Building on sand

Thursday was a bad day for games journalism. That can hardly be considered news, like with all cultural journalism the decline has been happening for years and layoff announcements have become a constant background noise. But the turmoil at Giant Bomb and especially the sudden end of Polygon should also be a point of reflection for journalism as a whole – unfortunately it won’t.

While we can debate the chicken and egg death spiral plaguing music, games and movie media (Are the audiences dwindling because pay cuts lead to worse reviews or was the pay cut because audiences were dwindling?) and we should heavily invest in finding new ways to make people interested in reviews again (A good review doesn’t just serve as a buying guide, but provides context to what happens in culture and the society in general and is a tool for media literacy.) the true problem begins way earlier: Journalism needs to be treated as the low-margin-business that it is.

It’s no secret that you can’t make huge profits off of good reporting and that you have to have some other income streams to make it work. The New York Times does Games, The Verge has a couple of people dedicated to find good deals and post them with affiliate links. 404 Media sells merch. German newspaper Die Zeit sells cruises for some reason? Doesn’t matter, it’s a level of income that’s separate from the reporting and has no impact on the work the journalists do. It just helps to create a sustainable business.

Don’t fall for the allure of borrowing big numbers

Then there are the hyper-scaling approaches that kill new media companies. Mic’s pivot to video, Buzzfeed’s listicles optimized for Facebook or Polygon’s game guides that show up when you google the solution to the Zelda shrine you can’t figure out. All of these models work great to gain a huge audience in a short time. They are leveraging the scale of billion user platforms to grow as fast as possible, that’s why every investor likes the strategy. They also don’t work. Because the platforms they are built upon don’t care about them and will take all of their scale away in a heartbeat. And then the business is dead, because it was never sustainable to begin with.

The largest problem with these strategies isn’t that staying on top of the platforms is hard. It’s that you’ll never grow your audience. Sure, the numbers go up. The Aftermath mentioned in their most recent podcast episode that some of Polygon’s guides provided so much traffic that they were a meaningful chunk of Vox Media’s overall ad impressions. But as the saying goes: Success hides problems. The traffic was never Polygon’s to begin with. It was Google’s. Nobody searching for a solution cares about who provides it. And if the AI summary spits out the right answer that’s all you need. (Which will lead to nobody writing new guides that AI companies can pirate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

After Mic literally and Buzzfeed figuratively died, you’d think that new media CEOs would realize that these approaches don’t work. That there’s a reason why basically all established brands chose to implement paywalls even though they tanked the readership numbers. A large circulation will get you meetings with new investors. A loyal audience who chooses you over the competition will pay your bills forever. You can’t cut the line. Journalism’s business model works the same as the job itself: Slow and steady wins the race. You don’t need to be first, you need to provide a value to your audience.

Why win when failing is so much better?

Jim Bankoff, CEO of Vox Media, should be fired for what happened to Polygon. Even if you ignore the fact he sold the site to one of the worst companies possible, cost people their jobs on International Worker’s Day and did all that while the union was negotiating for better protections for its members. Bankoff literally owns The Verge, which famously has rebuilt its website to be a destination. Whose editor-in-chief always talks about bracing for the day Google’s traffic will cease exist. He had all the facts, reported by people he employs. And yet he failed to prepare.

There is no secret to successful and sustainable journalism. There’s just doing the work. It’s slow, it’s often very tedious, it won’t make you a billionaire and if you take shortcuts you are going to fail and people will lose their livelihoods.

That’s not some ground-breaking news I just uncovered, everybody knows it’s true. That’s why sites like 404 Media and Aftermath are structured the way they are. That’s why the partly worker owned Spiegel is still successful after all that time. That’s why countries with strong public broadcasters have healthier democracies.

It’s just that the Jim Bankoffs of the world don’t care. They aren’t in it to create sustainable businesses. They’ll just extract every cent right until the house of cards is about to fall. Vice and Buzzfeed weren’t failures for their executives. It’s just the journalists and the people who relied on good reporting who got screwed. Unfortunately for society, good and diverse journalism is kind of important for a fuctioning democracy. Yes, even games journalism. Culture is a reflection of society. But that’s not your problem when you can board a private jet and fuck off to Saint Tropez.