This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the pressures of creating content for the internet, follow Mia Sato. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
How it started
Almost exactly a decade ago, the media industry was in the middle of a video revolution — or so it thought. In the mid-2010s, publications poured money into burgeoning social media video efforts, chasing the promise of reaching larger audiences and opening new lines of revenue. Print publications and digital news outlets alike hired teams, pumped out content, and entrusted platforms like Facebook with their reach and distribution.
That pivot-to-video slowly revealed itself to be a lot of smoke and mirrors when it became clear that Facebook had inflated video views. Newsrooms cut writers and editors in a move to video — and then cut those video teams when they realized the pivot had not paid off. For many in the media industry,
