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What happens when the best business decision you can make is to change businesses. What's the best way to redeploy your skill sets in the modern age of artificial intelligence and changing business models. I'm Barry Dhelts and on today's edition of At the Money, we're going to discuss how to manage your way through the challenges of technology driven change. To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your career, let's bring in veteran markets journalists
and CFA Sam Row. Sam is known for his clear, data driven insights into markets and the economy. He spent two decades working in the trenches for shops such as Forbes, Yahoo, Finance, Business Insider, and Axios. He launched his own substack three years ago ticker Tker, which earned him the Society of Business and Editor and Writers Award for Best in Business in twenty twenty two. So let's start with your background. You earn a certified financial analyst, but you became a
financial journalist. Explain that initial career choice.
Yeah, Well, the initial plan actually was to figure out a way to get into Wall Street. You know, if we go even further back, I was working as a contractor for a law firm that for whatever reason, got me exposure to equity research for the first time. And this is the first time I started to realize that how asset valuation worked. And it's not just math than spreadsheets and you know, a hard science, you know, theoretical exercise. There's a lot of soft sciences involved in here because
you're dealing with human behavior. So I was interested in getting into equity research. And my first job being able to write about stocks or markets was at Forbes in their investment Newsletters division.
So a traditional media outlet, but a sort of non traditional position. That's kind of been your career history. So you go from Forbes Newsletters, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider axios. These are all post twenty twentieth century sort of technology based news organization.
Sure, yeah, yeah, I mean even even Forbes when I was there, I was there from two thousand and six to twenty ten, was by far number one in terms of news websites. They had tons and tons and tons of traffic going to their website because they were one of the first new outlets to really establish themselves in the late nineties and early two thousands, and then of course the financial crisis comes, and you know, business media
did not do very well during that time. I eventually get laid off in twenty ten, and I'm in between jobs a little bit, and then I end up at Business Insider, where the business model is just completely different. You know what. My last day at Forbes, actually had a talk with my boss's boss in my office. That's what the state of things were back then. Right, that I could actually have an office at a print magazine in a building in Greenwich.
Village seems super inefficient.
Well, I didn't realize how inefficient that was until I ended up that Business Insider, where on my first day on a desk that's probably about three feet wide in a newsroom where we're basically just sitting their shoulder to shoulder with every other editor and journalist, including you know, the editor chief and the CEO of the company, and the productivity there was insane. So yeah, like in the snap of a finger, I realize, you know, there's a reason why we had layoffs at my previous employer.
So that took place in twenty ten. But really we've seen technology really hurting traditional media's business model since the nineteen nineties, So Craigslist really did a job on the classified advertising business, which is a big driver. eBay was another thing that took sales away from the traditional ad model. Now it's things like Facebook, Marketplace, Zillow for real estate, bring a trailer for automobiles. Technology has been taking big
chunks of the revenue streams from traditional media. It's now three plus decades of this. When did you first start to realize, hey, this entire underlying business model is under assault.
I think it was probably late in my business inside our days and early in my Yahoo Finance days, where we started to really begin to understand how much digital news sites were beholden to the traffic coming from places like Google Search and social media platforms like Facebook. But then in terms of like the revenue perspective with advertising and all of this stuff, the you quickly saw that
the economics of this was falling apart. And I think that the advertisers were largely realizing that the roi of having ads on some of these sites, you know, weren't as competitive as what they're doing now, which is having an influencer on TikTok, you know, hockeing products.
So we're going to work a way up to social media. I want to track your career. So you start Business Insider in the twenty twenty eleven Yahoo finances when twenty sixteen, so five years later, and then Axios.
Twenty twenty one for a very brief period.
And then you launch your substack back in twenty twenty two when substack was still kind of young. We hadn't quite hit you know, peak substack yet. Sure what was the motivation to say, you know what, I have to take control of this and do it on my own.
I think, you know, being in management at Yahoo Finance and getting a little bit of exposure to it at Business Insider. For me, I think it was as simple at it was. Two. There's two parts to this one. If you can keep your costs low, then I think
you can have a media operation. And related to costs, if you can be if you have an audience, and if you are sort of very deliberate about how who your audience is and how big that audience and get, then you can have the revenue to cover that cost and you can have a nice small business like like what I'm doing now.
So Substack really inverted the traditional media model back in when you have an office and a salary. They're the ones who are who are building subscriptions, running ads, doing the business side of it. Your job in a traditional media business is to just create content. The inversion is writers now earn money based on their subscriptions, which are driven in part by their content, but also their marketing, savage, their branding, their reputations. Is this new content model a modern meritocracy?
I think increasingly. I'm not sure if I would characterize it that way. You know, I think about you know, I spend a lot of time on TikTok and Twitch and watch you know, all the various streamers that have found career success. And there are some people who get massive, and there are some people who have very medium sized,
you know, moderate sized audiences. The analogy that I've been using lately when it comes to how people or how media has been working is the difference between publicly traded fast food companies and your favorite restaurant that's run by mom and pop around the corner. Right. It's possible to have a really great restaurant with just one outlet, Right. I think if you ask most people, if you ask them what their favorite restaurant is, it's a privately owned
family business somewhere. Because the red sauce will never be replicated by Olive Garden or whatever. That doesn't mean, you know, Olive Garden and McDonald's and any of this stuff is bad, But it's just the business strategy. The reach, the audience that they're going for is going to be very different. And so I think that there's probably a world where, you know, these big mainstream media outlets and the independent
journalists can coexist. I think it only works because the frictions and the costs and the barriers to entry to becoming an independent writer has come down significantly.
Let me ask you a sort of abstract question about about Google Search as a source for new readers or new blog followers or whatever. Cory Doctor uses the phrase platform crapification, and we've certainly seen that with Google. I find myself using Google far much less. The whole genius of page ranks seems to have gone away. I don't want their AI answer. I have perplexity on my phone. I don't need them. If I want an AI answer,
I know exactly how to get it. What I want is show me the top thirty fifty one hundred sites that have this phrase or this topic, and I just don't get that anymore, just fiston with so much garbage. So the question I want to ask you is has the slow I guess it's too early to call the death of Google, but has the crapification of Google harmed writers who are looking for an audience or are people no longer relying on it? And word of mouth is helping people looking from it? Yeah?
I would actually say it's probably helped. Really, I think it's made it's it's hurt the large media companies significantly. I think Wall Street Journal had an article, fabulous article about this in terms of how much search traffic digital media sites we're getting from from Google, and it's all shrink. It has been shrinking.
It's collapsed, collapsed.
Yeah, it's a nightmare. But that also means if people are spending less time being drawn to these mega properties, well where are they going for their news and their information? And maybe they're you know, gravitating toward you know, something like a newsletter that they signed up because you know, one of their friends shared something and they saw something good here.
So so Google SEO is not a job anyone should be thinking about that. That was a real job, certainly since the nineties and two thousands. Yeah, hey, if you can optimize for Google Search, here's a fire hose of traffic. Just hope they never changed their algorithm.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think passively. I try to be conscious of things that help improve the SEO of anything I publish. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it because you know, I might get a couple more clicks.
It's so diminished today from from what it once was. So what's been the most surprising part of this transition to you know, hanging out your own newsletter? What's been the most difficult part?
The most difficult part, you know, I you know, it is very easy. All of the other resources you get from working at a large company. You realize you took all that stuff for granted, having access to really great healthcare for a very cheap price. That's number one too. When you have tech issues, you're not on the phone, you know, when you're when you're employed by someone, you're not the one on the phone with Verizon. Someone else is taking care of that and.
You're here today coast your Verizon modem.
Yeah, that that's the whole other, uh nightmare but but yeah, all that stuff like you know, the ac doesn't work in my apartment, you know who's paying for the snacks and all this kind of stuff, and then you know there are there are other things that are you know, intangible value that that I really do miss about working at at larger media companies, which is being surrounded by people who are passionate about what they're doing. They're curious.
You can bounce ideas off and have something you know, crushed or really developed, you know, in a room with with with with people. So I think, you know, it's a trade off though. The other thing being that as an independent writer, I'm not in nearly as many meetings as I used to.
You're not wasting as much time. So so final question, someone thinking about a career change, thinking about hanging their own jingle, what's the most important lesson you can impart to those people?
You just have to go out and give it a shot. It doesn't cost anything to start a website or a blog on any of these newsletters, especially if you start off free, and you know, if you might actually find you have a passion for writing. Some people think that they want to be a writer, they give it a shot. They find out that they don't want to be a writer.
It's a lonely grind, it can be.
It can be very lonely. And then some people find that it's therapeutic or it's a way to keep themselves organized. You know. I've actually talked to a couple of financial advisors who have started newsletters for no other reason than to help them keep themselves organized, and have found an audience for this because what they're doing for themselves is actually benefiting someone else. Huhh. I think it's just worth giving it a shot.
So to wrap up, if you're thinking about changing careers, you should be paying attention to technology, what it's doing to your field's revenue and profit models. Understand how technology is changing the way business is being done. It's usually better to jump than to be pushed. I'm Barry Redults. This is Bloomberg's at the Money