A Millennial News Manifesto: Long Live the Media

Spring is blooming, but I don’t have a summer writing gig I’ve been seeking since leaves fell. Still, I remain rosy. After taking the media entrepreneurship class during Stanford’s faux winter, I am more convinced that media, broadly defined as “the connective tissue of society,” would survive and thrive.

I’m not alone in my bullishness. Two years ago, Silicon Valley icon Marc Andreessen published a news manifesto auguring the news industry would snowball 10-100X within the next two decades. Andreessen put his money where his mouth was, as he injected $50m into Buzzfeed for $850m valuation in 2014. His bet paid off handsomely within a year, as Comcast’s $200m investment doubled Buzzfeed to $1.5bn.

Burdened by elephantine fixed cost in print operation, legacy and local newspapers have been bleeding cash and shedding jobs during the Great Digital Transition. Even at the august New York Times, annual revenues have plummeted from over $3bn a decade ago to $1.58bn last year for a modest net income of $63m. Although the Times is serious about revamping itself as outlined in its leaked innovation report, I doubt they will recuperate sufficiently to offer me a job.

While the Sulzberger family has clung onto their heirloom NYT, the Graham family handed their historic Washington Post to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos for $250m in 2013. The Forbes family followed suit in 2014 by spinning off their billionaire-ranking magazine to a coterie of Hong Kong investors called the Whale Media.

The Wall Street Journal’s Korea Real Time, which offered me my first reporting job during the Brazil World Cup, was discontinued last year. While I was interning at the Financial Times last summer, the salmon-colored paper was acquired by the Japanese media giant Nikkei. My tea-sipping British colleagues greeted me with konnichiwa the morning after the sale.

Do these turnovers signal a red flag for aspiring journalists? If you want to write for a paper newspaper dating back to the 19th century, you’d better be the best muckraker in town. If you don’t mind working for a media startup younger than you, however, opportunities abound.

Edged by Bezos him in snatching the Post, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar pledged matching $250m to First Look Media, poaching Glenn Greenwald of Guardian who reported on Edward Snowden to head the investigative venture. While the two-year-old First Look may be out of league for a budding journalist like me, I hope one of the hip newcomers will scoop me.

And lest you think upstarts only regurgitate and repackage content, Huffington Post and Politico have both won Pulitzers.

The oldest and the richest of the youngsters is $4bn Vice, which kicked off 22 years ago in Montreal as a government-funded counterculture magazine. Since then, Vice has captured the imagination of stags worldwide with its at-your-face gonzo coverage of off-the-beaten-path destinations such as North Korea.

Spawned at MIT’s Media Lab, Buzzfeed has disrupted from the bottom by optimizing the art of distribution. Although you may associate Buzzfeed with listicles and cat photos, it is climbing up the value chain and some of its reporting and essays have become top-notch. I probably will not land a job there though, since its publisher was visibly irritated when I gauchely asked if her: “27 Signs you were raised by Asian Immigrants Parents” compromised the stature of Asians by portraying us as weird, sexually repressed, and not American.

Then there’s the colorful Ozy, whose backers include German media conglomerate Axel Springer and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of the late Steve. Ozy founder Carlos Watson has stated that he sees the current media landscape as history repeating itself, with Vice being the new Maxim, Buzzfeed the new MTV, and Ozy positioning itself as what Time and Wired magazines did in their formative years.

Even if all these startups falter, social media behemoths harvesting distribution dollars and pivoting upstream will be around. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, has launched Medium, a publishing platform pioneering the genre of social journalism. Jostling against Medium is LinkedIn, which has leveraged its 400-million member base to expand into news and blogging. Some of the posts I wrote as a campus editor for LI have garnered more views than my articles at the WSJ and the FT.

In the end, I want to be a journalist because I love to read, chitchat, and write. Although the access and reach of old-school newspapers sold at airports from Australia to Zimbabwe would be marvelous, digital publications are also available around the world and can be more experimental in their content and style.

And if none of the publications I’ve advertised natively here want me, I’ll try knocking on the ivory tower to read, brood, and write.