Silicon Valley’s machines were going to be great for artists, writers, publishers of all stripes. That was the conceit of the long tail, first floated in the last decade; you didn’t have to be a megastar anymore to make it. Turns out it’s still a compelling idea, but only if you read it backwards: Artists, writers, publishers of all stripes are great for the machines.
What’s more, sometimes the tail gets chopped off. On Thursday afternoon came word that SFist, part of the Gothamist network of blogs, was done publishing for good. Just like that, 13 years of local coverage evaporated. The SFist.com site now links to a missive from the parent company’s CEO announcing the closure, and has met a chorus of criticism. (Employees had just voted to unionize. Interesting how that went over.)
Let’s be fair. SFist was never a forward-looking, thought-leading forum of visionary journalism. It was a snapshot into what people in the city were talking about on the Internet — a modern, plugged-in version of the Herb Caen column from the Chronicle’s heydays. Which is to say it was often trivial and irritating. But it was our irritant. Now there’s nothing there, no itch to scratch, and we’re left with this resigned air about how that’s just the way things work in this global digital age.
There’s no need here to gaze at the navel again of how media businesses are struggling. The agonies of advertising rate declines and disintermediation are well known. This time, though, I think there are questions worth considering: Is there any model out there that can sustain quickly scanned, free-to-read, local color, news, and dish? Or was it only a matter of time before the machines did SFist in?
Taking these in reverse order, remember that the long-tail thesis proposed there would be enough oxygen for everybody, not just the premier properties or brands — the oxygen being advertising dollars. That’s been lost on Google and Facebook, because they are sucking all the oxygen out of the ecosystem. Even as tech’s monster firms face increasing scrutiny over how their platforms enable all kinds of shady fuckery, their earnings are ballooning. Facebook in particular is making analysts squeal.
We could say it’s silly to expect that there’d be enough Nacho Wednesday crumbs off the techs’ free-food cafés to sustain a network of local blog sites. Users, after all, are voting with their clicks; they spend on average 20 minutes on Facebook sharing 4.75 billion pieces of content. That’s per day. So scale wins, and those that can’t or don’t crack into the club of a billion eyeballs or shares, well, see about finding your niche. Happy posting!
Demand a pivot
Many communities, especially cities such as San Francisco, benefit from people finding their niche. Our artists and creators and thinkers and builders really get onto something when they go against the grain and break out something different and new. (You might call them innovators.) Having only one game in town, tech, with the means and resources to push, experiment, and produce can be negative, even detrimental when it crowds out or crushes others looking to thrive too. Big Tech’s platforms gobble up creative work and content, monetize it for themselves, and don’t give that much back. Never forget that ultimately we are their product, not the owners, partners, or customers.
Here’s a counterproposal: After years and years of disruption, we’re starting to see a subscription model start to take hold for the national newspapers of record. That’s a start. Yet there are more tiers to news, information, and storytelling than the New York Times or Washington Post. Tech needs to step up and pay publishers a fair share of the money it’s making off everybody’s content. It’s as simple as that, in one line.
If regulators are serious about reining in the companies that move fast and break stuff, they’d be doing right by nudging their capabilities and talents toward developing a broadly topical, relevant, and significant publishing model that has capsized in their wake.
I don’t have the details worked out. Segueing to address my first question, whether there’s a model that can pencil for local or smaller sites, including The Frisc, we are working to figure one out. We’re not about to accept that voices and stories of San Francisco aren’t viable, because that’s not how it works. You shouldn’t accept it either. Spread the word, keep in touch, and I pledge to do the same with you.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus