David Ingram has written a thoughtful piece about technology’s role in 2020 — both the good and the bad. He asked me about Zoom and its long term impact on how we live online. I enjoyed the conversation about our collective behavioral shift towards video as the primary communication mode in the future. “We are returning to a model of work-home life that would have been unfamiliar to our parents but completely familiar to our great grandparents,” said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, an author. The final piece is worth a read.
Etc
Given that nearly “half of the media jobs lost this year were in digital, print and broadcast newsrooms,” it is no surprise that many media personalities are running into the arms of Substack. As I told Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo, “They are the great white hope of media right now.”
The upcoming launch of a Substack reader app will make them a direct threat to the always in two minds platisher, Medium. On Twitter, @nickcicero said it best: “Email newsletters are just community-driven blogs with a specific distribution model, meaning platforms need better ways to deliver reliable reach for their creators.”
To be clear, I am rooting for the folks over at Substack — it’s not as if any of the people still in legacy media are doing anything other than complain while they wait for the guillotine. Whatever the future of the media industry is, it is going to be found by startups experimenting with the new and the bold. “As a former media guy,” I told Pompeo, “I would like my industry peers to survive and thrive and do well, and I think Substack shows them the way.”
Read: Why Substack is so hot/ Joe Pompeo, Vanity Fair Magazine.
December 8, 2020. San Francisco