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.