Battle of the brands: what or who is reshaping media power?

Pick apart any big media story right now and at its heart you’ll find the big known unknown of modern news media: who matters most — the journalist or the masthead?

Whether it’s the US media’s current obsession with the CNN shake-up, Australia’s raised eyebrows at the surprise Leigh Sales departure from 7.30, or what’s happening with Chris Uhlmann at Nine, the question is always: what’s the stronger news media brand right now?

Is it the institution — be it an old-fashioned masthead or a very 21st-century platform — or the journalistic creator?

There’s a lot at stake in the answer and plenty of people who are punting their careers on it. Trouble is, it’s less about battling brands than it is about how media (and individual journalists) manage the competing pressures of clout, utility and financial sustainability.

Leaning to the strength of the journalist brand suits the way the media likes to make celebrities of some reporters, with insider tips about, say, what Sales or Uhlmann are likely to do next. But it’s probably the worst way for reporting the continued disruption of Australia’s media.

While individual journalists within traditional media can build audiences (or, at least, add incrementally to institutional audiences), it’s unusual for them to be able to take them with them (commercial radio is the exception that proves the rule). Even a radio powerhouse like Alan Jones couldn’t translate his audience to television, either at Ten in the early 1990s or Sky last year.

Right now, individual journalists are being tempted by the promise of Substack as a platform that offers to juggle those pressures through email distribution of free and/or subscription newsletters. Good news: according to figures released late last year, there are about a million paid subscriptions for different products worldwide. Not so good news: it seems heavily concentrated, with about US$20 million ($27.8 million) of those subs being paid to the top 10 newsletters.

Even worse news for journalists (particularly those who tout their privileged access): the top politics newsletter is written by a Boston-based historian, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. Her academic speciality is the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow white supremacy. Guess the times suit her.

Right now, the Australian market may be just too small, although it’s not for want of trying. Tim Burrowes is attempting to leverage his experience in having launched Mumbrella and his book Media Unmade into the Unmade Substack.

It’s just the latest effort after the online attempts of former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Michael West with Michael West Media or ex-Australian journalist Anthony Klan with The Klaxon. (A recent piece by Klan on China went viral after being picked up by Indian media.) Even Crikey has its roots in that tradition.

There are some significant regional examples, too: India’s The Wire launched off the reputations of Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M.K. Venu. In the Philippines, Maria Ressa leveraged her CNN career to build Rappler (and, last year, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts).

Who makes the news?

The journalist v media answer can be deeply personal. The American journalistic co-founders of Vox Media all arrived at different answers: Ezra Klein joined the very institutional New York Times; Matt Yglesias launched his own Substack; Melissa Bell remained as publisher.

One of the surprising answers has come from US site Politico, which hit unicorn status when it was bought by Germany’s Springer group last year. It led founding editor John Harris to mark the site’s 15th anniversary with a ruminating note titled: “I led the revolution against journalistic institutions. Now I think we need to build them back up.”

The success of Politico, Harris says, has made traditional media more open to innovation and more prepared, as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg would say, to “break things” (although those “things” have mainly been journalists’ jobs). Politico also rejuvenated US political media, making it less dull and pompous — although at the cost of becoming more gossipy; more about the big-P politics, less about the small-p policy. The same is happening in Australia.

Politico staff seeded the US media, taking a start-up ethos built off insider access (Ben Smith launched Buzzfeed News and Maggie Haberman reported on the Trump era for The New York Times).

Think of it as the entrenchment of journalistic practice in the institution: access is almost always about the media brand, particularly in Australia, where News Corp has built its own privileged access into successive governments as a price of doing business.

The insider approach is finally getting kickback. After last year’s January 6 coup attempt, Perry Bacon Jr at The Washington Post argues the US media is de-Politico-ising, or, in his words, “doing a much better job describing the high stakes of governing and policy than it did a decade ago”.

Maybe, we can hope, a change is coming in Australia, too.