[panarky]

The author missed the biggest economic difference between fact-driven businesses and signal-driven businesses.

Today, to make money in a fact-driven business, you must restrict access to information.

For example, those who originate high-quality news have large payrolls of journalists in the field, layers of editors and fact-checkers, etc. They typically fund the business by restricting access with subscriptions, paywalls, premium content, and the like.

Fact-based businesses have small audiences with high cost per customer.

But signal-based businesses that sell opinion, tribal identification, status and emotion thrive through broad distribution. They need to maximize social sharing and generate large audiences.

Signal-based businesses are typically free or have very low per-user costs. They selectively remix content from fact-based businesses for their audiences, and add commentary, outrage, emotion and tribal identity.

[zaptheimpaler]

Good point. Do you have any examples of fact based businesses? I can think of ONE(!) - Stratecherry by Ben Thompson, but I'm really craving more.

Its not just facts, its facts in service of telling a story - truth. "Raw" facts by themselves are hard to contextualize for an uninformed person. I really want more like that.

[coupdetaco]

You really shouldn't share this here per the ToS. Also, the financial Times and Bloomberg machines are vehicles for expensive facts.

[TheOtherHobbes]

This is manifestly not true in public journalism. In the UK the paywalled newspaper all produce opinion propped up by heavily editorialised reporting, which tries hard to appear fact based but is anything but.

As others have pointed out, what has happened is that the status of "fact-based journaiism" has been degraded - because most "fact-based journalism" was only ever opinionation written in a high-status social register.

The real change has been the obvious shift in the social register of public writing, from schoolmaster-ish formal and paternal authority, to inclusive, child-like, and trivial accessibility.

It's not quite true that neither was ever in the fact business, and the old model did a far better job of hiding it.

But it was much less fact-oriented than it appeared to be. And the old long-form journalistic style of writing used to describe factual experiences - e.g. travelogues - has been replaced by short-form subjective quick-hit social media posts, often supported by amateur photos or captioned memes. (I.e. fixed-format DIY cartoons.)