The Trends We See
Aemula Media Spotlight - 6.11.26
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming after a rather eclectic streak of meta essays:
If you don’t own your data, you will die
The Pope Declares Butlerian Jihad
Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness
It was a fun run, and we might return to a similar style of posts in the future. However, we don’t want to distract from the purpose of our weekly Media Spotlight series, which is to share and promote independent reporters and creators. The emphasis of that sentence being on independent. We don’t see any good reason why all media isn’t independently created, owned, and controlled.
Our mission with Aemula is to support and promote the efficient exchange of information and ideas, optimizing humanity’s ability to collaborate effectively. Today, the exchange of information and ideas is facilitated by “the media”, which consists of legacy institutional publications, ad-supported social platforms, and a growing cohort of independent contributors.
We cannot create the most efficient structure for exchanging information and ideas by simply trying to scale up our current media environment. The news does not flow freely through the centralized bottlenecks of corporate media outlets. The perverse incentives of social media algorithms have a negative impact on the quality of content we consume. And the current landscape for independent contributors is fragmented and under-resourced.
With Aemula, we are building a new form of media to support the transition to independence. The Aemula platform is powered by the next generation of digital publishing infrastructure to ensure we are actually capable of meeting the demands of modern media. We now have the technology to create a truly free press.
We have been refining, developing, and iterating on the tools to support independent media for the past decade. Now our focus shifts to the more difficult problem of actually competing for attention in the crowded media industry. We take attention seriously. As AI threatens to automate everything and outsource intelligence, it is becoming more difficult to decide how we direct our attention. As the saying goes, you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. This is more relevant now than ever before.
Attention is our most scarce resource. Your time and focus is valuable, and we never want to waste it. This is why there are no ads on Aemula and no infinite scroll. Our goal is to help you discover high-quality, impactful content each day so you can stay informed, explore nuanced perspectives, and construct a more accurate worldview. Get in, read in peace, then get out and go live your life.
However, we have a long way to go to achieve that goal. It requires an active community of readers, reporters, creators, and contributors to bring the platform to life. It requires a refined reading experience and elevated design so you can enjoy your time interacting with the independent creators on the platform as seamlessly as possible. It requires a commitment from us to constantly improve the platform and engage with our open-source community to create the experience you deserve.
To meet those requirements, we have become obsessed with developing a deep understanding of the inner workings of the media industry. From traditional newsrooms to social media feeds, we are constantly researching the landscape, making predictions, reviewing the results, and updating our beliefs. Through this process, we have identified meaningful industry trends on timescales ranging from weeks to decades.
We value transparency. At the end of the day, Aemula is governed by our community. It wouldn’t make sense for us to gatekeep these insights. Rather than internalize the trends we see, we want to share them with you here.
I. Distrust & Polarization
Increasing competition and decreasing profit margins have led major media outlets into the trap of audience capture. To defend market share of a specific niche ideology, publications double down on reinforcing the existing beliefs of their audience. As we become further entrenched in our silos of information, it is becoming more difficult to communicate across ideological divides. We all live in our own separate realities, with every news story framed as “us vs. them”.
II. Industry Consolidation
For traditional newsrooms to compete with free-to-use social media platforms, they have to reduce the costs of conducting high-quality reporting. They can no longer rely on control over channels of distribution as their competitive advantage. The internet has democratized access. This has forced these corporate media outlets into a quest for achieving economies of scale. Local newsrooms and smaller publications are being acquired and rolled up into larger organizations, with redundant staff being laid off. With fewer voices contributing to the discourse, we are left with a less-nuanced understanding of the world around us.
III. Shift to Independence
With trust in legacy media outlets at an all-time low, news subscribers are looking elsewhere for credible sources. In the modern era, we have more access to information than ever before, and anyone with an internet connection can distribute content to billions of people across the globe in an instant. Rather than relying on traditional newsrooms as a trusted intermediary for sharing information, consumers can go directly to the source, forming a direct connection between creator and subscriber.
IV. More Noise Than Signal
Our feeds are optimized for engagement and time spent on platform. Social media is supported by ad revenue, and their only mission is to keep us scrolling so they can get paid. We are not their customers. Our time and attention is their product. Rather than promoting quality content, we are left with the slop that keeps us clicking. As AI-generated content lowers the cost of creating content, we are now flooded with an infinite scroll of noise. If we wish to filter signal from this sea of noise, we must align incentives to promote the creation and distribution of high-quality, credible content.
V. AI is Eating the News
Consumption habits are changing as AI agents now make up the majority of web traffic. Digital media platforms are seeing fewer views from real humans coming from search results and clicked links. Instead, they receive more hits from bots attempting to scrape information to be able to answer chat prompts. As the consumer of information changes, we need to ensure that the real people doing the hard work of reporting the news are still able to be fairly compensated for the value they create.
You can explore some of our past posts covering these topics in more detail using our Archive Map.
This is only the beginning of our overview for media trends. We are compiling a more detailed review of these trends into our first ever quarterly State of the Media Report, scheduled to post on Thursday, 7/2.
For today’s Spotlight, we are highlighting some of the best articles from independent reporters and creators that have landed in our inbox this week. We encourage you to explore their work and consider subscribing directly.
Media in the Media
Spotlight
House of Strauss
Written by Ethan Strauss, a former NBA beat reporter whose years covering the Golden State Warriors during their dynasty inform his sharp, independent analysis of the sports industry, media culture, and the growing intersection between athletics and broader social forces.
“Myles Brown said, ‘That was a top 5 game of my life,’ and I’d agree with that sentiment, which is funny because it was mostly a horrible watch. The controversial two quick fouls on Karl-Anthony Towns helped set up a situation where the Spurs coasted for a couple hours. More specifically, they spent over 60 percent of the game at above 90 percent win probability. And yet.”
Dwarkesh Podcast
Hosted by Dwarkesh Patel, a writer and interviewer known for long-form conversations with leading thinkers across artificial intelligence, economics, history, and science, exploring the ideas and technologies shaping the future, previously featured in our spotlight, “How to Fix the Media — Part II”.
“If a person hears and sees on average ~2,000 words an hour, then from birth to adulthood, they’ll see ~200 millions tokens. By contrast, frontier models are trained on somewhere between 10s to 100s of trillions of tokens. That is close to a million fold difference.”
Balanced Weather
Written by Alan Gerard, a meteorologist with more than 35 years of experience in weather forecasting, hazardous weather research, and scientific leadership, whose career has included senior roles at NOAA and a longstanding commitment to helping communities better understand and prepare for weather and climate risks.
“All signs are that El Nino conditions will not only persist for many months and qualify this as an official El Nino event, but that it will continue to strengthen and likely become one of the strongest El Ninos on record.”
Are you writing on Substack? You can easily set up automatic cross-posting with Aemula to instantly:
Increase your earnings
Expand your audience
Verifiably own your work
Plus, you will have opportunities to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create!
Link your Substack to your Aemula account using this link or reach out to writers@aemula.com to get started!
No cost, no obligations, and you can stop at any time.
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight in our Substack, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications.
If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, create an account on the Aemula platform.
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Any writers you want to see featured here? Send them our way! We are always searching for great new publications.
