Vol. 5, Issue 8: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

The Real Cost of Cheap Attention

As I’ve said before, I grew up in Rockland County, NY.*

*I was there for the first time in a while this past week when I had lunch with my parents in Nyack and Nyack is probably one of the very few places in Rockland that has retained anything resembling what it was like to live there when I was young. I also had a really good meal at the Art Cafe.

Rockland County was probably more interesting than I give it credit for generally, but broadly speaking, it’s a pretty unremarkable suburb of New York City. It had cute little towns and it had good schools and bad schools. It had diversity and some arts and culture. It was, in a word, ordinary.

It also had a local newspaper.

Back then, it was the Rockland Journal News*. It’s still served by what I would call a shell of that paper. It’s now the Journal News, having merged with the Westchester version of the paper when the economics of local news (like the economics of basically local anything) became untenable.

*I know everyone thinks they have the best local sports section, but I cannot stress how amazing the Journal News sports section was. They had the best local, regional and national sports coverage possible about every team and I’m not sure how they did it. I wore out that section every day of my childhood

That’s what we’re here to talk about today. The slow, agonizing decline of independent and local journalism and the role that advertising and content investment plays in that decline and (ideally) the potential revitalization of the discipline.

And the first thing we’re going to do is be honest with ourselves as a group. Especially on LinkedIn, I see a lot of self-aggrandizing posts about how someone’s tech platform or technology is busy supporting the growth and nourishment of independent and fair journalism or (far more often) the Open Internet™*. I don’t believe this to be a lie on its face.

*Related but not relevant, I want to start an open internet-based band. It’s either going to be called The Public Domain or Cache Me Outside and we’re looking for a bass player at a minimum right now. Inquire within

But I do think that there’s a difference between supporting journalism in theory and on professional social media and funding it in practice. The very clear reality is that there’s a misalignment between the incentives* of the advertising, media and technology ecosystem and the actual dedication to the funding of journalism.

*I feel like with everything I think about today, misaligned incentives are at the core of the issue

Ad tech runs on optimization, things like efficiency, scale and outcomes. That’s reasonable. The non-specific goal of advertising is to sell more stuff. That’s not really the issue. The economy generally runs on selling stuff. The issue is that the optimization that ad tech runs on rewards attention that is cheap, scalable and targetable. The important nuance to all this is that it’s not about bad actors or intent* necessarily. It’s about how incentives express themselves.

*Although there’s plenty of that if you know where to look

It’s not a bug. The system is doing what it’s designed to do.

And because it’s doing what it’s designed to do, two different things are happening:

You don’t need to look further than the flow of ad spend to see a massive imbalance and issue. For every dollar of digital ad spend that’s pumped through the machine, Meta, Google, Amazon and TikTok get 80-ish cents. Most of the rest goes to large, consolidated media ecosystems like enormous national content creators.

That’s one thing.

The second thing is that cheap, scalable and targetable attention isn’t really attention at all. It’s reach masquerading as attention. And because people reading local anything are not cheap those eyeballs haven’t been bought through local channels. And because those people aren’t being bought through local channels and are being bought as a reach extension by tech platforms sitting in the middle, they can’t scale. And because they can’t scale, they either shut down (bad) or they get swallowed up by a content conglomerate (probably worse).

This is where it gets a little dicey. Corporations typically have one goal: maximizing profit at the expense of basically anything else. That means a lot of things, but it mostly means that whatever it takes to make profit is fair game, including but not limited to, highly partisan-driven entertainment posing as news, poorly vetted editorial and/or increasingly stunt driven programming.

CBS News is openly partisan media, but ad spend continues to flow through Paramount post-Skydance acquisition despite the editorial integrity of a show like 60 Minutes being degraded and the shuttering of CBS News Radio under the guise of “changing dynamics.”* And the same people now own TikTok and are about to buy CNN. What I’d ask the tech platforms who suggest that they’re funding the open internet and real journalism: are there intentions to do anything about that spend?**

*The actual quote is “a shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service,” which honestly, it’s like a woman who made a living on podcasts has never heard of podcasts

**Or in the immortal words of Public Enemy, you gotta fight the powers that be

I wish that was the only example. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. He could take a fraction of his personal wealth and fund the paper into perpetuity. Instead, leadership slashed the newsroom and editorial staff by 1/3. Something like 30-40% of revenue for the Washington Post comes from advertising. Is there any plan to use spending power to create incentives to protect the newsroom?

Over 100 local newspapers in California shut their doors in 2024 alone. I get a newspaper called The Acorn in my driveway for free every week. It’s news entirely focused on my area, hyper-local, civic-minded, lived-in journalism. It’s not scalable, not optimized and not-programmatic friendly, I’m waiting for the day that it stops coming because they can’t afford to print it anymore. It’s not like there aren’t alternatives either. As a for instance, a company like Flytedesk captures the same engaged audiences online as TikTok (an evergreen 18-25) through small, independent campus newspapers and other campus outlets that are a haven for free speech and debate and have a meaningful impact on campus life. But massive investment continues to flow to Google, TikTok, Meta and Amazon.

I hear “we support the open internet and local, independent journalism” But what I see if “if you want to understand what we value, don’t listen to what we say, look at where the money goes.”

The system doesn’t need villains*. The system does the work itself. Buyers optimize toward performance. Platforms optimize toward engagement. Publishers compete in that environment. To be clear, there’s no explicit choice, but the outcome is still very real. No one deciding. Everyone reinforcing. Over time, systems tell the truth that narratives try to soften.

*Remember the Rogue’s Gallery of Villains from the Justice League of America? No point, just asking.

What if we actually meant what we said when we said we want to fund real journalism? How would that actually work?

There’s an obvious place to start and that’s by shifting the narrative. We need to stop asking “did this campaign work?” and start asking “what did this campaign fund?” That requires no new pipes, no new integrations, no new systems or platforms. It only requires reallocations, even small ones matter. $50,000 isn’t meaningful to Google, but I can promise you it’s meaningful to any one of the multitude of local publications that still exist.

What if we shifted 5-10% of spend toward things like local journalism and independent publishers and verified news environments instead of aggregators who take huge cuts of the spend and conglomerates who swallow it into their bottom line without reinvestment?

We can do that by using the technology that already exists. Leverage PMP and curated marketplace structures to build intentional access to trusted journalistic environments, because that doesn’t just value who sees an ad; it also values where the ad runs. Expand the definition of quality beyond things like viewability and fraud and brand safety and introduce additional vectors like context and contribution - what does this publisher or content partner produce?

Let’s solve some of the internal incentive problems of buyers not being rewarded for supporting journalism by tying KPIs to supply quality and publisher diversity and actual allocation to real journalism.

Let’s be actually transparent either through a report or an industry body so we can expand our understanding the percent of spend that goes to platforms vs. publishers, but also have a sense of how much goes to actual journalism vs. things that pose as such. Maybe a “media impact report” that shows the real direction of spend, publicly for all to see.

More than anything, we have to accept the tradeoff. This may reduce short-term efficiency, but it supports long-term ecosystem health. And if we’re unwilling to trade a few points for truth, then we’ve already made the decision.

If we’re not willing to fund journalism, we should stop saying that we do.

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With everything going on, I’ve really leaned back on the things that fill my cup. Writing, volunteering, time with my kids. Sometimes, finding the joy in the small things helps you get through the big ones. I hope you can find the small joys as well.

That’s all for this week. Until next time, friends.