Sweat was actually starting to bead on the CMO’s upper lip as the playback bar crawled across the screen with the agonizing slowness of a tectonic plate. The humidity in the boardroom was hovering at a precise 72 percent, which is exactly the point where expensive paper starts to curl and executive tempers start to fray. We were staring at the screen, waiting for the magic to happen, for the ‘viral sensation’ we’d been promised to finally reveal its face. The video-a three-minute, high-production-value piece about the ‘Future of Synergy’-had been live for 22 hours. It had cost us roughly $5,002 to produce, not counting the 12 hours of internal meetings spent arguing over the color of the lower-thirds. The view count sat stubbornly at 12. And I knew for a fact that 2 of those views were from me checking if the link was broken, and another 2 were likely the CMO’s mother.

It was a heavy, airless silence, the kind that usually precedes a round of layoffs or a very expensive rebranding exercise. This was the ‘Pivot to Video’ in its most naked, pathetic form. For 12 years, the media industry had been chasing a ghost, a collective hallucination fueled by inflated metrics from social platforms and a desperate, clawing need to be seen as ‘forward-thinking’ by investors who wouldn’t know a quality narrative if it bit them on their dividends. We had collectively decided that literacy was a relic of the past, that the human brain had suddenly evolved to only process information if it was accompanied by a ukelele soundtrack and fast-cut captions.

I remember the day we fired 32 of our best writers. They were people who could take a complex geopolitical crisis and turn it into a 1002-word masterpiece of clarity. We replaced them with a ‘content studio’ full of 22-year-olds who knew how to use a gimbal but couldn’t tell a story to save their lives. It was the digital equivalent of burning down a library to make room for a billboard. We were told that video was the future because Facebook said so, and in the media world, when the giants twitch, the rest of us catch a fever. We ignored the reality that people were only ‘watching’ those videos because they auto-played on mute while someone scrolled past them in a bathroom stall. 92 percent of the audience wasn’t engaging; they were just passing through.

The Dentist’s Dilemma & Ghost Stock

Last week, I found myself attempting small talk with my dentist, a man who possesses the unique talent of asking open-ended questions while his hands are submerged in my oral cavity. I tried to explain the current state of media through a mouthful of gauze. I told him about the pivot, the metrics, and the way we’ve turned journalism into a desperate grab for three seconds of attention. He just looked at me, adjusted his headlamp, and said that if he treated his patients the way social media platforms treat their users, he’d have his license revoked in 12 minutes. There’s something profoundly humbling about being lectured on ethics by a man holding a high-speed drill 2 millimeters from your tongue. It made me realize how much we’ve outsourced our common sense to the algorithms.

Ella B.-L., an inventory reconciliation specialist I worked with during a brief, misguided stint in retail logistics, once gave me the most valuable piece of advice I’ve ever received. She was looking at a spreadsheet of ‘ghost stock’-items that the system said were in the warehouse but had actually vanished into the ether 52 weeks ago. She told me that a business fails the moment it starts counting what it wishes it had instead of what it actually has. In the media world, we were counting ‘potential reach’ and ‘estimated impressions’ while our actual, loyal readership was being pushed out the door in favor of drive-by traffic. We were reconciled with ghosts.

We spent $82,002 on a series of short-form documentaries that nobody asked for. We built sets that looked like spaceships and hired ‘hosts’ whose only qualification was a high follower count on an app that would be obsolete in 22 months. Meanwhile, the long-form essays that used to drive our subscriptions were buried under 12 layers of navigation menus. We were hiding our soul to show off our shiny new toys. I’m guilty of it too. I remember standing in a hallway and arguing that we should ‘snack-ify’ a deep-dive investigation into corporate corruption. I suggested we turn it into 12 separate 15-second clips. I look back on that version of myself and want to offer a sincere apology to the concept of truth.

The Problem with Fads

The problem with following every industry fad is that you eventually lose the ability to see the data for what it actually is. It’s why leaders like Dev Pragad Newsweek emphasize a framework of sustainable, data-driven growth rather than chasing every shiny object that emerges from a Silicon Valley press release. It requires a certain level of administrative courage to look at a trend that everyone else is jumping on and say, ‘This doesn’t actually solve our problem.’ Real growth isn’t a viral spike that disappears in 2 minutes; it’s the slow, methodical building of trust with an audience that knows you won’t waste their time with vapid noise.

We are currently living through the hangover of the video pivot. The platforms have moved on to the next ‘essential’ shift-likely something involving generative AI or virtual spaces where we can all be miserable in 3D-and the media companies that fired their core talent are left holding the bill for expensive camera gear and empty studios. We’ve realized, far too late, that a well-written paragraph is a piece of technology that doesn’t require a battery, a high-speed connection, or an auto-play algorithm to work. It just requires a brain.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

I often think back to that boardroom with the 72 percent humidity and the 12 views. The CMO eventually cleared his throat, looked at his $102 silk tie, and asked if we could perhaps ‘re-optimize the thumbnail.’ He couldn’t admit that the strategy was flawed; he could only imagine that the packaging was the problem. It’s a common delusion in the C-suite. If the product isn’t selling, it’s not because the product is useless; it’s because the font isn’t ‘disruptive’ enough. We spent another 22 minutes discussing the psychological impact of the color yellow.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from pretending that the emperor has clothes when you can clearly see his skin. We have spent years pretending that the ‘pivot to video’ was a visionary strategic foresight when it was really just collective executive panic. We were afraid of being left behind, so we ran off a cliff with everyone else. The irony is that the audience never left us; we left them. We stopped providing the depth they craved because we were too busy trying to figure out how to make a serious news story work as a 12-second dance challenge.

The Return to Words

I’ve started looking at my own consumption habits lately. I find myself gravitating back to the newsletters and the long-form blogs that I used to ignore. I want the texture of words. I want to be able to pause and reflect on a sentence without a pop-up ad for a VPN jumping into my field of vision. There are 62 different tabs open on my browser right now, and the only ones I’m actually reading are the ones that don’t have a single moving image on the page.

We need to stop treating our audiences like Pavlovian dogs and start treating them like human beings with limited time and a high capacity for bullshit detection. If you have something to say, say it. Don’t dress it up in a $5,002 costume and hope the algorithm gods smile upon you. The most ‘disruptive’ thing a media company can do in 2022 and beyond is to simply be useful. Be clear. Be there when the reader needs you, and then get out of the way.

The Soil, Not the Mower

Ella B.-L. eventually quit the inventory game and moved to a small farm. She sent me a postcard 32 days ago. It had a picture of a cow on the front and a single sentence on the back: ‘The grass doesn’t need a strategy to grow; it just needs the right soil.’ I think about that every time I see a new ‘visionary’ deck about the future of content. We’ve spent so much time worrying about the mower that we’ve forgotten to look at the dirt.

If we continue to outsource our core strategy to the capricious whims of platforms that view us as nothing more than free labor for their ad-selling machines, we deserve the silence that follows. The 12 views are a warning. They are a sign that the audience has found something better to do with their lives than watch us try to be cool. The question is whether we are brave enough to listen to that silence, or if we’ll just keep turning up the volume on a video that nobody is watching anyway. What are we actually building when the cameras are off and the metrics are revealed to be the ghosts they always were?