🔗 The second age of digital journalism is over:

This is what the future looks like. This is where the third age of digital publishing is birthing, on podcasts and newsletters and sites run on existing, cheap and powerful infrastructure, like Ghost and Substack. These titles will grow, through building close relationships with their audiences, and keeping costs low. They’ll make money through ads and memberships, and eventually events as the businesses scale.

Some will manage to survive, while others will fail. The survivors will continue to grow and thrive, and eventually become the big publications of the future. It might take years. It might take decades. Remember, The Guardian started life as a weekly local paper for Manchester, and continues as such for decades… The age of the “other people’s money” shortcut is, for now, done.

It the third age of journalism is about publications becoming self-sustaining through advertising and subscription revenue, that sounds a lot like the traditional model of journalism to me.