Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins
Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins
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How Influencers Became Strictly Better Than Journalists
The mainstream media is dying — and almost nobody is actually reading it anymore. In this episode, Malcolm & Simone Collins break down the shocking reality behind the Washington Post laying off a third of its staff, why legacy media has become irrelevant, and how a new decentralized information ecosystem (YouTubers, citizen journalists, Substack, and AI synthesis) is rapidly replacing it. Topics covered: * Why the Washington Post’s 13–14 person climate team was mostly cut * How our small channel has more real influence than dozens of NYT journalists * The hidden truth about newspaper readership and subscription signaling * The new media pyramid: original research → synthesis → commentary * Why citizen journalism is outperforming legacy war reporting * AI’s biggest emerging threat to information quality * How we’re returning to real gumshoe reporting in the cyber age If you want to understand where news is actually going in 2026 and beyond, this episode is essential. Watch until the end for our thoughts on AI harmonic patterns and the coming verification crisis. Drop a comment: Do you still read any legacy media outlets? Which ones? Episode Transcript Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we’re gonna be talking about the death of Legacy Media. Recently, the big story in the news tied to this right now is that the Washington Post laid off a third of their staff Simone Collins: and they’d be mad. Malcolm Collins: You were just complaining to me, you’re like, oh my God. I do not understand. When you see people protest like. These people were not generating value, they were not generating money anymore. The number that had been going around that I think is hilarious is they had 13 to 14 journalists as part of their climate team. Simone Collins: Just, just to cover climate change. Malcolm Collins: And they let, I think all of them go, Simone Collins: no, I think they kept one or two. One Malcolm Collins: or two to like, Simone Collins: which is one or two too many. You could have honestly, like anyone covering economics or politics or really any, I mean, climate change is one of those subjects that really only. Has context and importance in relation to another field like science, [00:01:00] like, ecosystems, like food, like any, anything on its own. It doesn’t matter. It only matters in the context of something else. So you don’t need a journalist for that. I can’t believe they ha How did they even end up with that mini, I mean, the way that Aspen Gold was talking about it was that like you just get one and they just hire more and more, like they just want more of themselves and they grow like a cancer. Malcolm Collins: No, it’s, Simone Collins: it Malcolm Collins: is just like a cancer. I mean, wokes and Wokes topics aren’t like a cancer within an organization. Yeah. And they spread from the, the, the start point. And it is you have to cut out the entire cancer. That’s the only way to, to keep the organization alive. Simone Collins: Yeah. Malcolm Collins: And if you’re not willing to, and that’s the thing with giant bureaucracies, it becomes harder and harder and harder to do that. So giant bureaucracies perform less and less well. Mm-hmm. Which is why new companies are able to bubble up and do. New and cool things like our fab ai creating the best AI chat bots around. And they really are, we’re gonna start advertising. Like Simone Collins: actually yes. Malcolm Collins: Like actually, yeah, I’ve used the other bots, they’re not as good. And, and it’s just [00:02:00] because we’re using the top of the line models really, and everybody else tries to do some proprietary nonsense. But anyway, to keep going here if you get an idea, because I, I do not think people realize contrasted wiz, because what we’re gonna be talking about in today’s episode is. The phenomenon of media dying, but also the phenomenon of what’s replacing it, how you can gather information today, how people will gather information in the future. ‘cause a lot of people are like, well, when the media’s gone, how is information parsed? How do you get stories? How do you know what’s happening in the world? Mm-hmm. And I mean, the answer is obvious now. People are getting it from their information circles. You know, you were just talking about how I was learning about what happened to the Washington Post by watching as asthma gold. Don’t you all want a wife like that who genuinely is just like, what does, as asthma gold have to say? Say, yeah, God. I think a lot of guys are like, yeah, I want a wife who’s addicted to o asthma gold. But anyway I do not think people understand just how few people actually read [00:03:00] even the largest of media organizations. And we have an older episode where we go into the numbers on this. And in that episode, even when the channel was much smaller I was pointing out that if you look at, like, if you divide the show’s viewership by two, because there’s two of us working on it. Each of us is worth, I think it was seven full-time staff at the New York Times when you con we’re contrasting our viewership numbers. Was the average viewership numbers of the New York Times? Oh Simone Collins: no. Malcolm Collins: In terms of, yeah, it was bad. And I can try to find those numbers. I’ll add it in post here to give good idea of just how bad it was. So the average American when they click through to a newspaper is on that link for 1. 5 minutes actually a little less than that. So I’m inflating the numbers a bit. Okay. If you look at the New York Times, the New York Times gets around 385. 7 million clicks per month. That comes down to around 9, 642, 000 K hours now, [00:04:00] consider that they have 1, 700 journalists working there, and there are two of us. That means the number of people watching our content is equivalent for each one of us to 44 New York Times journalists. We have the same influence on the public as 44 New York Times journalist for each of us individually. 22 for the show in general, do you have any idea how much 44 people is? That’s like more people than could fit in our entire house. And we are not a particularly large YouTube channel either. Malcolm Collins: So Simone Collins: bad. Malcolm Collins: Bad. But to give you an idea, when you’re talking about New York Times pieces, because I’ll go through the major. Things because I think a lot of people, they’ll look at the total viewership on these platforms. Yeah. And they get confused because what they’re confusing is a few viral pieces versus how many people are reading the average piece. Right. How many [00:05:00] clickthroughs does the average piece get? Not the long tail piece. Right. So if you’re looking these days and you, and you do the math on this should I explain how. Views based on I’ll just, okay. Views based on 1.6 billion monthly page views, 7,000 articles, media media and adjusted full reads at 25 to 35% rate higher for long form EG 10 K views at or to 25% equals 2.5 k Engagement time is 30 to 45 seconds, which supports this. And with the New York Times. The way that we did that, by the way, is, is the average site time. It’s, I think 30 to 45 seconds, as I said, and then you’re looking at 1.6. Billion monthly page views. And so you’re like, okay, so how, what does that translate to in watch time versus what is our watch time? Simone Collins: Sure. Yeah. Malcolm Collins: Which generally, like when we’re humming along, right now, I think we’re at around like 120,000, 130,000 hours a month. Simone Collins: Oh, that’s awesome. Wow. Malcolm Collins: And, and our norm when we get to like our peak, because we’ve hit this number a few different times, has been around 150,000. Yeah. We’ve gotten to around [00:06:00] 200,000 at points. So we’ll see if we can get to a norm of over 200,000 this year. But anyway. If you’re looking at the estimated medium viewers per story in the New York Times, you’re looking at 10,000 to 25,000. Simone Collins: But the amount of money that goes into each articles. Malcolm Collins: Is enormous. What? So you’re going to understand why this doesn’t make sense anymore. And the estimated number of people who read an average New York Times story to the end of the story is around 2,500 to 8,700. Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Malcolm Collins: Not a lot. So the average New York Times story is getting about the engagement as an average video on this channel. Simone Collins: Yes. With one small counterpoint. Which is, and I think this is a, a difference with. Old media that’s going to keep it alive a little bit longer than these dismal numbers would suggest. Yeah. Which is that a lot of people, and keep in mind in New York Times doesn’t make money based on views. It makes money based on subscriptions. [00:07:00] Mm-hmm. And people often get subscriptions to publications they do not read. I mean, obviously a lot of people do it out of. Inertia or it’s a, an institution or a publication or a doctor’s office or whatever, right? And they just get it because they’ve always got it and they always will get it. And so it’s gonna take a generation for that to end. Or you know, more institutional shakeups for an auditing team to be like, wait, why are you paying for this when no one’s using it? You know, more doge kind of stuff. ‘cause that happened a lot when Doge people were like, wait, no one has ever used this software. Ever. Why are we paying for it? But then there’s also the element that people buy. Like I think the New Yorkers a better example of this. They buy a subscription to it, so it sits in their house, and when people come over, they’re like, oh. You read The New Yorker no one reads the New Yorker. You know what I mean? Like five people read the New Yorker. But they, they have those just as a signaling thing. Most [00:08:00] people who received, and I remember whe
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