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You get what you pay for
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Everybody’s now talking about how AI is about to disrupt so many industries and move everybody’s cheese. But for some of us that’s an old story by now, and I don’t mean travel agents (though I certainly could): Journalism was disrupted a quarter century ago, when the internet started turning fine Gruyère into Velveeta.
As I have written on these pages, the industry contributed to its own decline by throwing much of its content online for free in the early days. That helped cement a pathology whereby people actually think that although a hot dog must be paid for, news content is for free.
The business logic of this had to do with an assumption that advertising will cover the costs, especially because the ability to target specific audiences (down to readers of a given article) will make it more effective and therefore valuable. That didn’t take into account the explosion of other competing properties on the web, some of them with scale that no news platform can compete with.
For some people, the issue is that news is commoditized — that everything is the same and the source doesn’t matter, just as we really don’t care which gasoline (or electricity) we pump into our car.
The result has been a monumental culling of journalistics all over the world as revenues collapse. The Associated Press, where I worked for over two decades and which mostly depends on licensing fees from other media, saw its revenue fall from over $1 billion in today’s money about 15 years ago to less than half of that today.
The agency just won two Pulitzer prizes for its exclusive coverage of the Ukraine war — on which much treasure was expended, for which former colleagues risked their lives, and which contributed to the freeing of civilians trapped in Mariupol. How much longer, given the disaster that is the media business model, will this kind of work be done? Do we really want to see the world without it, just because conspiracy theorists have obsessively tried to discredit the “mainstream media”?
This kind of work is not a commodity. It is not all the same. Bret Stephens is not Robert Kaplan. Anne Applebaum is not Bari Weiss (who runs
on this platform) and neither is Maureen Dowd. And, with all due respect, none of these talented writers whom I very much respect could write Ask Questions Later. These pages, for better or for worse, are mine.They reflect my history, perspective, experience, interests and twisted humor. And in recent months that equation has yielded a wide range of content:
On America’s confounding inability to organize a reasonable situation for its people on health insurance, university costs and especially guns — the latter involving a mania for the right to “bear arms: which I debated on TV with a true believer.
On how Turkey, whose autocratic Recep Teyyep Erdogan faces a critical election next week, should get way more credit for being a trail-blazing fake-democracy. Erdogan was serious about it when others were still pretending.
On how books are thriving and will probably survive even as physical media for music are basically toast (despite a retro fashion for vinyl). Are we so literate? Unlikely given the death of letters. But books make excellent home decor.
On a possible endgame in Ukraine, the real issue with Iran, Brexit as the poster child for idiotic mistakes, and the remarkable self-immolation of Israel, where the government’s effort to go the way of Turkey is offering people the world over an invaluable lesson in the fragility of liberal democracy.
On the simply remarkable fact that the US Republicans’ blocking of the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing women’s right was utterly unapologetic, not at all surprising, and not a thing that will clearly be punished at the polls.
On how internet streaming sports has created a disastrous addiction among US expats, with Expat Sports Disorder becoming a (not always) silent killer of decorum, conjugality and early morning meetings. Meanwhile social media, contrary to the accepted narrative, has created the world that knew too much.
On how US policy toward Taiwan — not recognizing it while vowing to protect it against a nuclear power— is an absurd contradiction, yet in the imperfect world we inhabit, and given the confounding challenge posed by communist China, we lack a less-bad option.
These essential readings come with wacky visuals (like the above lead photo) and videos and polls and interactions on the Substack chat. In the future we plan to host excellent guest writers, who will need to be paid. So the articles also come with paywalls here and there, which the reader will have to agree is a case of fair enough.
(This article, the alert reader will notice, does not have a paywall. Ask Questions Later believes that no one should have to pay to be solicited. We are rational mendicants. )
I realize that most of us are unaccustomed to (and unenthusiastic) about paying directly for content. But the question is whether we want independent journalism to exist. It’s why I pay for several dozen subscriptions, and only three of them answer to the names of Netflix, Apple TV+ and Spotify. Hell, some are right here on Substack.
It is a new world, not necessarily so brave but quite certainly bizarre. And as always, Cousin Greg on the brilliant HBO series Succession puts it best and also most awkwardly: “Different times. Different times indeed. Better times? Not … not for all.”