Sebastian Mallaby: belief

Transcript context

…Putting aside family connections, your wife being editor of The Economist, but what is it in media or journalism you’re especially bullish on? Is it Substack? Is it old-style MSM [mainstream media]? Is it… whatever? I’m a big admirer of The Information, which is a Silicon Valley media start-up. It’s been going about 10 years. The reason I’m a fan is that I think that’s the right model for media start-ups. I think Substack, where it’s a lone writer doing a newsletter, can be excellent when you’ve got an unbelievably talented and energetic and exceptional person. You interviewed, Tyler, Andrew Sullivan not so long ago. I would put him in that category of just an exceptional person. If he wants to do Substack, fantastic. He’s exceptional. I think most of the time, somebody can be great at a Substack for three years, possibly five years, but it’s pretty hard to sustain that level of focus and energy. If you don’t sustain it, you’ve built a brand over three to five years, and then you throw it away because you stop, or you just go off the boil. Therefore, it’s more sensible to create a collective journalistic effort. That’s what The Information is doing. It’s going at a particular area, which is tech. It only covers tech. It hires good people who know what they’re doing. It’s got a team, and it’s building that team, and I think that’s terrific. As a journalist, you covered Japan for years. What do you see as the economic future of Japan? They seem to have a shrinking population, fairly low growth. Not much appears to change. Is that just going to continue forever, and there’ll be a tiny Japan with hardly any people in it? Or what’s going to change?…

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