The Arkansas media mogul you've never heard of
PLUS: The Creator Economy is finding new models to fund investigative journalism.
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The Arkansas media mogul you've never heard of
It’s been pretty widely documented that local news is in a death spiral — at least the kind of local news produced by legacy newspapers. Tens of thousands of reporters have been laid off at these outlets, and vast swaths of the US are now considered news deserts.
But amidst all this carnage, there are media organizations that continue to thrive. Some are lean news startups that mostly exist online, but others run legacy print publications that maintain pretty healthy profit margins.
Arkansas Business Publishing belongs to this latter group. Founded in 1974, the company operates dozens of local, niche publications that mostly operate in the B2B space. Not only is the company growing, but it’s managed to expand its print readership over the past decade.
In a recent interview, owner Mitch Bettis discussed how he started working at the company, why he decided to buy it, and whether he thinks his business model could be replicated in other states.
You can watch our discussion in the video embedded below:
Want to be featured in an interview like this? Shoot me an email and tell me about your own media outlet.
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Why some podcast veterans aren’t happy about the rise of video podcasts
Video podcasts are ubiquitous now, which means that a consumer is just as likely to encounter a podcast on Spotify, YouTube, or shortform video platforms like TikTok than they are on a traditional podcast player. Some in the industry aren’t happy about this blurring of the lines:
In the past, podcast deals essentially revolved around controlling who could sell ads on shows. Lately, that’s been rapidly changing. If a “podcast” shows up on Netflix, or stages a live event or gives rise to a merch shop, who sells the sponsorships on those various products and events? And who shares in the resulting profits? Even just selling a show as a video versus an audio program could be complicated.
“All the ambiguity around a working definition creates uncertainty with brands and makes it harder for them to make appropriate budget allocations by channel as video-influencer channels bleed over with podcasting without some method of distinction,” Dan Granger, chief executive officer of ad agency Oxford Road, responded via email.
A big part of the reason there's so much handwringing within the podcast industry over video podcasts is that many of the largest shows have business models that rely on dynamic insertion of programmatic advertising. Most YouTube videos are natively uploaded and therefore don't allow for this type of insertion; you also have to forgo dynamic insertion if you want to take part in Spotify’s new video revenue sharing program. A lot of podcast ad networks are therefore not happy that an increasingly large portion of their advertising inventory is becoming walled off from them.
Can professional creators compete with AI slop for attention?
404media published a good piece arguing that AI-generated content slop is performing a brute force attack on algorithm-based content feeds:
One of the first types of cyberattacks anyone learns about is the brute force attack. This is a type of hack that relies on rapid trial-and-error to guess a password. If a hacker is trying to guess a four-number PIN, they (or more likely an automated hacking tool) will guess 0000, then 0001, then 0002, and so on until the combination is guessed correctly …
…The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality … What this means, and what I have already seen on my own timelines, is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it.
If you boil a professional content creator's job down to its most basic definition, it's capturing attention. And while human content creators can still pretty easily outcompete AI-generated content in terms of quality, they can't outcompete it when it comes to sheer volume. After all, a single AI spammer can literally churn out thousands of videos per day, and it doesn't matter if 99% of them reach absolutely no one; if even 1% of their videos go viral, then they'll clog our internet feeds and make human-created content that much harder to access.
The silver lining right now is that AI slop is mostly successful on shortform video — which is governed by sensitive algorithms — meaning that if you specialize in other types of content — newsletters, longform videos, podcasts — you're probably at least somewhat protected. The question in the long-term is whether the major tech platforms will recognize this AI slop as a threat to their ecosystems and make serious moves to squash it. So far, they're still too busy hyping their own AI tools.
SNL won’t launch the next generation of comedy stars
American High, a Hollywood production studio that specializes in making high school comedies for film and television, just launched a sort of paid residency program that employs up-and-coming comedians to produce sketch comedy videos for its TikTok account:
With several feature films under its belt, American High launched American High Digital in November 2022, creating short-form content aimed at high schoolers.
They’ve since expanded with four social channels: American High, College Life, Barely Adult, and Unhirables, each targeting different demos from teens to young adults.
How it works: The sketch comedy group operates out of American High’s headquarters in Syracuse, NY. Cast members receive salaries, housing, and a platform to launch their own comedy careers in exchange for about 15 videos per week.
This is pretty cool. I've long held that the best sketch comedy in recent years has been posted to YouTube, with some of the funniest channels rivaling anything you see on SNL (check out the Almost Friday TV channel to get a sense of what I mean). I wouldn't be surprised at all if the next generation of comedy stars come out of the YouTube scene, whereas previous generations relied on the improv troupe-to-SNL pipeline.
I think the reason this genre has thrived on YouTube is that every sketch is basically a short film, which means it can be produced relatively quickly and on a small budget. Given that professional camera equipment and editing software are now relatively cheap to procure, we're seeing more and more TV-quality content from these comedy creators.
Some good longform journalism
There are literally thousands of reporters covering the federal government, including many who basically camp out on Capitol Hill. Yet every single one of them somehow didn't notice that a Congresswoman hadn't been showing up for over a year and was in fact being treated for dementia in an assisted living center. How did so many reporters miss this blockbuster story, especially at a time when so much media attention was focused on Biden's mental acuity? The answer probably has to do with the dwindling number of newspaper correspondents who cover DC through the lens of their local region. [Politico]
You've probably heard the stories of how ostentatious the glossy magazines used to be, at least in terms of how they treated their top editors and writers: the car service, the catered lunches, the generous expense accounts. Well, here's another data point that captures that era: "For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. " [Yale Review]
ICYMI: Judd Legum proved that investigative journalism can thrive on Substack
My other newsletter: The best longform journalism we consumed this week
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Behind the paywall
Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:
The Creator Economy is finding new models to fund investigative journalism
Shortform video plays a huge role in news distribution now
Why Hollywood streamers should syndicate YouTube content
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