‘Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job’
In a SPIEGEL interview, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of US technology and culture magazine Wired discusses the Internet's challenge to the traditional press, new business models on the Web and why he would rather read Twitter than a daily newspaper.
Context & Ripple Effects
The interview lands at the height of Twitter's news-cycle dominance: in July 2009 alone the service drew an estimated $48 million worth of earned media coverage across TV, talk shows, magazines and newspapers, rolled out a redesigned front page aimed at helping new users find relevance, and saw more than 300 confidential internal documents leak to TechCrunch, laying bare its stated ambition to be 'The Pulse Of The Planet'. Against that backdrop, Chris Anderson telling SPIEGEL he would rather read Twitter than a daily newspaper reads less as a provocateur's quip than as the mainstream view catching up with behavior.
Anderson's core claim — confirmed in the interview — is that the Internet is challenging traditional press so fundamentally that media may become a hobby rather than a job. Coming from the editor in chief of Wired, a magazine built on covering exactly this disruption, the statement functions as an insider conceding that his own industry's economics may not survive the shift to free web distribution.
First-order effects
- Daily newspaper publishers lose their most defensible position: when a prominent working editor says he prefers Twitter to the paper, the internal argument for funding newsrooms out of print-circulation revenue gets visibly harder to make.
- Twitter exits July 2009 with mainstream-media validation stacked on top of an estimated $48 million month of earned coverage, strengthening its bid to be treated as a primary news surface rather than a novelty.
Second-order effects
- Publishers experimenting with web business models — ad-supported free versus paid — now have to argue against a high-profile editor personally embodying the free thesis, raising the stakes of whichever direction newspapers choose next.
- Media companies and developers building distribution on Twitter have fresh evidence of platform fragility: earlier in July the company tightened limits on its verify_credentials() API in production without notifying developers, showing partners how quickly the rules of a dependent channel can move.
Third-order effects
- If the hobby framing proves durable, journalism reorganizes around individual bylines and platform-owned audiences rather than institutional mastheads, shifting bargaining power from publishers to whichever real-time stream captures attention.
- Free distribution without matching web revenue forces the industry toward one of two structural outcomes — genuinely new business models or persistently thinner newsrooms — and 2009's discourse, including this interview, is pushing publishers to choose publicly rather than defer.
The trend: News consumption is migrating from institution-produced daily papers to real-time social streams like Twitter faster than media business models can adapt, hollowing out the professional economics of the press.