My Secret Plan I’ve Never Told Anyone Pt. 1

Whelp this is the post I think I’m most scared to write.

I’m scared people will think I’m nuts.

That’s why I’ve been quietly working towards this goal without ever saying it out loud for two years. Until today.

As I said in the last post— I’m at a crossroads and can’t go further with the current plan. So I MUST explain.

It’s my hope these next posts will clarify why I spend so much time on graphics, why I want to build a bigger world beyond the $10 million dollar studio, and why I’m not happy with where Coffeezilla is at—and finally lay a foundation for where we’re headed.

Here we go:

Part 1: Journalism is broke(n)

Let’s start with a paradox. Although most people hate “journalists”, they never hate the idea of journalism.

In fact it’s the opposite. Ask someone on the street what they think of “journalism done right” and they’ll wax poetic about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile describing someone as a “journalist” is practically a pejorative.

Clearly, somewhere journalism went wrong. And if you’ll permit me the sin of simplifying… I think can tell you why.

Here’s the hard truth. Investigative journalism is a brutal business. It’s time consuming (expensive), legally risky (expensive), and on its best day, a game of fighting vultures (low margins).

Already we’re have trouble… expensive + expensive + low margin = bad business.

But it gets worse. Even if you have the best scoop in the world, today there are thousands of commentators/pundits/aggregators/tweeters who are waiting in the wings to try to take a piece of your hard-won story.

These people don’t have to go out and do all the expensive work like take on legal risk, or spend hours fact checking. They share none of your costs.

Not only that the advantages you used to have are drying up. It used to be that due to newspaper printing deadlines when you ran an original story, you were at least a day ahead of your competition… Today due to the ability to publish instantly, your competition can compete with you with a near duplicate of your story in the very same day.

Ouch!

I’m not saying this to complain, it’s the game I signed up for. I’m just explaining why there are so few “real” journalists left. It’s almost impossible to consistently run high-impact stories with great research without going broke in 6-months. Respect from your colleagues does not put food on the table.

This is why most news angencies have gone the “Loss-leader” model. This is where the company structures their business knowing that their investigative stories are going to lose them piles of money but they plan to make it on the backend with cheap articles and filler content.

But even that is hard to justify.

As more and more “news” companies are finding out, the real money is not in doing any real journalism at all! Just run a 24/7 commentary shop on twitter headlines. Give a few hot takes. You can make the more money at half the cost.

So great… the system is broken. What’s the answer that’s going to save journalism?

Well… I don’t know.

Sorry to disappoint you at the end here but I’m not trying to fix the whole system. I’m not that crazy.

Instead I wanted to show you why I decided to play a different game with Coffeezilla. Something that’s almost impossible to copy or clone. Something I’m building towards.

I want to make hyper-real journalism.

What is that? I’ll explain in part 2. 👀