A conversation with Entertainment Weekly founding editor and mass-media critic Jeff Jarvis

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE AND FREEPORT PRESS.

The news media industrial complex hits inflection points almost as often as you hear the words “breaking news.” Jeff Jarvis argues that the news is indeed broken—at least when he looks at mass media.

The idea that any single slice of the news industry can serve huge swaths of the population? It’s sputtering. It fails everyone.

As the large-scale model nears extinction, will a “pluralism of journalism,” as Jarvis suggests, emerge to present the wildly diverse perspectives of all communities? Is a multiverse of blogs, newsletters, and podcasts the answer?

Stay tuned. Film—or TikTok—at 11.

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There’s a lot of talk these days about the new arc of a career replacing the long-standing one—at least in our business—of “work until you drop.” And given our focus here at Magazeum, we’re painfully aware that, for many, sudden change comes earlier than expected.

But magazine people are built different. And these days, with an industry in turmoil, more of us are resetting intentionally—creating a “second act” that’s often more purposeful than our prior work, doing something we’re good at with people we trust and admire.

Over and over, we’re meeting more and more experienced magazine makers who tell us they want that for themselves.

We believe that creative magazine work—call it “magazine thinking” and its related skillset—can be a powerful driver of individual professional change.

The Next Page is our new podcast series featuring conversations with magazine creators who’ve left high-profile positions to see what comes next.

We’re glad you’re here.

“The old structure is going to go away, and after that will follow—and is following—chaos. And we need to reconsider the institutions that we have and what we need to do and what we need to build.”

CHAPTER 1

Sean Plottner: Early in your career, Jeff Jarvis wrote TV criticism. Now you have focused a sharp eye on the state of journalism, most notably the failures of The New York Times and the mass media. Your post-magazine career includes being a professor at the City University of New York’s [CUNY] graduate school of journalism. You’re the author of several books and a blogger at buzzmachine.com, with a primary focus on assessing journalism and more specifically The New York Times for their numerous ‘infractions.’ It’s a pretty interesting career arc. And of course, a lot of it in the magazine world involves your starting Entertainment Weekly, a magazine that I dearly miss. That’s quite an arc, but let’s start with just a quick summary of the young Jeff Jarvis. Could you tell us where you grew up and, maybe, when the first time you remember a magazine affecting you in any way?

Jeff Jarvis: So thanks for having me. My father got out of the Navy (so he wouldn’t have to move), and he went into sales and we moved throughout the sixties. I went to four elementary schools in three states, four high schools in three states.

And when I arrived at Claremont Men’s College, as it was then called, I was planning to go to law school and into politics. I got there and I said, “Three more years of this? No! I’m too eager to get out in the world. What else could I do?” And I was on the school paper and I decided people make a living doing that. And so I thought I would go into journalism. I transferred to Medill—frankly, a mistake. I wish I’d stayed for a more liberal arts education at Claremont. But that’s fine, it got me a career.

And I started working on the way there, at age 17, in a suburban newspaper chain. And then in turn, The (Burlington, Iowa) Hawk Eye, the Detroit Free Press, and then got a job on Chicago Today. I went to New York, I went to work for People magazine, where I became the TV critic, and there I came up with the idea for Entertainment Weekly. And the rest is the history you’ve given.

Sean Plottner: And what allowed you to be a critic? How does one step into that?

Jeff Jarvis: So it was like much in life, accidental. My friend Peter Travers, known in recent years as the movie critic for Rolling Stone, was my senior editor. And I missed California. I’d left the San Francisco Examiner and I said, “What have you done? You’ve left the easy life.” And I thought about going back to California. I had a job offer from the LA Times to cover the LA Arts Festival for the Olympics.

And I don’t do dance, I don’t do folk art. It is just not me. I’m a pop culture guy, so I wasn’t going to go there. But Travers wanted a TV critic. And so he went to Pat Ryan, the editor at the time, my mentor too, and said, “You’re going to lose Jarvis. You’ve got to make him a TV critic.” I didn’t know that was the case, but fine. And they didn’t really have one. They had “Picks & Pans,” which were just listings. So I was the first critic there.

And you ask what the qualification is for a critic? It’s a good question. I think it’s only to be a fan of the medium. Someone who wishes the medium to succeed and who thus is righteously angry when it doesn’t. But who’s independent of it and is there in loco audience and watches on behalf of the audience. And that’s what I wanted my critics to be when I hired them at Entertainment Weekly.

Sean Plottner: And what makes a good piece of criticism? Is it strong opinions? Does it include reporting?

Jeff Jarvis: I think it rarely includes reporting. In fact, at Entertainment Weekly, I forbade the critics who worked there to do features on the stars that they criticized because I didn’t want them to get starry-eyed. And I think opinion for opinion’s sake, no, it’s just one person’s opinion.

Indeed, if Entertainment Weekly—I wouldn’t start EW today because you have Rotten Tomatoes, and you have Reddit, and you have all kinds of places where you can hear opinions. It’s absurd. It’s one of the absurdities of mass media to say that one person can decide what’s good or bad for everyone to watch. But the watch word for EW was that we help people decide how to spend their time and money on entertainment. And so you want to give them enough information that they can make their own decision.

I always admired Roger Ebert as a critic. But I thought he was a little too enamored of French films. Which I like too, but I had to discount Roger when he talked about French films. So when he became a clear touchpoint for me critically, and I think that’s what a critic’s job is to be consistent at that extent. “If Jarvis likes it, it must be awful. If Jarvis hates it, I’ll like it.” That’s okay too.

Sean Plottner: Yeah, sure. And it’s interesting that we’re talking about specific critics, not an aggregation, a Rotten Tomatoes. And yeah, for those of us who grew up reading critics, you knew where you stood and you measured off that. These days that seems gone. In any case, one of the things you’ve done post-magazine career is you’ve written some interesting books, including a wonderful little book called Magazine, in which you very sharply, with humor, and I would say some great reporting, cover the history of magazines—a couple of centuries with good emphasis on the “Golden Age,” starting in the late 1800s and through their recent demise. Included in that is a fascinating account that everyone should read about the startup of Entertainment Weekly. Could you give us a little Cliff Notes version of the startup at Time Inc.?

Jeff Jarvis: So thank you for your kind words. Magazine is a small—literally a small book—and thin, so it’s a quick, fun read folks. And it’s part of the “Object Lessons” series from Bloomsbury, who’s my publisher of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the next book I’m writing about the Linotype machine. And it’s a wonderful series because you can contemplate the meaning of an object. And so I wanted to do that with a magazine.

By the way, I’m going to give you one quick aside here because it’s my favorite thing in reporting. I wanted to know how and why magazine paper was slick. And the why is because you want the ink to stand on the surface, so the colors are vibrant. The how I found out is that it is coated with kaolin, which is a mineral that comes out of the earth in Georgia, mainly—the kaolin capital of the world—and it still is somewhat radioactive. Thus, my friend, magazines have a half-life. That was my favorite little bit.

So, yes, I found myself looking at the arc of magazines as a whole and various lives they went through. But I used the story of Entertainment Weekly to also get across the business model of mass media and magazines. And it became a very handy mechanism to do that.

These days we hear a lot of people saying, “Well, everybody should just have a paywall.” And, “If everybody just paid for journalism, we’d all be okay.” And nobody talks about the business fundamentals behind that. That there is a subscriber-acquisition cost, there’s a high marketing cost, and so on. So that became a way to use EW as an object lesson.

Now, the other thing to tell you—a spoiler—is that I walked out of EW in a huff. I was being, I thought, harassed by management at Time Inc. They wanted to get rid of me. It wasn’t going to work. It was my baby. I had to let it go to somebody else.

I had refused to sign the managing editor’s contract at Time Inc., because it included a “non-denigration” clause—something we see in the news right now with a former employee of Meta writing her book—and she signed that clause and Meta’s trying to stop her from promoting the book. Yes, I thought it was wrong for a journalist to do that.

If I had signed the contract and had I been fired—I quit, but they wanted me gone—I would’ve received three years salary, bonus, and benefits. I know the price of integrity as a young schmuck to the penny, but I kept my tongue. Now, nobody really cared about the story of EW, but I was allowed to keep documents. I had the story. And so this is what enabled me in the end to tell the story of EW.

So the quick tale is that as I was on People, as a TV critic, it was coming at a very important change in media. And I recall the day when I think I saw the mass media die. Pat Ryan, who again was my mentor and editor at People, got the weekly cover sales report, which was life and death at People. And it had always been that doing a cover on People was pretty easy. If Dallas was a top show, you put Dallas on the cover, it sells well. Done.

When she got the report that day—I don’t know what show it was on the cover. It was either Dallas or Dynasty in my recollection—Pat saw me down the hall and she associated me with, and blamed me for, television. And she screamed down the hall, “TV’s dead, Jarvis. Dead!” Because it hadn’t performed for her.

And we saw then what I called the beginnings of bodily-fluids journalism. People shifted from the event in the star’s career to the event in the star’s life. Birth, death, disease, affair, and so on. And so I said there’s an opening here for a magazine to, in fact, care about the products of entertainment, and help people through that.

At the same time, we saw an explosion of choice, which the media industry considered fragmentation, but the audience saw as choice. Because we now had these fancy new things with blinking twelves called VCRs. We had cable. We had CDs, beginnings of that. And so we had all kinds of new entertainment options that didn’t exist before.

So I saw the opening for a magazine that would help people decide how to spend their time and money. I wrote a memo proposing the magazine and I put it online. Henry Grunwald, the then-editor-in-chief of Time, Inc.—there was only one editor-in-chief, everyone else was a managing editor—rejected the proposal. And his rationale was, “People who watch TV don’t read.”

Which makes one wonder why Time magazine advertised itself on television, but we’ll go past that. It languished for six years, going through silence for a long time, getting dusty. But then along came a guy named Mike Klingensmith, who was CFO of the magazine company who had a similar idea. And one of the executives said, “Oh, Jarvis was there before you, you should talk to him.”

So we worked together, of sorts, and I was seconded from People to do prototypes. We sent out junk mail for those prototypes, which is now illegal. It’s called “dry testing.” You were advertising something you didn’t have. But that’s how we could find out what we thought the audience was, and the demand was, what the cost would be of marketing the magazine, and so on.

And the numbers looked good. And Klingensmith and I prepared all kinds of proposals and went to the board. Time Inc. being Time Inc. was a culture of task forces. And because they had wasted a fortune on TV-Cable Week, they were gun shy. So they appointed a task force to kill the idea. Literally.

And the task force had to come up with every reason not to do it. And they did. But Jason McManus, who succeeded Henry Grunwald as editor-in-chief of Time Inc., wanted to make his mark by starting a new magazine, because that’s what you did at Time Inc. And this idea was there and it seemed good. And by the way, the company was about to enter into a takeover battle with Paramount and then Warner Brothers. They were going Hollywood. This is an entertainment magazine.

I should have seen the peril that lay there, but I did not. And so they did decide to start the magazine. Okay, so, I’m getting to the end of the story. So, as the magazine launched, we had special offers from the circulation department: “Four Free Issues!” Now, the way that operates in Circulationland is, “We’ll send you these issues and then we’re going to bill you, and we won’t charge you for them, but we’re billing you for the year, minus them at whatever rate we have.” It’s all a show.

And what happened was, part two of the story is that this was not going to be a newsstand magazine. It was not The National Enquirer or People about bodily fluids—right? “I want to know!” It was instead about your habits, your weekly habits.

So it was intended to be a subscription magazine, but nobody told me that the circulation director had bought wires—positions at newsstands and at checkouts—at Kmart and Caldor, and all kinds of mass outlets.

So my first issue, the cover was k.d. Lang, an absolutely unknown Canadian country crooner. The third issue, I think, was Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam War. As the circulation director said, “It was the only magazine camouflaged at the newsstand.” So the returns from newsstands were high and when it came time to actually pay for the magazine, people didn’t pay. They came after me: “They’re canceling, Jarvis. They’re canceling!”

The research had said that our audience was going to be yuppies, mid-thirties. In fact, the audience turned out to be very young—teenage and twenties. They don’t have the money to pay for this. So you tell them, “You’re going to get four free of something,” they’ll take the four free of something, then they’re not paying because they don’t have the money. And their cheap bastard parents weren’t giving the allowance, letting them pay for it, so they weren’t paying up.

So there was a panic, absolute panic. Everything was blamed. The design was blamed. The fact that it was one of the first major magazines, thanks to my wife Tammy Westmark, produced entirely on Macintosh. “Your damn postmodern font!” was blamed. (That body type was Caslon, designed in 1730).

The critics were blamed. Honest-to-God, Dick Stolley, the legendary editor from Life, who was then a top editor, did a grade point average, because we gave grades to magazines. And he said, “You’re being too mean to entertainment.”

I’d finally had it and knew I had to hand the magazine over to friendlier hands. And so one fateful Friday, I threw a copy down on the floor as Gil Rogan, the former editor of Sports Illustrated, was driving me insane, and I said, “I don’t have to take this.” And I left.

“Magazines should have seen themselves as maypoles of culture, of gathering points, of common taste and interest and circumstance and need. They should have seen themselves as the basis of community, but instead they saw themselves as the manufacturers of ‘content.‘”

Sean Plottner: So you detail this in the book, Magazine, and one of the things that comes across to me is quite interesting, is dealing with the brahmans at Time Inc., as you write later in the book, “The internet exposed the inexorably elite and isolated nature of the medium,” and I think there’s a direct line from that to, “the self-appointed arbiters of what a good magazine or what the culture was at Time Inc.” And I just wondered if you would talk about that a little bit.

Jeff Jarvis: Yeah. It goes back to the various missions of magazines over the years, right? If we start with Tatler and Spectator in London, it was to spark, capture, and inform the conversation in Habermas’ coffeehouses of London. And then you move forward and Harper’s magazine in 1850, its mission was curatorial.

Thanks to steam-powered presses there’s all kinds of good stuff out there, and we’re going to find it for you. Then you move to 1893 and Frank Munsey created the business model for the attention economy. He sold his magazine at a loss and made it up on advertising. And then you hit the 1920s and Henry Luce and Time magazine, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and the others.

And the mission of that company was, I think in some measure, to dumb down the world for an audience, to make them think that they were smart. “Here’s the whole week in one magazine.” And they wrote in their own idiosyncratic way, and they had very smart correspondents. I’m not saying there wasn’t very good journalism there. There absolutely was.

But it was a bit condescending in its ways. And it was produced by people who came from the Ivy League. And I think they looked down on the audience. As I was fond of saying at People, there were two guys named Jones. Neither was “Bob.” One was “Cranston” and one was “Landon.” One was Princeton and one was Yale. And that spoke for the company. And it was a media company in that sense, to use the law firm idea. It was rich people.

When I started EW, Pat Ryan was also proposing a resurrected weekly version of Life, where she was the editor then. And she said, “Jarvis, they’re setting us in competition. Only one of us is going to win and they think that we dislike each other. They’re going to want you to start your magazine, but you are not one of them and you never will be. And the best we can do is get you through two bonus periods and then you’re out. They’re going to use you to start it.”

And that’s a variation on what, indeed, did happen. But when I came to Time Inc. from newspapers, they said, “Oh, newspaper people do not succeed here. No, magazines are different. Magazines are a certain way.” And I had to do a tryout week. And the first day they gave me reporters’ notes, as happens at Time Inc., and then a bunch of clips, and said, “Write this hundred-line story.”

“Okay.”

I spent an hour or two, right? Like, “Okay, next? Give me the next one.”

So when I did get hired I went to my first staff meeting with Pat Ryan, and she scolded the writers, and she said, “People, can you at least try to write one story a week?”

And I realized why I was looked upon askance. Because newspaper people were seen as “fast.” Magazine people were “careful.” And they had this hubris. And I think that’s part of the issue of the magazine. Magazines should have seen themselves as maypoles of culture, of gathering points, of common taste and interest and circumstance and need. They should have seen themselves as the basis of community, but instead they saw themselves as the manufacturers of content—and a special content of that.

Entertainment Weekly did go on to be in very good hands. Jim Seymore took it over. I worked with Jim and people and I knew that they would appoint him and I knew the magazine would be safer with him. And it went through a time when what they tried to do was they tried to make it into People, Jr. They wanted it to be a newsstand hit, and it wasn’t that. It was never meant to be that.

And after a short try they returned to the essence what the magazine was meant to be, which was a magazine of criticism. And it lasted for a lot of years, but may it rest in peace. It’s now out of print and online only. And may it rest in peace.

Sean Plottner: Yeah, and it’s not what it was online, certainly. And, I just like to say that I was a big fan and I still yearn for an Entertainment Weekly. Everybody does their “10 Things to Watch This Week,” or “Here’s 5 Books Coming Out Next Year.” I want it all in one place. I want it all in one place with that design that had my eye roving everywhere, and a real voice, and a real sense of humor.

Jeff Jarvis: Yeah, but now again, I don’t want something that speaks for everybody at once. I think there’s the opportunity to say, “Oh, people like me”—whatever that means—“like this.” People who have similar tastes to me, people who love mysteries or hate mysteries. And I wish there were more book reviews in The New York Times Book Review.

When I worked at Condé Nast, I tried to convince The New Yorker to say that, “I don’t care about a bestseller list to the whole world. That’s meaningless. But if I had a bestseller list of New Yorker readers, “Oh, that’d be fascinating. I’d love to have that.”

Sean Plottner: Yeah. Another, just a final word on the book, it’s also fascinating and illuminating to note how digital has evolved, albeit in a fraction of the time. The same way that magazines did from aggregation and how technology affected everything from aggregation to advocacy acquiring advertising—of course the effects are pretty different. But that’s an interesting parallel in reading through the history that does not read like history.

Jeff Jarvis: Yeah, it’s interesting, too, to see the efforts that big, old companies like Time Inc. went through with their Pathfinder disaster. They thought that this new thing, the internet, was just another distribution mechanism for them. And I give a lot of credit—I worked for Steve Newhouse directly at Advanced Publications, which is Condé Nast and Advanced Local Newspapers, and Steve taught me a tremendous amount.

He’s now in charge of the company. And he saw that magazine content wasn’t valuable online. Companies thought it was, and he was happy to do deals with them, to get money out of them. But he understood that online was about, finally, conversation. And he pushed me very hard on our newspaper sites that we needed forums and we needed discussion.

When I stood to the side while helping out with the founding of CondéNet and Epicurious, Gail’s Recipe Swap was the kind of star there. People could edit gourmet recipes, for God’s sake. And Bon Appetit recipes. That fundamental difference was important.

And Time Inc. screwed it up. Murdoch really screwed it up multiple times. Other companies screwed it up. But Condé Nast and Advance I think, because of Steve Newhouse, really had a different vision for what online could be.

“We had the belief then that one newspaper or one magazine could serve the whole nation. That was always hubris. It was always ridiculous.”

CHAPTER 2

Sean Plottner: Okay. Let’s shift here and let’s talk about life after magazines or life after death—the death of magazines—and how your magazine career has influenced your life and your career, post-magazine. And I think the best way to start is, and I’m only using it as an example, but what’s your problem with The New York Times?

Jeff Jarvis: The New York Times is failing us in a moment of unprecedented crisis in the country. And if I didn’t think The New York Times were worth the effort, I wouldn’t criticize them. But they’ve been the best we’ve had. They’re the biggest we have. They’re the most important and most watched we have. And The Washington Post was presenting its sole competition, though that’s its own tragedy now, what’s happened there.

And so I’m trying to hold their feet to the fire and require them to be better. And we are at a, obviously, a critical moment in this country. And in my view—this is my opinion—we are in the midst of a totalitarian fascist coup. And every day The New York Times should have headlines in shock of what’s happening.

But instead they find new euphemisms, they prevaricate, they pussyfoot around it, and they don’t have the courage to have the judgment that we need in this time. You might say “Why should we use a label like ‘fascist’?” So you can then explain what that means.

A post I haven’t written yet because I’m too busy writing my next book, but I need to write, is about—there’s two of them I want to write. One is about this crisis of judgment—this problem that they’re afraid to judge the candidates, they’re afraid to judge the voters for what they’ve given us, they’re afraid to label what’s happening and then explain it.

The other part of this is there’s a history from where we go, and that’s every journalist should be reading and rereading Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism because the script is there. We know what is happening. We can stop asking and guessing.

And so we see—I’ll just give you a headline from when we happen to be talking here. This is The New York Times today: “Trump is blasting through norms, testing limits of his power, legal experts and scholars say. Experts say the president’s actions have pushed the country into fraught territory. They are divided on whether he has breached constitutional guardrails.”

God, that thesaurus is thumbed to death trying to find all the ways to avoid saying ‘authoritarian,’ ‘totalitarian,’ ’anti-constitutional,’ and ’fascist.’ And that’s where we are and that’s what they’re not doing. Now, the interesting thing is this goes to the death of magazines and the death of mass media too, because I think what we’re witnessing is in part a business phenomenon. And I think it comes from the death of mass media, the death of that mass media business model, and what results come out of that.

And in about 2018, Jay Rosen at New York University said the Times primary support has now shifted from advertising to audience, right? Frank Munsey’s, “Let’s lose money on the audience and make it up on advertising”—that model was finally coming to a close and he said, “This has to have an impact on the newsroom.”

And he didn’t say what it was. But carry that on now, and my theory of what it is, is that the Times is trying to say constantly to its audience, “See, we could piss you off. You don’t own us.” And when they try to think that they’re still mass media and that they should attract Trumpist voters and they piss off their liberal readers, they think that’s a validation of their mass media strategy.

But all they’re doing is losing the audience that last supported them. And I think that they’re rudderless. They don’t know where to turn right now. It’s because they haven’t shown shock. To suddenly, today, show shock is going to make everything that they haven’t done over the last eight years seem out of place. So they’ve boxed themselves in a corner where it’s like living in a cotton wad and nothing comes across clearly.

Sean Plottner: Well, isn’t that fear that results in all the hedging and the giant Roget’s Thesaurus next to them—what’s the cause of this fear? Is it fear of losing readers, which they may well be doing anyway?

Jeff Jarvis: Yes, it is. But it’s also the fundamental business model going away. So I taught entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY, and one of the things that I taught them is what I call the “myth of mass media.” What supported mass media was the idea that all readers see all ads, so we charge all advertisers for all readers. Thus, every reader mattered.

In the old newspaper days if you got rid of a feature, if you got rid of the Beetle Bailey cartoon, some old ladies would call up and say, “How dare you get rid of Beetle? He served his country honorably.” And the editor would inevitably turn around and write a column apologizing and putting Beetle back.

Because you didn’t want to lose even those dying old readers, because even if all she read was Beetle Bailey, you sold her eyeballs to every advertiser in the newspaper or the magazine. Come the internet, that goes away. And since this is a magazine related conversation I’ll go down a slight nerd hole here.

When the internet came along and I was working for Advance, Condé Nast, I was assigned to go and be the representative of the company on an Audit Bureau of Circulations committee on online advertising. Woo! What fun! And our job was to define such things as a “page view.” That’s how early this was.

What does it mean to be a page? What does it mean to be a view? Because the presumption was that advertisers were going to want to audit the circulation, the total audience of a website, because that’s what they did in magazines and newspapers, right? They’re going to want to buy the big place because that’s where their thing is going to be seen.

It soon became self-evident that it didn’t matter at all because you no longer had the myth of mass media that every reader sees every single page of the website and thus every ad. So all the advertisers wanted was an audit of their ads where they were served. But what it really meant was that scale didn’t matter anymore. Not really. Mass and size didn’t matter anymore.

It cut the hole through our entire business model and our self-image: we speak to the whole nation. We speak for everyone. We build bridges. No, to the contrary, we have a presumption that the people we speak to is everybody. And it never was. It was always a myth. So I think they’re scared of losing not just their business model, not just their business, but also their stature in society.

Sean Plottner: Well, and that goes to what you’ve said before about magazines are not communities.

Jeff Jarvis: Should be, could be.

Sean Plottner: Yes. But they should be. Bezos, Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, I think it’s been reported that when he declared that they would not be endorsing a presidential candidate last fall, that some quarter-million subscribers dropped out. I’m sure the new editorial policy that we know about there, which is pretty cryptic but also pretty clear, is also failing some interested readers. I know that two reporters from the Post have left and started something called The Contrarian. Is that part of a solution? And I know you’re—I love that you declare that you’re not a futurist and you’re not about to predict the future. And God help us try to do that anyways with the unpredictability of where technology’s going, but is the contrarian a step in the right direction?

Jeff Jarvis: So it was Jen Rubin, who’s a columnist on The Post who left and tied in with Norm Eisen, who’s the former ethics czar of the White House to start their new media business. And we see tons of these going on.

They did it on Substack, and Substack is frankly a little problematic because they have supported literally paying money to some bad actors. But there’s other mechanisms out there. Ghost is another one where you can do newsletters. Or you can have a podcast like what we’re doing right now. Or you can be a YouTube star or you can try to make it on any other platform that’s out there today. Or you can have a blog. Blogs are not gone. Blogs are wonderful things.

Sean Plottner: They’re easier to access than Substack, too.

Jeff Jarvis: Exactly. So I think you’ve asked a few questions in that one question. The old structure is going to go away, and after that will follow—and is following—chaos. And we need to reconsider the institutions that we have and what we need to do and what we need to build.

In my other book, the Gutenberg Parenthesis—sorry for the plug—I revel in the story of the first reported case of censorship of print in 1470, about 15 years after Gutenberg’s Bible. Niccolò Perotti, who was a Latin scholar, was much offended by a shoddy translation of Pliny. He wrote to the Pope and said, “Something must be done.”

Sound familiar? “And that you, your Holiness, should appoint a censor. To check every form before it comes off the press.” I thought about this and I realized he wasn’t seeking censorship at all. What he was doing was anticipating the need for, and the creation of the institutions of editing and publishing that would assure some measure of quality in print for a half a millennium.

But those institutions are inadequate to the scale of speech today. What I celebrate about the internet is all the voices who’ve always been there, who weren’t represented, weren’t heard, weren’t served in mainstream mass media, run by people who look like us—old white men, sorry about the old part. And we return, I hope, to an era of media at human scale.

But as I say, between here and there, there’s going to be chaos until we figure this out. There’s going to be all kinds of things missing. I have—I keep by my desk and your listeners can’t hear can’t see it, but they’re going to hear it. I’m going to plop this book I have on the desk. [Thud!] It is a big, heavy, thick book that is the directory of American newspapers in the year 1900.

And in 1900, in New York City alone, there were 46 daily newspapers, let alone a few hundred magazines—weekly, and biweekly, and monthly publications that served all kinds of communities, and all kinds of interests, and all kinds of needs.

And I think we’ve returned to that kind of pluralism in media, but we don’t know what to do with it because we assumed that mass media was somehow the natural state of things. And it wasn’t. It was what happened when television—radio and television—came along and killed so many of those choices. And we had the belief then that one newspaper or one magazine could serve the whole nation.

That was always hubris. It was always ridiculous. So yes, I think that a panoply of choices through newsletters and podcasts is where we’re going to go. And blogs. I think there’s a tremendous benefit to that. However, we need new institutions like magazines to help us through that.

So I returned to the idea of Harper’s magazine. In its first issue on its first page in 1850, it said basically—and I’ll use my language, not their elegant language—that thanks to the steam powered press and the explosion of media and speech, there’s all kinds of good shit out there. But it’s hard to find the good shit. We’re going to find the good shit for you. They certainly didn’t say it that way.

And their mission was curatorial for the first number of years. Of course, as time went on, they decided that they were going to manufacture their own voice. But they saw a need—not unlike Entertainment Weekly. There’s more choice now.

Somebody has to filter through this for you, and that’s a service that’s useful. Where’s the Harpers of 1850 for today? Where’s the Entertainment Weekly of political speech, or reporting, or local news? There is a need and opportunity there. Where’s the place where we can gather together around a maypole of common interest that a magazine could be?

There was a very smart editor on The New Yorker when I was there who was working on digital and they would listen to her any more than me. And she said, “We’re a tower, yes. But we have all these windows around and all we could do is look out them. Now we can open the windows. People can talk directly to each other. We can hear each other.”

That’s the right model to think of as a magazine. It’s not just somebody who thinks, I know all the good stuff and I’m going to just make a thing called ‘content,’ and you’re going to buy it from me. That’s ridiculous.

So what we see now with things like The Contrarian and all kinds of other publications, including, by the way, The Guardian, a venerable old publication, is the model of membership rather than subscription. Of saying, “We belong to something. We care about this. We want to support this. We are heard here. We have a voice here. We want to gather together with the other people who are here.”

That’s the way to rethink what a magazine could be. Magazines could be alive and vibrant now if they thought past print, and past ‘content.’

Sean Plottner: Yes. And, thinking about those readers, specifically, much more than they do with the current mass model.

Jeff Jarvis: Yes, exactly. And as more than readers. The nomenclature we have is troubling. I don’t like the nomenclature of ‘audience’ and ‘audience development’ because ‘audience’ is passing. I don’t like the nomenclature of ‘product development,’ because ‘product’ makes it seem as if it’s finished, not a constantly-changing protean thing. It’s the terms we’re stuck with, but I think it reveals our presumptions.

Sean Plottner: A couple of points, by the way, for those of you who don’t know The Contrarian, Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen have called it “unflinching journalism in defense of democracy.” This is rooted in their frustration with where the Post was going. And they write, “The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives.” I would be shocked if you disagreed. In any case, what’s good about journalism today?

Jeff Jarvis: There’s much that’s good about journalism. If I didn’t believe that I’d be a fraud teaching journalism school. I left CUNY, the Newmark School. I’m now a visiting professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism, and also a fellow at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.

I still care about teaching journalism because I want our students to reinvent it, to ask why we do what we do, the way we do it—oftentimes “follow the money” is the answer to that question. And ask where the real value of journalism lies, where the real need for it lies. And then rethink, with all these new tools we have, how we can reinvent journalism.

Communities need journalism because they need information about what’s going on. They need to be able to discern the policies of their communities through public discourse. We need to improve that discourse. There’s no question in my mind that there’s a tremendous need, but the old models don’t serve us well anymore.

“What we see now is the model of membership rather than subscription … of saying, ‘We belong to something.’ That’s the way to rethink what a magazine could be. Magazines could be alive and vibrant now if they thought past print, and past content.”

Sean Plottner: In the day—and I’ll date myself here—Woodward and Bernstein were true inspiration to head to J-School. What models are out there, if any, for a young aspiring journalist to look toward?

Jeff Jarvis: So at CUNY, at the Newmark School, my colleague Carrie Brown and I started a program in engagement journalism. And engagement journalism—and frankly, the reason that I left is because they screwed it up at CUNY. But Carrie is rebuilding something just as exciting at Montclair State. And engagement journalism starts with the premise that we’ve got to listen better.

That sounds glib and easy, but journalists aren’t great at listening. We have our own preconceived narratives and notions, and we go out to get quotes to fill in the blanks in them. We taught the students to go to communities and first listen, put down the notebook, put down the camera. Understand a community’s needs and their circumstances. See whether your reflection is correct in that. See what their needs are and see how journalism might help them meet those needs to improve their lives and communities.

And so I’m very proud of what we’ve done in engagement journalism. It’s spread across the country. Temple University is doing a lot of great work here. And there’s other journalisms: there’s ‘solutions journalism,’ which says you don’t just concentrate on the problems, you ask what people are doing about it. There’s ‘constructive journalism’ that says that we don’t just present a dystopian view of the world. There’s ‘deliberative democracy.’ There’s a whole bunch of movements like this that I hope to bring together. I’d love to have them all in the room at once.

But those are new models. And our engagement journalism alums do tremendous work and they carry this torch better than Carrie and I did. And that’s inspiring to see. So there’s still people going to journalism school, and I always told them—I used to have the privilege of talking to all the students at Newmark in orientation—and I would tell them: learn what we’re going to teach you, but then question it. Don’t throw it all away, but throw away the things that you should throw away. Reinvent the things that you can reinvent.

And I would point my finger at them and say, “You are the future of journalism. I’m too old. You are the ones who can do this.” and there’s no question there’s a need, but this is just like the beginnings of print and the need for editing, editing and publishing. We need institutions that will help us through this that we can trust. But that means we have to reinvent them.

Sean Plottner: Well it’s great you answered one of my questions and that is that there are still journalism majors out there. How would you characterize the students that you teach? I know it’s a broad question but what are they like?

Jeff Jarvis: It changes over time. It’s funny how every class can have its own kind of psyche, shared psyche. During the pandemic, it wasn’t a happy psyche. But I think that the thread that would tie it together through most of my time at CUNY and into now is that students don’t necessarily come out saying, “I want to write for The New Yorker.” Some do. God bless ’em, and I hope they do.

A lot of students come out saying, “I don’t want to work for ‘the man.’ I don’t want to work for the big old institutions. I want to have an impact in society.” Sure. “I want to address issues of justice, and fairness, and equity.” Now, some will put up their noses and say, “Well, isn’t that advocacy?” Fine. We’ve always advocated for justice and equity and fairness. There’s nothing new about that.

And so these students, though, take it seriously. And I think that the issue we have now—one of the reasons I’m so happy to be associated with Stony Brook—is that I’m working not only in a journalism department, but also communication. Communication, no ‘s.’

And I think this is a time when we need communication scholars to help us understand what’s happening in media and its relationship to society at a higher altitude. And we need that kind of theory to reinvent what’s happening.

Most journalism schools are vocational. “Here are the skills you need.” Skills, skills. That’s the word you hear all the time. And fine. Those are valuable skills. They’re useful. For example, one of the key skills we talk about in journalism schools, as we did at CUNY, a lot of the professors said, “They have to know what a story is.” Well, If you unpack that, that is an editor who stands in a position of privilege to say, “I’m the gatekeeper of what’s going to get in and what’s going to interest enough people to make my mass audience buy me.”

And all the time you’d see students, especially students of color, or LGBTQ students, or immigrant students come with a story idea and the professor, or in a newsroom the editor, would say, “Oh, it’s not big enough.” Because that’s not big enough for the mass audience. It also says, “That’s not part of my experience,” says the old white male editor. And so we have to be open to not just welcoming, but valuing, lived experiences in many ways.

Sean Plottner: It sounds like the shit is hitting the fan, we don’t know what the future holds, but there might be a little bit of hope.

Jeff Jarvis: Oh, yeah. I look at my students and unquestionably have hope for the future because they care. There’s always troubling things. We see students of color leaving. I funded research in a “leavers study” about how many black people were leaving our field and the value that we lost along the way because their careers were not being developed in the newsrooms where they went.

We have lots of issues to deal with. It’s still a field that lacks diversity—terribly. But the attitude of the students who come in who want to make a difference and want to do something is the energy that we need. And they’re learning the skills, but they also have a higher perspective, and a higher goal, and higher mission. And that’s what gives me hope.

Sean Plottner: Good. And I hope they succeed in helping the rest of society understand better what journalism can be. Because I think everyone’s losing sight of that. Particularly young people. Let’s finish up with talking about the blog. How do you decide what to blog about? And how much time does it eat up? And how frequently do you blog?

Jeff Jarvis: So that’s changed. I started the blo g in September, 2001. I survived the attack on the World Trade Center. I was on the last PATH train coming in underneath as the first jet hit. I was well aware of blogs. Nick Denton of Gawker had made me aware of them. And I got the Newhouses to, in fact, save Blogger, at one point, with an investment. But I didn’t think I had anything to say, so I didn’t blog. Which sounds amusing now.

And after the attack, I wrote a story. I survived, I made it up to Midtown. I wrote a story for our newspapers about what I had witnessed. And I said, “I have more to say. I have more memories.” So I said, “I’m going to try this blog thing for a few weeks.” It immediately took over, all available time and life. And it taught me a huge lesson about the true nature of media.

Nick Denton, again, founder of Gawker, saw what I was writing and he sent a message to friends who were bloggers in LA, Ken Lane and Matt Welch. And they wrote about what I was writing and linked back to me and I reacted and I linked back to them. And I realized—that this conversation was occurring at different times in different places. And this was the true essence of media. That media was conversational.

It’s what led me eventually to write the Gutenberg Parenthesis because that’s really about how media properly conceived to society is about conversation. And the internet returns us to that conversation. The blog changed my career. It changed my view of my profession. It changed, thus, my life.

Sean Plottner: Wow.

Jeff Jarvis: And I kept blogging, and blogging, and blogging and then along came like a squirrel to a dog … Twitter. And it was so easy to get a thought out on Twitter, and to get a reaction on Twitter, and to get into a conversation on Twitter.

And I didn’t abandon my blog, but I kind of abused it, because I didn’t do as much anymore. And I now, of course, regret that because my blog is on WordPress, it’s open source. Much of my public discourse, my little corner of it, was on Twitter, which is a private company. It could be taken over by the narcissistic nihilist that is Elon Musk. And, thus, is endangered.

So I think it’s really important now. That we support open source platforms. So the way I am now is I don’t blog that often now. I blog when I have something longer I want to write. I use Medium, but I also post it onto BuzzMachine, which is on WordPress. That way it’s my own spot, my own place.

Right now I’m writing a book about the cultural history of the Linotype, the machine that opened the door to mass media. You can see the thread in my thinking. And so right now I’m hardly posting at all, but I hope I’m—knock wood—near the end of the first draft of the book. And there’s things that are welling up in me I want to put in the blog.

What I do on social media is every day I post the same things to Twitter—I will not call it X—and Bluesky, which I want to support, and I love, and Threads because some people I care about are there. And Mastodon, because I really want to support ActivityPub, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. So I just paste, past e.

And the conversations in each place are different. And it’s interesting how they’re different. I see no patterns, but they just turn out to be different and varied, and I value that. And I really value that ongoing public conversation. That’s also my opportunity every day to point out, with the hashtags #brokentimes and #brokenpost, what they’re doing wrong.

Sean Plottner: And that drives me to ask, what nerves have you struck? What interesting feedback have you received? Particularly about journalism, the Times, mass media?

Jeff Jarvis: I would’ve thought that I would’ve gotten a whole bucket of shit for criticizing the Times and the Post, especially in this time when they’re being attacked, when all of journalism is being attacked the last 10 years as fake news, enemy of the people, and so on. It hasn’t been the case at all.

There’s one loyal former Timesman, who’s now a professor, who will come in and defend them uh, ably who I respect for doing so. But the anger at the Times and the Post—and right now, the anger of the Democratic Party is stunning.

I wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review about this. And the mistake that I think that media are making, from Joe and Mika on Morning Joe through The New York Times, to think that they can appeal to the Trump right wing, and, in the process, only anger the audience that was depending upon them.

And, we don’t have a liberal media. We have institutional media that is trying hard, so hard, not to be liberal that they’re not speaking the truth and they’re pissing off people. So the reaction that I get is constantly. “Yeah, go get ’em.” I get so much of, “Why do you even read them anymore? You should cancel your subscription.” No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to read them, I’m going to criticize them. They still matter. I’m going to hold them to account.

And let me be clear, I should have been clear earlier, there’s still a lot of good journalism and there are great journalists. And there’s good, important, courageous work that’s occurring in these publications. And that’s, all the more, the tragedy that it gets lost in bad editorial judgment at the higher levels of these publications.

And we see a brain drain—especially out of the Post—Jen Rubin is just one of many who’ve left the Post on a matter of principle. And the LA Times as well. People have had to leave there as well. And that’s a tragedy and it’s a problem.

And at the same time, the newspaper industry is primarily controlled now by hedge funds that are cutting them to the marrow. And magazines are dying. Try to find a newsstand in Manhattan. You can’t. I used to buy them by the pound. They had to double-bag me out of Hudson’s, carrying magazines. I don’t buy any magazines anymore. And that’s sad. But it’s the state of things. And we have to recognize this new reality.

And so I think that what matters to me more than anything is that conversation. And no, that doesn’t mean that I have to listen to bigots and fascists. But it means that we can be in conversation with people who care about the things we care about. And that’s what social media does still enable.

SUMMARY

The news media industrial complex hits inflection points almost as often as you hear the words “breaking news.” Jeff Jarvis argues that the news is indeed broken—at least when he looks at mass media. The idea that any single slice of the news industry can serve huge swaths of the population? It’s sputtering. It fails everyone.

As the large-scale model nears extinction, will a “pluralism of journalism,” as Jarvis suggests, emerge to present the wildly diverse perspectives of all communities? Is a multiverse of blogs, newsletters, and podcasts the answer?

Stay tuned. Film — or TikTok — at 11.

If you get excited by stories like this as much as we do, we want to hear from you. Shoot us an email at hello@magazeum.co. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks very much for listening.

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