YouSaid · the spoken record

Alana Newhouse

lines on the record: 47
first: 2025-10-05
most recent: 2025-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And that it's a Messy moment. I will say The receipt that JK Rawling put She is Whoever ex I mean, it will go down in history as one of the greatest receipts. Ten years from now, we could be talking about what is one of the greatest takedowns of someone who backstabbed you. Paragraph was just beautifully crafted. And I aspire one day to be able to write something so beaut”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe just stop talking if we don't If we're not totally sure about something, but that is, of course, not the times that we live in.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or it used to be much more difficult to like, you know, go back to the archives of various news stations and be like, hey, this is what people were saying, right? But like now any person can do it and be like, this person said this crazy thing and they haven't apologized. And I think you're right. Like we now have the system to track. But there is this hesitancy. And I think the Emma Watson thing is a good thing. Like the heroes will be villains. The villains will be heroes. And I think it's like good that she is called out as like, hey, you weren't an early believer. You didn't stand by your friend or you didn't just like, I mean, I think the thing that JK Rawling said that was beautiful was like she could have just shut up, right? Like just not said anything, which I think is very good advice for. Of us”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I think is so great about markets and investing is that there's a track record, if you're right, and it's marked how early were. And as someone who takes that very seriously, I really like to remember if you're early and right, and I really like to remember what I got wrong, right? Like that's intellectual honesty. And one of the things that I think X is truly given us is that is the same metric system for media now, because at least now there's receipts. There didn't used to be serious receipts.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acknowledge what you got wrong. And what I think she saw Watson doing, or at least it's certainly my read of her, was pretty cowardly. It was wriggling. It was like, well, I want to see everything. Well, I want to, you know, everyone should love everyone and we should all be able to see both sides of everything. And you're just like, what? So you're sorry. And to me, there's just this, I feel this way a lot with COVID.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also think that there's something else at work. I think that's right, but then there's another thing which is say you're sorry. Like, you don't get to be a leader who people listen to and get something wrong and then not take responsibility for it. Or you do, but then you don't get people's, you don't get to earn everyone's trust. I think what Rowling was saying was. Take responsibility for what you did, whatever you did in 2020, fine. But if you want to be taken seriously now as somebody who people should follow and listen to and take direction from, the first thing you need to do is”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's funny how quickly it dissipates, right? But what's important is that the meme dissipates, sometimes, sometimes it gets brought back. But a lot of times the meme and the effect dissipates, but it changes us. And it changed maybe in unspoken ways, but some of us get more skeptical and some of us just keep buying the manipulation. And it's interesting to see who's who, basically.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could see who falls for them and who doesn't in all sorts of directions. So I think it's very skilled politics, their approach to aesthetics both when they use them and when they don't like the effect of them or appreciate the consequences or not. But what I think Catherine is saying that I think is really important and actually really interesting and very few people are really thinking about it clearly is that these are people who think deeply about what images are and are not getting put out. And I think it behooves those of us who claim to analyze them and to observe them for readers or for audiences to get smarter about it and be able to serve our audiences in a more sophisticated way. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of that means reading them. Memes. It does.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Pete Hegseth's announcement last week, right? Israel Strike on Iran not announced before, right? And Pete Heggseth's announced to great fanfare lots of preparation, lots of people. In both instances, what was so great were the number of people who seemed absolutely sure that they knew what was happening. And one of the things that I think this administration, some people in the administration, I think definitely are conscious of this and know it, but some of them I think are just simply just do it naturally is I think that they're throwing into sharp relief the mediators, meaning the media, the people who tell us how to understand what we're seeing. And they are making fools of a lot of them. Because they're wrong a lot. And they're wrong in both ways. And the aesthetics is super important because”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their entire lives, and they understand sort of the importance of image and memes and that the kind of way things look is very inherent to how they are. And so I think a lot of the people who are predicting that it was going to be a really big momentous event was interestingly more about sort of aesthetics and making sure that the people who work at the department are in line with the aesthetics. I would also say that I think that you're picking up on this idea of the pseudo-event I think is really important because one of the things that we've seen with this administration is a lot of times the most important things that happen nobody actually knows are going to happen. And what I find useful about that is that in both instances let's Use two things as examples. One, Israel's strike on Iran.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This administration that deeply understands that aesthetics matter, and it kind of harkens back, I think it's in some ways, some way fitting, but like the kind of politics of aesthetics started with JFK. It started with the advent of television. And now we have an administration that, of course, was born from, you know, like the president spent how many years on TV. He understands that medium. And so we have to view every event. We have to view every political event through the medium of the people who are putting it out. And it's like we are, it's aesthetics, it's television. It's, you know, it's the Fox News look, right? Like everyone has the same look. There is something about understanding the world through that ascetic prism. And what's interesting, and this is sort of the last point on it, is I think young people get that. Like I really think young people understand it because they've been in a sort of memetic universe for.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of aesthetics and of drama and of what was called the pseudo event in the 1960s when television first started, right? There's a great book called The Image and it's all about these how do you create pseudo events that then lead the news. And I'm always of the opinion like these things are much more pseudo events, especially if they're planned and if they're organized. And I think that the politics of aesthetics that are on display when you say, okay, like it matters what our generals look like, or it matters that a lot of our administration has had a television career, right? Like I think one of the things that's most interesting about the Secretary of War is that he had, you know, a decade on TV.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the sort of news of the week that was all over our X feeds was the fat shaming of the military speech. And it's interesting. The reason why I think it's so fascinating is, of course, I work in the world of aerospace and defense, and a lot of people were sort of putting out their theories of what was going to happen, right? Like, why are all of these people getting together? Why is all the top rascal military getting together in one place? And I think there were people who have been necessarily following the optics of this administration, who thought, oh, you must be going to war. That was sort of the, and I always say a lot of mainstream media actually put out that narrative, like if we're having this kind of big powwow, there must be something extremely important happening. And sort of my internal view, which was vindicated, is an administration that understands the importance.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that is a perfect encapsulation of what's happening in New York City now. And as a resident of Florida, I fear for the number of people who are going to make the decision to move. Given the politics, given their reaction to the politics and to the waking up moment you just described”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The language that is used and kind of codified to sort of demonize some of these products. Where it's like, I see how I'm using AI. It's very useful in certain aspects and a not slop because I'm prompting it not to be slopp. So I think that there is something there too that's often missed in the conversation of it. It doesn't all have to be slop. Maybe that would be how I would write it. It doesn't all have to be slop.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the right way to architect a society? Yeah, no, Yeah, I guess, yeah, and I'd love to hear Eric's thoughts on this too. I guess it's. There were guardrails in the 90s. Like, this is the thing that I think doesn't exist with the internet. If I'm going to make the other case, you know, if I'm going to make the side for the other case, like this is very true. When I was 13 years old, I had to go to And check out the slop. There was friction. There were also guardrails, right? Like I wasn't allowed to check out a porno. I had to check out, you know, a PG-13 movie that was made directly for 13-year-olds consumption. The thing that is missing in a lot of not only the kind of existing slop, but the AI slop is that like”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I have a little bit more of an attitude of the kids are going to be all right. And we've made this movement from television. Slop engines. But it's still going to be okay because the kids are going to know how to metabolize it. Maybe I'm being way too hopeful, but I do think that there was the same sort of fear of television, definitely in the 90s when, you know, I was told that I was going to amount to nothing for how much television I watched. We don't”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff like I would, you know, get home from school, watch Boy Meets World, then watch some game shows, you know, during the summer, I'd watch some, you know, like CBS dramas, you know, built for housewives, right? Like soap operas, like you took in a bunch of nonsense, but I always look back at my sort of worldview now and I'm like, well, this is why my worldview is very different than a lot of the people I interact with because most people who are watching seven hours of television a day are not operating the tech world, right? So there's something about, okay, there's like a utility to having kind of bathed in slop that gives me a kind of a normie attitude that maybe I wouldn't have if I had parents who weren't policing me and if I had parents who were a little bit more engaged in what I was consuming. So I think there's something.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids are going to be okay slop argument is I was watching a podcast the other day and there was someone on I believe it was Sean Ryan's podcast and there was someone on and he was saying you know like kids use their phone seven or actually adults too but it's seven hours of raw consumption a day and I remember the exact same stat being used in the 90s because I was part of the seven hour a day television consumption world right like I watch seven hours of TV a day and it was mostly slop right like I like sure you could make the argument that law and order created a generation of like really you know hard charging prosecutors or whatever right like like but we were all watching this same”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get there. Everything comes back to the absence of God. But yeah, no, I think with what you say. I mean, I think in some ways the... If the LLMs have taught us anything, it gives us a better understanding of the human mind and that what you train yourself on, right? Like the kind of information that you take in, it completely transforms your worldview. And so the garbage in, garbage out model, like we 100% know that, right? Like that technologists know that better than anyone. If you train on bad data, you get a bad product. So in some ways, I think there's a lot of truth in that where I'm more sympathetic to”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We went pretty far out. I think we probably have a little farther to go, but we've gone far in five years. But I do think that we're in for a kind of normie revolution. I think we're in for A pivot where people start to want People start to want to institutions. They're going to want mass media again. They're going to want things that feel like when they say a lot of people, like when you have an opinion, you can feel like a lot of people have that opinion too. Yeah. And I think the increasing excitement or verb or prurience of marginal spaces is starting to wear thin.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not really right. If you actually read the piece, what I say is that we need to look at these institutions and assess them for health. Some of them we should abandon. I actually don't really think that anyone should spend that much time or energy burning anything down to just be useless. But you should abandon the things that are not actually going to survive or serve you or serve other people. Which ones should be reformed and which ones should be conserved where we actually work to preserve them? And so it was a broad plea to look at institutions and assess them for health and not just assume that because they had been there for your whole lives that they were actually serving you properly. But the thing that I think we're looking at now, I think Catherine's completely right, we just had five years where everybody grocked this and everyone was like, okay, we have to look at these institutions with a real skeptical eye. We have to abandon them.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversation that I saw happening was actually between people who deeply believed in the sense-making institutions of American life, media, universities, and also including other institutions, our healthcare system, the government, and those who believe that those systems had become irrevocably damaged or decayed. And the conversation between those two groups was the one that I found to be the most generative and also the one that I found, the one that had the most heat coming off of it. And the conversations I left smarter. But because of those two pieces, people assumed, and with good reason, but they just assumed that I was burn everything to the ground.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, it's actually, it was actually, I wrote it in March of 2020, but I published it in 2021. And yeah, you did have sort of a, okay, like, yeah, we got to decide what we are. Maybe talk a little bit about the kind of paradigm you. Put forward there. And I'll tell you how I think the paradigm was misunderstood. But the basic idea was behind everything is broken and then a follow-up was that the fundamental conversation in American life was not between the right and the left or Democrats and Republicans or even between conservatives and liberals. The dominant”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't need institutions. We're just going to voice or exit. I'm part of the exit train. I Florida, right? So, like, I was clearly a little bit more. More on the we can't save some of these parts of the dying establishment. But at the same time, it's like the recognition when people had sort of that panic moment during COVID, actually we do need these institutions, we do need to save things. That had been built over generations and centuries. And it's possible. Yeah, I was, I became known as sort of the Burn It All Down girl because of everything. Yeah, yeah. The brokenest piece, which was one of like the sort of essential readings of, I believe it was, what, 2021?”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. And one of the things that she found was that the amount of talent that wanted to come and build an institution with her was almost bottomless. Like there was just so much good talent out there that, and I actually think that if she had waited a few more years, there wouldn't have been because everybody would have. Left for other industries. And at some point, the glow off of an industry or off of a possible career goes away, right? And so I think she probably caught the last moment where there was real talent to scoop up. And they all found it. And they're going to continue to find it no matter what. It's just an incredible. Testament to institution building. Yeah. And that people really do want institutions. I do think there was this moment. Where, you know, a lot of us were black pillowing. I'll say several years ago.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Readers are as well. And we are in this moment where I do think it is a generational shift, right? Like we have one of the youngest vice presidents, I think it's the youngest vice president we've ever had. We have, you know, or maybe not ever, but in recent memory, we're having these sort of political sort of, you know, kind of shifting of the generations where like the next presidential election could be a millennial Gen X setup or a millennial millennial, right? Like you have the passing of the torch from the boomer era everything to this like very flux. So people can put their hands up and actually try to build things, but you have to try to build something. It has to be an institution. It can't just be a one-woman show. It has to be an institution. And so I think we're seeing that across a lot of different parts of the media and cultural stack. That's very exciting. But it also, I think, is going to lead to a lot of people thinking a lot bigger.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That means I'm creating Smarter brains and smarter, I'm making more smart, already very powerful brains. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. And I think as you mentioned, there's a lot of change happening in media, a lot of mergers, a lot of things that are happening and likely will happen over the next five years. And what I think a lot of that business activity is going to do is to showcase that, hey, it's really fun to be a pirate on the internet. Like it's really fun to be a personality and to have like a one woman podcast. That's really fun. That is not the business, like that's not the media business. And you can exist as an individual and just kind of run your mouth. But like actually these institutions are desperate for new properties for the antithesis of slop. They're desperate for prestige. They're desperate for new takes that are well researched. That's because they're”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ties. And that's why I'm so bullish on people can say, oh, well, these are small publications, or maybe they only have X number of subscribers. They're not going to compete with the New York Times, but those ties are so much deeper. Like they have so much more meaning for the customer. And when you think about like in any other world, not media, but think about like in consumer brand or in anything related to tech, it's you want those customers who are just going to fight for you where they're part of your army. And that is what new media looks like. Like people will fight for the personalities and for the newsrooms that they love. I also.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And this is why I think the substack model, too, where substack took a hard line, we are not an ads business. We are a you and your subscriber business and you have a direct relationship with your subscribers. It's sort of allowed for fandom, I would argue, to come back into the relationship. And like, I mean, the free press is a good example. Tablet is a good example of this where your readers are actual fans. Like they consider themselves part of the brand, right? They consider themselves part of a community. And it is a very different thing than the relationship we had growing up reading media where it's like you considered yourself maybe you donated to NPR or you subscribed to the New York Times, but it wasn't a deep fandom. It was more of like a corporate relationship. Like this is where I get my news. The fandom aspect of what's happening since 2020, since we've returned the sort of paramount subscriber relationship to the business model, it just creates much stronger.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Times in the Washington Post, where the young people took over because the old people all left. And the young people had very different views of what it meant to be a journalist. What Alana said about ads is really important. But when you think about what this new model, a lot of it is subscription, right? Like it's like a lot of these new, you know, personalities, whether it's the personality media or it's the kind of new institutions like the free press, like these are fundamentally built on subscription. The idea that people will pay for news. And that was something 10 years ago no one believed.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“12 slop stories a day and planed SEO. And so you had this sort of radical, it wasn't just a political sort of argument that was happening in newsroom. It was a radical, I would say, argument between the internet native young, you know, we were all in our 20s. Very, very, you know, very capable of writing 10 stories a day versus like these old hands who are just fabulous writers, but not used to the same sort of pace as well. And I do think that that led to a lot of it. You know, it's like, I mean, all those people took buyouts. A lot of the people who understood quality journalism left the industry because they were pushed also by this force of you have to feed the beast. And the beast is not 24 hour news cycles anymore. It's our news cycles. It's every day updating a website. And that was certainly something I think that kind of brought on the cultural revolution that you saw at the New York.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 80s and the 90s, and they remember going out for martini lunches. They remember writing a story a month. They remember having kind of, I would say carte blanche to do any story they wanted where they could fly anywhere in the world and tell a very interesting story. And they saw that as the glory days. And when you're coming off that high, and then there's these young people who graduate from top universities and see this as a prestigious career, right? Because the people who joined in the 80s and 90s did not see magazine writing or style writing or feature writing or reporting. Like it was not a prestigious career in the same way that it was for these Harvard grads at the kind of turn of the century. They realized, okay, now we have to compete with young people who are used to the kind of daily grind of the internet. And they're kind of, they're fine. And the word slop didn't exist yet. But they're fine putting out.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't actually sustain people's jobs. You can't promise them jobs. So, what you can do is while they're here, you can make them feel like they're changing the world. You can make them feel like they're waking up every day and they are fighting for justice. And so that's how to me the politics end up replacing or becoming a band-aid over what was essentially a business problem. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. I mean, I do think that the scarcity in the media culture, one, it leads to, you know, people taking each other down over various political causes, whether it's internal politics or whether it's sort of these grandiose kind of visions of what people stand for. But I think there was also this quality problem that you and I have talked a lot about, which is I joined the Washington Post in 2010 and people were talking about how the glory days were over. And there were reporters who had been there, you know, since.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, how many of those 20 million can afford a Chanel bag? Okay, let's say it's 4 million. How many of those four million ever buy a Chanel bag on the internet? And she starts asking me to stratify the audience. And she said, okay, so then we get down to it. It's a million and a half. Possible customers? Why don't I pay for that? And right away, I knew that there was just no ad market that was actually going to really be real and sustainable. As the business model starts to come apart, It is my contention that consciously or not, many of these legacy outlets decided to make themselves feel better with politics. So you take up righteous causes because you're not making any money.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What eventually happens certainly for local newspapers is that they obviously it begins with when the internet begins to eat away at advertising, you start to get a real effect on their bottom line. Classified ads start to go the way of Craigslist. But then all of a sudden, I'll never forget when I was starting tablet. This is 17 years ago. Before we launched Tablet, I was at a dinner party with a woman who had just been made the head of digital ad sales at a luxury very, very well-known luxury clothing brand. And she said to me, You're starting an internet publication. So explain something to me. Let's say she represented Chanel because it wasn't Chanel, so I'll use that as an example. She said, So the New York Times wants to tell me they have 20 million sets of eyeballs on their stories.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The real problem begins, I think, in the post 60s ad boom. And it happens slowly. It happens in the 70s, picks up in the 80s and 90s, particularly as Wall Street booms, where magazines, and again, none of this was conscious, but magazines at some point made a decision that the primary audience they cared about were the advertisers And the audience was the means to get to the advertisers, as opposed to the other way around, right? Advertisers were secondary and they were just things that you sold to your audience. When you make that decision to make your audience secondary, there's a whole host of Consequences that cascade from that. And again, you can have decades of boom, decades of massive success, decades of enormously successful journalism. But I think there was a problem in that decision fundamentally.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly, I think one of the only, it's an American art form. Novels are not in America. We have plenty of European novels. Like there are other art forms that we take from other places, but magazines, I think, are truly an American native art form. And I'm invested in them. I think they're different. And I think that they're different organisms and they mean something different. And I can talk a little bit about what I mean by that. The thing that was really interesting about magazines is that I'm going to bastardize the history just to get it there quickly. But”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think there's any success to be had for any legacy media outlet in simply trying to live back in that old landscape. I think it's just death. Maybe go back. I mean, I love what you said because it is true any of us who were working in media, I mean, it was layoff after layoff after buyout starting around 2007, at least from my perspective. Maybe it was even earlier for you. Maybe give us the history of kind of what went wrong in legacy media. Was it a business model problem? Was it a cultural problem? Was it a combination of things? Maybe give us sort of Alana's view of the last 25 years of American media. Well, so my view is a little bit colored by my particular investment in magazines.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to understand that tablet's 17 years old, right? Our view on media didn't start in 2020. It was already a deeply problematic space. And I'm not sure which, I think that any legacy brand that survives and that still exists in 10 years or five years is going to be because they made a decision to leapfrog into the ethos of the independent space. And again, I don't mean politics. It's not a political orientation. This is an ethos idea.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And their trust in their legacy media got bottomed out suddenly. But it didn't happen that way. Certainly for those of us who are in the media, I mean, I think Tablet has this really weird trajectory because Tablet starts out as a niche or marginal or cult outlet in the legacy media space. And effectively because of a bunch of moves that we made half consciously, honestly, I wish I could say I was strategic about it, we ended up becoming the kind of granddaddy of the independent space because I knew I was going to feel much more comfortable there.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A former postee, I feel very strongly that they're finally combating it after 11 years of doing nothing when Jeff Peso spot the paper.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of new media. And I think a lot of described it beautifully where. There's variations in what that media looks like. Swiss cheese is, I think, a good metaphor for there's like probably a lot of missing parts, but there's this sort of. Know startup like moment that's happening in media where it's like generational and there's passing of the torch in terms of people want new fresh things, but there's also sort of this. How do we now navigate this new landscape where someone who puts out a meme on X can completely control the 24-hour news cycle in a way that that did not happen five years ago? So it gives independent voices a much louder voice. And I think there is a lot of Sincere sort of questioning at legacy institutions of how do we combat this”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was sort of the seed stage, but like we're really hitting sort of these inflection points five years later, which are really exciting. And when you look at sort of the impact that a couple of really, I would say, sort of cornerstone moments happened, whether it's the firings and resignations at the New York Times. Like Barry was the one who resigned with the loudest voice, but there's also the firing of James Bennett, or actually wasn't a firing. He resigned before he was fired because he platformed a sitting senator talking about the riots that were happening, or George Floyd, and whether it's appropriate to send in the troops. The title was sent in the troops. So like people forget that there were mass cancellations across media, a lot of sort of reshuffling. We are now is what I would consider to be a true golden age.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where there was this kind of burgeoning of voices and people talking about this is terrible. We need to be able to create new things. But like it really started, I would say cascading and growing in the way that, you know, if you look at it from startup terms,”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of things in summer 2020, but Barry's letter being one of them just a sea change for what was happening in media. I actually think you kind of memory hold, like we kind of collapsed this five-year timeline. But even as I go back through sort of my own experience in media and 2021 was sort of this time where if you go back to old podcasts, there's still the COVID vaccine advisory on anyone who's even talking about COVID in a way that wasn't aligned with the AMA and with the CDC, right? We kind of forget that there were whole years, like lost years. In that sort of July 2020. November 2022.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I very much agree with that. I think it's very generational as well. Like, there's a lot of things we could talk about, and I think we should go deep into sort of the lore of the last five years. Because if you are bookmarking, if we're looking back 50 years from now, I think the state of American media is going to look drastically different than any of us can predict. And we would bookmark it as summer 2020.”
2025-10-05 · a16z Podcast · Monitoring the Situation #2: Alana Newhouse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source