THREAD
I am writing a much longer piece that addresses this on a larger level, but I want to explain why you should be less worried about the Washington Post collapse than you may think you should be at the moment.
The answer, ironically, can be learned from the far right:
I am writing a much longer piece that addresses this on a larger level, but I want to explain why you should be less worried about the Washington Post collapse than you may think you should be at the moment.
The answer, ironically, can be learned from the far right:
Comments
It may be hard to remember for some, but there was a time when the far right was shut out of almost every legacy media outlet. Not just WashPo but also Fox News.
Once upon a time, Glenn Beck got fired for spreading a Soros conspiracy theory. Wild to think about!
So the far right had to build out an alternate media strategy. Along came the internet and social media. And they were largely cut out of the latter as well.
But the structure of the internet is inherently decentralized, as much as we are used to thinking of some companies dominating it.
They gravitated towards 4chan, the Daily Stormer, chats, etc. They were still marginalized, but it allowed them to step by step build up an alternative media infrastructure outside of the one that existed.
They were pioneers in digital movement building mostly because they were forced to be.
This allowed them then to build strategies for recruiting in coded and less coded ways on mainstream social media. A project that many of us were trying to quash, but in retrospect may have been impossible.
We live in a decentralized world even on centralized platforms.
Since then, things have further fragmented. Podcasts, YouTube, Rumble, Reddit blah blah.
This is, imo, how they won both '16 and '20. But either way, they succeeded because they understood: legacy media is dying precisely because there is no centralized media source any more.
Instead, we have a multiplicity of media that are connected to each other through networks. They built that out, and that may be seen as insidious by many, but really it is just smart marketing.
The left, progressives, and liberals have largely failed in doing the same.
NPR will be defunded next year. It's up to us to build off it like the Right did AM radio.
Experienced reporters need to create video platforms that propagate short-form easily digestible content.
Can we start building alternatives right now and not wait till it's way too late?