News in the Age of Abundance

Author: David Perell URL: https://perell.com/essay/news-in-the-age-of-abundance/ One-line: As the old newspaper business model collapses and ad-saturated attention becomes the scarce resource, the best news gets better and the average gets worse — and the disciplined move is to ditch the news for independent writers and great books.

Key claims

• The collapse of the newspaper business has corrupted journalism’s incentives. Corruption rises when a local paper dies; subscription/ad salesmen used to insulate journalists so they could “stick to the facts” — that buffer is gone, and “a man cannot understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it” (Upton Sinclair) (Journalism).
• Attention is the scarce resource in an age of abundance. Americans saw ~500 ads/day in the 1970s; today it’s ~5,000 — one every 17 seconds of waking life. The constraint on learning online “is not access to information, but the discipline to ignore distractions.”
• Independent writers now out-explain legacy newspapers on technical subjects. After the second Boeing 737 Max crash, no-name pilots and obscure-blog writers out-reported the world’s best papers — the expertise gap is widest for technical/scientific fields (Crowdsourced News).
• Language quietly manipulates. “Russell Conjugations” — swapping a synonym (“estate tax” vs “death tax,” “undocumented worker” vs “illegal alien”) — change how readers feel without changing the facts. Repetition breeds belief; people overrate their independent thought.
• The medium shapes the message. Per Marshall McLuhan, when media shifts from text to images, societies “worship glamour over truth, emotion over rationality, and youth over wisdom.”
• Subscription media fragments society. People mostly pay for information they already agree with, so paywalled news reinforces priors and pushes readerships toward the extremes — “the organization will end up in a content box the readership won’t let them out of” (Andrew Potter). An interesting counterpoint to Substack.
• News breeds a negativity bias. Creation is slow and destruction is fast, so rare negative events dominate headlines while steady gains (falling poverty, better health) go unreported (Negativity Bias, Paradox of Abundance).
• The fix: read independent researchers and great books, and follow the right people. “Reading good books is like having a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries” (Descartes). “The people you follow online is a leading indicator for your success, your health, and your happiness.”

Notable quotes

“In the 1970s, the average American saw roughly 500 ads per day. Today, that number has spiked to 5,000 advertisements per day — roughly one advertisement every 17 seconds for all of waking life.”

“A man cannot understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

“Words don’t just explain the world. They change how we feel about it.”

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….” — Noam Chomsky

“Both mediums display the Paradox of Abundance: the average newspaper article and television show is getting worse and worse, while the best gets better and better.”

“In a matter of months, an obvious truth can be downgraded from common knowledge to rude, to unspeakable, to unthinkable. And soon, citizens begin to censor themselves and disable their capacity for free thought.”

“No human will ever be able to understand the world… Past a certain point, additional information deludes us because it makes us think we understand the world more than we actually do.”

“On the Internet, your rate of learning is limited not by access to information, but by the discipline to ignore distractions. The people you follow online is a leading indicator for your success, your health, and your happiness. Follow the right people, drink their recommendations deeply, and ditch the sugary cereal.”

How it connects

• David Perell — author; this is his fullest statement on news, attention, and the case for independent writing.
• Content Consumption — the discipline-over-access thesis and the warning against obsessive news consumption.
• Paradox of Abundance — the named idea at the essay’s core: the average degrades while the best improves.
• Journalism — diagnoses the broken business model and incentive corruption of legacy news.
• Substack — Perell’s pro-independent-writer stance, with the subscription-fragments-society critique as a direct counterpoint.
• Marshall McLuhan — the “medium is the message” lens on how images displace text-culture rationality.
• Live the Library — the Descartes “conversation with the finest minds” line; books over news.
• Negativity Bias — why news skews dark and distorts our worldview.

Verbatim source notes — restored from Roam, 2026-09-21

• In an age where ordinary people have the power to publish their ideas online, independent writers who write in their spare time on weekends can out-shine multinational newspapers with offices scattered around the globe. If these international outlets have an advantage, it comes from large armies of fact-checkers, which even small-town newspapers can’t pay for. But for subjects that require local knowledge, independent writers will increasingly outcompete the biggest newspapers.
• As Bill Moyers once said: “We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”
• A large percentage of the time we currently spend consuming news would be better spent reading the work of independent researchers or following writers on Substack.
• Obsessive news consumption leads to a negativity bias that distorts our worldviews because creation happens slowly, but destruction happens fast and seizes our attention. Therefore, the kind of rare events that jump to the front pages of the newspaper tend to be negative, while stories about steadily declining poverty rates or improvements in global health rarely make national headlines.
• Marshall McLuhan, known as the father of media theory, argued that book-oriented cultures tend to have a uniformity of thought. When media moves from text to images, societies start to worship glamour over truth, emotion over rationality, and youth over wisdom.
• Reflecting on his time at This Magazine and the problems caused by subscription journalism, Andrew Potter wrote: “When a news organization relies almost entirely on its readership for its revenue, it will inevitably start to cater to what the owners perceive to be the political centre of gravity of that readership. And the readership will in turn make demands on the editors to shape the coverage in certain ways, which will tend to gradually shift that centre of gravity away from the middle, and towards the political extremes. The organization will end up in a content box the readership won’t let them out of.”
• Shoddy journalists can change the meaning of a sentence by replacing a single word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax — even though they are the same thing. Likewise, many voters are against illegal aliens, but support undocumented workers. Like hypnosis, Russell Conjugations are deceptive because they are subtle and implicit.
• Spurred by the health of the newspaper business, journalists were historically free to focus on their craft. Subscription and advertising salesmen built the business on their behalf. Since journalists didn’t have to worry about financial constraints, many big-name publications like The New Yorker generally had the means to follow their core values, such as sticking to the facts, avoiding sensationalism, and assuming people were innocent until proven guilty.
• In my experience, people who say everybody should pay for news spend most of their time with people who also pay for news, so they overestimate people’s appetite for paywalled information.
• As Rene Descartes once said: “Reading good books is like having a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” Live the Library
• Subscription publications will reinforce their readers’ perspectives because most people only pay for information they agree with. Thus, an increase in subscription-supported media won’t just fragment information sources. It will fragment society.
• No human will ever be able to understand the world. It’s too complex, and we can’t see culture because we’re overwhelmed by its invisible influences. At best, we can build local expertise and useful — but ultimately inaccurate — models of the world. Past a certain point, additional information deludes us because it makes us think we understand the world more than we actually do.
• Everybody suppresses a hidden box of resentment for the people they love most. A relationship, for example, is a covenant between two people to let the other person annoy and upset you more than anybody else.
• As any advertising executive will tell you, people overestimate their capacity for independent thought. The more a message is repeated, the more inclined people are to believe it.
• Upton Sinclair once said: “A man cannot understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.” The modern equivalent for journalism is “never trust a journalist’s reporting on a company if that company threatens their job prospects.”
• In the days after the second Boeing 737 Max crash, no-name pilots and independent writers with obscure blogs out-explained many of the world’s best newspapers. The variance in quality between journalists outside a field and experts within it is largest for technical or scientific fields. Crowdsoured News
• As MIT professor Noam Chomsky once said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….”
• Corruption tends to increase when a local newspaper goes out of business.