54 – Can you handle the Truth: The Future of News

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Can you handle the truth? What is the future of news? Are we at a Spotify moment? Do we even care about the truth?

Navigation:

1. Intro (01:34)
2. Mainstream vs Niche News (02:09)
3. Are we Close to the Spotify/Netflix moment? (29:30)
4. State or Government Ownership and Influence of Media (46:06)
5. Polarization & The Truth (58:36)
6. Year of Election (1:05:10)
7. Conclusion (1:09:21) 

Our co-hosts:

• Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt
• Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro

Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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Nuno

In today’s episode of Tech Deciphered, we will be discussing the truth. Can you handle the truth and the whole truth? More specifically, we’re going to talk about the future of news, where we are today. Obviously, a lot of discussion around fake news, polarization of news.

Nuno

We will go into a conversation on whether we are close to the Spotify moment of the news space, and whether how we’re caring for the truth is still actually true. Do we still care for truth or do we just care about our own opinions and to reinforce them over time?

Bertrand

That’s a big question. I think to start about this topic, we probably want to start from this big debate that has gone pretty big over the past 10 years, but maybe even more the past five years. It’s maybe the mainstream versus niche news and all the dramatic changes that have happened in a way, thanks to internet.

Nuno

There’s the mainstream versus niche, there’s the mainstream versus speciality. Maybe let’s start with mainstream. What is mainstream news? Is it just news or do we get news through mechanisms that sometimes are not news anymore?

Bertrand

Is it still mainstream?

Nuno

Clearly, there has been a decrease in viewership of the newscasts, the news programs that we used to watch in our own countries, in the US. Now people can watch whatever they want whenever they want it. In some ways, there’s still maybe some flagship national news shows that people listen to. Obviously, there’s dedicated news channels like CNN, Fox News, of course, as well.

Nuno

Is it really where we consume our mainstream news? My view is obviously with the decreasing of viewership across the top channels, one would say maybe less so, but clearly still there is mainstream news. Fox News represents a specific side of the spectrum, but it is mainstream. CNN is as well. What’s your view, Bertrand?

Bertrand

I was asking this question only jokingly because I don’t know many people who still watch some of these mainstream news channels. My impression is that actually, first, the metrics are pretty clear. It’s a significant decline in viewership. You talk about TV, but the price is the same. A few managed to, I would say, stay somewhat relevant. Take a New York Times, take a Wall Street Journal, but even that definition of relevant is a very small viewership.

Bertrand

The numbers are extremely small in terms of who is paying for a subscription to these services. We are talking about millions at best, so that’s very small. One thing I noticed, I think that is pretty clear across the board is that, most of what we call mainstream media is more and more watched by the older generations, meaning people who have very long habits of watching their news that way from a TV channel. And two, who have not gone to the internet for their news because they were stuck in their old ways in some ways.

Bertrand

Obviously not everyone is like this, but my understanding is that they are all facing growing, older and older generations. Of course, there’s a question, what does it mean in term of advertising? Because if you’re not able to target 30, 40-year-old mom, that’s a problem. That’s really, for me, a big question. It’s not only becoming less and less relevant and mainstream because of the smaller and smaller viewership, but it’s also a different kind of viewership.

Bertrand

There’s, of course, a question of, is this viewership going to stick or actually just going to die? Sorry to be very abrupt, but if your target audience is mostly 70 plus and everyone younger doesn’t want or care or consume their news that way, that’s a huge trouble for these companies. Obviously, they know that.

Nuno

On the TV side, I think a couple of things. One, local news, in particular, if you look at the US, still has a bit of a role. If you want to know what’s happening, if there’s a storm coming, I think weather is a great example of why you check the news. In principle, it should have some directionality. Obviously, national news is a different ball game.

Nuno

I feel there’s many ways of consuming news today. In some ways, actually, news channels, the classic mainstream news programs, are competing with things, for example, like social media. A lot of people consume news, shockingly enough. We’ll talk about Twitter later, but a lot of people even consume news on TikTok. The latest thing that came out on TikTok, and people will share things, for example, on Instagram, on stories, et cetera.

Nuno

It’s just these tidbits that have very little context. I think TV is It’s a bit under attacked with low attention span. To your point, maybe, certain older generations, they have more the appetite to trust certain newscasters in what they say, the George Stephanopoulos at ABC, whoever else at Fox, et cetera. There’s this notion of maybe there’s a couple of generations that trust the newscaster for presenting news in a way that they think represents either some neutrality or whatever.

Nuno

If we step back on journalism, journalism was always supposed to be a counterpower. It was the fourth power, the counterpower. It was about keeping the powers in check, the judicial power, the legislative power, et cetera, in check. I think that’s changed. It’s changed because of the internet. It’s changed because of rapid access to information. Radio, for example, in some ways has been totally under attack. Podcasts have taken over on that side.

Nuno

Press has been under attack as well. Who are the publications that are still thriving? The publications that relatively thrive are the big guys, New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economists, where there’s either a quality expectation in reading them, or there is a notion of the number of journalists that they can throw at specific articles.

Nuno

A little bit the opinion pieces and the investigative journalism piece of the puzzle is what I think still makes press work, because you have the time to put stuff together, the time to really go under the hood and generate newsworthy things out of it. In some ways, the clickbait thing has changed the world. It’s like, can you get my attention or not? If you can’t, I’m going to just tune out and go somewhere else, and I’ll consume my news in some other way.

Bertrand

Two good points. One, local versus national. The other one about the clickbait. Local versus national, that’s true. I register to my local newspaper to get the local news because I want to know what’s happening. Unfortunately, I find it biased, so I’m not always super happy reading that. The other piece that is clear is, I don’t care whatever they publish on national news.

Bertrand

For national news, I have my Wall Street Journal subscription, I have my Bloomberg subscription, and that’s what I will use for national or world news, actually. In the past, if we go back a long time ago, when you have to print newspaper and journals and stuff, there was some logic to combine national and local news because it’s not efficient to have different newspapers for everything.

Bertrand

I think now it’s quite clear that you won’t get the best quality, get national-wise, global-wise from your local newspaper. In a way, why bother? That has definitely been my approach. Clickbait, that’s a great point.

Bertrand

I also remember reading stories, not just stories, but data analysis about how the news in term of, not just what’s in the title, but once in the body of the news, how it has gone downhill in the past 50 years. The language has become worse and worse in terms of making it scary at every level, from car crash to the Earth is dying, the world is burning.

Bertrand

There was this famous comparison I think it was on German TV where they were showing a weather forecast basically on TV, it looked like everything was burning in Germany. If you take the same news report, weather forecast report five years back with similar temperature, there was certainly not this impression that was shared by making the graphics looks very dangerous.

Bertrand

There is definitely a change. My take is that, consumers are noticing. People are not as dumb as some of the people in the news seem to think. People might think by themselves, notice a change, notice when it doesn’t correlate with the reality they live. We might talk more about this, about the brainwashing that some news organization have been trying to do.

Bertrand

I think it’s also part of why mainstream media has been dying because that propaganda part is becoming more and more visible. It probably went overdrive and as a result has become more visible. I think that’s totally part of why people are looking for more, there niche source of information, or new internet platform to get access to consumer journalism.

Nuno

It’s a tale that is important. We define our own canons. We define what are the things that we trust and the journalists that we trust and the things that we don’t trust. I’m similar to you. I consume my per local news. Actually, I think it’s probably the only subscription I have. Obviously, we have some corporate subscriptions through our firm.

Nuno

My subscription that I subscribe to personally is a local review, which is the Half Moon Bay Review, which is the local newspaper. I consume it because I want to know news and what’s happening, et cetera. Then there’s canons that you build. You’re like, “What are the things that I trust?” If I want to read an in-depth analysis on macro, I can’t say The Economist is without flaw, but it’s pretty decent most of the time. There is actual research behind it. It’s well thought through, et cetera.

Nuno

Interestingly enough, if you’ve noticed on The Economist, those who have read, there’s no bylines. It’s like The Economist takes responsibility for articles posted. There’s a couple of exception on opinion pieces, but in general, The Economist, there’s no byline. It’s like I’m not saying it’s me or whatever. It’s basically assumed by the newspaper. The Economist looks like a magazine, but it’s a newspaper. That’s how they call themselves.

Nuno

Obviously, on Economic news, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, in some aspects, I’ll look at New York Times, actually, for example, in arts, et cetera, I’ll go to New York Times. I will still consume breaking news as it shows up in my Google Now feature on my Android devices or whatever pops up on my Google Chrome first page, what’s the news of the day and whatever, just for breaking news.

Nuno

I do like to spend more time reading in-depth analysis, research, opinion pieces that are clearly put as such rather than the breaking news stuff, et cetera. Because to your point, it is there to make us feel a little bit more depressed overall. In some ways we’re all creating our little canons, our little things that we trust and the things that we don’t trust.

Nuno

There was this professor in Portugal. He wasn’t my professor, he was a humanities professor in university, quite well-known pundit as well on TV. He once came to a small group of university students. I was a university student back then, and I still remember this to this day, which is he said, “I always do this exercise at the beginning of my class.”

Nuno

It was on something, some critical evaluation of journalism, whatever the subject was that he was teaching. He said, “I always ask my students at the beginning of the course, have you ever been in a situation where there was news in a moment that you’re in? There was a situation that you’re in, a car crash, whatever, and there was news out of it that you saw later, either on radio, TV, press, whatever.”

Nuno

A very significant part of the class always raises their hand. Then I asked them to keep their hands up, and I said, “Do you think that the situation was accurately described by the journalist once you saw it later described?” Almost nobody keeps their hand up. I was a university student, so this conversation happened 20-something years ago. It didn’t happen in the time of Instagram and TikTok and fake news and all that stuff. It’s absolutely mind-boggling.

Bertrand

At the time when it was still somewhat trustworthy.

Nuno

Yeah, it’s absolutely mind-boggling, and this was back then.

Bertrand

That’s very interesting.

Nuno

Just to finish the story, his advice was, “If you want to have canonical views on things, doctrinal views on things, it is my doctrine that I believe in this versus that, read books. Read books, inform yourself. And anything that’s very short term, the last six months, the last three months, suspend this belief for a while. Create that doctrine over time in some ways.” I found it fascinating, but I think it’s really du jour. It works today. Today, that could be a good advice that we could give people.

Bertrand

To jump on that, actually, and I will go back on The Economist, but that’s one thing I notice more and more, and in a way, it’s obvious. The more you know a space, the more you know an industry, the more you realize that generalist journalists don’t know much at the end of the day. A specialized journalist might know more, but even then you see up to a point. It’s so much true of the generalist journalist, how bad it is at every level.

Bertrand

Still, they are designed to make you feel that they know a lot, and they spread stuff a lot. I think that’s part of the issue. Just to be clear, 20, 30 years ago, before Internet, you couldn’t spread one-to-one messages or one-to-few messages. You had to go one-to-many and broad, and so that might make some sense.

Bertrand

Today, I think the paradigm has changed. To go deeper on The Economist, actually, I stopped my subscription as The Economist, I forgot how long ago, but I actually disagree with what you say. I find them, first, late to the news. On any interesting topic, I will get better information on Twitter quicker.

Nuno

They’re not in that business, Bertrand. They’re in the business of investigative journalism, research-based stuff. They’ve never been in the breaking news business, The Economist.

Bertrand

No, because they will always have news that is relatively relevant to what happened a week ago, two weeks ago, three weeks ago. They do once in a while some deeper research, but it’s still timely news. They are not going to talk about stuff that happened some time ago. The most important point for me is that, as you say, there is no byline, and that’s something that they are known for.

Bertrand

I started to feel that actually I was certainly not in agreement with some of The Economist position and The Economist perspective. For me, they were just wrong in terms of perspective and analysis, and therefore more and more useless as a paper to follow what’s going on over the world because I certainly think they don’t represent basically the world and the economy and how it’s truly working, but they have this fancy perspective on how they think things works.

Bertrand

Personally, I’ve been disappointed over the years. I used to read that every week, 10 years ago. For me now, I don’t want to say it’s super bad, but it’s bad enough that, from my perspective, has become useless information.

Nuno

Slightly different perspectives, and maybe that is an actual thought to be had. At the end of the day, to your point, speciality journalism versus generalist journalism. But even in speciality journalism, there is more and more the tendency to create mythology. It’s mythology cells, in particular, negative mythology. We’ve talked about the myths of Silicon Valley in the past and myths of tech.

Nuno

I think tech journalism right now is going through this ‘tech is bad’ notion. Founders, in many cases, are bad. These people that were maybe five years ago idolised, and they were the best ever, and now they’re the worst ever. Why is that? Because it sells. Because people click through, and they go and listen to the last story about Elon Musk and the board still fighting his package. It’s like, cool, but it’s in some ways we know this as human beings. The reality, the truth is normally much more nuanced.

Nuno

It’s where we’ve gone. A lot of amazing tech entrepreneurs have been edified as the new people that are going to save us all just to be thrown down a couple of years later because maybe it sells more, maybe because there’s more clicks on it, and that’s the tendency of the market at that stage.

Bertrand

That’s really one of my issue is that, it’s not about long-term trend analysis. Most journalism that we see in the mainstream media, for instance, it’s always being sensational. It’s the news of the day, “This one was killed,” and, “Look at that big bad trend,” when actually there is no trend. Actually, typically, they will either show no metrics or they show metrics that have been manipulated so deeply that it’s totally untrustworthy.

Bertrand

I would advise anyone, obviously, who is looking at any stats shared by journalist, analyst, to truly take time to understand what it truly really means, and how it has been changed and tweaked over time. Actually, on this one, there was a very interesting tweet storm from the ex-Harvard President, Larry Summers, and he was showing a GDP metrics as they reported religiously from a Wall Street Journal to a Bloomberg to The Economist over the past 30, 40 years.

Bertrand

He treated that data by showing, you know what? Actually, there has been multiple change how GDP is calculated over the years. Obviously, it has been treated only one way. Sorry, I’m talking about GDP I wanted to talk about inflation rates. GDP also, by the way, is being manipulated over the years by changing definitions. Tricks of how GDP has been calculated for 70 years is also very interesting.

Bertrand

Going back to inflation and Larry Summers, he was showing how actually, if you were to use how inflation was calculated in the ’80s, and apply it to what happened the last few years, we will not have picked at 6%, we will have picked close to 20%. We were at 20% inflation rate based on previous definitions of inflation.

Bertrand

That’s pretty insane, because some experts will run this analysis, some hedge funds will run this type of analysis, but the mainstream journalists, even the specialized one in economy, they didn’t talk about that. They had no point about that. I don’t know if they didn’t care, they didn’t know, or if on purpose, they tried to play that game and keep misleading their readers about where we stand, really, by just publishing without thinking too much, government statistics, and without trying to make sense out of them.

Bertrand

That would be what I would call true journalism in my mind. I don’t think we get much of that anymore from this so-called journalist, to be frank. We need to get to the true experts who dare to share the truth.

Nuno

In some ways, and this is maybe a good segue for us to talk about niche journalism and niche news, et cetera, it was broken by the internet. Let’s be very honest. The internet broke everything. The digitization of how things get transmitted in a much more meaningful way, taking away the broadcasting aspect of it, which was radio and TV, changed everything.

Nuno

It changed it so dramatically that now we are looking for a couple of things. We’re looking for specialists or people that we perceive as potential specialists in a certain area to have an opinion on it. Sometimes maybe even misguided. Sometimes, to your point, you might be looking for something that is trying to reinforce a position that you have. It could be an educated position, or it could be an absolutely BS position. It depends on the person, I guess.

Nuno

That is where niche came in. Niche came in with speciality, with blogs, with people recording their own stuff on YouTube, with small channels that immerse to become relatively big channels. If you remember The Young Turks in the US. Guys that went after specific demographics in terms of news, shorter news, bites, et cetera.

Nuno

Everything changed there. Journalism changed because in some ways, to your point, we know the people that back in the day had the big scoops, that told us that Watergate had happened, people that changed how we saw government, and rightfully so. Now that’s not it. Now it’s like, how many followers do you have? How much click-through do you have? How much money do you make out of it? If you have a YouTube channel, how much are you making out of that advertising? That’s what matters.

Nuno

In that world, to be honest, being very truthful implies doing a lot of analysis and research, which implies a lot of time, which probably implies not putting as much content out. For example, just content cadence is a big deal. If you can’t put a lot of content out, you’re at the disadvantage. Monetising stuff, we’ll talk about business models later on, but monetising stuff, what are you monetising? Is what I’m seeing news? Or is what I’m seeing an advertisement for a brand or for something?

Nuno

What is your conflict of interest? Conflict of interest used to be a big deal around journalism. Are you trading stock on this company or whatever? It’s seemingly disappeared. We don’t talk much about it anymore. I’m like, “Surely now there’s more conflicts of interest than ever.” I might do a hatchet job on a founder of a company that I want to short, and I might actually be super supportive of a founder that I’m long on his stock or her stock.

Nuno

Honest, I feel we’ve lost the counterpower. News is no longer counterpower. News is another power, and it’s being exercised. We’ll talk about it later because some of these media platforms are very clearly an exercise of power, not a counterpower, an exercise of power.

Bertrand

I think that’s always the question when you say a counterpower is, who is the counterpower to this power of mainstream news organisation? There was no one actually until recently, where now you have what you could call citizen journalism or analyst experts sharing their opinions, either through their own newsletter or through Twitter, YouTube. That’s becoming the real counterpower. I agree with you. I feel that the mainstream media of today is not the one who would have investigated or published the Watergate. It feels the opposite. It feels the mainstream media that would have hidden the story.

Nuno

But I would push back on the niche thing is always a positive thing. Obviously, we have found people that are very thoughtful about their analysis and numbers and all that. There was this joke going on for a while that in some ways the comedians that decided to go and relate to news like Jon Stewart back in the day, well, he’s back now. John Oliver, et cetera. All of these guys, by making comedy out of news, are the new newscasters and investigative journalists.

Nuno

They have their own skews, and we know what their skews are and some of the stuff that they’ve portrayed. John Oliver, I used to be a huge fan of his program, but there have been a couple of shows that I’ve watched that I’m like, “This is a clear hatchet job, and it’s not comedy. This is not comedy either. He’s just gone after a company, or he’s gone after a person.” Sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s not. You could see that in the way it’s translated if you have some information behind the scenes on what’s going on.

Nuno

But the citizen journalism thing, there’s pieces, again, of it that are good, like breaking new stuff, what’s happening, people doing a little bit more in depth, going behind the scenes, figuring out stuff that was said before. All of that, I think, is very, very powerful. But honestly, not everyone is a journalist, and not everyone should be.

Nuno

During COVID, we had this. Everyone was an expert on what was happening in COVID. Everyone was a virologist. Everyone was an expert on everything that’s just going. That’s not true. There should be a number of specialists that know what they’re talking about.

Nuno

I work in venture capital, I see these posts posted by people. Some of them are not even venture capitalists. They have no clue. They probably have never even made an investment in their life at scale. Some that post are very young VCs. They’re like, okay, this person has been doing this for six months. Why are we reading this?

Nuno

I call the attention to this because, for example, at Chamaeleon, we share news between the team members just to talk about strategy every week, et cetera, and sometimes one of the team members will share something. I’m like, “Who wrote this?” “It’s very well-written.” It’s like, “Understood, it’s very well-written, and it’s very compelling, but who wrote it?” I want to know. I want to attach credibility to the buy-line. Who wrote it? Who’s this person? What experience does this person have in this industry? What investments has this person made? Why are we listening to this person or reading this person?

Nuno

Even in mediums like ours, and just to be clear, the mediums that people right now are listening to are probably mediums like ours, people that are more educated, more thoughtful, that are willing to listen, that have a degree of openness that is a little bit superior to the mass market, so to speak.

Nuno

Even us, we’re being subjugated now because of noise, because there’s so much noise like, “You should read this. You should read this.” Sometimes I’m reading, I was like, “Why am I reading this thing? Who wrote this?” That generates fake news. That generates the worst of fake news. It generates things that are just fundamentally flawed in their analysis and their research. They’re just well communicated, but they’re flawed.

Bertrand

Of course. You could argue that the definition these days, more or less of mainstream media are well communicated, but not well thought and sometimes pure propaganda piece, I would say.

Nuno

You keep going back to mainstream. It’s niche as well, right?

Bertrand

It’s niche as well. But the big difference is about freedom. You have freedom of choice, freedom of information, freedom of speech. This platform, like Twitter, mostly a YouTube podcast, you are free to listen, you are free to read, you are free to watch from many sources. It’s not coming from the top, it’s coming from the bottom up.

Bertrand

Where I agree with you is that, of course, there is crap, but I much prefer to be able to filter out the noise by myself, find reliable sources of information, check over time how these guys are talking, explaining things, and does it match what I’m seeing from the world? Does it match my understanding of the world? Does it have some predictive power? If it has, then you know what? I’m going to listen and read more of this person.

Bertrand

We just talk about Larry Summers. He was one of the first to talk about inflation risk in the US, and he was right. I was certainly following his perspective, but at the time, he was widely ridiculed by his peers. I much prefer a situation where there are multiple choices, multiple voices, and I can use my brain to search, match and ultimately select, than the other old traditional approach where you had little choice. You were stuck with it, and you could potentially discover some issues, but it was harder because less voices to give you a different perspective.

Bertrand

But totally, there is total bullshit that can come up. For me, that was especially clear during COVID because you could see globally how things were changing very fast in terms of how news was spread, how stuff was explained. Let’s not forget how from one day to the next, COVID initially was not a problem. “Don’t worry, nothing will happen in your country, in your state.” The next day, everything changed in terms of story. Not just one journalist, one magazine, but every journalist, every mainstream media would change their mind and opinion in 48 hours. You would see that change because I’m reading news from multiple countries happening. That was pretty disturbing to see that level of control and manipulation from state entities at some point. That’s what it is.

Bertrand

To go back to your point, yes, of course, I want to hear from infectious disease expert when it was time of COVID, I was looking for this news from different experts and collecting on Twitter names of people who were interesting, trustworthy, and were sharing news before others.

Bertrand

I never become an expert, of course, but I learned to search for the truth in a way. It’s obviously not easy, but it was amazing how early you would get ahead of some news. How early you would get in terms of government perspective on, “You should do this, you should not do that.” It has been in a way, for me, a wake-up time to realise that the government was not right on so many topics in France, in China, in US, in multiple countries, in Australia. And at some point, you need competition for source of news in order to make your own opinion.

Bertrand

It has been proven time and time again that many things, many decision were actually not only wrong, but were pure propaganda in the sense of not based on science. At the time where we were told to trust science, decisions were not based on science, were based on misunderstanding, political calculations, many things, but certainly not always about science.

Bertrand

You don’t want to hear and listen from any crackpot out there, but at the same time, I learned that mainstream media, government sources, were not as reliable as you would thought they were.

Nuno

Maybe just as a bookend to this section, bundling of news has happened. It’s done. We went from maybe listening to that radio show in the morning that we really liked and the news of the day in the evening to the channel that we prefer to a world where we consume news whenever we want, however we want it, video, short form, articles, whatever.

Nuno

Maybe the biggest shift of them all has always been social because we share news with each other. We share things. If I agree with Bertrand on many things, I’m going to listen to Bertrand when he said, “You should read this.” That becomes our focal point, the trustworthiness of the person that sends us those news. But in a nutshell, We’ve gone from a very bundled world, very massage into broadcasting to us into a super unbundled world, super noisy, with the pluses and minus that we just discussed.

Nuno

Maybe switching to where we are today in terms of some of these new platforms, are we close to the Spotify-Netflix moment? Are we close to having news providers to us that find interesting business and business models and products that basically attract us in the same way that Spotify was able to revolutionise music or the Spotify model was able to revolutionise music, where we consume whatever we want, it’s not prepackaged, we know the cues that exist, and that’s it? Are we there yet, I guess, is the question?

Bertrand

It’s a good question. I’m fundamentally not so sure. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is huge, for instance. Facebook is huge, but the news part of this organisation is actually quite small. If I pick Twitter, it has gone through some changes. Ultimately, in term of revenue generation, I don’t think it’s that big, that transformational at this stage. Even if for me personally, as a source of truth, X/Twitter is definitely a reference.

Bertrand

In term of business model, personally, I’m not so sure a true at-scale business model has been found. Of course, we have heard about other solutions like Substack to let writers monetise, but it’s still at a relatively small scale.

Nuno

The platform still owned today. We have obviously Apple with Apple News, which is almost like a loss-leader for them from a product standpoint. They just bundled it in. Either you want it or not, but it’s cool, and it’s not that pricey if you have a bundle. Google with Google News, obviously. Google News itself has a little bit disappeared from focal point, but they injected it into Google Chrome page, they injected into Google Now on the left side of your mobile phone on Android, so it’s there. They are serving you news that they think you want.

Nuno

I think those two experiences, honestly, you could argue they’re not great, they’re not fantastic, but they work. You’re being given news that they think you want to see. Obviously, we know there’s issues with that as well because they might be skewing towards your last searches and the last things you did, and they’re obviously mining your data. They’re doing a bunch of things. But those experiences in some ways have worked, but the platforms are using them as loss-leaders. They’re not really using them as the next Spotify. It’s another product that you get through a bundle that you consume. In the case of Google, it’s free because we then get other stuff from you, advertising, search revenue, whatever it is.

Bertrand

They want to be the gateway. I must say, personally, I used to use Google News back in the days quite a lot. Apple News as well at launch, but I’m definitely much more on Twitter or X, and specialised newsletter. I feel what they are distributing through Apple News and Google News is really one limited view of the world, not really providing wide perspectives.

Nuno

There is a new generation of players out there that are trying to bundle these subscriptions for things that you really want. Some of them are very creative. They give you credits and you can spend your credits. Whatever publications is attached to it, it’s a use of one credit if you want to read through one news, and you have a bundle of credits and that’s how you consume it, you just choose.

Nuno

There’s others that are trying subscription-based models with a baseline for certain publications. Then above that, you need to pay per article, or you need to maybe extend your subscription. It’s complex. The problem is why it’s complex is because of what we just talked about. It’s been unbundled. There’s a lot of news sources out there that you want to consume. Even on mainstream, we talked about a bunch, let alone on the niche ones.

Nuno

If I really want something that’s adequate for me, I might be interested in something that the Wall Street Journal published this month, but maybe not want to read anything by the Wall Street Journal for the next two months. Then I read New York Times every week, I don’t know. Maybe there’s this one economist article that I want to read every three months, I don’t know. How do I bundle for that as a product?

Nuno

In that experience, I’ve seen some interesting attempts at it, but I haven’t seen the untapping of that. One problem I see on this is when it’s product. It’s just generally product. How do you make the product seamless? How do I interact with the article? How do I make sure that I access the article under whichever browsing experience I’m having or every consumption experience I’m having?

Nuno

It’s complex because every provider has their own app, and then what browser are you on, and then how are you going through the paywall, and how is the paywall treating you, and how you register? It’s not easy to make a seamless experience work. I think that’s a product issue, and I haven’t really seen beautiful solutions to it. Maybe Apple News is one of the more elegant ones, but I haven’t seen any beautiful solutions.

Nuno

The second piece is actually business model. It’s like, “What do I charge for?” I charge a subscription, which people understand. That’s how news has always been working, even newspapers back in the day. Do I get money out of advertising? Again, very well understood, et cetera. Sponsored content, which for a while was tricking us all. They started making you have to put that little sponsored content down there. It’s like, “This is actually not news. Someone paid for this article.” Mysteriously, the company that they’re saying good things about.

Nuno

There’s all these business models. In my opinion, subscription probably is the way to go if we believe this will go the route of other content streaming, like video and audio, but it’s still not nailed because of the multifaceted nature of the providers, very unbundled.

Nuno

Every time we look at the space as a VC, we have this doubt around market size. How big is the total addressable market? How big is the serviceable addressable market? How easy is it to scale to that level? Everyone’s like, “This is huge.” I was like, “I understand it’s huge if you put everything together, but if you put everything together, how fragmented is everything you just put together?”

Bertrand

That’s a big question. Let’s not forget, one big issue with all these models is that you have a wealth of free information, free news, either reading Twitter or YouTube or just browsing the web. The Reuters of the world, the CNN, ABC of the world. I mean, it’s free content. You have to fight against that. Of course, you don’t just have to fight against that. You have to fight against other opportunities from watching a movie, watching a TV show, listening to music. Many sources are fighting for your attention. It’s a tough place to be.

Bertrand

Maybe going back to the business model, obviously, there has been some tentative from some governments. We can talk about Canada, Australia, trying to force Google News and other platform like them, Facebook, to do some revenue share or direct taxation of their news activity, which has led to some of these companies stopping their product in some markets.

Bertrand

California looks like if they can pick any bad idea somewhere, they will. They are looking into that as well. It has been somewhat a trend, but I have the impression it’s not going too far in that direction. What do you think of this one, that revenue share?

Nuno

If the music industry is anything to go buy, if some of these news providers do have some strength, which to be honest, some of them are relatively big, as I said, the market’s quite fragmented, there will be more and more legislation around those ways because you’re giving content that we developed that we are charging for, for free to your users. While that’s wonderful to your users, we’re getting nothing ourselves, and we develop the content, we own the content.

Nuno

Interestingly enough, the problem becomes even more difficult with AI and with ChatGPT-like functions like Gemini, et cetera, becaus