Public goods need a hook, too

A great irony: The prize that certifies journalistic seriousness is named after the Godfather of clickbait. 

Joseph Pulitzer pioneered a form of journalism with “no restraints on sensationalism or fabrication,” as the Pulitzer Prize website itself acknowledges.

Pulitzer filled The New York World with sports, sex, scandal, wildly exaggerated stories of crime, and news coverage so incendiary it pushed the country into a war with Spain. 

(The USS Maine explosion was not, in fact, caused by either bomb or torpedo.)

Most scandalously, Pulitzer was the first newspaper publisher to put pictures on the front page.

“I had a small paper which had been dead for years and I was trying in every way I could think of to build up its circulation,” he later explained. “What could I use for bait? A picture, of course.”

(Putting an unnecessary picture at the top of an article is low, but some writers will stoop to anything.)

New Yorkers took Pulitzer’s bait — hook, line and sinker. Circulation of The World rose from under 15,000 when he bought it in 1883 to over a million at its peak in the 1890s.

Illustrations, comic strips, the world’s first dedicated sports section, and sensationalist headlines — Pulitzer acknowledged the vulgarity, but said it was all for the greater good.

“If a newspaper is to be of real service to the public, it must have a big circulation,” he told a biographer. “First, because its news and its comments must reach the largest possible number of people; second, because circulation means advertising, and advertising means money, and money means independence.”

Pulitzer did in fact put that independence to good use, waging crusades against corruption in government, collusion in industry, and the indignities visited on New York City’s underclass of impoverished immigrants.

"More than any other media mogul,” professor Chris Daly concludes, “Pulitzer has had a continuing legacy of inspiring and elevating the practice of journalism.”

That legacy includes the business model that newspapers have used to elevate journalism ever since: funding high-brow news by bundling it with middle-brow hooks — not just sports and comics, but crossword puzzles, classified ads, and, most recently, Wordle.

The model worked for decades, right up until the internet seemed to break it. 

Craigslist took classifieds; ESPN took sports; Google took advertising — leaving nothing to cross-subsidize the investigative reporting that everyone wants to exist but hardly anyone wants to pay for.

But the business of journalism is adapting.

At The New York Times, news-only subscriptions are down 65% since 2022. But subscriptions to a bundle of news, games, cooking, The Athletic and Wirecutter are up 227%:

The creator of the above infographic concludes that “The New York Times is no longer a news company.”

But this misses the point. The Times remains a news company because the bundle that funds journalism was never just financial. It’s reputational, too. 

The Times is a brand built by decades of investigative journalism. We trust it to curate cooking recipes, crossword puzzles and games for us because we’ve long trusted it with the news.

This makes the model symbiotic: Popular content is funding a public good; but the popular content is only as monetizable as it is because of the reputation of the public good.

That kind of symbiosis — serious work funded by unserious money — is rare.

Except in crypto, where you see it everywhere.

Centralized exchanges fund decentralization. Memecoin trading funds layer-one infrastructure. Sports betting funds prediction markets.

These odd bedfellows make crypto an easy target for accusations of both unseriousness and betrayal. 

But there’s no other way to do it.

There aren’t enough cypherpunks to make bitcoin a serious store of value. There aren’t enough privacy advocates to fund privacy-preserving cryptography. There isn’t enough betting on things that matter to fund prediction markets on things that matter.

But now that crypto is going corporate, the accusations of betrayal have only gotten louder. 

This is understandable, as the companies dominating crypto headlines recently — Blackrock, Robinhood, JP Morgan — are precisely the institutions crypto was invented to replace.

But I’d argue that even corporate crypto isn’t a betrayal — it’s just an iteration of the bundle that makes cypherpunks’ dreams possible. 

The high-minded promise of a financial system that doesn’t rely on institutions has attracted the institutions that can bring censorship-resistance into the mainstream. 

If you think censorship resistance is a public good, you should be happy that it’s being bundled with some less-idealistic but more-profitable things.

Because circulation means money. And money means independence.

— Byron Gilliam

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