Brian Morrissey on rebooting media

Brian Morrissey has spent much of his career watching the media business change from the inside. After working at Adweek and helping build Digiday, where he served as editor-in-chief and later president, he founded The Rebooting, which examines the mechanics of building sustainable media businesses. He also hosts The Rebooting Show podcast. Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau spoke with Morrissey about where journalism talent goes as traditional institutions shrink, what comes after the open web, the importance of community and why the next generation of media companies may need to start from scratch.

As journalists and publishing staff are being laid off while J-school graduates are still entering the profession, where is that talent going to go? What are they going to do in today’s media environment?

That’s a good question. I don’t know. The overall journalism market is obviously being compressed from its traditional sources.

The skill sets of journalists are still very valuable. There’s still a need for credible information, and there’s still a lot of value in credible information. I assume new outlets will pop up, but I don’t think they’ll look the same as before.

This has been happening for 25 years. A lot of what’s going on right now is just an acceleration of existing trends. Journalism is a difficult business, and it will continue to be a difficult business.

In your work, you’ve said that despite AI and other forces, there will still be a desire for reliable information. Where do you see that breaking out? Who will produce it, and how will the public access it?

I think it’s going to be produced by a whole bunch of different entities and individuals, including self-interested entities using the trappings of journalism to create leverage within different marketplaces.

It’ll happen within institutional models that have subscriptions as part of their businesses. It’ll happen on an individual level, with talented people—particularly those focused on high-value niches—going out and building their own businesses. And there will be small collectives.

Look at 404 Media, a worker-owned collective, or Defector, another worker-owned collective. It’s easy to think in terms of doom and gloom when we’re looking at institutional companies that are in terminal decline. I don’t expect newspaper companies from basically two generations ago to be the ones that develop the new models.

But there are exceptions to the doom and gloom. There are people who are making it work. It’s not to the same degree, but people will always create media, and there will always be a market for credible information.

My concern is that market will be pulled toward the already rich and powerful. They’re going to be extremely well served with information products and various forms of high-end content. When it comes to the civic good, that is dicier.

How about the open web versus the walled garden? The open web powered the digital world as we know it. If we are at the end of that era, what are the consequences? Can AI make up for that lost ecosystem?

The open web, depending on how you define it, is in terminal decline. Most time is being spent within walled gardens. The walled gardens won.

When I think of open-web commercial publishing and where it intersects with the news industry, it produces terrible products. Anyone who lands on a local news site knows it’s often a horrible experience.

I understand all the reasons the experience is horrible, but you can’t keep treating your customers like dirt and expect that to be a long-term strategy. Nobody’s been able to figure that out on the open web, so the open web, when it comes to news, is not a growth channel by any stretch of the imagination.

There are a lot of opportunities to build news operations using platforms, whether it’s Instagram, TikTok or other Meta products. There are ways to build open-web-like businesses that just happen to use different distribution channels.

I don’t have any doubt that influential news operations are going to be created specifically for YouTube and various other platforms. YouTube is going to be the new TV. It’ll replace TV.

Who else shares your viewpoint about community and connecting with an audience?

I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a groundbreaking notion that the strongest businesses these days are ones backed by a community.

Audiences are getting smaller, and those audiences were never as big as a lot of publishers pretended they were. They were operating what was, in essence, an arbitrage business. They were using their shelf positioning on Google to put different types of content in front of people.

They would be known for news, then suddenly use their authority to generate a lot of affiliate revenue. That subsidized the news business. News has always been a subsidy business. You just need to find different subsidies for it.

I think community-based models are attractive because they’re very aligned. When you’re operating a business that’s part of a community, that puts guardrails around it. You don’t get the anti-audience experiences the open web was notorious for.

I think it has a lot more durability. These models are really difficult to do. It’s hard to get people to care about an idea or want to support something simply because they want it to exist. But if you look at Patreon and how people fund things they want to exist in the world, I think it’s encouraging.

I don’t think it’s the only answer by any stretch of the imagination. There needs to be direct subsidies from foundations and philanthropies. I don’t really believe in government funding as much because I think the government will inevitably get involved in deciding the direction of the content. I don’t trust the government to keep its paws off that. The current government is a great example.

There are a lot of market failures when it comes to journalism.

Before founding The Rebooting, you worked at Adweek and helped build Digiday into a publication covering the transformation of media and advertising. What did those experiences teach you about creating a focused media organization and building community?

They were very different. When I was at Adweek, it was very much a magazine model, and it was clinging to being a magazine. I had colleagues who would always ask, “What about the magazine? What about the magazine?” It really wasn’t about community at all. Events were an afterthought.

In a lot of these models, events are the stand-in for community. I think they’re different from community, but they force you to focus on your audience more as a community.

Digiday was an events company to begin with when I went there, and we were building the publishing operation on top of an events infrastructure. Events were a much better business model than trying to sell congratulatory ads in a magazine. There wasn’t much economic value being created by those. There was ego value, and that does have some value, but there’s only so much of that stuff you can do.

With events, particularly in a business-to-business context, you can match up a buy side and a sell side and enable commercial transactions to happen. That has real, tangible value. You can use that value to subsidize work that is additive to creating that value, although it has different dynamics.

My big takeaway was that there’s real power in matching up a buy and a sell side, and content can be used as leverage in a business model that connects them.

What were the circumstances that led you to leave Digiday and start The Rebooting?

I’d been there for almost a decade. I was the editor-in-chief and then the president, and things run their course over careers.

At the time, I wasn’t going to go to another place. First of all, there weren’t that many of those types of jobs. I would either have to go into a totally different field or basically do the same thing somewhere else. To be honest, I wasn’t going to get those jobs anyway. I didn’t want them, and they weren’t trying to hire me either, so it was mutual.

I wanted to build my own company. I think a lot of people—and the pandemic heightened this a little bit—wanted to have more autonomy in their lives. That was certainly a motivating factor for me.

Did you believe there was a gap in coverage of the media business when you launched?

I don’t know. I think there are a couple of different ways to build businesses. One is to reverse engineer a market and find a gap—a white space, if you will.

I remember when I was a reporter, probably in 2002 or 2003, interviewing Samir Arora at a coffee shop in Union Square. He was telling me how he was going to build Glam Media into this network of sites for women.

I asked him, “Why are you building this?” And he said, “I did all this research. I talked with all the Fortune 500 CMOs,” and he rattled off statistics about how they needed a place to put their advertising and there wasn’t one.

And I’m thinking, “You’re a dude.” That struck me as strange.

I want to create something different that’s informed by how I see the world, put that out into the world and build a business around it. I identify more with that approach.

I think journalists build those kinds of businesses more than they look for white spaces and reverse engineer businesses. The last generation was reverse-engineered businesses, and just about all of them did not work. Maybe it’s time to try something else.

Right now there are more journalists building these businesses. The last generation was not built by journalists, and it didn’t work. So let’s give the journalists a shot. Why not? What’s the worst that could happen?

The Rebooting focuses on the mechanics of building sustainable media businesses. What does sustainability mean to you beyond simply remaining solvent?

That’s number one: be default alive.

When I first started using the term “sustainable business,” people were like, “Oh, you mean cutting down on the use of paper and stuff?” That’s very important, but to me, economics determine everything.

In this profession, I was always an anomaly in that I gravitated toward the business side. Business is basically how the world works. We live in a capitalist world. Everything is ruled by capitalism. Even the Chinese Communist Party is ruled by capitalism.

If you’re a curious person trying to understand how the world works, you cannot ignore that. That was always critical to me.

A sustainable business is one that has a model that is long-term focused, solvent and has a logic to it that allows it to persist for a given period of time.

I’ve changed my tune a little bit because I’m not sure a lot of brands are going to be created for the long term. When we were building Digiday, we’d say, “We want to build a 100-year brand.”

I don’t know if that’s a realistic goal these days because so many brands are built around individuals. By their nature, they’re not going to be as scalable or long-lasting.

There’s not much enterprise value in a lot of those brands because they’re tied to a person. Their value goes away if the person gets hit by a bus. So I’m not even sure long-term sustainability should necessarily be the goal at the end of the day.

Where did the name The Rebooting come from?

I needed a name. I had no idea about all this AI and everything else that was coming down the pike, obviously, but I always had a nagging feeling that the industry I was part of and focused on professionally needed to be rebooted, in the way you reboot a computer to get it to work better.

When you’re out of options, you reboot. I kind of felt that. Nothing felt very long-term sustainable with all the arbitrage models relying on platforms, not having direct connections to the audience, not having control of your distribution and outsourcing your monetization to programmatic channels.

Treating your customers like garbage when they do arrive on a website didn’t make sense. Common sense-wise, it did not feel like a way to build a business, and it turns out that common sense was mostly right.

In rebooting these businesses, it’s best to try a different approach. These businesses are going to be much more audience-focused. They’re going to have much more direct support from the audience or community to exist. Media is going to be used to create leverage in different business areas.

Media itself and information have never been more valuable. It’s just that the mechanisms for extracting value as an independent entity or business are broken. In the larger picture, media is incredibly valuable.

How did you get your first audience without the institutional distribution of a larger publication behind you?

I benefited a lot from personal brand and reputation because I’m focused on a niche. I don’t have a big audience, and that is by design. A lot of the most successful brands now are focused on niche audiences.

I had a leg up because I’d been in the same area for 20-something years. I knew a lot of people, and I had a reputation. When I left my job, I got a couple thousand email subscribers.

I had to come up with a brand. There was no six-month discovery process. I had to negotiate my exit while thinking, “Okay, I’m just going to put up a Substack.” When people leave jobs, you get what we used to call a “congrats Twitter”—everybody saying, “Congrats, congrats,” even if it wasn’t something you should necessarily be congratulated for.

I thought, why don’t I use that as a distribution hack? So I started with a couple thousand subscribers, which was helpful. I spent a year not really focused on the business, just figuring out the product and figuring out whether I wanted to do it.

Do you distinguish between an audience and a genuine community around a publication?

Yeah. To me, a community is when you can get people to take actions and they want to connect with each other.

At Digiday, we had a few different brands. Interestingly, the Digiday audience behaved more like an audience than the audience of a fashion and beauty brand we had called Glossy.

At Digiday, we had an audience with an events business, and we had a community within that events business, but it was different from the overall audience. The events business was heavily commercial, based on the people who handled advertising demand at publishers and the different technology providers they needed to operate those businesses.

Digiday intermediated between those two sides. That was a small subset of the larger audience.

When we were building a membership, we thought we would do more community-based things, but in the end, what people wanted was to pay for access to content that would help them do their jobs better. There really wasn’t a community.

On the Glossy side, they would do these meetups, and I’d go to them and think, “Wow, people really want to connect with each other.” They were just hyper-social.

I think community can actually be easier to pull off as an individual brand because it’s more natural. You have parties. You introduce people to one another.

You talk to a lot of media founders and operators on The Rebooting Show. What have those conversations taught you about companies that you couldn’t learn by analyzing them from the outside?

It’s hard for me to unpack it from my overall experiences and conversations with people. I don’t think I learn as much from conversations with my guests as I do in other ways.

I learn more from observing the world around us than from speaking to individuals who are reacting to those changes.

I feel like media goes first in a lot of industries. That’s why it’s so fascinating. It’s already been so compressed, and this compression is coming to other industries.

Media has always been reactive to larger forces in some ways since the internet. I think every industry is going to be downstream of technology, particularly technology companies and technologies that have choke points. They’re going to be just as reactive.

Media is used to being reactive. I remember when I started as the interactive advertising reporter at Adweek, around 2006. They didn’t know exactly what was going on, and they wanted me to cover it the way their agency reporters would cover McCann Erickson: “What are the four finalists for the Pennzoil review?”

And I thought, no. The West is being settled right now. Why would I be writing about the gold-panning companies? The entire West is being settled. That’s the story. The story is this environment being created out of whole cloth.

Was part of Adweek’s problem that it was simply too big or too established to see what was changing around it?

I think everyone hates change, and that’s just the reality.

Change sucks. When people fetishize change, they’re not being honest. Nobody likes it. Everyone wants to keep doing what they’re doing. I do. I want to keep doing what I’m doing. I don’t want this AI stuff. Why do I want to do this? This is crazy. I’m 53.

That’s organizational inertia. Stasis is normal. I don’t think it’s unique to publishing, media, Adweek or B2B.

It’s not necessarily a knock on the people who were running it. I just got to the point where I thought, “You’ve got to start from scratch.”

You could argue we’re in a period like that right now. There’s actually more of a competitive advantage in many areas of media to start all over again.

The legacy players and digital players are trying to continue operating an old traffic model to fund the creation of a new model. They have an entire culture, DNA and systems built for the old model while they’re trying to build the new model.

The new model is hard as shit to build, but they have to keep operating the old model at the same time. That’s really difficult.

By clearing all of that out, you probably have a better shot at it. You can build your cost basis far lower.

No matter what you think of the role unions have played, I don’t understand how these old newspaper companies can do it with that massive amount of internal regulation designed to slow things down and, throughout history, keep innovations out.

That’s going to be the hardest thing. I don’t think anyone talks about the fact that internally there isn’t actually a big constituency for change in a lot of these organizations because of people’s narrower interests.

You’re also involved with People vs. Algorithms. For someone unfamiliar with PvA, could you describe its premise and your role?

That’s a second podcast I do. It’s a discussion show with me, Troy Young, who used to run Hearst Magazines, and Alex Schleifer, who used to be head of design at Airbnb and is now running a video game studio.

The idea is that the three of us connect the dots across media, technology and culture because we’re all downstream of a lot of things. When it comes to technology and culture, media is absolutely downstream.

Over the years as a reporter, I always felt I was covering a narrow slice of a larger picture. You had to understand the bigger picture, but you also had to remain focused on the narrower mechanical stuff.

This is an opportunity for me to feed the parts of my brain that are curious about how the world works and how that affects my focus area. So it’s not totally far afield. It’s not like I’m talking about the Philadelphia Eagles, for instance.

I would totally have a Philadelphia Eagles podcast, but I don’t think there’s a market for it.

You have an upcoming conference in New York City. What issues and ideas do you want your guests to address there?

It’s called the TRB Audience Summit. I was involved for many years in a publishing event that was mostly about how you accumulate these large audiences, often through Google or Facebook, and then put display ads in front of them, often through programmatic channels.

That business is the old business.

The new business is developing direct connections with specific audiences and monetizing them in different ways based on new value you create, whether that’s connecting people with one another or creating products for them.

It’s obvious to me that the most successful businesses are going to start with complete audience focus and audience centricity in everything they do. That’s what the summit is about, and our guests are going to speak directly to how they’re building those models.

You have a lot of ideas. Are you putting them down in a book?

No. I’ve thought about it. My mom always asked me over the years if I would ever write a book, and I’d say, “No, I’m writing 3,000 words a week. I guess I could put them all into a book.”

I’ve always said I would only write a book if I were super-driven by it—if something struck me that made me want to put in that kind of work.

There are a lot of people producing slop books where it’s like, “Okay, I’ve got hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written. I’m sure I could feed it into Claude and gin together some kind of book based on everything I’ve written.” But I don’t know if that would be valuable.

I would want to have something to say. The book I would want to write would be the broader book about what I call the information space and how information is being used for leverage across all kinds of different markets.

I sometimes get bored talking about this specific market—how you extract value in the publishing and media market. Information and content are being used in different markets to create leverage. I’m very passionate about this particular market, but it’s also one I’ve been focused on for a long time.

I’m really interested in how Silicon Valley is building an alternative media ecosystem. I’m interested in how politicians are now content creators.

Look at Trump. Maybe he was early on this. But look at Mamdani. He’s basically like an influencer as far as I can tell. What is the difference between a garden-variety content creator and Zoran Mamdani? The quality of production is there. He’s a natural, generational communicator.

In the same way that Trump had a feral understanding of how to win in an attention economy, I think Mamdani completely understands the short-form-video version of the attention economy.

Neither of those people are in power without the media—their mass media.

Why would you monetize through ads? I’d rather be president of the United States or mayor of New York City than have a good programmatic ad business.