Content Curation in an Age of Fake News, with Dave Pell

The Transcript

Content Curation in an Age of Fake News, with Dave Pell

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM.

Dave Pell: I’m Dave. I write NextDraft, a look at the day’s most fascinating news. In other words, I’m just another English major in search of a business model, so I’m definitely unemployable.

Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one, and that’s putting it gently. In addition to this podcast, thousands of freelancers and entrepreneurs get actionable advice and other valuable resources from the weekly Unemployable email newsletter. Join us by registering for our free Profit Pillars course, or choose to sign up for the newsletter only, at no charge. Simply head over to Unemployable.com, and take your business and lifestyle to the next level.

Brian Clark: It’s been almost two years since I started Further, my curated email newsletter about personal growth, and there’s no mistaking that the project was inspired by Dave Pell’s NextDraft.

Content curation is all about becoming a trusted editorial source that finds the best information within a certain topic from amongst the valueless click bait and mediocre dross that overruns the web. Pell’s NextDraft takes on the daunting of delivering “the day’s most fascinating news,” plus commentary that’s often better than the links themselves.

I’m Brian Clark, and this is Unemployable, the podcast that provides valuable business intelligence to freelancers, coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs. Thanks for tuning in.

Even though Further is a side project for me, I’m an advocate for smart curation due to the valuable service it provides in a world of excess content. And because it’s centered around an email audience, it can become the catalyst for a thriving business based on sponsorships, affiliate marketing, or promoting your own products and services.

Now, curation is becoming more important than ever. Trust in media has never been lower, and the new norm of social content distribution allows fake information and fluff to go viral — which just amplifies the skepticism.

Listen in to my conversation with Pell to understand how to become a trusted editorial voice for a valuable audience. More importantly, understand how curation can restore trust in the media sources that you trust.

Dave, thank you so much for being here. How are you doing?

Dave Pell: Good. Thanks for having me.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. Obviously, you know I’m a big fan. I kind of fanboy you on Twitter a little bit. You’re pretty much the reason I got into curation, and that’s today’s topic.

Before we get too deep into that, because we live in interesting times, to put it mildly, when it comes to the news, tell us a little bit how you got to this point. What’s your background? How did you get into Angel Investing, and then of course, what was the genesis of NextDraft?

The Birth of Dave’s Passion Project and Its Evolution to “the Day’s Most Fascinating News”

Dave Pell: Sure. I got into Angel Investing at the earliest part of the first Internet boom. A friend of mine was a lawyer at a law firm that represented a lot of startups, and I had a small stock portfolio that I ran. I decided I’d rather invest in things where I actually knew the people, so I said, “Hey, I want to invest in Google and Yahoo.” My friend said, “Well, you’re too late for those, but here’s one you might want to meet.” I met with the company, and I got into that.

Even though I’ve been angel investing for years, writing has always been my passion, my main focus really of my life. At that point during the early days of the Internet, I used to write a newsletter where I would cover the day’s most fascinating tech news. I’d basically just wrote up a blurb and link off to the full story for people who wanted it.

It was started by just being sent to people that were in my network or CEOs and employees at the companies that I had invested it. It sort of spread from there. At one point, it had about 25,000, 30,000 subscribers. It got pretty big among Internet professionals, of which there really weren’t that many back then.

As the bust came, I started to get sick of writing a daily obituary — the first Internet bust when everybody started going out of business. I also was just interested in a lot more than tech news. I just sort of was writing about that because I was doing the investing. I expanded it, and that’s really where NextDraft came from, where I sort of cover the day’s most fascinating news. I think of myself less as a curator, even though I’m linking off to 10 to 20 stories a day, and more of a columnist.

I really think if the modern-day columnist, if you were to invent the newspaper column today, it would essentially be a take on the day’s events or individual events with links to other places for more information. That’s what I’m really trying to do with NextDraft. It’s a top-10 most fascinating news stories of the day, but what I’m really trying to do is say, “Here’s the story of today from one guy’s perspective, in his words, and here’s links that you can go read more about whatever you’re interested in.”

Brian Clark: Yeah, I agree with you. Your tagline is “the day’s most fascinating news.” But half, if not more of it, is Dave’s take on that news, which makes NextDraft an interesting read as opposed to just a collection of links. I have to admit that I started out trying to do that, because it’s a side project, with Further.

Then I kind of regressed down to trying to find the most interesting copy that’s already in the article, just as a practical matter. My original intention was to write it myself. You know Jason over at Media Redef. He basically takes the content from the article itself as the teaser as opposed to writing original copy.

Dave Pell: I think there’s definitely a value to that. I do that for two, three, or four out of the 10 stories that I link to a day. What NextDraft is really about for me is writing. The choice I’m making is really a personal passion choice as opposed to a value to the consumer choice. NextDraft is really Dave’s take on the day’s news. It really is a personality-driven project. It’s completely biased. Every link I chose is an active bias, every word I write is an active bias. It’s really what am I interested in today. That’s just what works best for me.

When I first started NextDraft, it was a lot more exhaustive. I felt like, “Well, if I want to be somebody’s news source, I need to cover everything and make sure that, if there’s something happening at the US Embassy in Iran that’s on the front page of the New York Times, I have to cover that because it’s big news.” But then I decided, “No, I just want to focus on what I have something to say about and what I found particularly interesting that day.” That’s really when NextDraft started to take off.

I think it’s really more of a personal fit for what I want to do. I’m a writer first, and I use the news as something I can sort of riff off — sort of like a talk show host would use the day’s news to come up with their monologue, or Saturday Night Live does the same thing with their Weekend Update. That’s sort of where I’m coming from.

I’m looking at the news, and then I’m trying to express something that I feel is important about it or a funny take or an aside. It’s really driven, though, again, by my own neediness and ego rather than some grand consumer benefit.

Brian Clark: Well, there’s a lot to unpack with what you just said there, so first of all, of course, all editorial function, all opinionated writing, and some would say even attempts at objective news are bias. Yes, and I think, at least in your case, I like your bias, especially in these times.

Let’s go back a little bit. I did not realize that you’ve been doing NextDraft for that long. It’s been 16, 17 years?

Dave Pell: Well, the current iteration of NextDraft is really only about three years old. I did have one earlier when I used to write this tech newsletter. I switched it.

Brian Clark: Oh okay, so there was space in between.

Dave Pell: Yeah. A friend of mine who I had built a few sites with … I’d still been writing. I’d mostly been writing in the interim about the intersection of technology and our real lives. Those posts were published to a blog and syndicated on NPR, Forbes, Huffington Post, and a few other sites. I was really interested in that. I didn’t feel like anybody that worked in the Internet industry was really talking about some of the downsides or worries that we have about the technology.

Today, of course, that’s sort of front-page news with fake news, distractions, and students being too focused on their tablets and all that. But the early days of mobile technology especially, I felt like, privately, everybody in the Internet was talking about that stuff, the downside and what they were worried about, and publicly, it was sort of the golden goose, so you wouldn’t mention that. So I wrote about that stuff for a few years.

Then a friend of mine told me, “Hey, you should really bring back NextDraft.” At that point, Twitter was already going and Facebook. I felt like they were already overwhelmed by sort of a constant stream of news. I felt like the last thing they needed was another news update.

But he sort of kept pressing me, this friend of mine named Angus, who I’ve built a few sites with and was one of YouTube’s key developers in the early days. I tried it mostly because it was always my favorite thing to do on the web, and it still is. It’s the best part of my day. It’s really my favorite thing that I do professionally.

So I gave it a shot, and it turned out that, as opposed to adding one more thing on top of all the other news, I think people sought almost sort of a refuge from the ongoing stream of a million links a day and just having 10 to 12 links from a trusted source that is in their inbox, and you get it once a day. It never changes. It never updates during the day. It doesn’t scroll by you. You didn’t miss anything. You can read it when you want to read it. It turned out that people sort of wanted it. It was actually more popular than it had been before. That was good news for me because I really love doing it.

Brian Clark: I think the two key words there, and really it seems like a current thing, but fake news has been a problem for a long time. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but trust is really the key. Who do you trust? Your voice is not going to be welcomed by some segments of the possible audience for news, but then again, that’s a recipe for failure anyway.

Going back to the three-year thing, that’s how long I’ve been on NextDraft. I actually found out about it just because I’m friends with Andrew Norcross, who built the site for you.

Dave Pell: Yeah, he did an incredible job.

Brian Clark: Somehow he said, “You got to go check out what Dave Pell’s doing.” I did, and I’ve been subscribed ever since. That’s interesting. Okay. I’ve been kind of on board with this iteration from the beginning. Earlier you made a joke about an English major looking for a business model. Can you share your subscriber numbers?

Dave’s Reach and How He Unobtrusively Incorporates Limited Sponsorship

Dave Pell: Sure. I have an app also, an iOS app, so it’s for iPad and iPhone that’s really nice that Andrew Norcross helps do the technology. I also have a guy named Chris Morris who did the app itself and a great designer named Bryan Bell who designed it, so it’s really nice. I mostly did that because a lot of people just don’t like email because they get too many work emails and stuff. I wanted to give people that option.

I’d say between the app, the blog, and the newsletter, the newsletter’s definitely the primary, I probably have about 100,000 readers and about a 50 percent open rate, something like that.

Brian Clark: Right. I also notice that here and there you’ll do a sponsor. It seems like with that kind of reach, you would have people who want to reach that audience. Is that a conscious decision not to go that way? It’s more of a vehicle for Dave Pell is an investor and kind of accentuating that aspect of it?

Dave Pell: No, it’s really totally unrelated to my investment life. I don’t really use it for that much. I do have a sponsor. A company called Betabrand that has really great Internet-era clothing, sort of crowdsourced designs and incredible products. They’re most famous for their horizontal corduroy pants that came out a few years ago. They’re really, really popular, especially out here in San Francisco, but getting more popular everywhere. They sponsor it. I feature a few things about them a quarter, and then they have a little blurb at the top of the newsletter in the app.

Brian Clark: Oh okay, it’s so un-intrusive that I don’t notice it. I just opened today’s issue because it just showed up, and there it is. It really kind of blends in with the NextDraft logo, to a certain degree. It’s certainly not slapping you upside the head or anything.

Dave Pell: No, I’m really lucky. Betabrand is really supportive of what I’m doing. I put them in front of readers often enough, but they aren’t constantly in their face. So people have a good experience, but also Betabrand is sort of associated with a good advertising experience and a good product. Before that, WordPress was my sponsor for a couple years. I’ve been really lucky.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I remember that. That was kind of like a ‘powered by’ message, but I’m sure that Matt threw you something for that, I hope.

Dave Pell: Yeah. I’ve been really lucky in the writing business model world even though I joke about it, but to be able to have one sponsor for a long period of time is sort of the best-case scenario. I do make a decent amount of money off it. Probably not enough to deal with San Francisco prices, but I do make a good amount of money for the writing. That’s not my main source of income, but it’s really important to me to get paid for writing. It’s gratifying.

Brian Clark: Is there something else besides NextDraft and investing?

Dave Pell: No, that’s the key. The Angel Investing is sort of what I do from noon on every day.

Brian Clark: That keeps you in San Francisco.

Dave Pell: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Okay, cool. Yes, it is a for-profit project, even though you’ve got a very cool sponsor, sticks with you, same person. You’re not constantly having to introduce the next benefactor, which is nice. Email, if you can get people to pay attention to it, it’s still the transactional conversion medium of the Internet. I know some people are sick of it, but all of us have to deal with email.

Why Email Lives on As the Transactional Conversion Medium of the Internet

Dave Pell: I’m a huge fan of email. I don’t work at a big company, so I’m not getting the thousands of messages a week or whatever. I guess Slack has taken that off people a little bit. I still think Internet is the killer app of the Internet. It’s the most personal way to communicate. It’s the way I like getting most of my news. I really try to make NextDraft personality-driven. Even though people use and like the app, the most popular format is definitely the email.

The nice thing about it is people can just hit reply. Well, it was nice maybe before the current election. They can just hit reply and let me know their thoughts on any subject or something I should check out. Maybe that’s gotten a little bit more aggro as our politics have become a little more aggro over the last six to eight months. It’s little less pleasant. I think that’s a key factor of it, that people just hit reply and it’s going right into my inbox with the rest of my email, and I always get back to people almost immediately.

Brian Clark: Let’s talk a little bit about people who might be listening thinking is content curation, specifically via the email newsletter, a model that maybe they should consider. Now, I want to talk about the trust issue and the fake news thing in a second. It seems to me, and also I’m subscribed to your wife’s email newsletter, as well. That’s a more recent thing. You’re starting to see email newsletter backed startups right now. Are you aware of what’s happening in that space?

Potential Models for Curated Email Newsletters

Dave Pell: Yeah. I see a lot of those coming along. Whether they be sort of vertical, targeted ones, like Media Redef, which that model, I think, makes a lot of sense. If you’re going to start a curated newsletter to the extent that you can target it towards one specific industry, it’s obviously the easiest way to get it read by a lot of people quickly, get it to go viral, and to get advertisers.

Mine is sort of the opposite of that, which is why it really is a passion project. It’s a lot harder to get advertisers when it’s just general news. You don’t necessarily know quite as much about your readers, and they’re not all in the same industry.

There’s a bunch of those in that space. Then there’s newsletters like theSkimm and some other ones that are in a similar marketplace as I am, but have funding and have bigger companies behind them. Really, for me, it’s a creative outlet. I’m really lucky that I work with guys like Andrew Norcross, that you just mentioned, that are indie developers who take what I do seriously and really want to put out the best possible project product that we can. That really, I can’t say enough.

This is giving Tuesday. I’m really grateful for that, but I don’t want to work with a team when it comes to the typing and the writing. I have one friend named Rob who sort of looks at a few of my blurbs to make sure there’s no typos or to make sure my jokes make sense. That’s also really helpful, but in general, I don’t want anything between what I think or have to say and the reader. That’s really, for me, the power of the whole thing and the fun of the whole thing.

Brian Clark: One thing I’ve noticed on Twitter is it seems to me you’re testing out your one liners that end up in NextDraft. Is it a test, or are you just decide you want to say something funny on Twitter — or if something falls flat, do you decide to write something else?

Why Twitter Is More About Impulse Than Strategy — for both Dave and the President-Elect

Dave Pell: That’s a good question. I probably shouldn’t do that as much honestly, that sort of repeating my jokes for people who follow me both places. I think it’s just more of the dopamine hit that all of us that do what we do get when we have an idea and then we can put it out there and get some kind of reaction — whether it’s a ‘like,’ Retweet, or whatever other crack that we need at that moment.

I think of a joke. If it does really well, I might incorporate it into NextDraft later. I suppose if it falls flat, I definitely, in addition to blaming my followers, I’ll also exclude it from NextDraft. Almost everything about NextDraft, the number of which item shows up where and all that kind of stuff, is very well-thought-out. The relationship between my Tweet and NextDraft — or my Tweets and any part of my life — is incredibly not well-thought-out.

That’s one of the things where I really think, right now in the news, there’s a lot of people in the media are convinced that our president-elect is Tweeting for a very specific purpose, at specific times. The latest take is that he Tweets on a subject that will get us all going crazy in order to distract us from what he perceives as a bigger or more damaging story. I think those theories are interesting, and they may be true sometimes, but I’m not really sure about that.

I’m not sure that Trump is not just a sort of a more extreme version of what many of us are though. An idea pops into our head — whether it’s something we’re angry about, think is funny, dissing on somebody, capping on somebody, sending off a message to somebody — and just putting it out there without thinking that much about it, more as a reflex over time. This is a guy who’s, in addition to everything else he is, he is sort of the king of social media, sadly.

I think some of the psychology that goes into that is probably closer to the rest of us than we think, even though he’s different in a lot of ways. I think maybe he just Tweets these things because they pop into his head, and Twitter allows you to push it out there. That’s probably closer to me. That’s the only thing we have in common.

Brian Clark: I think we want him to be diabolically clever in his strategy with Tweets. For example, “Okay, Pence. Go see Hamilton. Something’s going to happen. This will distract people from the $25 million fraud settlement.” You want to believe he’s almost that sophisticated. I think I agree with you. He’s just like me except I would never run for president because I would have to modify my behavior.

Dave Pell: Just to clarify, in terms of sophistication, I think the guy is maybe the media savant of our times. He’s incredibly sophisticated when it comes to manipulating the media and getting attention. I’m just not sure that each Tweet has quite the strategy behind it that some in the media are sure it does. I’m also not sure that when people say one story is obviously 10 times more important than the other, that that’s even true.

I’m not sure that the $25 million settlement against Trump University that everybody knew was coming was necessarily that much bigger than the fact that he was commenting on what was a complete act of free speech by the people in the musical Hamilton. You can argue that one is much more damaging or much bigger, but I’m not sure it’s that clear cut. It’s certainly not clear cut enough to say, “Hey, I want to take people’s mind off the Trump University thing by attacking free speech, attacking the media.” It doesn’t make that much sense to me, honestly.

I think, in general, I don’t know what the strategy is. I think a lot of the media is in the same boat as I am. That’s why they’re having a really hard time covering the election, and they’re having a hard time covering the transition. It’s really important that all of us figure it out real soon how we want to cover this guy.

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve held my tongue about most things, but I’ve started being critical of the media. It’s just like no matter how sophisticated he is, he’s playing you, and it’s working. Bottom line there.

Let’s talk a little bit about social media. Like most things Internet — and I go back to ’98. I was in Austin during the dot-com thing when everyone was saying the basic rules of economics no longer applied. Okay, that was wrong. Then blogging was going to create a utopia, but really it just became a highly commercialized thing. Then social media was supposed to democratize everything, and instead, it’s turned into kind of a mess, especially in the sense of journalism and news.

One of the big fallouts from the election was the revelation of the fake news — some for profit, some for propaganda. Trump’s use of Facebook Ads to target very specifically. He was targeting people, I don’t know if you’ve heard that Facebook is being sued by civil rights attorneys because their ad tool violates the anti-discrimination statutes at the federal level. But he used those very effectively to speak to certain people.

All in all, what does this mean? Before we even get to whether curators become the trusted news sources, which we would hope. What do you see for social media going forward with this lack of trust. You’ve got click bait, and now you’ve got just flat-out fabrication.

Dave’s Take on the Future of Social Media in the Age of Fake News, Click Bait, Distrust, and Flat-Out Fabrication

Dave Pell: Let me start with what I think is the bad news. Actually, everything is bad news about this. I like to say that I’m not sure if we have an existential threat or something worse. Let me start with the something worse first.

The biggest problem with this election and with the fake news thing is that there are people that are open to believing it. You look at something like climate change, 99.9 percent of the scientists around the world know it’s important. Almost every country in the world is stepping up to do something about it. America lags, but we finally got on board. You’ve got people in Alaska having to move villages because of it. You’ve got islands in the South Pacific that are under water because of it.

It could not be more real, yet a fake news story, or two, or a million come out and say that it’s a hoax, and those stories are spread by people, including the president-elect — and people buy it. Is the problem that fake news exists or is more easily spread online? Definitely. The bigger problem is that there’s people that are susceptible to believing it or using it as an excuse to support other beliefs that they might have that might be more of an affront to others — like racial issues, misogyny, xenophobia, or the other big ones that people have brought up during this election.

But I really think it’s that susceptibility to believing that stuff that’s more important that it exists in and of itself. Today in NextDraft, I linked to story about Abraham Lincoln’s second election, where he was accused of all of these wild and crazy things by the opposition party. Those were spread through the news and believed, really hurt his campaign a lot, and almost cost him the election.

So the fake news is nothing new. The ability to spread that news and to make that news look more real — whether by site design or by sharing it on social media — makes it more dangerous and more prevalent. I don’t mean to minimize the problem, but I do think the bigger problem is that people believe it.

In this election, I think there’s been, or post-election analysis, there’s been a huge rise about the issue of fake news, and is Facebook responsible? Or should Twitter do more? Should social media be guarding that? Those issues do point to an increasing power, curation power, of the social networks and that these are the platforms where people go to get their news, which is probably a problem that we need to worry about.

But I really think the lack of information among the public, the split between those who read and don’t read, those who think about issues and don’t think about issues, is really vast. The fake news problem that we’re seeing right now is evidence of that bigger problem, as opposed to the problem itself.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it just occurred to me that people want to believe what they want to believe. Even the better read of us can certainly have our own bias. I think we saw an extreme version of that on the other end of the spectrum.

So I’m thinking about curation as an opportunity to be trusted to tell the truth, yet you could easily see someone using curation to just feed people what they want to hear. For example, with Further, my editorial positioning is no woo-woo crap, no gurus for personal development. I hate that stuff. Just stuff that I’m reading, science-backed, research-validated — that’s the type of people I draw.

There’s probably a bigger audience out there for the woo-woos and the cult of personality, but I want nothing to do with that. It occurs to me that curation could not necessarily be a truth-telling exercise.

The Real Truth (and a Much Harder One to Face) About Fake News’ Effect on the 2016 Election

Dave Pell: Well, I think it can help, for sure. Before this election, I’m like many people, before this election, I used to be a political blogger. I was one of the 30 bloggers that were the first bloggers ever to get press passes to a major national convention when the Democratic Convention gave us press passes in 2004. That was Kerry’s convention, but it was really Obama’s coming-out party.

I wrote about nothing but politics and was in that game of the left yelling one thing and the right yelling another thing. When I started NextDraft, I purposely wanted to keep that out of NextDraft really. People who want it can find it anywhere. It’s sort of like sports. There’s not that much point in including sports scores or sports gossip in NextDraft, even though I’m into it. Anybody who is into that stuff is listening to ESPN radio and a million other sources, going to 20 blogs. They’re sort of in that conversation. You’re not adding anything to it.

That’s why I wanted to be more of a generalist unless something really pops up that’s big. This election, I think, is different because of so many massive, massive issues about what kind of a country we want to be, what does democracy mean, and all that kind of stuff. That really is when this stuff started coming out.

One of the things I found that’s most interesting about that as a curator is that I think I kept a lot of the people who have political differences. I’m sure I had a majority of readers who were anti-Trump before this all started and were shocked by his victory. But I’ve definitely gotten my share of hate mail and enraged responses to things even that weren’t political from people who support Trump over the last few months that’s gone through the roof, both on Medium, Twitter, and NextDraft. Even though I’m more political, but it’s definitely not a political newsletter.

One thing I think is really interesting is Peter Thiel had one of the most famous quotes of the election when he said that the media takes Trump literally but not seriously, while his supporters take him seriously but not literally. I got to tell you, he gets a lot of credit for being a guru, but I really think that is one of the most misguided statements of the whole election period. When I get critiques on Medium where I’m more political or I get critiques on NextDraft, they’re almost word for word out of the Trump campaign. I think people are taking him entirely literally.

I think this is a little bit complicated, maybe getting into the weeds, but one of the reasons why people on the left are so convinced that fake news was so important in this election is because they just can’t believe that people heard what Trump said and saw how Trump acted and decided to vote for Trump.

Fake news definitely hurt the perception of Hillary Clinton and helped support Trump’s framing of her as
‘Crooked Hillary.’ But I think the harder truth of this period from a media perspective — and I think it’s important that the media understands this — is that I don’t think that half of America was fooled into voting for Donald Trump.

I wish they had been because then we can inform them well enough to vote against him in four years, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the truth is uglier than that. I think over time, we’re going to realize that, and the fake news is going to have more of a compartmentalized place in our discussion.

Brian Clark: Beyond the election and political issues, which are incredibly difficult to escape at this point, Ryan Holiday wrote a great book about media manipulation, of which he participated also. A lot of us, we understand what goes on, but I’m not sure the general population did. I guess that’s to my point. After the fake news story really kind of blew up relevant to Facebook, you did a limited-run T-shirt. I forget the exact saying — something, “Say no to fake news,” or, “Get real news.” What was it?

Dave Pell: “Read real news.”

Brian Clark: Read real news, right. Then a lot of us who read NextDraft saw that, and it was an opportunity to recommend NextDraft: “If you want real news, here you go.” In kind of a perverse way, this could end up good for NextDraft in particular, but perhaps also for other content curators.

Why It’s a Good Time to Be in the News Games (and the Tradeoff That Simultaneously Damages the Credibility of the Media)

Dave Pell: I don’t think there’s any doubt. A friend of mine who’s equally upset by the election result as I am, but a lot smarter than me, said, “The one silver lining in all of this, if there is one, is that we are living through the most interesting story of any of our lifetimes — certainly the most interesting political story of our lifetimes.”

I don’t know about you, but I assumed the Bush/Gore election that went into December would be the most amazing and unthinkable presidential election story of my lifetime. That’s nothing compared to what we just saw. I think it’s going to take us a while to understand what it was, but there’s no doubt.

The New York Times is selling subscriptions, paid subscriptions, like crazy. CNN’s numbers are up. Everybody’s talking about CNN. Trump is talking about CNN. A year ago, CNN’s numbers were so low that there was a question whether they could even survive. Now, people are arguing, “Hey, they’re terrible,” “Hey, they’re good.” Whatever people are arguing, they’re in the conversation. They’re being watched. They’re being mentioned by the president-elect regularly.

I think it’s a good time in terms of business to be in the news game and in terms of readership to be a curator or to be an opinion columnist. I think it’s a dangerous time for the media as a whole. In some ways, I think that the next four years threatens the media as much as almost any of our institutions.

It’s not a good trade off, in my mind, that I get more subscribers, more readers, more Retweets, or whatever in exchange for the damage that’s being done to the credibility of the media. Which, hey, if you’re a citizen and you criticize the media, how they cover things, more power to you.

They do cover some things wrong. They do make big deals out of things that shouldn’t be big deals. They do cover politics like a sport instead of covering the issues, which is one of the reasons why we ended up with a guy who focused on nothing but saying he was winning all the time, and why we rail against each other as we do with fans from other rival sports teams.

It’s different when a citizen is criticizing the media or a media critic is saying what they could do better than it is when somebody in the oval office is actually calling out individual writers and publications and smashing them. That weakens the press. And a weak press is just dangerous for society, our democracy in general, but it’s most dangerous for the people that Trump says he represents most completely. That’s sort of working-class Americans that have very few other defenses.

There’s constantly been this meme since the election that the white working class in particular was ignored over the last few years. They may have been ignored by the Democratic party too much and they may have been ignored by policy too much, but they were not ignored at all by the media. I go to a hundred news sites a day, and one of the top stories over the last two years was the things that are happening in coal country, steel country, and places where globalism and technology have really cost people a lot of jobs, changed the way of life, and changed the American dream.

Hammering away at the media is just taking away one more big protection that the most vulnerable people in our population have. I think it’s really worrisome. It’s certainly, if you want to write a curated newsletter or you want to write an opinion column, the marketplace has never been better for that than it is right now.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it is unfortunate that that was the catalyst. I think a lot of us found value in it just before. It’s not like we weren’t dealing with information overload. You make a good point about some of the people that are hoping Trump is going to turn it around for them, besides the issue that perhaps he could never fulfill any of those promises.

You and I are in the technology space. We know more jobs are leaving by the time we get to four years than are going to be created, at least the way it looks now. It’s a tough time. It’s unfortunate when people vote against their economic interests, I guess.

What’s new in 2017 for you? Anything planned, or do you pretty much have your hands full with the current climate?

Post-Election, Dave’s Hope That Opening News Tabs Gets Less Painful in 2017

Dave Pell: I pretty much have my hands full. The two weeks leading up to the election and the three weeks after the election, it’s been a lot of … I don’t want to give the impression that NextDraft is exclusively focused on this. I usually give maybe one item or two items a day to the transition and to presidential politics, but the main thing I’m looking forward to in 2017 is at least a normalization of our tone, if not a normalization of certain policies.

I certainly don’t want to normalize those or normalize a direction in American I think is wrong, but I do look forward to writing about more stories that are unrelated to this. The news media understandably has sort of been sucked into the vacuum of this election and what it means globally, populism, and all these issues. They are important issues and interesting issues, but it does wear on a person.

I’ve talked to a lot of people on the flip side of this sort of the media revenue opportunities during this era. A lot of people are turning away or opening NextDraft less often. Even some of my best friends said, “Oh, man. For about a week, I just couldn’t open it because I just couldn’t take the news. It was just too depressing.” I worry about that. I think looking away is the worst thing we can do at this point.

But as somebody who has to open news tabs every day, I certainly understand that feeling. There were some days I could barely open my browser. In 2017, I’m looking forward to having that feeling a lot less. For whatever reason, I really hope that that’s the case.

Brian Clark: Maybe there is an opportunity for something like NextDraft to, I don’t know, inject some hope to the bleakness through humor, activism, or what have you. It remains to be seen. As you said, interesting times. Dave, thanks a lot for hanging out with us today and sharing your wisdom.

Dave Pell: Oh thanks a lot. It was fun.

Brian Clark: All right, everyone. Content curation probably needed now more than ever. Whatever your motivation, people need someone they can trust. Find your audience. Thanks for listening, and as always, keep going.