Wordle With a Side of Propaganda

A feature story at New York Intelligencer asks, "Can the Media Survive?" 

The long-form story quotes industry experts who outline what's happened to journalism over the last decade and imagine where it's going. One section of the lengthy article—"Everybody Is Jealous of the New York Times"—caught my eye. 

It quotes an anonymous "journalist" who explains, "It’s a tale of two cities. It’s almost like it’s the one percent and the 99 percent." Yeah, no kidding. 

The Intelligencer describes the Times as the "Amazon of legacy media — an everything store for blue-state America’s information needs (and more)." 

“They’ve got Wordle and all the journalism,” says Hamish McKenzie. “Almost all the journalism talent and quality gets sucked up because it’s becoming the megalith, the giant in the room that can’t be stopped.” "Journalism"? Right. 

Anyway, the article continues: 

“They sit on 10 million paid [subscriptions] that’s unlikely to dwindle. That’s just a very powerful base to operate from,” notes one rival editor-in-chief. “They figured it out first — how to make a killing off recipes and games that could sustain the rest of their journalism,” says former CNN boss Jeff Zucker. It’s gotten to the point that, according to one estimate, the Times now employs some 7 percent of newspaper journalists nationwide. “When other people are doing something better, they hire their people away,” says a digital media executive.

Right now, the Times is so far ahead it’s hard to imagine anybody catching up. “There’s a conversation that comes up all the time with people starting or working in journalistic enterprises, which is, ‘What’s going to be our Wordle?’” says Bari Weiss. And can anybody else do that? “Not to pick on the Times, but every answer to success can’t be, ‘Let’s point to the Times,’” says another media executive. “You’re not going to be able to replicate the Times’ success.” Just look at the new supersize app, which combines all of the paper’s many offerings. “It’s like, ‘Our newsroom of 2,000 people is just one of ten things you can be choosing,’” says an editor-in-chief.

According to NeimanLab, the NYT made over $1 BILLION from digital subscriptions in 2023 alone: 

The Times added 300,000 new digital-only subscribers in the last months of 2023, more than it added in any quarter for the previous year. The Times now makes more than twice as much revenue from digital subscriptions as it does from print subscriptions. Revenue from digital subscriptions totaled $1.09 billion in 2023.

Those numbers are breathtaking. Millions of Americans are apparently happy to shell out money every month for Wordle with a side of propaganda. Meanwhile, we have this from The Atlantic: 

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent.

I don't put a lot of faith in Comscore or any other ranking system, namely because they don't have access to our internal metrics so there's a lot of guesswork involved. But there's no doubt that conservative media has been on the ropes, in large part due to fact-checks that are treated as inerrant by media power brokers and social media companies that throttle our content. But there's some good news in all of this. 

I've been with PJ Media since 2012, and I've seen a lot of trends come and go. This site was built on relationships with readers. Some of our writers have relationships going back 20 years. I confess that for a while, we got sidetracked with trying to appeal first to Matt Drudge—who linked our content relentlessly for several years before he sold out to the Left—and then by Facebook, which was responsible for huge traffic bumps for a brief period in our history. Now, all that has changed, and we are returning to the basics of why our loyal readers love PJ Media. We no longer care what interests Matt Drudge or what will produce a viral Facebook post. We're here to make our readers—our customers!—happy. 

There's an unwritten rule for those who write online: "Never read the comments." I could retire if I had a dime for every time I've heard it. At PJ Media, we believe the opposite. I tell our writers that this is a two-way conversation. I encourage them to participate in our lively, intelligent, and troll-free (!) comments section. It's unorthodox, for sure, but the truth is, we enjoy it as much as you do. And this fall, we went one step further, creating a Platinum membership tier that allows readers to send direct, private messages to our writers. We also have other ways to connect: The "Five O'Clock Somewhere" live chat has what can only be described as a cult following (I mean that in the nicest way). It's a quirky little community within our PJ Media community. 

That's what we're all about. Sure, other sites may get massive traffic and have dozens of paid writers who make bank churning out content all day, but I like to think of us as a boutique site. Google's AI describes a boutique hotel as: "a small, trendy hotel that offers a more personalized experience than larger hotel chains." That's what we're offering at PJ Media — you're not a number to us. We see you, and we're glad you're here. 

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