It always takes resources to run a media outlet, but the factor has been what kind of resources?
Pre-internet and pre-desktop publishing the resource requirements to achieve any kind of reach were significant barriers to entry. Enormous quantities of money, capital equipment, organizational expertise, and oftentimes regulatory compliance were required - all necessitating considerable operating revenue to sustain. This put tremendous power into the hands of media outlets and relatively little into the hands of the audience.
Pre-internet, there were a few things going on that reduced the cost of entry. Desktop publishing meant that you didn’t need a massive printing operation to produce content on a small scale, thus newsletters could reach small audiences. The airwaves loosened up slightly with more local TV stations, public-access TV, and low-power AM/FM stations. Cable TV broke the power of the “big 3” national networks and brought us more TV news options, including our now much-unloved 24-hours news cycle.
But the internet changed things. Over the course of less than a decade as the nation got online, the overhead required to operate a media outlet with global reach dropped almost to the theoretical minimum of just reporter wages. No printing operations, no TV studios, no transmitters, almost no regulatory compliance burdens, and ever-cheaper hosting/administrative burdens. As media outlets blossomed, audiences fragmented. Sure, hosting costs a bit more than rock-bottom $7.77/mo powweb price for a site with any serious volume of traffic and you need some smattering of tech/admin/sales/mgmt people around, but it’s stupid cheap now relative to pre-internet print and broadcast.
This is media hyperpluralism. This is my quip about how anyone with something on their mind and twenty bucks can reach a global audience.
Concurrent with the explosion of outlets, the audiences fragmented along numerous lines. Age, location, political ideology, subject interest, cultural aesthetics, profession, lifestyle, you name it - I’ve certainly not even covered all of the broad segments. With this fragmentation the power of the few players in the rarefied atmosphere of the de facto old media oligarchy rapidly diminished. No longer were there sufficiently few players as to dictate standards to the audience. In order to win or retain audience, media players now have to cater to what the audience wants lest they simply find another channel or website. Some outlets are amazingly frank about this - clickbait headlines, senationalized coverage, and endless series of articles about gossip and other superficial nonsense are all backed up by data: viewers, listeners, clicks, comments, referral links, shares, etc.
This is the audience tail wagging the media dog. This is us responding to things in contradiction to what we say we actually want. Local TV stations figured this out in the 1980s when on-the-scene eyewitness news started fixating on crime - it scared people but they tuned in much more reliably. Netflix learned this early on by comparing what they used to ask subscribers what they wanted to watch vs what they actually watched - the resulting elimination of that feature algorithmicly - and reliably - determined the usually mid- to low-brow fare people actually watch vs the aspirational material they would claim to want to watch. At a more visceral level, pornography producers know we’re broadly interested in subjects outside of our comfort levels that don’t line up with mainstream sexual mores. This is an aspect of human nature in America playing itself out at a pace and to a degree of precision not possible before the internet.
Some outlets might accept a smaller market share abiding by Standards™, but the audiences to be hand - and money to be made - are in delivering what people actually respond to.
