Pushkin Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As regular listeners know, this season's theme at Deep Background is power, and right now we're talking about power in the worlds of media and publishing. Today we're going to look at an aspect of publishing that is often opaque, the world of business journalism. But not business journalism as you would find it in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Rather business journalism of the kind that you find in magazines like Entrepreneur, Fast Company, or Force. These kinds of journalism are distinctive in their relationship to the structures of capital themselves, namely the businesses that gather capital and expend it in trying to make more money. In that sense, today's conversation genuinely goes behind the stories that we might read in this genre of news. To discuss these issues, we're joined by Jason Feiffer, who's the editor in chief of the magazine Entrepreneur. He's agreed to talk to us about the state of his industry, how he conceives his job, and how it relates to other forms of journalism. That we're accustomed to thinking about. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. I want to start by just diving into the industry that you're most focused on right now, the magazine industry. You're part of it, the business journalism part of it seems to be thriving at a time when most of the rest of the industry is. I guess it's somewhere in the middle of its freefall according to conventional wisdom. So am I right about what looks like a good moment in the history of a business journalism and business magazines? And if so, what's the secret that you guys have that the rest of the industry is struggling with? At least I can speak for us in that we are doing very well. The pandemic was scary, of course, as it was for everybody, but it came roaring back really fast, and we've been on an upward trajectory for years as you would define it by any reasonable standard, which is to say, traffic, readership, advertising, and so on. And that's been great. And look, I just want to make sure I'm like speaking most for my own corner of the world, because when we say business journalism, we can mean a lot of different things, and one thing I don't do an entrepreneur is run deep investigative pieces that are gonna uncover bad deeds from CEOs and so on, because that's just not our mission. Our mission is to support entrepreneurs. And so in my world, what I see is an unbelievable explosion in interest and desire to be an entrepreneur or to at least infuse your life with those kinds of mindsets of taking control of your life and building something for your own and so on, and so there's a lot of energy around that. I have often said, as I've explained the media to friends, that I don't know what on earth I would do if I was running Time magazine, because it tries to reach so many people, it has to be so many different things. But this particular audience, business, entrepreneurship, there's a lot of energy. And I don't think even though there's a million resources, enough trusted resources, because there are a lot of people who are out there trying to take advantage of your time and money, and so to have a did brand that people can turn to, I think still has a lot of value even in a fractured media environment. Let's dig deep a little bit on that, because it makes sense to me to say that to be in a space where the culture is bringing a lot of energy, right, we are in a better or worse in a business culture where many of our heroes are people who started companies, and in that sense, entrepreneurship is a kind of tremendous cultural ideal. Yet if you think of say, you know, fashion or glamour or luxury, that's also a space where there's a lot of excitement and attraction in the culture. And yet the big magazines that were the dominant players in shaping our conception of that cultural movement are struggling relative to where they once were. So does there feel like there's something different to you about entrepreneurship at that end of the business that makes us distinctive. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think that we need to put what I'm experiencing into a broader context, which is to say, maybe thirty forty years ago, because that's how long this brand has been around. The brand was a singular voice in the world of entrepreneurship in a way that it is not now. It simply can't be. There are too many people, as you say, who are offering the kinds of things that we offer, which is to say, guidance on entrepreneurship and insider access to how people think and all that stuff. And so what's our value proposition now in a crowded world of those folks. Well, for one, I think there's a I think that it's fair to say that we live in an abundance world, which is to say that just because somebody comes along and occupies a space that you might be in doesn't mean that you necessarily have to lose something. Instead, I think that we have to think of a brand and an individual as both being valuable and in a space that has infinite expansion. I'm really unthreatened by and I know that we'll get into this a little bit later, but you know, I'm unthreatened by the fracturing of a media environment. I'm unthreatened by not being the sole authoritative voice in a space. I think that as long as you have an understanding of what kind of value you can bring that maybe others don't, that you still have a place in their lives. Let me ask what I hope it's a foundational question and if it has a tinge of kind of curious skepticism. That's okay. Sure, you use the word brand a few times describe entrepreneur, and that makes perfect sense, both in the concrete it's a business and it's a business that's setting out to make profit, and also in the sense that any entity can be thought of as a brand in some sense. That said, when you were describing the brand, you were also saying, look, there's certain kinds of journalism we don't do. We're not trying to do the investigative journim to find distortions or frauds. And you also said that you have a kind of mission driven vision that you're supportive of people who are entrepreneurs. Is it possible that that's the model that's capable of existing in the media world today, And is there something worrisommer or devastating about that that, namely that a media business that says, look, this is our mission. We're helping these folks. We stand behind this set of beliefs and values. We're not trying to, in some neutral or objective way, describe the ends and the outs and the goods and the bads to the world. And if if that's right, shouldn't we be worried about that with respect to media power, because won't let mean that more and more media will gravitate towards that kind of brand oriented, mission oriented work rather than trying to explain the world to us. So this is a really wonderful question and really insightful. And again, I can only speak for myself and my own views and experiences here, but I think that we do ourselves a disservice. And I'm speaking we generally, the people who think about things when we try to create simple narratives out of chaos. And I don't worry that just because a brand like Entrepreneur is doing well. And again, I just very very open about what we do and what we don't do. We're not the New York Times Business Section, we're not Bloomberg BusinessWeek. We serve entrepreneurs and we champion entrepreneurs. It's a totally different thing. But just because this does well doesn't mean that the opposite can't do well too. And we also should be mindful that the way that we think of the media today is not some timeless thing, but it's actually a fairly new thing. I mean, if you're rewind to what media looked like in America and the eighteen hundreds. It doesn't look anything like what we are worried we're losing now with a handful of authoritative and objective enterprises that try to separate truth from fiction and call the shots that that that's a that's a new thing. So let's not think that just because something exists now, it needs to exist in the way that we're familiar with it forever and ever, because it didn't exist forever and ever. So that's not to discount the real importance, of course, of that kind of journalism. It's exceptionally valuable. I just don't worry about its existence in a changing media environment because we are we are the products of change. We're constantly seeing change. And I think that we often make this mistake of thinking that just because something exists in the form that we're familiar with it, that that's the best form that it could ever take, and that any shift in that form is somehow unprecedented, because that's not the case. So yes, I think that it's a good thing that entrepreneur thrives. I think that it's a good thing that brands and media organizations that do quite the opposite of us also thrive. And I think that both are and will be disrupted. And I think that's also fine because new forms of serving what those brands do, which could be either supporting industries or supporting people on individual levels, or holding power to account, which is an exceptionally important thing, is something that people will know how, they'll find ways to do it, even if the economies of media as we know it shift and maybe even die. It's just it's happened enough times before that I just don't think that we can say our time will be different. Our time is never different. So let me push back a little bit on that. Sure, the background music of what you're saying is the language of I would call it creative destruction. Within capitalism, things are changing, they're evolving their new opportunities, and that makes a lot of sense, especially given that entrepreneur has a history of being associated with small businesses, scrappy startups, the little guy who are after all, almost always interested in trying to change things and disrupt and bring about new results. But there is a powerful argument out there that says what's distinctive about our moment is just how enormously powerful the near monopolists out there are. The Amazons, the alphabets, the facebooks, and that argument sometimes comes with a title the Curse of bigness. It's actually an idea that comes from Louis Brandeis and from progressive antitrust legislation more than a century ago. But it was used recently by Tim wu who's a professor at Columbia who's become Joe Biden's special advisor on antitrust. And you know, broadly speaking, the view is that all that good stuff change, evolution is being blocked in the current moment. When you think about the mission for entrepreneur, how do you think about the big mega companies, which on one view, are actually a bad thing for your smaller mission driven people. I don't know. I mean, if you rewind only a couple decades ago, you find all these stories about how Yahoo will never be defeated and Nokia will own smartphones forever, and because Amazon has put such a dent in Walmart, and you can rewind all the way back to A and P Supermarkets, the very first supermarket chain, and who how could that ever be defeated? And you know, like we were constantly I think having this narrative in American culture that that bigness is permanent. Whatever new thing we're seeing couldn't possibly be displaced, and then over and over again it is. And you're right, of course that people small businesses must use Facebook. They must use it. It's impossible not to. They also find it pretty useful, and I think are also finding lots of other ways to reach people that aren't on Facebook. I think you work with what you've got. I think that when I look at entrepreneurs, I find, first of all, quite a lot of fascination. Interestingly among entrepreneurs of big players. People want to know about Jeff Bezos. They want to know about Elon Musk. I mean at entrepreneur dot com right now. I mean if Elon Musk farts in the woods and we ran a headline Elon Musk farts in the Woods, it would get like three million views. And people are fascinated by these people because they built something extraordinary, and they are savvy, and they are sometimes is quite ruthless. And it's not to say that their business practices are always to be celebrated, because they certainly are not. I ultimately come down on the side of it's worth figuring out where the opportunities are and where the opportunities aren't, both in coverage and being an entrepreneur who's trying to live and build in a world that has large competitors. And what you will find if you talk to entrepreneurs is that they do not sit there wringing their hands over that there is a giant competitor in a space. Instead, what they tend to do is think, well, what is this competitor missing and what kind of white space is available? Because this competitor fast in some ways, though they may be are slow in other ways. And this is why people aren't afraid of trying to establish new social networks and new search engines. And that's not to say any of these are necessarily going to topple Facebook or Google, but I don't know that that has to be the goal. The goal is can you build something new and innovative that's going to solve a problem that in existing incumbent does not And I think the opportunity is there to do that. You're saying something that's really fascinating me, So go back for a moment to this policy debate that's being fought out between the Biden administration and others, and that's going to be thought over the next few years in the courts about bigness at about competition. You know, one of the things that the innovative thinkers like Timu, like Lena Khan, who's now become the chairperson of the FDC, have been arguing is that although it's not so obvious how individual consumers are harmed by bigness, nevertheless there is somebody who's really affected by it, and it's the smaller firms that would want to rise up and compete, and we should be really worried about that because without those in the long run, things really will be worse off for consumers. And that's sort of one of their back to the future kinds of arguments that they're trying to make. If I hear you correctly, it sounds like, at least speaking in a general way, for this constituency of small business owners, that they're not so worried about in your account, they're not so worried at least at a collective level about it. It's not the thing that that preoccupies them. And indeed, if you put up coverage that's interested in the big successful people who started companies, you're saying, you get a lot of reaction and probably most of it adulatory, you know, positive in some general sense. So if that's so, that means that the case the Timu that Lena Khan that the Biden administration are trying to make, it's actually an even harder case to make than they present it as being. If the constituency that they say is being harmed small business is actually not so upset or doesn't really imagine itself as thinking of itself is harmed. And just to follow onto that is, if they did. If your readers and your constituents thought that they were being badly harmed by this, I take it that would become an important part of your coverage. Right If they thought an everyday basis that something was making their lives difficult or miserable, I assume they would want to want to read about it, and they'd want you to cover it. I really appreciate that observation. So a couple of things here. Number One, Entrepreneurs are kinds of people who like to look at what's available and what other people aren't thinking about, and then move forward. What they don't do is sit on the sidelines and grumble about the things that are in their way. It's not the thing that's on the top of their mind. They are thinking about how they can spot opportunity that other people haven't, and they see these giant companies as at once instructive. They're very interested in what exceptionally successful founders have done and how they operate, because there are things to learn from them. But then they also are looking around for ways that they could build something utilizing opportunities that are created by these incumbents. I mean, how many businesses have been built on Instagram. I mean it's countless. I mean, look, this is like a This is just going to zoom far off, but I promise I'm going to bring it back. I just want to tell you this little story that I'm obsessed with, and it's about the dawn of the phonograph. So the phonograph comes along and it is the very first time that anybody ever can hear recorded music. I mean, just think about the massive change that that represents. So before that, through all of human history, the only time that you could ever hear music is if somebody is literally playing an instrument in front of you, the only way. And then suddenly this machine comes along, and this new industry comes along, and it proposes a completely different way of experiencing this music, and all of the musicians of the time, high profile musicians at the time, are absolutely furious about this. John Philip Souza, who of course we know now is the composer of all our fam marchesa, that's John Phillips, John Philip Susa, is writing screeds against recorded music. He makes one of his arguments, which I love the most because it's just so insane, was he would say, recorded music will enter the home. When it enters the home, it will replace all forms of live music, because of course, why would you perform live music when instead you could just hit a button and hear it out of a machine. And now, because of that, mothers will no longer sink to their children. And because children grow up imitating their mothers, that children will grow up imitating the machines. And thus we will create a generation of machine babies. And so he and his musicians and the musicians unions of the time were very, very concerned and upset about this new industry. They felt like it was displacing them. Now what did we learn, you know, one hundred years later, I'll tell you what we learned. What we learned was that actually this gigantic shift, though it seemed to dominate, did not actually dominate. What it did was it created a million new opportunities. Find a studio engineer and they can thank the phonograph for their job. There was a job that didn't exist before that. And this, I think is how entrepreneurs think. They see a long game. They think about how new things don't just gobble everything up, They in fact shift the environment, they fracture, they create new opportunities where there weren't before. And so I'm honestly not very compelled or concerned by the antitrust conversations, which I would not propose to be an expert about at all. But I can tell you that on the ground level, as entrepreneurs are talking about building their businesses, the thing that they're not obsessed about is how a handful of giant companies are stopping them from coming up with great ideas and building something new. It's it's just not what I hear. We'll be right back. You've alluded to a distinction between what's sometimes called a hard journalism, you know, exemplified by the big newspapers, maybe at one time by the network news shows and by implication, software journalism, journalism that in some way is allied with an industry and is self consciously supportive of it. I think for those of us who are not connected to the journalism industry, and I am perfectly connected to it, so I do follow this a little bit. But for most people who aren't, we don't know much about the thought world, the power structures, or the operation of the so called software journalism. There are no movies about it, you know, all The President's Men is not about a software journalism entity. Would you say a little bit for the interested and open minded listener of what is the business structure of software journalism? Do you think of yourselves as in a different relationship to your subject, to your advertisers? How would you conceptualize that? And I wouldn't have introduced the distinction at all if you hadn't introduced it. No, it's fine. I'm totally comfortable with it because it's been a shift for me and I enjoy it. Though it should be noted I come from a harder journalism background. I started in daily newspapers and this is ultimately where I landed, and I love it, but I also want to be really wide eyed and open that I'm I'm not the guy doing deep investigations. I'm glad somebody else is doing it, but it's not me. So yeah, sure, let me tell you about it. Yeah, tell us about it, and tell us how power works in it relative to how we at least imagine it works in harder journalism, right right, Okay, let me tell you a little quick story. When I became editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, I started getting interview requests and I said yes, and then people would introduce me in this really interesting way. They would have me on their show. And you know, generally speaking, I'm talking about there's like a billion podcasts about entrepreneurship and these kinds of things, and I'd be saying yes to this stuff first, and so somebody would have me on and they would say, we're so excited to have Jason five, a thought leader an entrepreneurship here we're gonna be talking about. And I would say, WHOA hold on a second. You know, I don't consider myself a thought leader. I consider myself a journalist. I'm a storyteller and my job is to find information. And I found that they had no idea what I was talking about and it was killing the vibe. It was like falling downstairs, right, and leader in that and anyway, in the world of self promotion, there's no such thing as anyone who's not a thought leader. If you're breathing, you're a thought leader. Well that's right. And I mean, I was telling my wife about this problem. How do I what do I do here? Because I'm like, I'm destroying the reason that these people are having me on their show. And she said, if they want you to be a thought leader, just be a thought leader. And I realized that the difference between a thought leader and not a thought leaders that the thought leader is willing to call themselves a thought leader. That's literally the only distinction. And so I started to try to understand what people understood of me. And that was a really interesting experience because look, prior to that, when I was a journey when I was a pure journalist, when I was covering city council meetings for local newspapers. You know, I'd walk in and everyone would sit up because now they know they're on the record and whatever they say could end up in the paper. And my job is and people were understanding me different at entrepreneur, and I started to listen to the questions that they were asking me. What they primarily were asking me was some version of what are the qualities of a successful entrepreneur? And I came to this interesting philosophy, which is that when you listen to the questions that people ask you, what you're actually hearing is them telling you what they think your value is to them. And so I was like, well, first of all, I need an answer to this question, because they keep asking me the question. But then also this gives me insights into what they think I am. They don't think of me as a journalist. What they think of me is as like a like the super entrepreneur, the entrepreneur who talks to all the entrepreneurs, who sits in the middle and likes sees the patterns, and then his job is to bring you the patterns. And I realized that they they don't even understand me as a journalist. And that was weird at first, and then ultimately fine. And the reason for that is because I found that I liked it. I liked relating to the audience, and I liked supporting them. There's a deep skepticism that traditional journalists bring to the sources that they cover and in the industries that they cover. And what I ultimately discovered about myself is that although I can summon that skepticism, I'm a little happier without it. And so I started to really lean into calling myself an entrepreneur and relating to them and writing these motivates. I mean, if you pick up my if you pick up the magazine, the first thing that you'll read is this column that I write, which you know, every other editor in chief uses their editor's letter as like a table of contents and essay form. But what I've done is turned it into this thing where I share my own lessons and failures and the lessons to draw from it. And I get it just a tremendous response from So anyway, you ask about the power structure of this thing and how this actually works, and look, I mean, structurally, it's not all that different from any other traditional journalism. There is a hard wall between advertising and edit. You cannot buy edit in the magazine. You cannot influence edit in the magazine and edit it for the listeners. Edited short for editorial there which is itself a shorthand for the idea of articles that you write as opposed to advertisements. That's right, thanks, yes, correct. So we I assign short and long stories to professional journalists and they go out and they report those stories. But the instruction that I give them is the people who are reading this are going to be entrepreneurs, and their number one question when they sit down to read this story is what is in it for me? What can I learn that I can apply directly to my life? For this, So, if you're going to report a story about how somebody built this company or whatever's going on in this world, that the number one question to be answering all the time is how did this problem get solved? How does this thing work? How can entrepreneurs learn from this? That's the mission. And again, yes, an advertiser cannot buy a story. They cannot influence a story. We function like traditional journalism, but I probably do more than a I'm not probably, I'm sure a hundred thousand times do more than like somebody at the New York Times would do to engage with an advertiser. So let's say, for example, LinkedIn. Recently, we partnered with LinkedIn, as you know, their sponsor, and part of that was that I moderated a clubhouse and then I did a LinkedIn live talking about how to build your brand on LinkedIn. Now that doesn't feel dirty to me, and the reason for that is because I know my audience is actually really interested in how to build their brand on LinkedIn. It's a subject that they care about, So it doesn't feel like I'm sacrificing anything or that people will feel differently about me or the brand in any way. If I'm the voice and face of that conversation, I'm happy to do it. We sell ads, we create products. You can literally book my time through entrepreneur and I will give you advice on your business. It's a service that we offer. I've come to realize that the best that I can do for my job and my audience is to be a blend for them in which I take the skills and the methodology of journalism, which is to say, go out, gather information, create a coherent narrative that people can follow, and to have standards that I think that somebody outside of journalism may not know how to apply to this world. So for example, why are we covering certain things? We don't want a log roll for people, etc. But then also be mindful that what the audience ultimately wants is not journalism, but they want is help. And by delivering those two things, we can call it soft journalism, sure, but what I just think of it as value. I have an audience and I'm providing value to them. Jason, I want to come around to one of the places where your power actually enables you to potentially do good. And I know it's something that you focus on, and that is getting diverse faces and voices into your magazine so as to promote the greater diversification by sex, by race, by class, across the full space of really of capitalism, of entrepreneurial capitalism. That's obviously hard because we live in a world where you're not in charge of capitalism and you're not in charge of the allocation of capital. And for systemic and structural reasons, it's harder to get access to capital and start a business if you're a woman. It's harder to get access to capital and start a business if you're a person of color in the United States. And you're not responsible for the fact that those things came into existence, but it is part of your mission to try to help make them better by coverage Yeah, how do you think about that? How do you push forward and enable there to be different faces and different voices given the background conditions that already exist and make it much harder. Yeah, it's an important question. I used to work a fast company and the editor in chief at the time, a guy named Bob Saffian, said this thing that I really liked and that I've I've thought about a lot since, which was our job is not to show business as it is right now, necessarily, but to show where business is going, what business looks like in the future. We are to imagine a more diverse cast of players in business. What does that look like? And let's make sure that we're reflecting that. So on a practical level, what does that look like? Well, I mean it literally looks like us as a staff saying do we have enough diversity in every issue? I mean, I don't know that I should even be saying this aloud, but I don't know how else to do it. So I'll just tell you when we put together a package. So, a package, in magazine parlance is a number of pages that are all around the same theme. So let's say we have a package called one hundred Powerful Women that's a package. When we are producing a lineup for that, we are mindful of and in fact literally writing down on a spreadsheet who and what everybody is. Making sure that because the thing is that I don't want to I don't want to have come up with a list and then look at it and say, a crap, eighty percent of these people are white. We want to make sure that we're we have a good mix, and literally the only way to do that is to put it on a spreadsheet and make sure that you've got the right numbers. And that's what we do because there's no better, there's no other way to do it. And that means doing a lot of extra work, and it means being proactive and contacting communities and constantly asking them for their own insights. I met with a female investor a couple days ago. We got coffee and I told her, I was like, look, we're casting this hundred women thing. We're looking for a really diverse range of founders. I would love you to tap your network as well and tell me who you think we should be considering. That's the only way to do it. Take down the walls, let people contact you. Be proactive in contacting them too, because to me, the best way to serve our community is to try to knock as many of those barriers down as possible. Last question for you, Jason, Yeah, when you think about your industry and your job, what worries you the most? You sound like an upbeat, positive guy with good messages to learn in good goals, and I don't want to in any way undermind that you must have some worries sometimes, and I'm wondering what they are. It's a funny, weird, hard question. Actually, you're right. I am generally a very optimistic, upbeat person, and I will tell you that serving an optimistic and upbeat audience really helps do that. What keeps me up at night, I mean, I guess the thing that worries me the most is that there are always bad actors who are looking to take advantage of people. And in the world of entrepreneurship, I can tell you that there are so many people who are looking to get you to show up at their ten thousand dollars three day course, and the whole point of that course is to sell you on the fifty thousand dollars three day course. And I hate those guys. They're bad. They're bad for the people who they're trying to who they're proposed to serve. And I think that it's good to have strong leadership and strong I mean, I'll use the word brand again because to me, entrepreneurs a brand more than it is anything else. A strong brand that isn't trying to actively take advantage of people. And I think that it's possible that as the economics of these brands shift, some will survive and some will not, and some will disappear. And it's possible that that creates more oxygen for the Charlottean's of the world. But I don't think that that means that the Charlottean's of the world win. I think that if Entrepreneur disappeared tomorrow. I think that if you and I wrapped up this conversation and then I look at my email and I've got an email from the president of Entrepreneur that says, you know, crap, it's all over and the company has disappeared. I don't think that entrepreneurs suffer forever, right. I think that they lose a trusted source of information and then another one rises, and that's how it should be. Jason, thank you for your candor, your enthusiasm. I learned a huge amount about your industry and how it works, and also about what it takes to succeed in it. And I'm really really grateful to you for your time. Oh well, thanks, I appreciate you and this is a lot of fun. Thanks. We'll be right back listening to Jason. I was extraordinarily struck by his candor. In no way did Jason attempt to mislead, misrepresent, or sugarcoat the basic structure of how he understands his branch of business journalism. In Jason's account, the point of what he does is to support and embrace the mission of small businesses, to help them be inspired to do better, to give them advice about how to do their jobs, and not to focus on negative stories that might inevitably have the effect of alienating his readers. Jason sees his readers as constituents or stakeholders in an overarching project, which is, after all, part of the central project of capitalism in America, namely getting small business to do big things in the world. This perspective on a whole genre of journalism is almost entirely missing from our general discussion in the culture of what media is for and what it does. We tend to think of newspapers and magazines in the classic mold of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal being objective, aiming to tell the truth and uncovering instances of wrongdoing by the subjects that they cover. Yet, in today's complex economic reality for media journalism, it may be that the business model of traditional objective journalism is limited to only a handful of significant players. However, the market for journalism of the kind that Jason described seems in fact to be doing pretty well and even growing, reflecting the underlying economic interest that many people seem to have in reading stories that do give them feelings of uplift and that do guide them towards their business objectives. In that context, so relently positive is Jason's vision that even topics like the potential monopolistic effects of big tech topics that are in constant discussion on Capitol Hill, for example, are not particularly in Jason's expert view of interest to his readers. Why because they represent limitations, and his job, as he sees it, is to tell stories that emphasize possibilities by bringing us inside the actual world of how journalism works at his magazine, Jason gave me and I hope you too, a remarkable gift, the gift of the unvarnished truth about how power actually is deployed in certain journalistic spaces today, very much outside of the headlines. Until the next time I speak to you here on Deep Background, Breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and try to have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noah Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Ben Taliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mccibbon. Editorial support from NOAHM Osband theme music by Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. As regular listeners know, this season's theme at Deep Background is power, and right now we're talking about power in the worlds of media and publishing. Today we're going to look at an aspect of publishing that is often opaque, the world of business journalism. But not business journalism as you would find it in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Rather business journalism of the kind that you find in magazines like Entrepreneur, Fast Company, or Force. These kinds of journalism are distinctive in their relationship to the structures of capital themselves, namely the businesses that gather capital and expend it in trying to make more money. In that sense, today's conversation genuinely goes behind the stories that we might read in this genre of news. To discuss these issues, we're joined by Jason Feiffer, who's the editor in chief of the magazine Entrepreneur. He's agreed to talk to us about the state of his industry, how he conceives his job, and how it relates to other forms of journalism. That we're accustomed to thinking about. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. I want to start by just diving into the industry that you're most focused on right now, the magazine industry. You're part of it, the business journalism part of it seems to be thriving at a time when most of the rest of the industry is. I guess it's somewhere in the middle of its freefall according to conventional wisdom. So am I right about what looks like a good moment in the history of a business journalism and business magazines? And if so, what's the secret that you guys have that the rest of the industry is struggling with? At least I can speak for us in that we are doing very well. The pandemic was scary, of course, as it was for everybody, but it came roaring back really fast, and we've been on an upward trajectory for years as you would define it by any reasonable standard, which is to say, traffic, readership, advertising, and so on. And that's been great. And look, I just want to make sure I'm like speaking most for my own corner of the world, because when we say business journalism, we can mean a lot of different things, and one thing I don't do an entrepreneur is run deep investigative pieces that are gonna uncover bad deeds from CEOs and so on, because that's just not our mission. Our mission is to support entrepreneurs. And so in my world, what I see is an unbelievable explosion in interest and desire to be an entrepreneur or to at least infuse your life with those kinds of mindsets of taking control of your life and building something for your own and so on, and so there's a lot of energy around that. I have often said, as I've explained the media to friends, that I don't know what on earth I would do if I was running Time magazine, because it tries to reach so many people, it has to be so many different things. But this particular audience, business, entrepreneurship, there's a lot of energy. And I don't think even though there's a million resources, enough trusted resources, because there are a lot of people who are out there trying to take advantage of your time and money, and so to have a did brand that people can turn to, I think still has a lot of value even in a fractured media environment. Let's dig deep a little bit on that, because it makes sense to me to say that to be in a space where the culture is bringing a lot of energy, right, we are in a better or worse in a business culture where many of our heroes are people who started companies, and in that sense, entrepreneurship is a kind of tremendous cultural ideal. Yet if you think of say, you know, fashion or glamour or luxury, that's also a space where there's a lot of excitement and attraction in the culture. And yet the big magazines that were the dominant players in shaping our conception of that cultural movement are struggling relative to where they once were. So does there feel like there's something different to you about entrepreneurship at that end of the business that makes us distinctive. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think that we need to put what I'm experiencing into a broader context, which is to say, maybe thirty forty years ago, because that's how long this brand has been around. The brand was a singular voice in the world of entrepreneurship in a way that it is not now. It simply can't be. There are too many people, as you say, who are offering the kinds of things that we offer, which is to say, guidance on entrepreneurship and insider access to how people think and all that stuff. And so what's our value proposition now in a crowded world of those folks. Well, for one, I think there's a I think that it's fair to say that we live in an abundance world, which is to say that just because somebody comes along and occupies a space that you might be in doesn't mean that you necessarily have to lose something. Instead, I think that we have to think of a brand and an individual as both being valuable and in a space that has infinite expansion. I'm really unthreatened by and I know that we'll get into this a little bit later, but you know, I'm unthreatened by the fracturing of a media environment. I'm unthreatened by not being the sole authoritative voice in a space. I think that as long as you have an understanding of what kind of value you can bring that maybe others don't, that you still have a place in their lives. Let me ask what I hope it's a foundational question and if it has a tinge of kind of curious skepticism. That's okay. Sure, you use the word brand a few times describe entrepreneur, and that makes perfect sense, both in the concrete it's a business and it's a business that's setting out to make profit, and also in the sense that any entity can be thought of as a brand in some sense. That said, when you were describing the brand, you were also saying, look, there's certain kinds of journalism we don't do. We're not trying to do the investigative journim to find distortions or frauds. And you also said that you have a kind of mission driven vision that you're supportive of people who are entrepreneurs. Is it possible that that's the model that's capable of existing in the media world today, And is there something worrisommer or devastating about that that, namely that a media business that says, look, this is our mission. We're helping these folks. We stand behind this set of beliefs and values. We're not trying to, in some neutral or objective way, describe the ends and the outs and the goods and the bads to the world. And if if that's right, shouldn't we be worried about that with respect to media power, because won't let mean that more and more media will gravitate towards that kind of brand oriented, mission oriented work rather than trying to explain the world to us. So this is a really wonderful question and really insightful. And again, I can only speak for myself and my own views and experiences here, but I think that we do ourselves a disservice. And I'm speaking we generally, the people who think about things when we try to create simple narratives out of chaos. And I don't worry that just because a brand like Entrepreneur is doing well. And again, I just very very open about what we do and what we don't do. We're not the New York Times Business Section, we're not Bloomberg BusinessWeek. We serve entrepreneurs and we champion entrepreneurs. It's a totally different thing. But just because this does well doesn't mean that the opposite can't do well too. And we also should be mindful that the way that we think of the media today is not some timeless thing, but it's actually a fairly new thing. I mean, if you're rewind to what media looked like in America and the eighteen hundreds. It doesn't look anything like what we are worried we're losing now with a handful of authoritative and objective enterprises that try to separate truth from fiction and call the shots that that that's a that's a new thing. So let's not think that just because something exists now, it needs to exist in the way that we're familiar with it forever and ever, because it didn't exist forever and ever. So that's not to discount the real importance, of course, of that kind of journalism. It's exceptionally valuable. I just don't worry about its existence in a changing media environment because we are we are the products of change. We're constantly seeing change. And I think that we often make this mistake of thinking that just because something exists in the form that we're familiar with it, that that's the best form that it could ever take, and that any shift in that form is somehow unprecedented, because that's not the case. So yes, I think that it's a good thing that entrepreneur thrives. I think that it's a good thing that brands and media organizations that do quite the opposite of us also thrive. And I think that both are and will be disrupted. And I think that's also fine because new forms of serving what those brands do, which could be either supporting industries or supporting people on individual levels, or holding power to account, which is an exceptionally important thing, is something that people will know how, they'll find ways to do it, even if the economies of media as we know it shift and maybe even die. It's just it's happened enough times before that I just don't think that we can say our time will be different. Our time is never different. So let me push back a little bit on that. Sure, the background music of what you're saying is the language of I would call it creative destruction. Within capitalism, things are changing, they're evolving their new opportunities, and that makes a lot of sense, especially given that entrepreneur has a history of being associated with small businesses, scrappy startups, the little guy who are after all, almost always interested in trying to change things and disrupt and bring about new results. But there is a powerful argument out there that says what's distinctive about our moment is just how enormously powerful the near monopolists out there are. The Amazons, the alphabets, the facebooks, and that argument sometimes comes with a title the Curse of bigness. It's actually an idea that comes from Louis Brandeis and from progressive antitrust legislation more than a century ago. But it was used recently by Tim wu who's a professor at Columbia who's become Joe Biden's special advisor on antitrust. And you know, broadly speaking, the view is that all that good stuff change, evolution is being blocked in the current moment. When you think about the mission for entrepreneur, how do you think about the big mega companies, which on one view, are actually a bad thing for your smaller mission driven people. I don't know. I mean, if you rewind only a couple decades ago, you find all these stories about how Yahoo will never be defeated and Nokia will own smartphones forever, and because Amazon has put such a dent in Walmart, and you can rewind all the way back to A and P Supermarkets, the very first supermarket chain, and who how could that ever be defeated? And you know, like we were constantly I think having this narrative in American culture that that bigness is permanent. Whatever new thing we're seeing couldn't possibly be displaced, and then over and over again it is. And you're right, of course that people small businesses must use Facebook. They must use it. It's impossible not to. They also find it pretty useful, and I think are also finding lots of other ways to reach people that aren't on Facebook. I think you work with what you've got. I think that when I look at entrepreneurs, I find, first of all, quite a lot of fascination. Interestingly among entrepreneurs of big players. People want to know about Jeff Bezos. They want to know about Elon Musk. I mean at entrepreneur dot com right now. I mean if Elon Musk farts in the woods and we ran a headline Elon Musk farts in the Woods, it would get like three million views. And people are fascinated by these people because they built something extraordinary, and they are savvy, and they are sometimes is quite ruthless. And it's not to say that their business practices are always to be celebrated, because they certainly are not. I ultimately come down on the side of it's worth figuring out where the opportunities are and where the opportunities aren't, both in coverage and being an entrepreneur who's trying to live and build in a world that has large competitors. And what you will find if you talk to entrepreneurs is that they do not sit there wringing their hands over that there is a giant competitor in a space. Instead, what they tend to do is think, well, what is this competitor missing and what kind of white space is available? Because this competitor fast in some ways, though they may be are slow in other ways. And this is why people aren't afraid of trying to establish new social networks and new search engines. And that's not to say any of these are necessarily going to topple Facebook or Google, but I don't know that that has to be the goal. The goal is can you build something new and innovative that's going to solve a problem that in existing incumbent does not And I think the opportunity is there to do that. You're saying something that's really fascinating me, So go back for a moment to this policy debate that's being fought out between the Biden administration and others, and that's going to be thought over the next few years in the courts about bigness at about competition. You know, one of the things that the innovative thinkers like Timu, like Lena Khan, who's now become the chairperson of the FDC, have been arguing is that although it's not so obvious how individual consumers are harmed by bigness, nevertheless there is somebody who's really affected by it, and it's the smaller firms that would want to rise up and compete, and we should be really worried about that because without those in the long run, things really will be worse off for consumers. And that's sort of one of their back to the future kinds of arguments that they're trying to make. If I hear you correctly, it sounds like, at least speaking in a general way, for this constituency of small business owners, that they're not so worried about in your account, they're not so worried at least at a collective level about it. It's not the thing that that preoccupies them. And indeed, if you put up coverage that's interested in the big successful people who started companies, you're saying, you get a lot of reaction and probably most of it adulatory, you know, positive in some general sense. So if that's so, that means that the case the Timu that Lena Khan that the Biden administration are trying to make, it's actually an even harder case to make than they present it as being. If the constituency that they say is being harmed small business is actually not so upset or doesn't really imagine itself as thinking of itself is harmed. And just to follow onto that is, if they did. If your readers and your constituents thought that they were being badly harmed by this, I take it that would become an important part of your coverage. Right If they thought an everyday basis that something was making their lives difficult or miserable, I assume they would want to want to read about it, and they'd want you to cover it. I really appreciate that observation. So a couple of things here. Number One, Entrepreneurs are kinds of people who like to look at what's available and what other people aren't thinking about, and then move forward. What they don't do is sit on the sidelines and grumble about the things that are in their way. It's not the thing that's on the top of their mind. They are thinking about how they can spot opportunity that other people haven't, and they see these giant companies as at once instructive. They're very interested in what exceptionally successful founders have done and how they operate, because there are things to learn from them. But then they also are looking around for ways that they could build something utilizing opportunities that are created by these incumbents. I mean, how many businesses have been built on Instagram. I mean it's countless. I mean, look, this is like a This is just going to zoom far off, but I promise I'm going to bring it back. I just want to tell you this little story that I'm obsessed with, and it's about the dawn of the phonograph. So the phonograph comes along and it is the very first time that anybody ever can hear recorded music. I mean, just think about the massive change that that represents. So before that, through all of human history, the only time that you could ever hear music is if somebody is literally playing an instrument in front of you, the only way. And then suddenly this machine comes along, and this new industry comes along, and it proposes a completely different way of experiencing this music, and all of the musicians of the time, high profile musicians at the time, are absolutely furious about this. John Philip Souza, who of course we know now is the composer of all our fam marchesa, that's John Phillips, John Philip Susa, is writing screeds against recorded music. He makes one of his arguments, which I love the most because it's just so insane, was he would say, recorded music will enter the home. When it enters the home, it will replace all forms of live music, because of course, why would you perform live music when instead you could just hit a button and hear it out of a machine. And now, because of that, mothers will no longer sink to their children. And because children grow up imitating their mothers, that children will grow up imitating the machines. And thus we will create a generation of machine babies. And so he and his musicians and the musicians unions of the time were very, very concerned and upset about this new industry. They felt like it was displacing them. Now what did we learn, you know, one hundred years later, I'll tell you what we learned. What we learned was that actually this gigantic shift, though it seemed to dominate, did not actually dominate. What it did was it created a million new opportunities. Find a studio engineer and they can thank the phonograph for their job. There was a job that didn't exist before that. And this, I think is how entrepreneurs think. They see a long game. They think about how new things don't just gobble everything up, They in fact shift the environment, they fracture, they create new opportunities where there weren't before. And so I'm honestly not very compelled or concerned by the antitrust conversations, which I would not propose to be an expert about at all. But I can tell you that on the ground level, as entrepreneurs are talking about building their businesses, the thing that they're not obsessed about is how a handful of giant companies are stopping them from coming up with great ideas and building something new. It's it's just not what I hear. We'll be right back. You've alluded to a distinction between what's sometimes called a hard journalism, you know, exemplified by the big newspapers, maybe at one time by the network news shows and by implication, software journalism, journalism that in some way is allied with an industry and is self consciously supportive of it. I think for those of us who are not connected to the journalism industry, and I am perfectly connected to it, so I do follow this a little bit. But for most people who aren't, we don't know much about the thought world, the power structures, or the operation of the so called software journalism. There are no movies about it, you know, all The President's Men is not about a software journalism entity. Would you say a little bit for the interested and open minded listener of what is the business structure of software journalism? Do you think of yourselves as in a different relationship to your subject, to your advertisers? How would you conceptualize that? And I wouldn't have introduced the distinction at all if you hadn't introduced it. No, it's fine. I'm totally comfortable with it because it's been a shift for me and I enjoy it. Though it should be noted I come from a harder journalism background. I started in daily newspapers and this is ultimately where I landed, and I love it, but I also want to be really wide eyed and open that I'm I'm not the guy doing deep investigations. I'm glad somebody else is doing it, but it's not me. So yeah, sure, let me tell you about it. Yeah, tell us about it, and tell us how power works in it relative to how we at least imagine it works in harder journalism, right right, Okay, let me tell you a little quick story. When I became editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, I started getting interview requests and I said yes, and then people would introduce me in this really interesting way. They would have me on their show. And you know, generally speaking, I'm talking about there's like a billion podcasts about entrepreneurship and these kinds of things, and I'd be saying yes to this stuff first, and so somebody would have me on and they would say, we're so excited to have Jason five, a thought leader an entrepreneurship here we're gonna be talking about. And I would say, WHOA hold on a second. You know, I don't consider myself a thought leader. I consider myself a journalist. I'm a storyteller and my job is to find information. And I found that they had no idea what I was talking about and it was killing the vibe. It was like falling downstairs, right, and leader in that and anyway, in the world of self promotion, there's no such thing as anyone who's not a thought leader. If you're breathing, you're a thought leader. Well that's right. And I mean, I was telling my wife about this problem. How do I what do I do here? Because I'm like, I'm destroying the reason that these people are having me on their show. And she said, if they want you to be a thought leader, just be a thought leader. And I realized that the difference between a thought leader and not a thought leaders that the thought leader is willing to call themselves a thought leader. That's literally the only distinction. And so I started to try to understand what people understood of me. And that was a really interesting experience because look, prior to that, when I was a journey when I was a pure journalist, when I was covering city council meetings for local newspapers. You know, I'd walk in and everyone would sit up because now they know they're on the record and whatever they say could end up in the paper. And my job is and people were understanding me different at entrepreneur, and I started to listen to the questions that they were asking me. What they primarily were asking me was some version of what are the qualities of a successful entrepreneur? And I came to this interesting philosophy, which is that when you listen to the questions that people ask you, what you're actually hearing is them telling you what they think your value is to them. And so I was like, well, first of all, I need an answer to this question, because they keep asking me the question. But then also this gives me insights into what they think I am. They don't think of me as a journalist. What they think of me is as like a like the super entrepreneur, the entrepreneur who talks to all the entrepreneurs, who sits in the middle and likes sees the patterns, and then his job is to bring you the patterns. And I realized that they they don't even understand me as a journalist. And that was weird at first, and then ultimately fine. And the reason for that is because I found that I liked it. I liked relating to the audience, and I liked supporting them. There's a deep skepticism that traditional journalists bring to the sources that they cover and in the industries that they cover. And what I ultimately discovered about myself is that although I can summon that skepticism, I'm a little happier without it. And so I started to really lean into calling myself an entrepreneur and relating to them and writing these motivates. I mean, if you pick up my if you pick up the magazine, the first thing that you'll read is this column that I write, which you know, every other editor in chief uses their editor's letter as like a table of contents and essay form. But what I've done is turned it into this thing where I share my own lessons and failures and the lessons to draw from it. And I get it just a tremendous response from So anyway, you ask about the power structure of this thing and how this actually works, and look, I mean, structurally, it's not all that different from any other traditional journalism. There is a hard wall between advertising and edit. You cannot buy edit in the magazine. You cannot influence edit in the magazine and edit it for the listeners. Edited short for editorial there which is itself a shorthand for the idea of articles that you write as opposed to advertisements. That's right, thanks, yes, correct. So we I assign short and long stories to professional journalists and they go out and they report those stories. But the instruction that I give them is the people who are reading this are going to be entrepreneurs, and their number one question when they sit down to read this story is what is in it for me? What can I learn that I can apply directly to my life? For this, So, if you're going to report a story about how somebody built this company or whatever's going on in this world, that the number one question to be answering all the time is how did this problem get solved? How does this thing work? How can entrepreneurs learn from this? That's the mission. And again, yes, an advertiser cannot buy a story. They cannot influence a story. We function like traditional journalism, but I probably do more than a I'm not probably, I'm sure a hundred thousand times do more than like somebody at the New York Times would do to engage with an advertiser. So let's say, for example, LinkedIn. Recently, we partnered with LinkedIn, as you know, their sponsor, and part of that was that I moderated a clubhouse and then I did a LinkedIn live talking about how to build your brand on LinkedIn. Now that doesn't feel dirty to me, and the reason for that is because I know my audience is actually really interested in how to build their brand on LinkedIn. It's a subject that they care about, So it doesn't feel like I'm sacrificing anything or that people will feel differently about me or the brand in any way. If I'm the voice and face of that conversation, I'm happy to do it. We sell ads, we create products. You can literally book my time through entrepreneur and I will give you advice on your business. It's a service that we offer. I've come to realize that the best that I can do for my job and my audience is to be a blend for them in which I take the skills and the methodology of journalism, which is to say, go out, gather information, create a coherent narrative that people can follow, and to have standards that I think that somebody outside of journalism may not know how to apply to this world. So for example, why are we covering certain things? We don't want a log roll for people, etc. But then also be mindful that what the audience ultimately wants is not journalism, but they want is help. And by delivering those two things, we can call it soft journalism, sure, but what I just think of it as value. I have an audience and I'm providing value to them. Jason, I want to come around to one of the places where your power actually enables you to potentially do good. And I know it's something that you focus on, and that is getting diverse faces and voices into your magazine so as to promote the greater diversification by sex, by race, by class, across the full space of really of capitalism, of entrepreneurial capitalism. That's obviously hard because we live in a world where you're not in charge of capitalism and you're not in charge of the allocation of capital. And for systemic and structural reasons, it's harder to get access to capital and start a business if you're a woman. It's harder to get access to capital and start a business if you're a person of color in the United States. And you're not responsible for the fact that those things came into existence, but it is part of your mission to try to help make them better by coverage Yeah, how do you think about that? How do you push forward and enable there to be different faces and different voices given the background conditions that already exist and make it much harder. Yeah, it's an important question. I used to work a fast company and the editor in chief at the time, a guy named Bob Saffian, said this thing that I really liked and that I've I've thought about a lot since, which was our job is not to show business as it is right now, necessarily, but to show where business is going, what business looks like in the future. We are to imagine a more diverse cast of players in business. What does that look like? And let's make sure that we're reflecting that. So on a practical level, what does that look like? Well, I mean it literally looks like us as a staff saying do we have enough diversity in every issue? I mean, I don't know that I should even be saying this aloud, but I don't know how else to do it. So I'll just tell you when we put together a package. So, a package, in magazine parlance is a number of pages that are all around the same theme. So let's say we have a package called one hundred Powerful Women that's a package. When we are producing a lineup for that, we are mindful of and in fact literally writing down on a spreadsheet who and what everybody is. Making sure that because the thing is that I don't want to I don't want to have come up with a list and then look at it and say, a crap, eighty percent of these people are white. We want to make sure that we're we have a good mix, and literally the only way to do that is to put it on a spreadsheet and make sure that you've got the right numbers. And that's what we do because there's no better, there's no other way to do it. And that means doing a lot of extra work, and it means being proactive and contacting communities and constantly asking them for their own insights. I met with a female investor a couple days ago. We got coffee and I told her, I was like, look, we're casting this hundred women thing. We're looking for a really diverse range of founders. I would love you to tap your network as well and tell me who you think we should be considering. That's the only way to do it. Take down the walls, let people contact you. Be proactive in contacting them too, because to me, the best way to serve our community is to try to knock as many of those barriers down as possible. Last question for you, Jason, Yeah, when you think about your industry and your job, what worries you the most? You sound like an upbeat, positive guy with good messages to learn in good goals, and I don't want to in any way undermind that you must have some worries sometimes, and I'm wondering what they are. It's a funny, weird, hard question. Actually, you're right. I am generally a very optimistic, upbeat person, and I will tell you that serving an optimistic and upbeat audience really helps do that. What keeps me up at night, I mean, I guess the thing that worries me the most is that there are always bad actors who are looking to take advantage of people. And in the world of entrepreneurship, I can tell you that there are so many people who are looking to get you to show up at their ten thousand dollars three day course, and the whole point of that course is to sell you on the fifty thousand dollars three day course. And I hate those guys. They're bad. They're bad for the people who they're trying to who they're proposed to serve. And I think that it's good to have strong leadership and strong I mean, I'll use the word brand again because to me, entrepreneurs a brand more than it is anything else. A strong brand that isn't trying to actively take advantage of people. And I think that it's possible that as the economics of these brands shift, some will survive and some will not, and some will disappear. And it's possible that that creates more oxygen for the Charlottean's of the world. But I don't think that that means that the Charlottean's of the world win. I think that if Entrepreneur disappeared tomorrow. I think that if you and I wrapped up this conversation and then I look at my email and I've got an email from the president of Entrepreneur that says, you know, crap, it's all over and the company has disappeared. I don't think that entrepreneurs suffer forever, right. I think that they lose a trusted source of information and then another one rises, and that's how it should be. Jason, thank you for your candor, your enthusiasm. I learned a huge amount about your industry and how it works, and also about what it takes to succeed in it. And I'm really really grateful to you for your time. Oh well, thanks, I appreciate you and this is a lot of fun. Thanks. We'll be right back listening to Jason. I was extraordinarily struck by his candor. In no way did Jason attempt to mislead, misrepresent, or sugarcoat the basic structure of how he understands his branch of business journalism. In Jason's account, the point of what he does is to support and embrace the mission of small businesses, to help them be inspired to do better, to give them advice about how to do their jobs, and not to focus on negative stories that might inevitably have the effect of alienating his readers. Jason sees his readers as constituents or stakeholders in an overarching project, which is, after all, part of the central project of capitalism in America, namely getting small business to do big things in the world. This perspective on a whole genre of journalism is almost entirely missing from our general discussion in the culture of what media is for and what it does. We tend to think of newspapers and magazines in the classic mold of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal being objective, aiming to tell the truth and uncovering instances of wrongdoing by the subjects that they cover. Yet, in today's complex economic reality for media journalism, it may be that the business model of traditional objective journalism is limited to only a handful of significant players. However, the market for journalism of the kind that Jason described seems in fact to be doing pretty well and even growing, reflecting the underlying economic interest that many people seem to have in reading stories that do give them feelings of uplift and that do guide them towards their business objectives. In that context, so relently positive is Jason's vision that even topics like the potential monopolistic effects of big tech topics that are in constant discussion on Capitol Hill, for example, are not particularly in Jason's expert view of interest to his readers. Why because they represent limitations, and his job, as he sees it, is to tell stories that emphasize possibilities by bringing us inside the actual world of how journalism works at his magazine, Jason gave me and I hope you too, a remarkable gift, the gift of the unvarnished truth about how power actually is deployed in certain journalistic spaces today, very much outside of the headlines. Until the next time I speak to you here on Deep Background, Breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and try to have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noah Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Ben Taliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mccibbon. Editorial support from NOAHM Osband theme music by Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background