 Sponsored by Duke University Press  Jacob Weisberg; In the Review’s October 23 issue, Jacob Weisberg turns his attention to the attention-seeking, all-seeing algorithms that continue to shape our culture, on- and offline. “How did we get to this place,” he asks, “where mirror realities have replaced shared facts?” Weisberg would be the person to answer the question, having been at the frontline of digital journalism when he joined Slate magazine in 1996 (where he was editor in chief from 2002 until 2008) and at the vanguard of podcasting as the cofounder, in 2018, of Pushkin Industries, which now produces dozens of podcasts, including Jill Lepore’s The Last Archive and Michael Lewis’s Against the Rules. He is the author of the books In Defense of Government, The Bush Tragedy, and Ronald Reagan. Last week Weisberg and I spoke over the phone about what it’s like to figure out new forms of media, the viability of Substack (of course), and the podcast’s pivot to video.  Advertisement Lauren Kane: Your essay seems to understand two aspects of these social media algorithms: the first is the danger they pose in the hands of powerful bad actors, such as politicians with self-serving interests. But you also appreciate how they can serve subcultures by connecting audiences. Is that a fair assessment of how you conceive of these computer algorithms? Is there is a middle path of living with them in some kind of harmony? Jacob Weisberg: Like a lot of technology, algorithms are not good or bad in themselves. We have to recognize how the algorithm has itself become a medium, in Marshall McLuhan’s sense of the term. If you think about it that way, the algorithm’s defining characteristic is personalization. In the news business, that’s what the technology has made possible. You couldn’t personalize the CBS evening news. But now the news can be tailored to anyone’s interests or tastes. That’s also what creates the potential for manipulation and harm. I think it’s important to recognize that algorithms are not forces of nature. They’re not just there. They’re designed and developed by people, and they reflect their developers’ biases and assumptions, often unintentionally. And sometimes they reflect, quite explicitly, what their creators do and don’t want people to see. In your work as a journalist and in podcasting, what have you noticed about how journalists’ use of algorithms has changed? I started working at Slate in 1996, which was really about as early as there was digital journalism. So I think I’ve been unusually conscious the whole time about the ways these shifts in technology have affected everything we consume. There was an early understanding, before most people had experience with the Internet, that it was going to change our relationship to information. Before I went to Slate, I worked at The New Republic in Washington, D.C., and my next-door office neighbor was the writer Robert Wright. He was writing one of the first pieces, maybe the first piece, I read about the Internet, which The New Republic must have published around 1994. Bob came into my office and said there’s this thing called the Internet, and you should be paying attention to it. It’s going to be a great thing in all kinds of ways, but one bad thing it’s going to do is connect extremists who are now isolated and put them in communication with one another. And that might make them more dangerous. Decades later, that’s almost exactly what happened. In the early days of Google and search technology, a lot of people were looking very closely to see whether different people got the same results if they used the same search terms. And Google did personalize results, but they didn’t—at least it’s my understanding that they didn’t—personalize results politically. They weren’t giving one user conservative results and another liberal results. I think they made a conscious effort not to do that. But once social media—the Internet 2.0—supplanted the open Internet, there started to be much more filtering through algorithms. And that’s when I started to become much more concerned about the potential for political polarization.  Advertisement What made you interested in moving to online journalism? What caught your attention about it? There aren’t that many moments when new forms of media emerge. And if you’re a journalist, it’s very exciting to be part of that, because you can start fresh without all of the rules and routines of the old forms. Honestly, that’s why I’ve always jumped at it. I think with any new medium, there’s a formative period before the rules are set when you can be part of discovering what the form will be. At Slate we had a sense of responsibility—since most of us who worked there in the early days came from more traditional magazines—to make sure that journalistic standards around fairness and verification were applied on the Internet. We thought it was really important that websites, just like newspapers and magazines, not just fix their mistakes but acknowledge them. That wasn’t at all a given in the early days of the Internet. The Internet also provided an opportunity to write in different ways. Before I went to Slate, I hardly ever wrote anything in the first person. It was considered bad form. When I write for the Review, I don’t ordinarily write in the first person. But on the Internet, the style came very much out of e-mail; you are addressing an individual reader who you imagine to be on the other end of an electronic device. It’s a more direct and personal form of communication. The medium enabled the development of new and more conversational forms, like the blog. Those early moments are filled with all kinds of possibility and a lot of fun. Then after a certain amount of time, rules do get established. Articles have to be a certain length and they have to be done a certain way, and new writers get taught to do that as opposed to figuring out how to do it for themselves. Is that when it becomes a little less exciting or interesting? I think so. It’s when things become more standardized. Look at radio or television: at some point a television news broadcast became twenty-two minutes long, with eight minutes of advertising breaks, and a certain order to how things were presented: breaking news, perhaps a longer story, then weather, and finally sports. Well, when television news was first invented, those weren’t the rules. The period that’s the most fun is before there are rules, and you can figure out what works by experimenting. That’s how we came up with the first news aggregation feature—an early morning summary of how the five top newspapers were covering the day’s big stories. It seems that early phase is where Substack and newsletters are now. Very much so. I love Substack as a form, and I get and spend a lot of time reading various Substack newsletters every day. I relish the sense of being deeply engaged with a small number of writers and thinkers who I find really interesting. They can invent a new form for their work, and they don’t all have to do it the same way. There’s an opportunity for greater depth and variety of styles or frequency of publication. That is what the invention of blogs felt like in the mid- to late Nineties. But at some point, everyone got a little exhausted with blogging. It was partly because Twitter came along and supplanted it, but it was partly because bloggers and their readers were tiring of the form. I worry that’s going to happen with Substack, too. Already I feel there are too many that I like that I want to keep up with, but there are only so many hours in the day. Substack is wonderful in part because the subscription model creates the opportunity for a writer or thinker or journalist to be an independent business and support what they do on their own. Most bloggers were not making a living with freestanding blogs, or they had to beg readers for donations. I think it’s great that writers can essentially publish their own little magazines with their own subscribers—a dedicated audience. Where do podcasts fit into this shift? I got excited about podcasting for the same reason—the invention of a new medium. At Slate we had a partnership with NPR in 2003 to produce a midday show, and we were trying to invent new kinds of audio journalism. Then when podcasting appeared as a technology—this is more than twenty years ago now—we started asking writers at Slate to experiment with it. It was novel and exciting to relate to our audience through voice as well as through text. In the heyday of print newspapers and newsmagazines, with the exception of a few big names, most readers had no idea who wrote what they were reading in, say, Newsweek or The New York Times. But podcasting, even more than radio, creates a kind of intimacy with a writer’s voice and personality. Someone might recognize your voice in line at the coffee shop and feel like they know you really well. Of course, there are also limitations. When you’re doing something narrative in an audio format, there’s a much greater demand for you to tell a complicated story in a straight chronological fashion, because people get confused if you jump back and forth. If you make a conversational podcast with too many voices, particularly if they’re too many voices of the same gender, listers can’t keep track of them. But much like digital journalism, pioneering podcasts felt like we were inventing something. Now, years later, it’s already been invented, and people are going to tell you that there’s a right and wrong way to do it. Do you think that’s where podcasts are right now? I’m afraid so. It’s still possible to make wonderful podcasts—my company, Pushkin, makes a lot of nonfiction documentary storytelling podcasts, and we work with wonderful writers like Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Dana Goodyear, Tim Harford, Jake Halperin, Hari Kunzru, Jill Lepore. It’s thrilling to make audio at the level we do. But there’s also been a big infusion of what used to be right-wing talk radio: the descendants of Rush Limbaugh are now making podcasts instead of radio shows. Those are in many cases the most popular podcasts with the biggest audiences. And they’re dragging it into video, which I think is unfortunate. I got into podcasts because I didn’t want to make video, and now increasingly you have to make video to go with audio, whether you want to or not, so that your show can reach an audience on YouTube. I think that early heroic period of podcasting is over. It’s not that you can’t still make great podcasts, but the rules are being inflicted upon you. To me, if the essence of algorithms is personalization, then the essence of podcasting is multitasking, listening while you’re doing something else, while you’re exercising, doing your laundry, tidying up your house. The last thing I want to do is sit and watch the podcast as low-quality television. But I’m sixty-one years old, and there’s a younger generation that is very habituated to consuming all content on YouTube and through video. If you want to reach that audience, you have to at least offer that alternative.  Advertisement More by Jacob Weisberg at nybooks.com Algorithm NationFights about digital filtering tools have turned more and more bitter. That’s because of their extraordinary power to shape both political opinion and mass culture.  The Lucky OneWho was the “real” Reagan behind the carapace of vagueness, self-delusion, and contradiction?  The Autocracy AppThe growing consensus is that Facebook’s power needs checking. Fewer agree on what its greatest harms are—and still fewer on what to do about them. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.   You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 11 de octubre de 2025
New Media Rules
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