Attention Economy

Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.

I started my “information” life typing copy on an ill-tempered Remington. As a teenage reporter, I saw newspapers being typeset, one letter at a time. It was a messy, slow, and laborious process. So I don’t carry romantic notions about the old days. I’ve been quick to embrace any technology that, in Stephen Covey’s words, helps me keep “the main thing the main thing.” The main thing is telling a thoroughly reported, well-written story.

The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”

For the past decade and a half, the whole