The Decline of Mainstream Media - Why I Cancelled Most of My Paid Subscriptions

I am an ardent fan of high-quality journalism and news. I used to subscribe to more than 10 top-notch publications in the past, and now I’ve canceled almost all of these subscriptions.

Here are some paid publications I subscribed to for many years but have canceled in the last 2 years or the last few months:

• The New York Times (20+ year subscriber)

• The New Yorker (20+ year subscriber)

• The Financial Times (on and off, a 20+ year subscriber)

• Bloomberg News (5+ year subscriber)

• LA Times (5+ year subscriber)

• The Atlantic (on and off subscriber)

• Fortune Magazine (10+ year subscriber)

• MIT Tech Review (2+ year subscriber)

• Wired Magazine (4+ year subscriber)

• Der Spiegel (English) (3+ year subscriber)

• Guardian (5+ year subscriber)

I’m disappointed to have done this. The fundamental reason is that the quality of news has gone down. Surprisingly the high-cost subscription news products have gotten comparatively worse, vs some free ad-driven products.

Here are the handful of paid subscriptions I’ve kept:

• The Economist Magazine

• The Wall Street Journal

• Dwell Magazine

• Apple News Plus (which gives me partial access to many publications)

I’ve talked to many other well-informed and highly-educated Americans, and this seems to be part of a 5-year or even decade-long trend.

So what are the reasons I’ve canceled so many subscriptions when I would much rather keep them and pay for high-quality journalism?

Top reasons why I quit most mainstream media:

• The quality of news has decreased: standards for basic factual reporting (“the whole truth and nothing but the truth”) have declined compared to the prime 1980s and 1990s reporting. An older Walter Cronkite generation had a standard of accuracy, timeliness, and fairness that many modern publications have rejected, reverting back to a new age of Yellow Journalism that was common a century ago. James Bennet’s critique of the New York Times failing as an institution applies to many of the older publications - they are imploding.

• The rise of opinion journalism replacing fact-based reporting: Publications keep replacing objective journalistic reporting with editorials, commentary, and analysis from generalist pundits who traffic in politicized pablum (the New York Times and FT were recent offenders). I much prefer journalists who do investigative reporting, objectively present many sides, and link to hard evidence (e.g. reports, images, video, etc).

• Endless partisanship: Most of the paid subscriptions have decided via their publishers, senior editors, or hired journalists that they will be politically partisan and present subjectively slanted reporting. I don’t want to read Democrat, Republican, Tory, Labour, CDU, etc news. I want politically neutral, objective reporting, which was a standard in some high-quality publications from the 1970s to the 1990s. That has been lost. I mostly look for intelligent news, and prefer views from the center, or the rare smart views on the left and right - media political bias has hit extremes (see the chart below). There is some evidence that paid news and paywalls increase polarization and hyper-partisanship, specifically “evidence that the newsroom got more polarized after the paywall adoption: journalists who wrote more left-leaning news articles are more likely to get new byline assignments.”

• The lack of a global perspective, or hyper-local news: Most of these high-quality publications focus on national news, often sensational hangups, when I see value in having a global perspective (for large publications like the NYT, FT, etc), a hyper-local perspective (for say the LA Times or SF Chronicle), or reporting on important long-run trends such as demographic change, people and capital movements, institutional updates or decay, cultural diversity, etc.

• The lack of evidence: We live in a world where posting a report, transcript, image, video, court document, or so on should be a standard journalistic practice - if you cite something, link to it. Unfortunately, very few journalists do so.

• Clickbaity headlines and articles mixed with conflicts of interest: The quality of headlines has gone down as many editors have regressed to clickbait models. Often even the first few paragraphs of many articles read like clickbait to promote wild emotional reactions instead of a thoughtful hook or summary of the piece. Editorial coverage is suspect too. As one example, I think editors could cut the reporting on Elon, Trump, Israel/Palestine, and other sensational areas by half and free up that attention to important, long-run trends. Finally, I see journalists at top publications writing articles slamming politicians or companies in sensational weekly articles while they are on a book tour promoting their book on said politician or company - a clear conflict of interest in reporting that somehow is allowed. Other conflicts come from promoting a journalist’s personal brand and political views on social media, while hurting the credibility of their publication.

So where have I gone - what has replaced the mainstream media in my information diet? The trends I’ve noted are a movement to expert-driven reporting and commentary and paid newsletters.

What replaced the paid mainstream media in my information diet:

• Reuters, AP News, Politico, and The Hill - free, ad-supported mainstream media that still has fair quality levels

• Stratechery (Ben Thompson) - a tech newsletter, which along with Techmeme and the Verge has the best tech reporting

• Techmeme - a tech news aggregator

• Verge - a niche tech news site

• Hacker News - a niche aggregator site for coders

• Politico and the Hill - websites with relatively unbiased reporting on American politics and government

• Money Stuff by Matt Levine (Bloomberg) - a financial industry newsletter

• Parent Data by Emily Oster - a parenting newsletter

• Lawfare and Scotusblog - niche websites on legal matters

• Quanta Magazine - a niche math and science publication

• Podcasts: Founders, American Optimist, Freakonomics, No Priors, Dwarkesh Podcast, The Lex Fridman Podcast, Conversations with Tyler, The Ezra Klein Show, People I Mostly Admire, Stanford’s ETL Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, Invest Like the Best, Big Technology Podcast, Goodfellows.

• The Great Courses: Online video courses in math, physics, history, etc.

• YouTube: Lectures from professors in areas I care about (robotics, AI, climate change, math, etc); Royal Institution science weekly Friday talks; interviews with key political, business, and cultural leaders; and clips from specialist reporters like Fareed Zakaria on geopolitics.

• Twitter/X and Threads: As a place to follow specialists (e.g. ML Twitter, Tech Twitter, books Twitter/Threads), and then link out to specialist websites or informed commentary that avoids the Dunning Kruger effect.

My consumption pattern suggests that a few, high-quality generalist publications that maintain high standards will do well (e.g. WSJ and the Economist), while the future is all about reporting by specialist journalists or experts who become journalists and who start their own newsletters and podcasts. They will monetize their high-value content without being held back by a legacy institution.

There remains a small minority of great journalists in mainstream media. Some that come to mind: Cade Metz, Thomas Friedman, Steven Erlanger, Keith Bradsher, Andrew Ross Sorkin, George Johnson, Roger Cohen, and Katrin Bennhold at the NY Times; Evan Osnos and Jiayang Fan at the New Yorker; Derek Thompson at the Atlantic; John Burn-Murdoch, Jamie Smyth, Edward White, Leila Abboud, Roula Kalaf at the FT; and so on.

I hope that these journalists start to push for a return to better institutional values in their publications (high-quality news, little or no editorial and opinion reporting, political neutrality, global or hyper-local views, plenty of attached evidence, neutral and not clickbaity language). If not, I hope they can leave to start a new institution, just like Barri Weiss did for The Free Press or Ben Smith did for Semafor.

And ultimately I hope to pay premium prices for high-quality news and reporting - that this recent trend reverses through the integrity and hard work of a new generation of editors and journalists. I especially hope to return to the NY Times and Financial Times one day in the future when they have new publishers and editors and have higher quality institutional values and reporting that hearkens back to or improves on their prior peak.