The big picture:
Big-dollar news organizations spend their big dollars recycling press releases into bite-sized formulas.
Why it matters:
The news media have traditionally been a check on government and corporate power. As the traditional news media disintegrate, it’s a concern when their replacements depart from the “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” model, and it’s an open question what their replacements will be. The traditional nonpartisan media had flaws, but not having them around seems worse.
What’s happening:
A few years ago, we mocked the news organization Axios for running the following story:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled a video of his Boring Company’s underground tunnel that will soon offer Los Angeles commuters an alternative mode of transportation in an effort to escape the notoriously clogged highways of the city.
“Soon” didn’t seem so likely back in 2018, and now that it’s three years later we can safely say that “soon” didn’t happen.
In the years since that post, Axios has run approximately three zillion articles about Tesla (it gets clicks, right?), out of which approximately zero address that in 2018 they reported that the tunnel would be coming soon.
What to watch:
What do people actually read? I think Axios got a bit of attention a few years ago with a splashy launch, but it seems to have a pretty low profile now. Actually, had I not come across that old post, I don’t think I would’ve been able to tell you exactly what Axios was, exactly. I knew it was a news website, but I kinda confused it with Vox and Politico. OK, not confused exactly . . . I know that these are 3 different companies . . . I know that Vox does explainers (I’ve written for them, and I sometimes get questions from their writers) and I know Politico does political news (obv, given the name), but I wouldn’t’ve been able to say anything about Axios except that maybe it’s a kind of cross between Vox and Politico? So maybe it’s already faded and is in a Yahoo!-like zombie state of still having enough money to maintain its internet presence while having no reason for existence other than the hope by its owners that some deep-pocketed investor will decide it holds enough attention-economy real estate to be worth being bought out.
I guess you could say that Axios is a kind of new-model dinosaur, a big-money, unmaneuverable behemoth created from nothing. Instead of taking an old-school media property and extracting all its wealth before it expires (what Henry Hill called a bust-out) or running a healthy company into the ground, they created an instantly obsolete property from scratch.
What they’re saying:
Media critic Glen Runciter said in a statement, “When they said that journalism is like high school, I didn’t realize they were talking about cookie-cutter five-paragraph essays.”
Yes, but:
Axios has raised 30 million dollars, which is either a boatload of money or chump change, depending on what you compare it to.
Go deeper (1 min. read) ->
By labeling Axios as a news organization, the implicit comparison is to something like an old-school newspaper or TV news division. But, looking through Axios’s articles on Tesla, I see a wide range in content and quality. All the Axios articles look the same because they’re all short with bullet points and photos, but a more careful look reveals a mix. The above-linked article is like something from Popular Mechanics (to make a retro reference): breathless gee-whiz reporting aimed at rubes, with not even a show of journalistic objectivity. On the other side, Axios has articles with more critical takes, and in between they have articles which are pretty empty in content and quote both sides. So Axios is more like a bag of articles of different levels of care and quality, all bound by a common “five-paragraph essay” format. In this way, it’s less like a traditional newspaper or magazine and more like an internet address, kind of like what Youtube would be if all their videos looked kinda the same and were all 1 minute long. I’m not talking here about Axios not having a consistent political line; I’m talking about it being agnostic in their articles as to whether they’re gonna include critical analyses or just reheat press releases. (I assume that actual reporting is out of the question; presumably that would cost more than $30 million.)
P.S. This post keeps getting bumped in favor of more topical material. At this point, it’s even money whether Axios will even exist by the time the post actually appears.
It’s been going on for a while.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_(book)
When I first read it, I thought flat earth was just a figure of speech. Since then, there have been some literal flat-earthers…
The Boring Company still exists.
How can you not love a company that (1) sells consumer-friendly flame throwers and (2) names it’s latest tunnel boring machine design Prufrock?
They claim that Prufrock is six times faster than their previous generation machine Godot. No doubt, because Godot was so slow, people always had to wait. They characterize Prufrock’s speed as “still 4-5 times slower than a garden snail…but Prufrock is catching up”.
I tried to track down the original 2018 story. I’m not sure I found it. https://www.axios.com/2018/05/11/elonmusk-shows-off-his-first-boring-tunnel-in-los-angeles#
The story I found seems to have made assertions that go beyond the quoted Musk statements. I could not find a press release, but it seems possible that Axios did more than republish a press release.
In 2018, Musk was referring to their soon-to-be-completed R&D tunnel (1.1 miles long).
If you want to travel in a Boring Company tunnel, go to Los Vegas during a big convention. https://www.pcmag.com/news/tunnel-vision-what-its-like-to-ride-in-elon-musks-vegas-loop.
Bob76
Sorry, I couldn’t continue reading after “Media critic Glen Runciter said…”. Now I just want a link to his statement.
Many Old Media journalists certainly have a taboo against links to original sources unless they are birdsite! I can recall a story where a public figure published a letter of resignation on social media, and all the news articles I could find were summaries and quotes without a link to the full text. So not providing a link was a nice touch in this parody of hastily-written, quicklty-researched journalism.
The name of the “media critic” was an even nicer touch.
Axios’ profile is not that low. At least I get that impression from one of their reporters routinely being on NPR’s 1A
This has long been an issue with Old Media commentators. In one case, a columnist started off saying that Putin would not invade Ukraine because he did not have enough troops and it would trigger massive sanctions and military buildup in the EU, to saying the next week that Putin would clearly conquer the country and suppress all resistance, to saying two weeks later that Putin was doomed. In no case did the columnist acknowledge the mistake or explain how the columnist derived their new view (or fulfill the columnist’s promise to apologize if Putin did actually invade). Old Media columnists just have no incentive to admit when they were wrong or show their work.
I have not noticed any difference in this between “Old Media commentators” and “New Media commentators,” whatever the latter may be.
Well, pretty much anyone can create a social media account or a podcast and start pontificating, whereas the Old Media vet who writes their columns and gets interviewed on camera. When Old Media folks feel hard done by, they complain that Internet and social media figures are not checked for accuracy, but their own record of doing that is not great.
Another typical complaint by Old Media figures in the oughties was that bloggers were not doing original research just regurgitating press releases and other people’s reporting. That complaint also did not age well.
I would agree that there *are* bloggers / New Media people doing excellent work, critiquing themselves, etc. (like our host!), but I am skeptical that this is the norm, that the median New Media person is any better than the Old. There are vastly more of the former than the latter, so one can certainly find examples of high quality “New” stuff.
Raghu, I have been saying something a bit different than what you are answering. Andrew’s original post opens by contrasting “The traditional nonpartisan media” and organizations like Axios. But New Media model their behaviour on the Old Media, and Old Media have often embraced the same unhelpful patterns of behaviour as their broadcast and print revenues shrink. I don’t know this Axios site in particular, but its coverage of Tesla seems misleading in the same ways that Old Media coverage is often misleading.
Was it Tom Friedman?
What ever happened to crusty crime fighting reporters?
“F/8 and be there!”
Axios puts out nearly two dozen newsletters with 2.2 million subscribers. It pulled in $86 million in revenue last year and expects more than $100 million in revenue this year, and they’ve repackaged their “Smart Brevity” article format for corporations who want more employees to open internal communications emails.
I’d love to run that kind of zombie business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/business/media/axios-local.html
Whatever AXIOS was, it’s gotten a lot worse since COX bought it in 2022. Now many of the “news” articles are overt right-wing opinion (“rot of nation’s core values”) or advocacy pieces (e.g., you must trade crypto to really understand and appreciate it). Sheesh.
Anon:
My favorite Axios thing is when you can click on a link that says, “Go deeper (1 min. read).” Finally, a publication that matches my attention span!
I’m looking forward to the next iteration when the links will say, “Go deeper (20 sec. read).” Eventually the articles will reach some sort of asymptote where it won’t be necessary to read the articles at all. They can be written by machine and read by machine, keeping the human out of the loop entirely.