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Why I Joined Puck

So much of the legacy media, like politics, is essentially a gerontocracy, stuck in old ways of thinking and chasing outdated business models. Puck, which puts journalists and readers at the center of the equation, is trying something different.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Abby Livingston
September 28, 2023

One of the greatest changes in the media business, since I began my career as a journalist in the mid-aughts, is what I call “news deflation”—the phenomenon in which the fierce competition between reporters to get their stories in the next day’s paper, or onto the evening news, was gradually replaced by an endless, minute-to-minute mandate to produce digital “content.” Alas, the threshold for publishing stories collapsed, as did average news value. Reporters were forced onto a treadmill of content creation to generate pageviews and programmatic advertising, not serve the needs of readers.