Ed. Note: This article and the one that follows were originally posted on Facebook and are reprinted here with the author’s permission.
As journalism itself continues its depressing decline, I am dismayed at how the publications I worked for and oversaw have all but dissolved in just two years. Recall that Belvoir’s aviation publications were sold to then Flying Media (now Firecrown) in 2023. That’s Aviation Consumer, IFR, Aviation Safety, AVweb and KITPLANES.
Aviation Consumer is no longer available in paper but in digital form for now, IFR and Aviation Safety are gone and longtime editor Russ Niles was just let go from AVweb. Russ is standing up a new daily news service called AVBrief. KITPLANES no longer has editorial staff—Marc Cook and Paul Dye have exited—and my friend Larry Anglisano left Aviation Consumer last week.
The publishing world was once rich with specialty publications, some of which verged on mass magazines. Belvoir’s titles were niches within niches and attracted discerning, demanding and loyal readers who would pay premium prices for high-quality information. These were small audiences and the challenge was to make them profitable by balancing editorial costs, paper, postage and marketing costs against subscription revenue. Because they were subscription-based—no advertising—they were independent of the glad-handing bullshit aviation is so famous for.
What changed? The demographics, the economics and the rise of the attention economy that drags eyeballs away from contemplation as surely as flies cluster on turds. The universe shrunk. Accelerating the erosion of journalism is the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence, which I commented on yesterday.
So we’re at another great inflection point in media history, pondering whether robots can produce publications. But it’s not that simple. We know AI can generate readable, if flawed, copy. What we don’t know is if readers will find sufficient value in such content to consider it credible and stick their eyeballs to it widely enough to make advertisers want to pay to support it. Firecrown, in my view, never understood what it had with Belvoir’s well-regarded titles and understood even less what quality editorial looks like.
Gens X and Z and Millennials do read, but not publications to the degree that earlier generations did. My guess is that the discerning audiences are still there because intelligence and curiosity are still there. The question is finding them in sufficient numbers to aggregate a profitable whole. AI has complicated this, too. It first kneecapped publisher links to traditional content and now, getting content seen through conventional search is harder than ever—like 700 times harder, according to Cloudflare, an internet security company.
Newton Minow, chairman of the FCC in the 1960s, famously called television a “vast wasteland.” He couldn’t have imagined TikTok, I’m sure. But Minow was referring to television not in general, but at its worst. Same with TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, et al. There’s good stuff there, some of it brilliant, cast adrift in a wasteland Minow would recognize. A special mention for YouTube. Of all the social media, it stands out for high value and usefulness. I just watched a 1:36 video on how to remove the broken window switch in my truck. YouTube is blessed with quite a few good aviation channels. And if you have the stomach for it, you can see an accident analysis before the wreckage has cooled.
I don’t pretend to know where any of this is going. But I do think there’s a digital home for something like Aviation Consumer and a news service that’s not generated entirely by AI, but one that uses AI to grease workflow, fact checking and research. Much turns on who’s paying for this, which may be advertisers who are sensitive to reader respect and expect to see the click-throughs.
I do know this—and this applies to the entire universe of media: At a time when competent reporting uncontaminated by self-interest is more important than ever, it’s more difficult than ever to produce same and make it sustain.
Paul Bertorelli led the Aviation Division at Belvoir Media Group for decades and is the former editor of Aviation Consumer Magazine. He retired as AVweb’s Editor-at-Large in 2023.