to spam Facebook, to spam to, like, do targeted advertising and and so on and so forth. And then the actual, like, impact and result of that is that human made work is a lot harder to find. It's devalued. You have, like it's all these all these, like, really terrible chatbots that make mistakes, and then you also have sort of the the permission structure for all of these big companies to release their half baked AI and sort of, like, all of the shitty effects of that. And that is what we have seen in 2024 by and large.
Jason:And I don't think that that has really been, represented in in these debates. It's like you have the utopian. Here is here's all the cool things that chat gpt can do. You can write a better email with it or whatever. Like, the other stuff than that, but, like, it's gonna save your employees 4:4 seconds of time so that they're gonna be able to automatically analyze meetings and stuff, and, therefore, your company will get value out of them.
Jason:And then there's, like, the fact that a small number or a large number of people can use it to create infinite pieces of shit that flood everything and, like, ruin the Internet. And that is neither, like, that doesn't fall into the shitty and fake side of things or the, like, real and good and gonna change the world side of things. It's like all of those things that, as Edward sort of mentions, with an emphasis on, like, fucking things up, I feel.
Emanuel:It's also like it's the thing that's not discussed because it's like I find it very interesting. I find it the most interesting because it's real and it's bizarre. But it's, like, it's not this utopia and dystopian thing. It's just, like, was it is it shrimp Jesus that became, like, the word of the year or something like this?
Jason:Like Slop.
Emanuel:Slop. AI slop. And it's just like, that is, like, the accurate take because it's like that's the majority of the output. It's like we can have these big ideas about AGI and all that, but it's like when you look at what is actually happening, it's like overwhelmingly the result of this technology has just been slopped, which is like an overused term at this point, but it's like it's just true. It's just what is happening.
Emanuel:It's like Casey Neughan, Gary Marcus can, like, talk about all this stuff as much as they want, but it's like, what is actually happening? It's just like ugly images on on Facebook.
Jason:Yeah. I have one more thing I wanna say, and then I I wanna hear what Sam thinks or just, like, I'll stop dominating convo. But when we were at Vice, like, right before we left Vice, Nancy Dubuc, who was our CEO, asked me to make a presentation about AI for the board members, more or less, and then she was fired before I could give the presentation. And I pulled it up, and the first thing the first slide that I have is generative AI and the fact that AI is not only generative AI. And I think the fact that Casey does this in his piece, like, sort of mixes machine learning with, like, algorithms with AI, with generative AI, it's it really muddies the water.
Jason:It makes it very difficult to have a conversation about these things because we've been covering artificial intelligence for a decade. Artificial intelligence is here in many, many ways. It's changed the world in many, many ways. It's clearly real in many, many ways. And then the next slide, I have examples of that.
Jason:And I have social media algorithms, self driving cars, facial recognition, criminal justice algorithms, drug generation and disease diagnosis, labor, robots, worker surveillance, customer service and language processing, smartphone cameras hallucinating, like, if you take a picture of the moon. You're not really taking a picture of the moon that you're just, like, telling an algorithm to generate something there. Deepfakes, scams, malware, nonconsensual porn, high frequency trading, and, like, lots of other things. And these have changed the world in many, many, many ways. But when people talk about AI, it's all kind of just, like, lumped together, and I think that that is, like, super harmful.
Jason:Like, you kind of need to be specific about what you're talking about because AI machine learning have changed the world in many, many ways that we've been reporting on for a long time. It's just a question of whether, like, this specific generative AI tool is going to lead to a superintelligence or, like, lead to everyone losing their jobs. And I think that that has been a little bit lost in the debate. And Casey even says, like, I'm only gonna talk about generative AI, and then he lists a bunch of stuff that is not generative AI that's, like, more traditional machine learning and things like that, and that's been part of this whole thing. But, anyway
Joseph:So I have multiple Yeah.
Sam:I mean, that's kind of, like, what you're talking about with, like, being told to make a presentation for an executive at a company that is scrambling to stay relevant or become profitable or dig itself out of a hole in general, I think is kind of the the heart of what's happening with AI as, like, a marketing term. Because in the last few years, it has become a marketing term. It's this idea that's not even it's like you said. It's not even we're not even talking about machine learning, machine vision, versus, like, actual, like, what is AI. It's become a thing that you can slap onto products or slap onto your company and hope that it fixes whatever is wrong with what's going on.
Sam:And I think in that way, it is a lot like the metaverse and NFTs, and all this stuff that gets hyped. It has hype cycles. But because there's a separate thing happening, which is, like, machine learning is changing the world, like you said, and you're using it all the time every day without knowing that you're interacting with, like, quote, unquote, AI. You don't really know that you're using AI, whatever that is meant to mean, until you have one of those stupid little, like, sparkle emoji things come up in your face that says, like, would you like to rephrase that, like, notepad entry? It's like, fuck off.
Sam:And I think people have a strong reaction to being advertised to, and they know that they're being advertised to all the time in products that they already pay for. It's like I don't need that feature in my Word document or anywhere or in my text field when I'm just, like, writing a text. I think that's part of, like, where this has come from is these 2 things are happening at the same time where, like, executives are saying we need to stay relevant. We need to make money. We need to strike these deals with these companies that are, profiting off of our content or whatever it is.
Sam:And at the same time, it's like users are getting hit with this garbage all the time, and they know it's garbage, and they're sick of it. And those things coming up together becomes, like, a versus situation. And then you have these conversations going on that are I mean, I don't know. Like, I don't wanna speak too directly about, like, anyone's, like, journalism, but there is a real profit motive to starting a conversation that at its heart is controversial and kinda stupid. And, like, getting everyone to share your Subsack article probably is a good way to I don't know how subs Subsack, like, rev share works, honestly, but, like, it certainly gets people to subscribe if they relate to what you're saying about AI because AI has become this identity thing.
Sam:It's like being against AI is an identity. Being for AI is an identity, and there's not a lot of in between that's that people talk about, but most people probably feel. It's just like I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion about it. I I think it's something that's, like, in the future is probably what a lot of people think about it.
Jason:Yeah. The this is another part of the presentation that I gave because the entire point of the presentation was, like, how do we how do we, Vice, use AI to become relevant again and to, like, dig us ourselves out of this hole and, like, blah blah blah. And it was never like, hey. We're gonna replace all the reporters. They just, like, ended up firing them anyway.
Jason:But in that presentation, I had a whole slide that says we're already using AI. It's like anyone who has a job anywhere in any sort of creative field is using artificial intelligence, whether they know it or not, as sort of like table stakes to remain relevant in their job. And what I mean by that is, like, the the optimization of, like, Vice can be a better or, like, any journalist can be a better, more productive journalist if they use AI has already occurred, and it's occurred, like, long ago. And the examples were Descript. Like, we're using Riverside right now to record this.
Jason:Riverside is a podcast tool that does a lot of the, like, editing process for us, sort of. It's like we have it can, at least. We're recording this with our podcast producer and editor, and, she's made it, like, way, way better. It's kinda trash, but, like, if you're putting together a really, like, a narrative podcast and you need to transcribe everything and, like, cut selects and stuff, which is how narrative podcasts are made, you might do it in Riverside. Like, you might do a lot of that work in Riverside.
Jason:You're not hand transcribing, which we all used to do. Otter dotai is another one that, like, a lot of journalists use where you're like, we we used to just transcribe every single interview we did by hand, and I used to just type very fast when I was on the phone with people. And I've stopped doing that, and I now just, like, have a robot transcribe it for me, and I listen back to it and make sure that everything is accurate. But it's like, that saves me hours and hours and hours and hours. As an editor at VICE, reporters used to say, hey.
Jason:I'm doing this feature. I'm just gonna transcribe today and tomorrow. And I'd be like, cool. Like, you're just gonna type, like, all day, and it took forever. There's auto generated subtitles on, like, social media things and on YouTube transcripts.
Jason:There's translation. Like, Google Translate is really good now, and it changes how we report.
Sam:But even with these, like, I like, someone corrected me on this recently, and so I and I didn't actually go further with it to find out, but I totally should have. But, like, I wanna hear what you guys think. It's like those like, is transcription AI even? Like, is that speech synthesis or is that AI? Like, is is speech to text actually generative AI?
Sam:Is it it's definitely, like, machine learning maybe. I mean, like or, like, it's like, where are these where do these things land in this spectrum of, like, AI as a word? It's not creating something new. You know?
Jason:I I think I know we just had a conversation about how this is important, but I think it doesn't matter that much in terms of, like, when you're just, like Yeah. I can save 5 minutes doing this, and it doesn't matter.
Sam:But I robots is, like, the overcharging kind of it's, like, we've talked about robots a couple of times. It's like, well, I get a robot to do that. Like, people kinda consider that AI now, which is interesting. And AI has become this thing that people feel strongly about. But I use AI.
Sam:I use AI the other day for I use it all the time, but, like, I use it specifically to, like, find a shirt that I liked with Google Lens. Like, that's that's machine vision.
Emanuel:I use it to Where
Sam:is it in AI?
Joseph:I use it to take photos of my food and automatically calculate the nutritional content.
Jason:Right.
Emanuel:That's not why that's good at data.
Joseph:I know. I mean, I've been fine
Sam:just eats chickpeas. So he's like, here's
Joseph:a Chickpeas.
Sam:For reference.
Joseph:There you go. That's it. Just give my Sorry.
Sam:I didn't mean to interrupt you, Jason, but that was something I thought of because it's like this it's also confusing.
Jason:I think you're absolutely correct, and I I just I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I I would argue that, like, a lot of the translation stuff is then used for generative AI
Sam:stuff in some way. It's getting fed into, like, AI datasets.
Jason:Yeah. And it's like, you can also now, I mean, I would consider 11 Labs, for example, which does, you know, like, voices and translation and things like that to be generative AI. Yeah. For sure. 11 Labs also does translation for that, and it's like there's a mix of just, like, generative stuff and not generative stuff, like the actual translation of it.
Jason:I don't know. It's like I I think that they're I think, inquiring minds could disagree on where the line is.
Sam:I'm sure that our listeners who are way smarter than me on a good day will let us know.
Joseph:I'm sure. And I hope so. Let's leave that there because we have another conversation we want to do, which is more about what's happened in media and journalism over, the past year, you know, in regards to our own publication, but, obviously, many others as well, big and small. We'll be right back after this. Alright.
Joseph:And we are back, to talk a little bit about journalism and I suppose sort of the business of media. We launched shit. How long now? 12, 30, blah blah blah blah. 14 months, 15 months, something like that.
Joseph:There's been a lot. And we came, obviously well, not obviously, for maybe people who don't know. The, slow bankruptcy of Vice Media and the technology section of that core motherboards, and then we leave, and then we make this. There's been many other smaller, independent media outlets as well, you know, Hellgate and then a massive one, Defector. Then you have Remap also from Vice.
Joseph:You have Aftermath who also, cover games. I think, Jason, the first thing you have here is just, you know, the real collapse of finding readers. What do you what do you mean about what do you mean by that and how does that apply to us and others?
Jason:Yeah. I think that for the last several decades, it's like, let's say you wanna find let's say you wanna get traffic, which was the goal of pretty much every media company that has really ever existed on the Internet for a long time. And it was like you try to get people to read your stuff via Google by having search engine optimized articles, and you try to get people to to read your stuff via Facebook. And then Facebook obviously, like, kind of died as a traffic refer several years ago, but Twitter kind of, you know, replaced that in in many ways, and Twitter was always a place where it never drove, like, tons of traffic necessarily, but it served as it had a very, like, influential readership and user base that would then kind of, like, push the articles everywhere else. And the way that you got traffic on the Internet was not, like, a mystery, really.
Jason:It's like you hit you won the Google lottery by getting to the top of a Google search result or getting on Google News. You won a social media lottery by doing something that was shared very virally on Twitter, or Facebook, and then you, like, collected pennies of ad revenue. Like, that was pretty much the model. And that model collapsed a few years ago. The the ad model collapsed first where, you know, you were getting fewer and fewer pennies per page view, and then that sort of led to the bankruptcy advice and led to really bad outcomes for, like, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post and, you know, Vox is still around, but, like, many, many, many new media startups sort of, like, died, or became shells of what they once were.
Jason:But now, like, really, it's not clear how you get a big audience. And, increasingly, I would argue it doesn't even matter. Like, you don't need to get as large of an audience as you once did because what has happened is Twitter has become a disaster. It doesn't drive nearly as much attention as it once did unless you are sort of, like, actively trying to be a, like, right wing Elon Musk signaling,
Joseph:like, a or something. Yeah.
Jason:Yeah. And then it's like threads is a mess. Also, blue sky is exciting and interesting, but it's also very new. And then Google has gotten way less useful because Google, first of all, is filled with, like, affiliate marketing links and just, like, all these little boxes that try to keep you on Google, like the knowledge panels and all of that. But then there's also the artificial intelligence answers at the top, which we've talked about before, but and which went away for a while because it was just giving incorrect information all the time, but which are now back and which I would argue probably are still quite bad, but, are there.
Jason:And, like, there's not the the backlash to them that there was because people can only stay mad for so long. And so it's, like, a lot harder to build an audience. And I think I'll be very honest with you. I think we launched at a very good time because when we launched, Twitter had not yet fully collapsed. And I think that we were able to get sort of, like, a first, round of readers just by doing the same, like, I'll tweet my story, and that's it.
Jason:But even just in the in this year, it's like it the Internet has become a much more fractured, siloed place. So I guess let's let's start there maybe. Like, we've been able to get an audience, but I think the way that you do that has changed significantly.
Joseph:Yeah. I'm most worries for well, on one side of the spectrum, you have sites like ours, which are, look, to be real, we we we grow steadily and we wanna grow sustainably and responsibly, but we're niche. You know? There was a really good interview on Decoder, Nilay Patel's podcast. And it was about how, you know, you have these outlets which are basically for nerds, which I took as a compliment.
Joseph:And I think we were actually mentioned in the same breath or at least a a couple of seconds late later or before. But you you have these very niche publications which are serving to a smaller, more dedicated audience. And then you'll have the ones on the far, far other end of the spectrum like The New York Times, which is basically a tech
Jason:company now with a newspaper attached
Joseph:to where they're just, you know, buying Wordle and attached to where they're just, you know, buying Wordle and really developing their products all over on that side. I'm worried about the ones in between. LA Times, you know, where they're losing their staff and all of that sort of thing. And then we have a billionaire owner who's saying we're gonna put an AI powered bias meter into our articles. It's like really, really crazy shit.
Joseph:The Buzzfeeds as well where you have it was one of the best investigations teams in the entire business. What do you have, to replace that with when it's either just one or the other? And I think you're right in that. How do you even go about building an audience that can grow to that size if all of these traditional or at least the distribution models that you relied on and you understood how they worked when they're all falling around you? I mean, our idea that, what our solution that we've we go on and on about is that we heavily emphasize email.
Joseph:Right? That we we wanna bypass all of these platforms in case they do fall apart. And we just have this email list of people who want to give it to us and opt in to receive our articles, and that sort of thing. And who knows? You know, maybe years down the line, we could grow into a more of a medium sized media outlet.
Joseph:I have no idea if that's possible. I don't even know if we want that. Right? But, there hasn't been an example of that happening. I mean, except Defector.
Joseph:How big is Defector now, Jason, off the top of your head?
Jason:It's like 40,000 paid subscribers, but they have probably 25 employees, something like that.
Joseph:That's a lot. That's a lot.
Jason:It is a lot. Yeah. But, like, I I've mentioned this on some of the podcasts that I've been on where they've sort of talked to me, and it's like, we've created 4 journalism jobs, and there have been thousands and thousands of journalism jobs lost, especially at the local news level. And I think that's really scary. That's still not a solved problem.
Jason:But I do think that the the, quote, unquote, market can support many, many more of us, like, many, many more 404 medias if you're in a specific niche, the tools to do it have gotten a lot easier, a lot more, like, off the shelf accessible, and the economics of it are not so crazy that, it's like, can you get a a 1,000 or a couple thousand people to pay for what you're doing? And I think that that is doable for a lot of people, a lot of journalists, but I think the way you do that, it it has to be or at least the way that we've found it to work is you have to be doing, like, original reporting. You have to be getting original scoops that you cannot find elsewhere because for a while, you could just, like, aggregate other people's work and hope that your version of the story got read very widely. That's, like, not I don't think that works anymore. Maybe there's some version of it where it still works if you're, like, the Daily Mail because you're just, like you have hundreds of journalists or writers doing it.
Joseph:And, well, in tech websites still do it. You'll have, you know, the Gizmodos and the Mashable and all of that. And sometimes they do do, good original reporting as well. And sometimes the aggregations actually add, you know, a little bit of new insight, but they're still very much doing that model unlike we did the Muffleboard sometimes. I don't think to the same extent.
Joseph:Right? But, you know, if a report came out and somebody already covered it, maybe we would quickly hit it. But we just don't do that anymore because why why would someone come and give us money if they can just go read it elsewhere? As you say, we you need original stuff to actually provide people
Jason:You wanna be the ones getting aggregated at this point, or you wanna be the one who like, there's newsletters out there. You want that newsletter writer to include your article in it. And I think that that is what has really worked for us as far as growing our audience is that people are saying, well, you can come to 404 Media, and you'll find stories that you cannot find anywhere else. And I think that's that's a whole different skill set than a lot of places have been training their journalists for the last decade. Like, there are many, many places, like, I see you have on here, the Messenger, which is, like, a disaster of a website that was they they leaned really hard into, like, we're just gonna aggregate stuff.
Jason:We're just gonna, like, see what other people are doing, and then we're gonna write a 300 word version of it, like, over and over and over again, and it failed within a few months last year.
Joseph:And they hired aggressively. Dozens upon dozens of journalists for very high paying jobs. You know, I think I got pitched at one point, and then it's like yeah. It just I mean, I'm not gonna pretend, oh, I I knew that was gonna happen. I know it did.
Joseph:I wasn't really thinking about the business there, but they were trying to do a very, very old model in a time where it's like, you can't do this anymore.
Jason:Right. And there there are people who work there. There were some people, like, when that shutdown said, like, I worked here for 8 months. I I wrote 300 articles, and I'm not proud of a single one of them. Like, I didn't do any original reporting, and therefore, I don't have the skills to do it.
Jason:You know, anyone can do it if if they sort of are taught how to do it and get the opportunity to, like, learn how to do reporting and stuff like that, but a lot of these media outlets that have failed in the middle didn't do a lot of original reporting. I mean, many of them did, but a lot of them did not. And I think that is that's bad. That's, like, a bad sitch.
Joseph:Yeah. You've also got here human create curation that cuts through the noise. Like, what what what do you mean by that? Are you referring to, like, newsletters that can provide value? What because because it's almost different, you know, on what you might have aggregators who will just quickly aggregate a new story.
Joseph:Then you have newsletters who really keep tabs on so many different sites and other newsletters potentially around the web all at once and then pick out what really matters and provide value that way. Is that what you mean? Like, what do you mean by Yeah.
Jason:I mean, I don't know for a peak newsletter. There's, like, tons and tons and tons of newsletters, but I think that as it becomes harder to wade through Twitter or to wade through Blue Sky or or Google, people are relying on influencers that they trust, like, you know, God forbid, like YouTubers, Twitch streamers, Instagram, accounts, and TikTokers that they they're like, I like what they post, so I'm gonna follow them. And and I like their perspective, so I'm gonna follow them. Like, that's something that we've seen. I think that we have not done that much on those platforms.
Jason:Like, we we've started doing more recently, but I think part of the reason we have this podcast is is it's a different medium and a different way of talking about our stories. But, when when it comes to, like, curating stuff, I think it could be newsletters where it's like, I can't find shit on Google. I don't have time to doom scroll through Twitter all day. So I'm just gonna read this one tech newsletter that has 20 good links in it, and I'll click what I want to. There's a there's a newsletter called 14:40 that Sam is a huge fan of, number one fan, that
Sam:Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Jason:That you said that. You said that.
Sam:I like them. I read them.
Jason:Yeah. That's just like, here's a couple links, and there's, like, not that much information about it, and they have, like, 4,000,000 subscribers. I haven't read that much 14:40, so I don't know if it's good or bad, really.
Joseph:But
Sam:It's just very straightforward. It's just like it's not there's not a lot of angle opinion type anything happening. It's also like you said, it's just short. It's almost like an RSS feed. It's like that short.
Sam:It's really just like the headline and then, like, a little tiny glurb about what's going on, which I appreciate because the Internet is busy.
Jason:Return of RSS is is has happened as well. Sam, you're you're you're back on RSS in a big way.
Sam:Kinda back. It's not a big way. I'm like, I'm I struggle to find a good a good RSS reader, honestly. I think they're all a little bit bad, or I'm using them wrong. But, like, Feedly is I struggle with Feedly, and inner reader, I cannot figure out.
Sam:But, yeah, I mean, that's that's what I want, though. I want that sort of way of, consuming, for lack of a better word, like, what's going on in the Internet because everything else is just so overwhelming right now.
Joseph:Why why do you want it in RSS because you can is it that it's presented in a much more clean way? You don't have to go out and, like, search and keep scrolling through Twitter? Like, why do you want your news like that?
Sam:I mean, it's like the like, consuming it on social media has always been really bad. It's, like, bad idea always. But, like, lately, it's just like, everyone is trying to get everyone else whipped up all the time, and I am exhausted by it. So just having the information just straightforwardly put in front of my face and let me figure out how to think about it would be my preferred mode of, like, consuming the news. Short of, like, if I really if I wasn't doing this for a living, I would just be, like, one of those people who reads the paper, one of those people.
Sam:Like, just, like, get get the newsletter get the newsletter the newspaper delivered once a day, read whatever is, like, on it, and then put it down. Sounds nice. So I'm trying to get closer to that.
Joseph:Here is a human curated list of stories that we think are important from our mastheads. It's basically human curation, obviously, just making a tutorial decision on what stories are important, and you're delegating the picking of it to to the paper, basically.
Sam:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's always an angle, obviously. There's always like, even, like, 14:40, I'm sure has they pick and choose what they're gonna show me in any given newsletter too. So it's not like it's totally, you know, unbiased or whatever.
Sam:But yeah. I don't know. It's, like, it's all just so scrambled up right now. Maybe we should do one. Maybe we should do a newsletter like that.
Jason:We should.
Joseph:We should. Well, we're we're
Jason:I have an idea for it. It and I think it's really good. I don't know if the technology exists to do it yet, but I think it's very good idea. I'll tell you later.
Joseph:Yeah. Maybe not right now.
Sam:A little bit of foreshadowing.
Joseph:Yes. But you mentioned RSS, and I think that just brings to something I just wanted to just mention because I think it's interesting in that. The Verge, you know, very long running technology news website that we often have crossed paths with, over the years with, you know, former colleagues going to work there, etcetera, etcetera. They've put up a a paywall, now on a ton of their coverage. Also, I'm pretty sure if you pay you get access to the RSS feeds, which is very similar to ours.
Joseph:Right? You know, the vast majority of the content on our website is payables. And, if you wanna use an RSS feed, you're gonna have to get one that bypasses the payable, obviously, and you get that once you pay. They're just doing something similar. I just think it's interesting, and I wish them, obviously, all the best of luck doing it.
Joseph:I will be watching very, very closely how successful it will be for them. Obviously, I have no inside knowledge and only gonna understand and see what they share publicly. But I look at something like TechCrunch, you know, which is very much a industry leaning publication. They had a subscription product, kinda like an insider sort of thing. And I think they sunset that eventually.
Joseph:I think though I I was actually at an event where TechCrunch spoke, I think, the head of it, and they mentioned that, you know, it was good, but maybe not as successful as it as it could have been or perhaps should have been. So that didn't happen. I wonder if The Virges will keep going. No idea. Again, wish them all the best of luck.
Joseph:I just find it interesting, sort of in the same way they were talking about. On one side, you have the tiny publications like ours, then you have the big ones, right on the other side. Though those people in the middle, I think it can be really, really hard to launch a paywall or a subscription product when you haven't done for so so long, which is why we had the benefit of, like, basically starting fresh. And immediately, we're like, we need your subscriptions. You know?
Joseph:And this isn't I'm not saying this is the case with, The Verge, but say something like Vice. And if you go to Vice, you can sometimes see, at the moment, they're asking for subscriptions. There's a difference between giving $10 a month to us because there's our 4 faces here on this podcast, and it's literally going to us. Right? And then we're the ones who are choosing what to to do with it and to hire people and maybe invest in new projects and build the RSS feed, that sort of thing.
Joseph:That is so different to giving $10 to a faceless corporation, and you have no idea where that money is going. And I just don't know how successful a company like Vice, for example, is gonna be turning on a subscription. You know? And I definitely think more people are gonna do more companies are gonna try, though. Crucially, not more people.
Joseph:More companies are gonna try it.
Jason:This is a very interesting thing about Waypoint Plus and Remap Radio. So Waypoint was Vice's video game section that had a really dedicated podcast listenership and community and readership, and I managed them along with the manual eventually. They they started off as their own thing. And there was a long period of time where Vice was like, how what are we gonna do with this with these people? Because they have this, like, really dedicated audience, but they don't have, like, a huge mass audience.
Jason:And we decided to launch Waypoint Plus, which is a subscription product. And we launched it, and their their community supported them. Like, thousands of people subscribed to them. And that was nominally supposed to, like, protect their jobs, etcetera. But, like, I don't really know how or what to say here, but it's like, it was successful, but that success didn't really, like, come back to Rob and Patrick and Cotto in the form of money.
Jason:It came back to them in the form of, like, they didn't get fired for longer than they probably would have. Like, they they kept their job their jobs longer than they would have been able to if Waypoint Plus did not exist. But, like, let's say it was a wildly successful thing where they were bringing in, like, 1,000,000 of dollars. There was no, like, plan to, like, pass that money onto them in some way. And it I guess it just so happened that, you know, they brought in enough money to, like, sort of keep it, like, more or less sustainable for a little while.
Jason:But, eventually, they were able to spin it off into their own thing called Remap Radio, which you should go listen to and subscribe to and support. But it's like every new subscriber that they're getting, every recurring subscriber that that they're getting is going directly to them, and that is, like, so much better for them than the setup that they had at Vyze even though as their manager, it's like I went into it trying to to make it as, like, equitable for them as possible. But I I do think that subscriptions have been a part of the media forever. They're they've come back. They're gonna continue to be the New York Times has subscribers, like, obviously, like, all of these publications have subscribers.
Jason:The question is just, like, when you have someone who's very good at what they do and who drives a lot of subscribers, it's like, how are they compensated? How does that work? Emmanuel, it looks like you were gonna say something.
Emanuel:I mean, I don't know what to say about the Verge's subscription product either other than, like, many talented people work there and good luck. It's like, I hope that the people who are creating the value at that company, get to keep their jobs and are rewarded for building a subscription business if that if that's what they are doing. But, yeah, I guess just to repeat what Jason said, I do know what to say about our own subscription, which is every single dollar that you send us, we all see it and we all decide what to do with it. And I think that's why people are supporting us and why they supported, like, all these other people on Substack. Like, intuitively, I think it makes a lot of sense to readers to be like, okay.
Emanuel:There's one person behind the Substack or there's 4 people behind 44 Media, and I like their reporting, and I trust what they are doing. So I am putting money in their pockets so they can decide what to do with it, which is exactly what we're doing. We had a conversation about doing a subscription business for motherboard and for Vice back when we were there. And I think the reason that it worked for Waypoint is because, by their nature and by their design, they very much built their own sub brand that had its own identity and that people really identified with, and that's why people, subscribe by but they did that by overcoming the fact that they were working for a large corporation. And we when we were talking about doing it from motherboard or for doing it for vice, we were like, there's no way.
Emanuel:Like, there's no way that we can make some pitch to our readers to be like, hey. We know that you know that there's, like, a bunch of executives getting paid 1,000,000 of dollars above us. Why don't you give them money so we can keep our jobs for another 16 months or something? You know what I mean? It's like, that's not a good pitch.
Emanuel:No. You know? And that's why we never never even, like, attempted to make it. This pitch makes a lot more sense, and thank you again for for for subscribing.
Joseph:Yeah. I guess, it's just last thing I'll say before we wrap up is, like, I was gonna mention sort of influences and that sort of thing. And I don't just mean, like, oh, stereotypical Instagram influencers selling whatever niche they have. I mean, more what Emmanuel was getting at. You have all these people with individual sub stacks.
Joseph:You have these people with smaller outlets like ourselves. And it's something I've had to sort of come to terms with over the past year and a half or whatever. But elements of our branding do represent influencers in some sort of way. We're very serious journalists who do a lot of really serious, hard, difficult, impactful work. But there there is some sort of crossover there.
Joseph:I wouldn't call us influencers. I would still call us journalists, obviously. But we have to have our faces out there, literally, which is very, you know, very weird for me as a very, privacy centered person. People are, as you say, among us, sort of buying into the brand. And when it's a substack, maybe they're like I don't know.
Joseph:They have a lot of opinions that you agree with or maybe they provide actual interesting analysis or maybe sometimes they just have, like, a really strong voice. I don't know if this is necessarily true or not, but if I had to say I had a brand, and I'm only talking for myself, just just personally. It's like, if my brand would be like, well, he's just a very, middle of the road journalist. That's, like, almost the anti brand of it. Like, I don't have a voice.
Joseph:I'm very, very oh, no. You can't do that. Wagging my fingers, trying to be an ethical journalist or whatever to the point where it almost becomes a little bit of a caricature and actually does become a brand, weirdly, in and of itself. But as you say, people want to support individuals or small groups of people. And I say that both as somebody who is running this business with all of you and as somebody who subscribes to a ton of independent media.
Joseph:Because when I go and send money to somebody, I know it's going to them and it's not going to some faceless corporation. You know? And, again, that middle ground of these middle, size newsrooms, I don't know whether they have the benefit of that.
Jason:I'm trying to become an Instagram influencer Sure. Sharing our work on my own Instagram page. Not successful so far.
Joseph:Alright. Okay.
Jason:But you can find me on Instagram. Please follow.
Joseph:Yeah. Sure. Alright. How about we'll leave that there? As I said, this was a pretty different, episode.
Joseph:Hope you enjoyed it. We'll be back in the new year, obviously, with a ton of original reporting and scoops and all of that. So with that
Jason:Happy new year.
Joseph:Happy new year. And I'll play us out. Like, I didn't do the intro, but I feel like I should do the outro. So I'm just gonna do that real quick. As a reminder, 404 Media is Joonas founded and supported by subscribers.
Joseph:If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.c0. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about the bonus story each week, not this week, though. This podcast is made a partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a 5 star rating and review for the podcast.
Joseph:That stuff really helps us out. This has been 4 of 4 Media. We'll see you again next week slash next year.