Building A Newspaper Out of the Internet with Molly White

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host Ed Zitron

and today I am joined by the incredible critic and author of the citation needed newsletter Molly White.

Molly, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

So you generally seem to, this is a strange way to put it, actually love the internet.

Kind of be like, like you're mad at what they've done to it, but you actually enjoy the computer quite a lot.

Yes, big fan of the computer over here.

You wrote this fantastic thing about RSS, and I think like a lot of people kind of have the idea it's a feed.

Can you walk people through exactly what RSS is and why you like it so much?

Yeah, so RSS is just a protocol.

It's sort of a system by which websites can make their content available to be ingested by programs called feed readers, which are websites or applications or, you know, can be an app on your phone

where you can pull together feeds from any number of sources, whether it's the newsletters you follow, the news organizations that you subscribe to, podcasts, YouTube videos, Mastodon feeds, any sort of feed-like structure can be pulled into these feed readers.

And then you can read them anytime you want on your own time without, you know, going to the Substack app, opening your Mastodon account, you know, going to wired.com.

And it's a really wonderful way to interact with the web these days because

it's sort of radically different from how a lot of

our online interactions have become this sort of abusive,

you know,

wrestling match with whatever it is that you're trying to read.

You know, the content appears there.

There's usually no ads in your RSS feed.

There's not any, go ahead.

And is it like you could, you said you can put Mastodon posts and Blue Sky into it, like you can have your social feeds in there too?

Yeah.

Yeah.

A ton of different services provide RSS feeds, sometimes without people even realizing it.

So pretty much any WordPress site will publish an RSS feed.

Every Ghost blog has an RSS feed by default.

Substack has RSS on by default.

There are other

content management systems where it's either on by default or easily enabled with a click or so.

And

the real benefit to the person using an RSS reader is that you don't have to rely on the sort of algorithmic feeds that we have become accustomed to, where, you know, if you go to Twitter and you just want to see, you know,

news articles written by the journalists that you chose to follow there, chances are you're not going to see that.

You're going to see Twitter ads.

You're going to see rage bait that's being boosted by the algorithm.

Four or five gripers, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like Elon Musk's posts always show up, even though you don't follow him.

Right.

And then the journalist that you did go out of your way to follow, the chances are you're not going to see the news articles they wrote because Twitter downranks links.

And so that's the same thing with threads as well, I think, but maybe not to the same extent.

Facebook, I mean, a lot of social media websites have started downranking links to try to convince people to stay on the platforms rather than going to wherever people actually publish their work.

And it's this horrendous situation for both publishers and readers.

And so you can sort of opt out of it by using RSS to follow these things very very directly and avoid a lot of the surveillance and a lot of the,

you know, sort of abusive practices that we're increasingly seeing on platforms.

And

do they still get the traffic?

So that's the one thing with RSS that they've really been able to get

the hang of.

Because I know I don't get subscribers.

Like I won't get like reads, which is fine.

But does this...

Does this not like slightly disadvantage the publishers?

I'm surprised they haven't turned it off.

Well, it depends a lot on how a publisher makes their money.

So, for example, I write a newsletter, people can pay to subscribe to my newsletter.

And it's really no different to me if they read it in their email inbox, if they come to my website, or if they read it in their RSS reader.

It's sort of all the same.

And then

people who publish paywalled content

can opt to have either excerpts of their posts published on their RSS feeds, or increasingly, we're starting to see people create subscriber RSS feeds so that if you pay for that, I know Patreon does that.

Yep.

And I subscribe to 404 Media, and so I have a specific RSS feed that I can follow there that gets me the full text articles.

And so that's a way in which publishers can still earn money through subscriptions while offering RSS feeds.

The place where it can be challenging is ad-supported

publishers where they really rely on you visiting the website to get the ad traffic.

And so you'll often see ad-supported publishers publishing excerpts from their RSS feeds, but not full text, meaning that if you're following them in a feed reader, you still have to open the page and it takes you to the website and they get the ad traffic.

And so that's how a lot of those sites get around it.

But there are websites that basically decide that it's, you know, sort of a loss leader.

It's like the Costco rotisserie chicken.

It gets people in the door.

Even if they lose some ad revenue, you're still seeing their material more that you might not otherwise.

You're still visiting the site.

You might sign up for a subscription, whatever it might be.

And so they sort of decide it's a worthwhile trade-off.

And you use Inner Reader, right?

I do.

Yeah.

And you mentioned, this is a really specific one, but I saw on your piece you were saying you no longer recommend Feedly.

And I've heard Feedly mentioned a few times.

Why is that?

Yeah, so I used to use Feedly and I used to recommend them pretty widely.

You know, they were doing, they had a very nice full-featured RSS reader.

And then they sort of started to pivot in ways that were a little bit uncomfortable, where it was very clear that they were targeting,

you know, cybersecurity researchers a lot of the time and very like corporate,

people.

Yeah, it was a very odd like subset of traffic where they were constantly trying to help me like follow threats online and stuff like that.

I was like, What?

Threat intelligence.

Yeah.

They, and then, so, but that was fine.

You know, I was like, okay, I'm not the demographic for this.

Yeah, they've just changed their business.

Yeah.

Focus on that.

Except that once they, after they did that for a little bit, I started to get

promotions about tracking strikes.

And it was all about monitoring where there might be strikes happening.

Oh.

And it, um,

there, they, they, they say that they sort of RSS read up.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

They, they tried to sort of, after I, you know, wrote to them a little bit about this, they tried to sort of play it off as like bad messaging and that they were really just trying to help people protect their work.

Here's how people strike.

Yeah, it definitely came off as sort of strike breaking as a service.

And I decided I was done with Feedly.

Finally.

Yeah, right.

What we've all been waiting for.

But I mean, the one thing I really love about RSS is that, you know, it's a protocol.

It's not a service that you're locked into.

And so it's actually very easy to switch RSS readers if one of them decides that it's going to start surveilling strikes.

That's actually a good question.

How do you, so if you sit, and I really, I'll be linking to this piece consisting.

conspicuously, your excellent RSS piece, but how do you move was actually one of my questions.

It's incredibly easy.

Pretty much every RSS reader allows you to export all of the RSS feeds that you follow.

And it's just a simple XML file.

It's the same thing that I use to publish my blog role on my website.

So if you're curious, like what blogs I read, I just export

those,

you know, folders into

an OPML file is what it's called, and then I put it on my website.

But the same.

You just open that file in

a reader or what have you.

Right.

And it took me probably 10 seconds to switch from Feebly to my new

readers.

Yeah.

Wow.

There's some stuff in the internet that works still.

It's magic.

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Hi, I'm Morgan Summ, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

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It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

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You can find Close

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And having you on here to talk about RSS was important because, first of all, people say I complain all the time, and they are right.

And it's just, it's nice to see that there are still some functional parts of the internet.

Is there, are there other parts that you actually, like other feet, things like, I don't know, RSS that you use regularly that could make other, make the worlds,

make our listeners, internet worlds a little bit better?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's all part of a theme of sort of avoiding these intermediaries that have these incredibly extractive relationships with both the users and, you know, and often publishers who are on, you know, the other side of that relationship.

And so I do everything I can to sort of avoid those intermediaries where possible.

And so, you know, for example, I write a newsletter.

I use the Ghost

newsletter software where, you know, the relationship that I have with the people who subscribe to me is very direct.

You know, people are subscribing to Molly White, the writer.

They're not subscribing to Ghost, the website that then, you know, deigns to give me a cut of whatever they're taking in, which is unlike some of the other services out there.

For example, Patreon, where

if you set up a Patreon account, everyone is actually in a financial relationship with Patreon, not with you.

And so if you decide to leave, it can be incredibly challenging to move people to another service.

Whereas with Ghost, if I want to leave, I can just set up somewhere else.

I can export my subscribers.

The financial relationships are already just directly with me.

And so that's a very powerful thing, the sort of escape hatch, where now if Ghost decides, you know, hey, maybe we're going to, I don't know, slap ads on everyone's newsletter without them agreeing to it, they now have this incentive on the other end, which is like, well, Molly and all the other people who publish with Ghost

might not like that and they might just leave because they can.

Whereas other services that have more of a locked-in relationship can make those decisions and take the gamble that, well, it's so hard to leave that people are probably just gonna put up with it um

and so that's that's one place where i do that um you know there are sort of other other services throughout the web that you know are sort of similar where i try to keep the intermer intermediaries to a bare minimum yeah i use ghost myself and i used uh outpost from

they're very good it's basically a it's one of the things i actually like about ghost is that you can build a company on top of it and the company is just hey we'll provide some of those slick little features that you get from a Substack or what have you, like following up with people if their credit cards expired or what have you.

But it's, and it's also for giant babies like me who can't do code.

I didn't vibe code it, I swear.

But thinking of Substack, I've never seen a company go quite as weirdly as them.

Putting aside all the obvious promotions of Nazis, it feels as if Substack has just turned into another dog shit social network.

Yeah, I mean, Substack is a weird platform because they do in some ways have that similar ethos of you know your subscribers are subscribing to you not to substack and so it's easy to leave to some extent um where you know i i used to be on substack i decided to leave i exported all of my email contacts you know i moved all of my content to a different website and it went fairly smoothly um and that's always been a part of substacks marketing is, you know, this is a very direct relationship.

You'll be able to leave if you want.

But I'm getting the impression increasingly that they're almost regretting that decision and that they are trying to

install ways that lock people into the platform without effectively locking people in by trying to cut off their

you know, escape hatch, essentially.

You know, they could say, sorry, you can't export your email lists anymore, or we're going to make it really challenging for you to get you know move your content off the platform and they haven't directly done that but they are

they've got this following thing now well that's that's what I was going to say is they are sort of trying to add in these new you know so-called features that make it very challenging for people to leave so there's now followers which are different from subscribers and the idea is that you know if you attract followers they may eventually convert into a subscriber and that's very potentially valuable but you can't take your followers with you.

They have this sort of network and this almost like short form social media platform now where you publish these notes and you know those don't come with you when you leave.

They are increasing.

Including video now as well.

Yeah, they're increasingly encouraging people to use the substack app, you know, which is the idea then is that if you leave sub stack, all of these people who've gotten used to reading on the substack app will no longer find you and they won't get access to your writing because you're not there anymore.

And so we see this sort of constant gravitational pull of

inshitification, to use Gory Doctorow's word,

where

platforms increasingly are trying to keep people locked in so that they can then extract more value both from the publisher end and from the consumer end,

while making the experience worse for both.

Yeah, and you're kind of seeing, and you've mentioned this in your article as well, publishers are moving towards the newsletter format as well.

It's like 2021 again.

I don't know if you, do you remember in 2021 when you had like the Atlantic and there was that weird side channel thing, like all these people were like, oh, we're going to build a community, just gave up on that.

Right.

But it's, you're seeing everyone starting newsletters again.

It's just, you made the point as well.

It's at this point, it's just moving stuff into your inbox in a way that people probably don't necessarily want or at least find a little overwhelming.

Yeah, so that is sort of the downside of this newsletter boom, which is that it's exhausting if you read a lot of newsletters, which I do, you know, to get, you know, if you follow 10 newsletter writers who are publishing maybe once a week, twice a week, something like that, then constantly throughout your workday or your weekend, you're getting, you know, a notification in your inbox at sort of a random time that you need to read this email, which maybe you're in the middle of something and it's not time, you know, not a good time for you to read.

And so it's just sort of constantly lurking there waiting for you to read it.

It's, you know, potentially edging out other more time-critical emails that you need to pay attention to.

And it's just sort of this, you know, deluge of material.

Whereas it used to be that, you know, you would go to

the websites that you follow or, you know, open the physical newsletter or newspaper that you receive in your mail and, you know, you could sit down and read the news with your morning coffee.

um and now it's sort of a different you know it's more of a push relationship than a pull relationship you're not going to read you are being sort of inundated with the reading and so rss is a really nice uh way in my opinion to handle that as a reader because now you know if i subscribe to your newsletter i can you know turn off the email notifications, but put the RSS feed in my feed reader.

And then at my leisure, when I feel like reading my newsletters or going and catching up on the news or whatever it is that I'm reading, I can go do that.

And it's all in that one place.

And my email inbox is, you know, safe to have just emails and all of the stuff that's more suited to that.

It is funny.

We kind of feel like everyone has built these obtuse and complex ways of delivering the news or selling the news or getting people news in different forms.

And for the most part, the thing that keeps working is the thing from what, 20, 30 years ago, just like reading words on a page.

It's, it's funny as well, because looking at this move back to newsletters, like I hate to give Nili Patel any credit at all, but Google Zero is a real effect.

I think, I don't know if it's going to zero, but it's, it's, I'm still getting a ton from my newsletter, but it is funny to watch people try and get back to newsletters, but it almost feels like they're just treating them as the same thing as a regular article rather than a unique way of delivering news, which I guess it is.

But I feel like that the email format is not treated with any

necessary particular respect.

It's just almost become a dumping ground for these companies.

Like it's just like, hey, I think I, with Washington Post, let's see if I still get them because I got really pissed off.

There was a point when I was getting four or five emails a day from them, I swear to God.

And it's just, it's abuse on your inbox in the same way it abuses your feed and so on and so forth.

Right.

I think that's really true is that especially high-volume publishers really need to grapple with the strategy when it comes to these types of relationships with subscribers because, you know, it's one thing to publish 20 articles a day on

WashingtonPost.com.

That's not, you know, that's not a problem for anybody.

In fact, people probably enjoy all of that choice.

But getting 20 separate emails is not a viable way to have a respectful relationship with the people who have chosen to subscribe.

And so I think that you know, it is incredibly important to consider that as, you know, if you're a publication that's thinking about creating a newsletter, is like, what do people actually have the appetite to read?

And how can we maintain a respectful relationship with these people who have chosen to receive this material?

And my answer is 10,000 words.

Just

10,000 words every week or so.

No one ever emails me to say my stuff is too long.

No one has ever complained about it.

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it's kind of depressing on some level, though, because the way it's going, I don't know how these large publishers can, like, it's like they don't understand any particular format.

They're just doing newsletters.

Not trying to bag on the verge too much, but I don't know.

Suddenly, them doing newsletters a lot in the last year doesn't feel like it's specific to, it doesn't feel like it's a specific format.

It's just like, please give us your emails so that we can continue to email you, which is desperate.

Yeah, I mean, I think there is sort of reasonable desperation among.

Oh, yeah, I must be clear, like, I totally understand why they're desperate.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of publishers have realized that relying on intermediaries, whether it's social media platforms like Twitter to get your news in front of people or,

you know, Google search was used to be a massive way that,

you know, news publications received readership.

And now, you know, as people are increasingly using the excerpts on Google, they're not clicking through to the page.

And mostly, when you say excerpts, you mean the AI summaries?

It depends.

Yeah, so

it used to be that Google News would just show like a literal excerpt from,

you know, the top result, and then people would often not visit the underlying website.

Or, you know, you see the like Wikipedia knowledge panels that just sort of summarize what you're looking for.

But now, yeah, more recently, there's the AI overviews that attempt to do sort of a similar thing, but often drawing from multiple sources.

And then if people are satisfied with what they see there, they often don't click through.

They don't either see the ads that are funding the website or they don't

see the invitations to subscribe.

They don't

view all the other material that might be available to them and so on.

And so the traffic is dwindling at a sort of alarming rate.

And so I think a lot of these publishers are trying to get more direct relationships with readers, and email newsletters are a way that they're doing that.

Which I think is very reasonable.

I mean, I think that it is incredibly important as a writer to have a very direct relationship with your readers because if you are relying on Twitter or Google search, then the second Twitter or Google search decides it's more profitable for them to twiddle the knobs in a way that is going to cut off the flow of subscribers to you, they're going to do so and you're going to be up a creek, essentially.

But I do think that there needs to be some thought put into this, especially by high-volume publications, so that they are not essentially

directing a fire hose at their readers and essentially turning them off from the publication.

I think it's also a challenge for a publication versus a person because we were talking about this on the last episode, how it's people will gladly pay for a person, paying for an outlet, that's different.

I also think the other problem is, and I'm not, just to be clear, I know I bag on the verge, this isn't about them specifically, but it's the problem that I've seen with legacy media at least is they're terrified of giving a voice to their people.

They'll give it to their top columnists, but they think, oh, no, if we let people develop a personal relationship with the writer, then they could leave and have some sort of autonomy over their future.

It's not why we're in this business.

But now it's going back the other way where they realize, oh, crap, that's the only way in which

people will have any kind of sticky relationship with us.

After winning the Fell for It Again Award 11 times in the space of 15 years with Google and everyone else, even sub.

I am actually like, I loved Substack at the beginning because it was free.

It was really easy to use.

It was just a platform.

Hamish would go out and do these things about this is the future of media and media is good and we love being free here.

But I think that just it was everything, it was exactly what happens every time.

It's, oh, right, we need to make more money than we spend.

Yeah.

How do we do that?

Hmm.

And it's just, it's an inevitable point because it's almost, I, I have the, here is my, my media theory.

I think media outlets are just too big.

I think if they need to cap out at some point, because all of the problems we talk about, every single one, seems to start when they get too large for a company or a media out there.

They get too large to have any personality, or they get to the point where they're too large to have an editor who actually still writes and has a personality themselves.

So it's like, ah, we can't give people too much freedom or anything.

It's disappointing as well, because

you've kind of proven this exceedingly well with your many successes, where it's like, people will pay for someone who is themselves, stands for something, and gives a shit.

Right.

And yet they don't seem to want to to copy that.

Yeah, I think you're totally right on that, where, you know, newspapers are sort of afraid of letting writers develop their own personalities, as you say.

I mean, you see this with large newspapers, you know, restricting their writers on social media, for example, where if they say something too opinionated on social media, that's against the social media policy.

And,

you know, I think that is very contrary to what people are looking for.

They want to see people who have strong opinions and strong beliefs and strong principles and stand up for those things.

And so I do think that, you know, that's a shortcoming, but I also agree that newspapers,

some publications seem to be realizing that that sort of direct relationship with a writer is a valuable thing.

You know, I mentioned in my piece that Wired was also one of the outlets that has recently announced a major newsletter push.

And their strategy has been,

you know, here's five or 10 options for different newsletters that you can read.

And they're written by specific people at Wired

who are, you know, seen to be experts in a specific area.

So you can follow, you know, the Kylie Robeson Wired newsletter.

And I was like, Miss Robinson's model behavior.

I'll put a link in there.

Follow Kylie.

Right.

And I saw that and I was like, oh, hell yeah, sign me up because I know that her work is incredible.

And I'm going to read it when it shows up in my newsletter or in my feed reader.

Whereas, you know, I don't read every single article that Wired publishes because that's just not feasible.

And so I think that publications would be wise to do more of that and to sort of understand that people do look at bylines.

They do have specific authors who they trust or whose writing they enjoy more or whatever it may be, rather than going for the sort of faceless, you know, we're just the Washington Post or we're just the New York Times and the author doesn't really matter.

matter.

It's classic.

It's honestly, it's NBA brain.

It's corporate brain where it's like, well, how do we, how do, do you think that a person like thinks, oh, I love my relationship with the New York Times?

But that's how they're thinking about it.

Like,

what is a consumer's relationship with the newspaper?

There is no relationship with the newspaper.

There might be a vibe, but there is not a relationship.

I think the Financial Times has actually found, though not in the newsletter era, they found a very good balance between hard news and excellent.

like they've got Bryce Elder, Skaggs as well, who's over at Barons now.

But you've got Alpha Ville, they found a way to unleash it and the FT has done very well.

It's just, I don't know, there's some part that feels like this is the comeuppance for 15, 20 years of hubris of follow Google, follow Meta, follow whoever will send us traffic,

build as big as possible on this.

Yeah, and also the sort of view from nowhere news approach where, you know, it's it's the belief was that there shouldn't be any sort of opinion, there shouldn't be any sort of,

you know, principled analysis.

It should all just be, you know, both sidesism and the s supposedly objective reporting,

which does strip out a lot of the personality of the writer and it removes a lot of the, you know, reason that people

identify with or appreciate specific writers.

And so I think that this was to some extent sort of a

crisis of their own doing in that sense as well.

I also think that

I also think that the raw economics of media might be completely fucked on some level.

I think that there's just, you see, and I think it's because of the Google traffic and the social traffic as well.

You've got these massive ad staffs, you've got these massive social staffs, every, and it doesn't seem to necessarily connect to anything.

It doesn't, I don't know if it like drives results or not.

I truly don't know, but it's the way that every single media out there at some point in the last few years has acted like it's been, acted like it's been pecked to death by birds, just acted crazy, like the Verge added their paywall.

And I get it, by the way, things cost money, but it's it almost feels as if these castles have been built for a land that no longer exists anymore.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the news

landscape is incredibly challenging right now for a number of reasons.

You know, there's the traffic issues, there's the AI scraping issues that are, you know, causing a lot of

news outlets to put up paywalls that are then, you know, blocking people who previously, like real people, not scrapers, who might previously have, you know, visited their sites and enjoyed their work.

And, you know, now you see this double-edged sword, whereas people paywall news media, you know, they might block scrapers to some extent, but they're also blocking people from reading the material that might then incentivize them to subscribe.

You know, if every article is paywalled, there is no way to know if you're going to like what's behind the paywall, right?

And so, I think that, you know, this is sort of an incredibly challenging moment for a lot of news organizations that are really struggling to figure out how to deal with it,

you know, how to maintain a sustainable news business when you're facing those types of threats.

You're also facing political threats increasingly, especially in the United States,

for publishing any sort of controversial material about the administration.

Or, you know, there's, you're seeing

an incredible unwillingness by a lot of major publications to have strong opinions or to say anything that is, you know,

not supported by 10 separate sources, you know, any kind of speculation, that type of thing,

because of the legal environment that we're in.

And so, you know, I have some sympathy, I think, for a lot of these publications that are trying to navigate it.

But I also think that the ways in which they have been navigating it have often been pretty misguided.

So to wrap us up, is there anything giving you

any hope online right now?

Anything that like genuinely is like thinking things can be okay, even in a different form?

Yeah, I mean, I would say so.

I do think that there, you know, one thing that has

been made very clear to me is that people still care a lot about good writing

and people who have, you know,

new or interesting analysis.

You know, a lot of people sort of look at the way that I do my newsletter, which is, you know, everything is free.

There's no paywall.

You don't have to even sign up, much less subscribe.

And

I have a pay-what-you-want model, so you could pay you know, a dollar a month, you could pay ten dollars a month, whatever you want.

And people look at that and they're like, That can't work, you know, they're like, No one's gonna do that, and it has worked, right?

It works great,

yeah, it works great.

Um, and you know, people sort of have this belief that well, if something's free, no one's ever gonna pay for it, which isn't true.

I think that people actually strongly value

the work that people are doing, even if they're not forced to pay for it.

And they understand that people need support to be able to continue to do their work, and they will gladly provide that.

And so I do think that, you know, there are models available that

will work very well that we can try, and different people are trying those models.

You know, we're seeing it widely throughout the media landscape where people are just trying new things, whether it's, you know, the 404 medias and the defectors and those folks who are doing, you know, worker-owned media collectives that are doing incredible work.

I mean, 404 is trailblazing, I think, in a lot of ways.

Their reporting is incredible and their,

you know, their sort of model is incredible.

You know, we're seeing people

very proactively

setting up ways in which they can create sustainable media that does not rely on ads, that does not require paywalls, that does not,

you know, rely on clickbait through social media websites.

And so I am very optimistic in some ways, even though the sort of landscape is also fairly terrifying.

And on that note, we'll end it there.

Molly, where can people find you?

So you can find my newsletter at citationneeded.news.

And then I am also at mollywhite.net, which has links to all my social media and everything else.

And you can find me on this podcast, betteroffline.com, as well.

And yeah, you can catch us on the monologue this week.

Molly, thank you so much for joining us, and this has been Better Offline.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski.

You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com.

M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening.

Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

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