> the nerdy scumbag, a truly despicable character, both a pedant and an asshole
Somehow, despite having zero connection to poker (and being something of a pedantic nerd), this really resonated with me because it feels like an instantiation of a broader pattern of: marginal trade gets recognized > marginal trade gets elevated > marginal trade becomes popular > marginal trade is now dominated by ivy league kids performing marginality. Didn't something like that also happen to journalism, to some extent?
What happened in journalism, and some journos are raising ethical issues about it, is a new kind of bias called the Media Belt.
It's a region, sort of like the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt. The media belt consists of New York, Southern California, Washington and the Bay Area. It wasn't entryism by Ivy Leaguers -- the pay in journalism is too shitty. It was the march of technology that enabled this, which consequently led to the collapse of journalism in anywhere but these four markets.
I posted this on Max Read's substack (including the link to the article):
"The Media Belt is four metro areas: New York, L.A., Washington, and the Bay Area. They are politically very blue and demographically very diverse, but it's not politics or diversity that forms a kinship.
These four regions dominate search engines and social media. For one thing, most of what remains paying journalism is physically based in these areas. Two, what keeps journalism viable in these communities while local journalism is distressed everywhere else, is that the media is in service to Wall Street (NYC), entertainment (L.A.), politics (DC) and tech (Bay Area). Three, people physically located in these cities like reading about themselves, consuming such content. Four, because such content is consumed so much, search and social algorithms reward it with high ranking results or trending topics. Five, because algorithms reward Media Belt content with prominent play, journalists treat search and social like sourdough starter and keep producing (and consuming) more content because of the incentive structure the internet has nurtured.
So yeah, journalists do have a hand in it but they are more participants and spectators than the architects and executives of this culture.
Google and social media are really what happens when you decide to give the gatekeeping aspects of editorial discretion to AI."
While certainly an appealing concept (meaning it makes sense and sounds like it could be true), I'd still like to know if it is backed by any rigorous fact finding, and where the idea emerged from. For instance, what journalists are raising awareness of it? Have they any in depth reporting about it?
It's an emergent phenomenon, and not yet an established theory. Think of it like a TED Talk: They specialize in a dazzling claim, support it with incompletely formed data, and basically hang the argument on a nail and wait for a more rigorous, academic treatment of it to vindicate or refute their point.
The idea emerged from journalists and media academics, interestingly within New York and the West Coast itself, so there is some self-awareness involved. The "Media Belt" itself is a tag, like how birth cohorts are arbitrarily grouped in "generations" like baby boomers and millennials. It could simultaneously be bullshit and serve no purpose for a lay audience, yet provide a useful framework for theorists and academics to examine and argue over.
The part that does have voluminous data supporting it is where the jobs in journalism are -- in NY, DC, LA and SFBA. More than half of all journalism jobs are based here. You can see this in LinkedIn and other job-board postings. Journalism overall is losing jobs in all media: print, broadcast and online, and it's happening everywhere. However, if you're outside of the four cities, when a journalism job disappears it's gone for good. An out-of-work journalist has to change careers or move to a larger market. In the Media Belt, there's work to be had.
These four cities also have vastly more journalism-adjacent jobs, like public relations, academia and commercial content production (e.g., writing sponsored content or producing audio and video). These kinds of jobs are all but non-existent elsewhere except for major metros like Chicago, Atlanta, Austin or Seattle.
> The idea emerged from journalists and media academics, interestingly within New York and the West Coast itself, so there is some self-awareness involved.
Addendum: One other name I'd add to media criticism is Jay Rosen. He's an NYU professor and one of the most vocal critics of political journalism as it has come to be practiced in the U.S. He's the one who coined "the Cult of the Savvy," or the evolution of political journalists who covered their subjects as newsmakers into journalists as armchair political consultants.
I'm having a hard time of finding the origin of the Media Belt term. Was looking on Youtube for the conference of it but no luck.
The people really good about tracking these developments are Ken Doctor of Newsonomics (he covers it from a business angle, so the impact on employment is solid) and the Columbia Journalism Review. The American Journalism Review ceased publication in 2015 but leaves its archives up; CJR carries on AJR's baton.
I did find this one CJR article, not calling out the Media Belt per se but noting the biases embedded within it. It's a starting point.
"[Question]: How do you think about representation and amplification?"
"Rebecca Jennings [Vox]: The space of internet culture reporters is very white, very middle class—you know, one segment of the population that is in no way representative of the actual population. I think there needs to be way more people covering this beat that are not middle-class white women and white men that live in New York or LA, or wherever. That’s for sure."
"Jason Parham [Wired and founder and editor of literary journal Spook]: Media is a very white space. And sometimes the problem is, there just isn’t the bandwidth or the staff to cover things that should be covered. I think the cultural desks don’t necessarily always get a ton of resources. Culture sometimes is an afterthought, when so much of what we see today or what we talk about today is driven by communities that I find are important—and that are deserving of validation."
I've also found really good media criticism from James Fallows, a veteran longform journalist and author who also worked as a speechwriter in the Carter White House. He's excellent about unpacking how media frames articles and hidden biases other than the obvious left/blue vs. right/red. I highly recommend his Substack: https://fallows.substack.com/
This is the best I could muster from research while on a work lunch break. B-)
I very much sympathized with your comment about trying to make your living at poker feeling a lot too much like a (very unreasonable) job. In fact, why I never really got into poke (aside from being genuinely bad at most card games) is that when I thought about it seriously, it felt to me far more stressful than my job.
Great post. I share your general sympathy to the mensheviks, but I have to admit to being swayed by Rabinowitch's argument in "the Bolsheviks come to power" that Lenin rode the popular wave to the soviets as much as he directed it.
I'm also not sure a coalition would've had any more success maintaining democratic institutions in the civil war, which I assume would've still happened.
As a follow up to the Menshevik question, what are your feelings on the Bund? After all, it was their decision to walk out of the 1903 conference (held within weeks of the Kishinev Pogrom, a contextual detail that Deutscher et al never mention) that gave Lenin his victory on the final day, and allowed him to call his faction Bolshevik (despite being, as you said, the smaller faction).
I loved the game of poker when I first learned it, and I eventually took a stab at playing for cash in a nearby casino. Definitely what ended that for me was not the game itself but the really hard and unpleasant crowd of people who were in there all the time playing for a living. If you weren't a fish, you were trying to cut them out of a big cut of the fish and they'd do everything they could to get you off the table. I couldn't see spending hours and hours with those guys.
Are there particular books by Amarilllo Slim or Doyle Brunson you’d recommend that capture what drew you to the game. My son’s an avid player and I think he’d enjoy reading about that.
John, I’d lap up a sociopolitical poker oriented novella by you
> the nerdy scumbag, a truly despicable character, both a pedant and an asshole
Somehow, despite having zero connection to poker (and being something of a pedantic nerd), this really resonated with me because it feels like an instantiation of a broader pattern of: marginal trade gets recognized > marginal trade gets elevated > marginal trade becomes popular > marginal trade is now dominated by ivy league kids performing marginality. Didn't something like that also happen to journalism, to some extent?
What happened in journalism, and some journos are raising ethical issues about it, is a new kind of bias called the Media Belt.
It's a region, sort of like the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt. The media belt consists of New York, Southern California, Washington and the Bay Area. It wasn't entryism by Ivy Leaguers -- the pay in journalism is too shitty. It was the march of technology that enabled this, which consequently led to the collapse of journalism in anywhere but these four markets.
I posted this on Max Read's substack (including the link to the article):
https://maxread.substack.com/p/buzzfeed-gawker-and-the-end-of-the/
"The Media Belt is four metro areas: New York, L.A., Washington, and the Bay Area. They are politically very blue and demographically very diverse, but it's not politics or diversity that forms a kinship.
These four regions dominate search engines and social media. For one thing, most of what remains paying journalism is physically based in these areas. Two, what keeps journalism viable in these communities while local journalism is distressed everywhere else, is that the media is in service to Wall Street (NYC), entertainment (L.A.), politics (DC) and tech (Bay Area). Three, people physically located in these cities like reading about themselves, consuming such content. Four, because such content is consumed so much, search and social algorithms reward it with high ranking results or trending topics. Five, because algorithms reward Media Belt content with prominent play, journalists treat search and social like sourdough starter and keep producing (and consuming) more content because of the incentive structure the internet has nurtured.
So yeah, journalists do have a hand in it but they are more participants and spectators than the architects and executives of this culture.
Google and social media are really what happens when you decide to give the gatekeeping aspects of editorial discretion to AI."
While certainly an appealing concept (meaning it makes sense and sounds like it could be true), I'd still like to know if it is backed by any rigorous fact finding, and where the idea emerged from. For instance, what journalists are raising awareness of it? Have they any in depth reporting about it?
It's an emergent phenomenon, and not yet an established theory. Think of it like a TED Talk: They specialize in a dazzling claim, support it with incompletely formed data, and basically hang the argument on a nail and wait for a more rigorous, academic treatment of it to vindicate or refute their point.
The idea emerged from journalists and media academics, interestingly within New York and the West Coast itself, so there is some self-awareness involved. The "Media Belt" itself is a tag, like how birth cohorts are arbitrarily grouped in "generations" like baby boomers and millennials. It could simultaneously be bullshit and serve no purpose for a lay audience, yet provide a useful framework for theorists and academics to examine and argue over.
The part that does have voluminous data supporting it is where the jobs in journalism are -- in NY, DC, LA and SFBA. More than half of all journalism jobs are based here. You can see this in LinkedIn and other job-board postings. Journalism overall is losing jobs in all media: print, broadcast and online, and it's happening everywhere. However, if you're outside of the four cities, when a journalism job disappears it's gone for good. An out-of-work journalist has to change careers or move to a larger market. In the Media Belt, there's work to be had.
These four cities also have vastly more journalism-adjacent jobs, like public relations, academia and commercial content production (e.g., writing sponsored content or producing audio and video). These kinds of jobs are all but non-existent elsewhere except for major metros like Chicago, Atlanta, Austin or Seattle.
> The idea emerged from journalists and media academics, interestingly within New York and the West Coast itself, so there is some self-awareness involved.
Which journalists and media academics?
Addendum: One other name I'd add to media criticism is Jay Rosen. He's an NYU professor and one of the most vocal critics of political journalism as it has come to be practiced in the U.S. He's the one who coined "the Cult of the Savvy," or the evolution of political journalists who covered their subjects as newsmakers into journalists as armchair political consultants.
https://pressthink.org/2022/01/the-savvy-turn-in-political-journalism/
I'm having a hard time of finding the origin of the Media Belt term. Was looking on Youtube for the conference of it but no luck.
The people really good about tracking these developments are Ken Doctor of Newsonomics (he covers it from a business angle, so the impact on employment is solid) and the Columbia Journalism Review. The American Journalism Review ceased publication in 2015 but leaves its archives up; CJR carries on AJR's baton.
I did find this one CJR article, not calling out the Media Belt per se but noting the biases embedded within it. It's a starting point.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/internet-online-culture.php
"[Question]: How do you think about representation and amplification?"
"Rebecca Jennings [Vox]: The space of internet culture reporters is very white, very middle class—you know, one segment of the population that is in no way representative of the actual population. I think there needs to be way more people covering this beat that are not middle-class white women and white men that live in New York or LA, or wherever. That’s for sure."
"Jason Parham [Wired and founder and editor of literary journal Spook]: Media is a very white space. And sometimes the problem is, there just isn’t the bandwidth or the staff to cover things that should be covered. I think the cultural desks don’t necessarily always get a ton of resources. Culture sometimes is an afterthought, when so much of what we see today or what we talk about today is driven by communities that I find are important—and that are deserving of validation."
I've also found really good media criticism from James Fallows, a veteran longform journalist and author who also worked as a speechwriter in the Carter White House. He's excellent about unpacking how media frames articles and hidden biases other than the obvious left/blue vs. right/red. I highly recommend his Substack: https://fallows.substack.com/
This is the best I could muster from research while on a work lunch break. B-)
Thanks!
On Arendt, what about the Heidegger connection? Also, I think Howe was right about the Eichmann book.
Read a bit of your answer on poker to my wife and she thought it was going to be about Nate Silver after one sentence
I very much sympathized with your comment about trying to make your living at poker feeling a lot too much like a (very unreasonable) job. In fact, why I never really got into poke (aside from being genuinely bad at most card games) is that when I thought about it seriously, it felt to me far more stressful than my job.
Great post. I share your general sympathy to the mensheviks, but I have to admit to being swayed by Rabinowitch's argument in "the Bolsheviks come to power" that Lenin rode the popular wave to the soviets as much as he directed it.
I'm also not sure a coalition would've had any more success maintaining democratic institutions in the civil war, which I assume would've still happened.
As a follow up to the Menshevik question, what are your feelings on the Bund? After all, it was their decision to walk out of the 1903 conference (held within weeks of the Kishinev Pogrom, a contextual detail that Deutscher et al never mention) that gave Lenin his victory on the final day, and allowed him to call his faction Bolshevik (despite being, as you said, the smaller faction).
I loved the game of poker when I first learned it, and I eventually took a stab at playing for cash in a nearby casino. Definitely what ended that for me was not the game itself but the really hard and unpleasant crowd of people who were in there all the time playing for a living. If you weren't a fish, you were trying to cut them out of a big cut of the fish and they'd do everything they could to get you off the table. I couldn't see spending hours and hours with those guys.
What turned me off the game is that I suck at it. Somehow, my son doesn’t
Are there particular books by Amarilllo Slim or Doyle Brunson you’d recommend that capture what drew you to the game. My son’s an avid player and I think he’d enjoy reading about that.
check out Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People