❝ Start with a thousand people

Ernie Smith, editor of Tedium on the future of journalism in the digital age:

At some point, I just wonder if we’ve let things slide a bit too far from reality to let modern journalism work in the digital age. […] I wonder if the big problem is that we focused on scale when we should have been focused on nailing down the audience. If we focused on millions when we should have focused on building ourselves a liveable wage. And if we put too much of an emphasis on global at the cost of local.

I think we need to scale down, get the basic stuff right, and stop worrying about getting 2 million followers on Instagram. Let’s start with a thousand people who are willing to chip in a couple of bucks and see where that gets us. It might mean smaller empires, or it might not mean empires at all. But it could mean a better future for many more journalists than the current model seems to be able to support.