The High Cost of Cheap News
Both the news and social media suffer from structural shortcomings for the sophisticated reader seeking information and insight. Bismarck Brief is a new, superior model to save both time and money.
The news and social media cost you, at minimum, thousands of dollars each year—even if you don’t pay for them. In the modern era, it is not feasible to stay completely out of the loop on the many economic, technological, intellectual, and geopolitical developments occurring outside of one’s profession or interests. From personal financial planning to long-term career choices to even the simple question of where to live, the lasting influence of far-off events, trends, and decisions is brought to bear on every person through the power of modern technology, globalization, and our outward-looking social and political systems. At a low monetary price, news and social media offer to keep you informed on these developments, so you can make better, timelier decisions, and benefit accordingly.
In practice, however, they are both more likely to cost you hundreds if not thousands of valuable hours of attention per year while resulting in minimal and indeterminate improvements to your awareness and decision-making. Frequently, they will sorely mislead you about key events or even just fail to identify the most important global developments, omitting them from your attention entirely. One need not earn a very large amount of money, or be misled very often, for the costs of cheap news to vastly outweigh the purported benefits.
The case against news outlets is familiar to most discerning readers today. Most news organizations draw their personnel from the same pool of young English-speaking academic journalism graduates, which means most news organizations share the same focuses, biases, and worldview, duplicating each other’s efforts without adding new information or analysis. Many publications explicitly or implicitly cater to political or ideological positions, “telling you what you want to hear,” rather than what you need to hear. It is easier to both write and market stories with a short-term orientation and exaggerated points, rather than carefully balanced, long-form analyses, especially in a wider literary culture where standards for critical thinking and background knowledge of the world continue to decline.
As a result, many have abandoned legacy newspapers and television news, and have turned instead to social media sites, where they can access the thoughts, opinions, and observations of hundreds of millions of people without intermediaries. But though it has some key advantages over traditional media, obtaining information from social media comes with its own problems. Opaque algorithms optimize harshly for maximizing engagement and ad revenue, which means taking more of your time. A lack of a strong, independent news-gathering and analysis culture means much discussion on social media, even if oppositional or contrarian, is still just downstream of the traditional media’s tempo and topic selection anyway. The sheer quantity of content is itself a barrier to piecing together useful information, separating signal from the noise.
It is no surprise then that even moderate users of such platforms can frequently spend hours per day “doomscrolling,” far longer even than any person spent reading a physical newspaper in the past. The true cost of such usage is then far higher than a small monthly fee. For a person earning a $200,000 salary for 2000 hours of annual work, each hour of that person’s time is valued at $100. Many people therefore easily rack up thousands of dollars in opportunity cost per month just by scrolling. Such time often feels well-spent, or at least neutral and unavoidable, like a form of empty entertainment. But, objectively, it comes at a very high price.
The cost of both news and social media is also increasingly direct. Until the last few years, both news outlets and social media platforms were generally totally free. Now, it has become the norm to charge a subscription fee for full and unrestricted access. Based on the prices charged by incumbent information institutions, we can gather that the absolute floor to the price of being informed is roughly $120 per year. That is about what The New York Times and The Washington Post charge, followed by the platform formerly known as Twitter at $168 per year, and The Wall Street Journal at up to $240 per year. The average consumer pays nearly $1000 per year in streaming subscriptions.1 In the quest for diverse news sources with a wide range of perspectives, one could easily pay well over $1000 per year to be informed, before the opportunity costs of spending hundreds or thousands of hours per year reading such sources is even factored in.
Price, in both time and money, is only one half of the equation. Acquiring information about the world should lead to measurably better decisions and outcomes—financial and otherwise. A source of information that leads to far better decisions can rightly justify a far higher price. But is one making better decisions thanks to their attention to the news or social media?
Once again, the sheer quantity of content being produced and consumed, whether via The New York Times or the social media timeline, makes it difficult to disambiguate which, if any, piece of information led to a particular positive decision or outcome in one’s own context. Both types of news sources create a feeling of indeterminate informedness. Rather than proof of a high density of generally useful information, perhaps this is a way to mask what is really a low density of useful information.
Elm Wealth’s Crystal Ball Trading Game challenges players to see how well they would do trading stocks and bonds knowing the front page of The Wall Street Journal one day in advance.2 The surprising thing about the game is that, despite “seeing the future,” even seasoned financial veterans have a difficult time generating time-traveling returns. Perhaps the deeper lesson is that the daily front page news is not actually a source of valuable and useful information at all. And would one do any better if, instead, one was presented with a collection of daily top tweets and hashtags a day in advance?
Solving the Problem of Staying Informed
I designed Bismarck Brief to be the solution to the problem of acquiring the most timely and useful information in the shortest amount of time. Every element of the Brief, from the workflow of our team of analysts to specific choices of words, has been thought through and deliberately chosen to maximize the density of insights and information our paid subscribers receive, while minimizing the valuable time they need to spend to get them.
The news could be said to operate at a daily pace, which is why we speak of a 24-hour “news cycle.” Events that would seem notable to someone who was paying close attention the day prior are reported on, like a politician’s remarks or small changes in a key government statistic. Social media operates at an hourly pace, dissecting such events in real time, as well as the reactions of others to them. Both news and social media are capable of taking a wider, longer-term view of things, but this is the exception rather than the rule. In principle there is no limit to the amount of time one could spend absorbing the supposedly informational content produced by such sources. The corpus of new social media posts being produced every second is well beyond any human’s ability to read, but the same could be said of the daily output of just a single media outlet.
In contrast, the entirety of information produced by Bismarck Brief is equivalent to no more than one hour of focused reading per week—hence the name—as paid subscribers receive an in-depth, long-form investigation of a key institution, industry, or influential individual in their inbox every Wednesday at 2pm GMT sharp. Rather than daily or hourly, I would argue the Brief has a yearly pace. I aim for every Brief to remain relevant for two years after issuance and to be due for an update after four years. Although we now have over 150 Briefs in our catalog, any human being could become a completionist of this corpus with a few weeks of catch-up reading.
We were all taught in school that the news is a reliable source. Yet one will be hard-pressed to find citations or links to further reading in a typical news article. More problematically, journalists will frequently cite anonymous sources, especially in government, who are rarely heroic whistleblowers but usually adversarial actors themselves taking advantage of their ability to leak to journalists without accountability in order to cause public furors and win opaque political battles. At its best, social media can be far more rigorous and transparent than this. But it is frequently much worse than even the low bar set by the news media.
Each Bismarck Brief rigorously cites every claim, quote, and numerical figure it introduces. The list of footnotes at the end of each Brief contains not only narrow sources for claims, but many quality links for deeper investigation and learning for the interested reader. Despite our focus on contemporary events and individuals, we strive to maintain the standard of rigor that was once the pride of the academy. When we are unable to meet it, we do not issue a Brief. About 5-10% of all Briefs we have ever begun have not been issued to readers, but indefinitely tabled until we can meet this high standard through future research.
A typical Brief cites well over fifty news articles, academic papers, government documents, corporate reports, books, and public interviews or speeches by key figures—from sources both open and paywalled—then distills this information into a readable and insightful format. Our analysts frequently seek out and interview industry experts for guidance and insider knowledge, identify and translate foreign-language sources into English, and crunch raw data themselves to check claims and assumptions or generate new insights. Many Briefs include sleek, original maps, tables, and graphs displaying these insights and other key background information. We spare no expense in diving into the ocean of information to find the very best sources and integrate them into a single, coherent, objective, and actionable perspective for our paid subscribers.
The news media is probably far more rife with jargon than social media, but both suffer from a lack of impartiality and habitual exaggeration motivated by both politics and by the economic incentive to maximize attention through sensationalism, or intellectual authority through unnecessary jargon. The constant use of imprecise, flowery, partisan, or obtuse language—and frequently all of the above at once—makes even the most simple events and dynamics seem incomprehensible, while ruling out the possibility for either author or reader to surface generalizable insights, models, or theory from the subject at hand.
With Bismarck Brief, we strive to achieve crisp, neutral, and unornamented language, avoiding jargon wherever possible and sticking to the principle that anything important can ultimately be explained in plain English. This is not to say the Brief will “explain like I’m 5 years old,” but it will explain in a way that both a 15-year-old and an 85-year-old could understand. Whether this means breaking down the inner workings of central processing units in computers, explaining the fundamental chemistry of working with hydrogen gas, or articulating the opaque powers and abilities of international financial institutions, our commitment is to never leave our readers feeling like they did not understand something or did not grasp its full gravity, from the basic dynamics to the future implications.
Bismarck Brief is not just a series of unrelated reports. It is rather a comprehensive research project to map out the global landscape of live players, functional and dysfunctional institutions, new technologies, and fundamental economic and demographic flows. The end result will be an informational and intelligence product that has never existed before: an up-to-date atlas of institutions capturing the shape and structure of our civilization—and the people piloting it—in unprecedented detail. Our work so far has already made it possible for our paid subscribers to rapidly acquire an informed generalist’s understanding of numerous key domains, apprised not just of the latest developments, but also the underlying dynamics driving the course of events forward. There is no better source of navigation-grade intelligence than the Brief.
Unlike the news or social media, we can quantify and show that Bismarck Brief leads to better decision-making and better outcomes: because the data shows that the Brief outperforms the S&P 500. The Brief is not an indeterminate firehose of updates and information, but a methodical, regularly-scheduled series of deep investigations into discrete organizations or individuals. If a Brief changes your mind about something, you won’t forget it.
A monthly subscription to Bismarck Brief costs $120 per month. But for an annual subscription of $1060 per year, you will save 26% of the monthly price. In exchange, Bismarck Brief will save you hundreds if not thousands of valuable hours of your time each year, that otherwise would have been spent reading the news and browsing social media in search of important information and insight about world developments in technology, industry, and geopolitics. By providing superior information and insight, the Brief will also, in all likelihood, do far more too. Like every great product, this means that paying for Bismarck Brief is not merely an expense, but a way to save a still greater amount of your time and money, and invest in the long-term quality of your informational and epistemic environment.
I warmly invite you to become a paid subscriber to Bismarck Brief and join us on this ongoing investigation into the global power landscape, as we pioneer a superior model of news and information-gathering for our readers:
Sincerely,
Samo Burja
Founder and President, Bismarck Analysis
See here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-consumer-pays-nearly-1-190009547.html
See here: https://elmwealth.com/crystal-ball-challenge/