I think the true irony of the media business is that for years the tech industry has been desperately re-creating what almost every media company started throwing away in the aughts. Your hometown newspaper was the very first Everything App. It had cars, it had marketplace, it had sports stats, etc...
The model of American news organizations was always to be the home base for everything you did. Local events, business announcements, local news, national news, international wire service news. Ads made sense in that package because they were part of the service, they were also providing you with information about your community and things you wanted to know, just from a different angle.
When Craig's List launched, media companies got it into their head that they should only be one thing. Just be the news. From basically that point continually to the present new money-making businesses would emerge organically from being a news organization and usually get spun off because they weren't The News.
But you shouldn't be spinning off your cars section, your obits, your conversational podcasts, your sports stats, your distribution tools; because the business model of News is more than news. The journalism is in a concrete block. You build on top of it because it is a stable necessary product in the modern world.
The New York Times success isn't because becoming an app foundry is somehow a surprise move that is antithetical to being a news organization, it's because that was always in the DNA of being a media company. Let's face it, that is why every social network succeeded by first being a news distribution platform and building from there.
The news is the foundation for a company. But it is very rarely the edifice. The dotcom boom convinced a lot of news organizations that specialist companies would always out-compete them, but it hasn't turned out well for most of the specialist companies. The companies that did survive have been continuously trying to de-specialize ever since.
The revelation of the 2020s is that different people want different windows into the world and the money is in providing them a window and a readout of the world entire, not just the News part of it. The news industry was the original everything app and the smart move is aiming back towards that again.
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