Tuesday, April 01, 2025

One Simple Question

 




NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

The major newspapers have failed in their mission. We need a new format that does everything they once did–curate, inform, educate–without the baggage.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

APR 1, 2025

The major newspapers simply aren’t getting the job done any longer. Apart from the fact that the printed paper is outdated before the press run is even finished, they aren’t telling us what we actually need to know in an effective manner. Smaller local papers continue to disappear, and the three leading national papers cower, cave and collaborate with the demands of the Orange Monster and their own corporate masters – joined these past few weeks by several of the largest law firms and major universities.

We are largely left to our own devices to find alternative sources of substantive news, serious thought, and opposition to the onrushing autocracy.

Newspapers today – even with unlimited online space – are opting for fluff, filler, and a lot of nice-to-know nonsense instead of substantive coverage of pressing national affairs. Many local papers are now dropping editorial pages entirely. And, as they shrink in size and shirk their obligations, they look like unfortunate jugglers trying to catch the wrong end of a bunch of plummeting knives – painful, pathetic, and painted red with the blood, sweat and tears of departed staffers.

The most immediate result of layoffs, buyouts, and bizarre dictates by billionaire owners like Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times and Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post is the continued flight of major talent. Readership is disappearing, too.  Many of the best writers, editors, and reporters have abandoned the major rags to set out on their own to tell their stories and honor their callings through social media, YouTube videos, podcasts and new digital forums. But it’s an enormously difficult task to find an audience and make a living while you’re at it.

The Best Journalists Are Leaving Newspapers Behind
 

Online digital channels like Substack, which provide a forum for opinions, reports and longer articles, are the prime beneficiaries of the writers’ exodus, for example, Jennifer Rubin of the Post. I also like Joyce Vance, Heather Cox Richardson, Shelly Palmer, Charlie Sykes, and Frank Bruni. Other new services like Bluesky and Threads — which unfortunately followed the constricted Twitter model best suited to short slander, right-wing hate, and trolling — haven’t really offered much of a viable alternative, despite building substantial audiences.

You can’t really say much of value if your message needs to be truncated into a dozen little squibs. And literally millions of new users signed up for these services without a clue as to what they were likely to find, or which other users and contributors might be on any given channel.

But these new forums, channels and writers face a much bigger obstacle that is likely to financially doom many new authors seeking a viable audience. What you say or how well you’ve said it doesn’t matter if (a) no one can find your work and (b) if, as a result, no one is reading or listening to it. Even if you think you know what you’re looking for, without a specific name in mind, there’s virtually no way to find anything of value among the thousands of returns that a typical Google search might generate. There are no editors, curators or guideposts to manage the constant stream of new material.

How Substack Hurts Its Own Users

Substack makes life even more challenging for its authors to build a sustainable audience by the utterly stupid step of automatically unsubscribing anyone suspected of forwarding a post to a mailing list. In other words, while their own offers litter every column with pitches to subscribe at various fee levels (including free), Substack punishes anyone for aggressively sharing a particular piece with a larger audience of potential subscribers by kicking them off the author’s page. This even includes articles which have been served for free by writers trying to get their message shared as widely as possible.

As if finding new materials and writers wasn’t tough enough, the Substack idiots penalize people for providing free marketing for their authors.

With Trump and his flunkies now threatening to effectively limit access to Social Security and privatize the United States Postal Service, online services may soon be the only effective channels that remain for most of our population. As they envision their brave new, tech-first world, the MAGAts never bother to mention the millions of older, rural and poor people, including their own supporters, who still lack access to online internet services or cellphones.

There are still important and critical nuggets of information regularly buried among the gross amount of garbage we get online. Today we all live in various degrees of fear of missing something critical from a friend, family, bank, litigant, government agency or other correspondent. And we regularly do miss messages directed to us at infrequently visited sites.

How To Be a Better Reader

Given this cluttered context, the scarcity of our time, and the fractionalizing of our attention, you need to selectively invest the energy in finding valuable new information sources, intelligent and informed writers, and news feeds that anticipate important events and prepare you to respond.  That’s in contrast to those that merely regurgitate the same tired factoids we see in dozens of different posts across the web.

You can start by finding out where some of your favorite columnists moved and follow them. But this process is too often frustrating. Medium does a decent job of collecting your interests (very generically) and then provides a long list of suggested writers who might be relevant. But it feels like a complete crapshoot, and you’re required to subscribe and pay a fee to proceed. Plus, much like those of us who presently subscribe to too many streaming services for no good reason, it quickly becomes a fairly expensive proposition to spend $50 a pop to support a dozen of the newspaper columnists you used to follow in one or two places.

Interestingly enough, this process of aggregation, validation and assembly of select writers, educators, scientists and other professionals used to be one of the primary functions of major newspapers. Your favorite paper was basically a one-stop shop, a convenient, well-organized and edited, and relatively painless delivery system especially when compared with the absolute drudgery that discovery on the web today represents. Those were the good old days.

Bottom line: we need a trusted online aggregator, or maybe a linking service more tailored than Apple News, where users can find and designate the content, authors, commentary and topics that interest them and have those delivered in a single, morning submission. Sorta like the newspaper you used to find on your doorstep.  

Monday, March 31, 2025

THE ORANGE EXTORTIONIST


 





IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD


 







THE ORANGE MONSTER

 











A Perfect Storm Is Brewing

 






A Perfect Storm Is Brewing

The long-range forecast.

 

 

Trump is killing jobs.

Trump is killing your retirement.

Trump is raising prices.

Trump is causing inflation.

Trump is causing a recession.

Trump is causing a trade war.

Trump is hurting kids.

Trump is hurting seniors.

Trump is hurting veterans.

What is it about those messages that cuts politically? What is it about them that spells trouble ahead? Why do those messages matter going in to 2026?

Because they’re the truth.

Trump’s Administration is cruel, corrupt, and destructive, and for the first time in January 6, 2021, Trump himself knows that the damage he’s causing isn’t just reflecting the Woke DEI Wiccan Soros Lesbian Drum Circle Blue State Antifa Vermin. No, Trump is realizing, slowly, that he and the DOGE maniacs are fucking over his own people. Steve Bannon (R-Broken Clock) was right: a lot of the DOGE cuts are hitting Trump’s MAGA base.

The markets tried repeatedly to rationalize and justify the trade war, hoping for some sign of coherence or strategy, and found none. They simply ran out of excuses in the past week, and now the economy is teetering, the markets are crashing, and it’s all Trump’s fault. Try blaming that on Joe Biden, even if you’re one of the most diehard MAGAe, and you’ll get laughed out of the room.

“Don’t look at your 401k” is the new “Don’t look up.”



Since the kickoff of Signalghazi (or Signalgate, if you prefer), Donald Trump’s once-formidable White House/MAGA media machine looks lost, flailing, and growing shriller by the day. Karoline Levitt (R-Pink Hanbok) is getting more shrill and wild-eyed. Susie Wiles is dreaming of the end.

Everything is falling apart.

His vaunted Russia deal is a burning wreck. Europe and Canada have become fiesty and aren’t playing his game. His trade wars are an economic nuke in the American heartland. His outsourced DOGE plan to kill seniors and veterans — they’re cheaper to bury than to care for, don’t you know? — is wildly unpopular and growing less so by the day. His team is a clusterfuck clownshow with no hope of redemption or performance, QED everything.

Meanwhile, out in the warming Spring waters of the political Atlantic, we’re seeing the early swirl of a perfect storm: a potential Category 5 hurricane forming. Nothing is certain yet; maybe it shifts north or south, fizzles out, or blows inland over empty territory. But storms this big have a way of finding land, and the signs are all there.

I’m an empiricist, and could make the case with the data, but sometimes, you can just feel it.

Any one of the predicates below could lead to a very strong 2026 election. Almost all of them are cutting into the national consciousness, and some of them are already baked in the political cake:

Imagine an election where the damaging ripple effects of Trump’s spectacularly ill-conceived trade war have six full months to radiate through the economy—hitting the very voters Trump once claimed to champion: rural farmers, non-college whites, and blue-collar workers. Watch those golden promises melt into a haze of retaliatory tariffs and mass layoffs.

Imagine an election where the DOGE cuts Social Security, Medicare, and veteran programs and benefit cuts—all accompanied by brazen breakages of the systems that deliver real care—send seniors to the streets in anger. The Third Rail is very real, and it can be fatal for any politician who grabs it.

Imagine an election where Democrats almost ignore Trump in their attack ads and instead substitute Elon Musk. You should. He’s less popular, and doesn’t invoke the MAGA/GOP immune response to any critique of Trump.

Imagine an election where Trump’s random obsessions—Greenland, Canada, the Kennedy Center—stop being nod-and-wink Republicans inside jokes about “owning the libs” in the D.C. bubble and become concrete anchors, dragging down every Republican clinging to his coattails. Imagine trying to defend invading Greenland when Michigan and Wisconsin are in an economic collapse because of auto tariffs.

Imagine an election where Trump’s mumblecore ramblings and perpetual retcons—excused by the compliant Washington press corps for years—get harder and harder to spin. Remember the “Did the White House cover for Joe Biden’s decline?” obsession of a few weeks ago? That’s fluff compared to ignoring Donald Trump’s daily bouts of dimwit glossolalia.

Imagine an election where America’s institutions, long asleep under normalcy bias, finally snap awake. We’ve seen some small and limited pushback against Team Trump’s ceaseless demands for total compliance. Some of the law firms he’s extorted and punished who complied — Paul, Weiss and Skadden — have poisoned their brands. The ones standing up — Wilmer Hale, Jenner and Block, Perkins Coie — will in the end of this be seen as fierce fighters for their clients and the country.

Imagine an election where Trump’s casual betrayals of Wall Street and Silicon Valley—after they showered him with billions—start to sting. The “number go up” dream gets deflated by his random policy whiplash. Trump just floated that he’s going to screw them on the promised Musk-Zuck-Bezos-Blackrock tax cut. The number of Wall Street donors who’ve told me, “Yeah, I hate him, but for my firm I need support him because of the tax cut and economic growth.”

Imagine an election where Democrats pivot to one simple message: “This is madness. He’s hurting you. We’ll stop it.”

Imagine an election where Democrats own up to past failures to listen and understand working-class voters and tell them plainly, “We fucked up. We hear you. More jobs and a stronger economy, fewer 900-page dissertations on how brilliant we are.” That moment is already dawning, with some distance to go, but the signs are good.

Imagine an election where Democrats never, ever take the culture war bait on trans or guns or Hamas or the rest of the things that make them feel good but give the GOP a key to unlock voters they ought not have. This one is going to take work, but if Democrats remember that culture wars are where they go to die, we might avoid disaster. Absurdities like “What about USAID funding trans opera singers in Ecuador?” should only get the response of, “That’s all you got? What about jobs, motherfucker?”

Imagine an election where Democrats recruit candidates who fit their districts, even if they’re more conservative than the coastal donor class would prefer. We saw it work in 2018 with Nancy Pelosi’s DCCC netting 41 seats by letting local candidates be themselves.

Imagine an election where the anti-Trump forces beat the MAGA crew at their own attention-economy game—outmaneuvering Fox News, Elon’s troll-laden social media platform, and every right-wing echo chamber. It’s not easy, but the pieces are sliding into place.

I am not, famously, a ray of sunshine. I have seen the Democrats snatch more defeats from the jaw of more victories than I can possibly count. This political zombie apocalypse has taught me to plan for the worst. (“How much ammo do you need?” “How much is there?”)

But you can feel it brewing. Like a long-range weather forecast, the direction and trending of both the polls and economic indicators is making MAGA wary and Democrats feisty.

Watch for the — and the ghost of William Safire will strike me down for saying this — vibe shift. Pay attention to those town halls, and watch Democrats—who, for once in the last few years, seem to sense a real opening— and are moving with speed and purpose.


Wednesday, March 26, 2025

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