{"id":676,"date":"2025-01-30T09:59:12","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T13:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/?p=676"},"modified":"2025-01-30T09:59:12","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T13:59:12","slug":"adapt-or-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/30\/adapt-or-die\/","title":{"rendered":"“Adapt or die.”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ryan Broderick in his excellent Garbage Day newsletter<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

And like many Americans, I spent yesterday trying to process the new reality we\u2019ve suddenly found ourselves in. One where I am aware that\u00a0something<\/em>\u00a0is happening, but largely unable to actually figure out the specifics. And throughout the day a loop emerged. I would see a claim on a social platform like X or Bluesky, like SNAP benefits being affected by the freeze (it seems like they wouldn\u2019t have been), try to verify it, and only get days-old\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>\u00a0stories and a bunch of aggregation from Indian newspapers that have figured out how to game American search traffic like\u00a0The Hindustan Times<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Times Of India<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Hoo boy does this capture how it feels to look for information online now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random \u201cnews influencers,\u201d some of which\u00a0are literally using ChatGPT<\/a>\u00a0to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the\u00a0people<\/a>\u00a0taking over<\/a>\u00a0the country currently have spent the last decade, in\u00a0public<\/a>, I might add, crafting a playbook \u2014 one you\u00a0dismissed<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they\u2019re pretty confident it\u2019ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I\u2019m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they\u2019re literally\u00a0replacing<\/a>\u00a0you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I keep coming back to the old Jay Rosen phrase \u201coptimize for trust<\/a>\u201d and how many media orgs have utterly failed that assignment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan Broderick in his excellent Garbage Day newsletter: And like many Americans, I spent yesterday trying to process the new reality we\u2019ve suddenly found ourselves in. One where I am aware that\u00a0something\u00a0is happening, but largely unable to actually figure out the specifics. And throughout the day a loop emerged. I would see a claim on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","iawp_total_views":17,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-media","h-entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":677,"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarednewman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}