A recent scout campout got me thinking about who gets an audience. A small group was sitting around a campfire silently. Eventually the person who piped up and sapped our attention was 9 years old, with all the maturity expected thereof. Who is to blame for the low quality of discourse that night? I didn’t expend any energy to make good use of that time. I could have taught those kids something, if I had told an engaging story or introduced a clever joke. It would have taken energy to communicate something important in a way that they would want to listen to it.
We have a limited number of minutes to pay attention to the world and we use few of them productively. There is a metaphorical campfire every night, after the work of subsistence is over. Who speaks up? Who gets an audience? When a journalist is doing their best to cover an important issue or sound an alarm, how many people bother to click or get a paid subscription?
I regularly see people complain that journalists or the media are doing it wrong. “Why didn’t the NYT cover X?” Jeremy regularly points out that the NYT did cover X, but not many people clicked.
Ship hijackings on the other side of the world aren’t very fun to read about. What really got clicks this past week was Melania’s hat.
Most of the handwringing over what the media should do is deflecting blame from what we should be doing, which is paying for good journalism and engaging in the boring/important news.
Even before LLMs, for decades, there has been no shortage of great serious writers and text could be shared at very low cost online. The bottleneck is the audience. Good readers are more scarce than writers.
Economist Writing Every Day 
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