Why is the gentleman next to me smiling? Possibly because he works in a small market.
The U.S. media market has been more than decimated. (The word comes from losing 1/10th of your soldiers in a battle). Everything from The Washington Post to your hometown paper has either gone under, sold to a propagandist or is under dire threat. I went by a magazine stand before I left, and it was nearly empty. Broadcast TV is circling the drain, and cable is right behind.
Since the U.S., and the English language, dominate the online world, it was easy for the Cloud Czars to take it over. Our media decided they would “sell” advertising, rather than build communities. Google and Meta sold ads for less, with tightly focused demographics at run of network pricing, and delivered solid data besides.
But in the Netherlands the Dutch language and culture act like a dike against all this. DPG, the Belgian media conglomerate for which Robert van den Ham works, just opened a new building last year, a showplace for the company’s wide variety of newspapers, magazines, and web sites. They even have free coffee, and it’s good! (Sorry, lekker.)
Language and culture have helped DPG survive the age of the Cloud Czars. Robert told me all his writers are developing their own AI sidekicks. It’s not worth the coin for the Czars to try and understand what makes small, non-English speaking markets tick. (Note that almost everyone here in the Netherlands speaks better English than I do.) Identity creates community. This gives publishers the opportunity to not only deliver what folks want to read, but aggregate their market so advertisers stay happy.
Publications are Communities
I’ve been trying to get this across for 30 years, but no one listens because I’m just a writer.
But there is no such thing as a newspaper, a magazine, a TV news channel or even a news website anymore. There is only the Web. If you want to live there, you must build a community within it.
That means doing something I hate, namely specializing. It also means creating a two-way street, like Facebook without the sludge. A safe place for locals to not only vent but connect, emphasis on the word SAFE. You’re about as safe on Facebook as you are on an unlit alleyway behind a strip club after midnight on a weekend.
Once you build a community, you can build another, but it won’t be any cheaper than the first one was. Doing this takes deep learning, expertise, and a desire to serve. The best publishers have always identified with their readers, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Their business is creating =communities around shared needs, through unbiased journalism and a clear delineation between advertising and editorial.
Who’d a thunk it? In 2025, it still works.
