Yesterday the media world was rocked by two big stories that came in quick succession: Penske Media, which already owns Variety, Deadline and more entertainment sites and publications announced it was buying IndieWire, the great site that has done a ton to champion independent film and quality entertainment writing over the last two decades. And Univision, the company that manages the largest Spanish-language channel, announced it was buying a controlling stake in The Onion, the satirical news site that started as a print paper in Madison, WI.
There are various real business reasons that both deals happened. Penske obviously wants to create a significant sphere of influence in the entertainment media world and IndieWire is home to some of the biggest writers in the industry right now and has established itself as a great source for news about independent film as well as the movie/TV industries as a whole. The news was tinged a bit by speculation IndieWire’s network of blogs might be shut down and indeed it was announced later by Sam Adams that the Criticwire blog he and Matt Singer produced would not survive the deal. There are a host of others whose fates, unfortunately, remain uncertain as Penske sees how the IndieWire parts fit into his overall machine.
Univision’s acquisition of The Onion is a little harder to parse, though the company has been working on ways to reach a younger audience as its core one ages out of the programming that has been its bread-and-butter for years.
Both deals, though, are examples of how hard it is to keep an independent media organization going in the mid-2010s. Last week the Chicago media company TouchVision TV shut down because it just wasn’t able to make a successful go of it despite putting out some incredible original programming. Indeed in listening to TouchVision’s Justin Allen and Scott Smith on WGN Radio the other night they came *this* close to saying it was *because* they were producing original programming and not playing the same “viral sameness” game other media companies are. And 2015 was plagued by the closures of The Dissolve, Grantland and others that weren’t focused on sharing the same crappy viral stories that originated on Reddit but instead were putting out original, often long-form material.
It’s disappointing that in a world with so many choices people keep making the same one, opting to reward a news site’s three paragraphs of “context” that surrounds the same video of a panda sliding down a hill that appeared on 62 other sites and not the original reporting that’s going on elsewhere. And it’s too bad that media saturation has led to advertising saturation that results in these independent sites not being able to finance their operations sufficiently through advertising while at the same time knowing that asking for premium, paid memberships isn’t a viable option. ScreenJunkies is making a go of that option with their Plus paid subscription that allows for bonus content, as is podcast network Howl, but it’s still early in both cases and both are still heavily ad dependent.
What we’re seeing is a contraction that is the result of a deemphasis on links and content sharing. Let me unpack that:
Blogs, after they came on the scene, were distributed by RSS (an open and free technology to both use and consume) and grew because I linked to you, you linked to this other person and they linked to me, with the whole chain usually starting with a link to The New York Times or some other site that provided both the jumping off point of the case I was trying to make and the proof point for the data I was citing. Google loved the updated information and used recency of post, URL structures, supporting links and more to point people to what it felt was important. But The Blog Age was built on links that were unselfish and free-flowing.
Then the big sites started coming into their own. As they got more traffic they were less willing to share their search ranking and so instead of linking elsewhere to support their current point, they linked back to a previous post on their own site. RSS distribution began to be replaced by social networks. Many of the writers who had launched their own blogs to provide an alternate voice to the mainstream pubs, which were seen as often being unwilling to challenge the major players in the industry they covered, were hired by those pubs. Or they joined sites that had grown so big they were legitimately competing with those publications.
Now we’re seeing the inevitable contraction in the market. All of these sites were playing for the same ad revenue and the sites that either haven’t played the game or haven’t been able to play it as well as others are now feeling the pinch. Some are going under, some are laying off staff but many are running for the cover that could be provided by a bigger company coming in as an owner and protection.
Unfortunately that, combined with the overall decrease in independent blogging that keeps the internet weird, is just going to keep making the problem worse. Cross-linking will dry up even more because the big companies don’t want to send a cent of ad revenue anywhere else. And the surviving sites will gravitate more and more toward the lowest common denominator. And all this happens while we’re busy watching videos of a tiger befriending a goat on a site that used to provide in-depth foreign policy news or quality entertainment analysis.
