Welcome to a Tech Mem Right Home Bonus episode. I'm Brian McCullough. Believe me,

at least on New York and New York-based media Twitter, the big news of this week was

layoffs. The layoffs at the company formerly known as Oath and the proposed layoffs at Buzzfeed. As I said on Thursdays

episode there's two tracks to this story, one being Tim Armstrong's

apparently a board of attempt to cobble together a media empire to compete for

ad dollars with Google and Facebook and the whole phenomenon of digital media

startups who took gobs of venture capital money to attempt to do news and media

at scale only to have that scale seemingly be ephemeral

and the VC well now running dry. Well I actually recorded this interview back in December, but someone who has been very vocal

about all of this all along has been Raffat Ali, currently the founder and CEO of Digital Media Company, Skift, but also if you weren't aware,

a true Digital Media pioneer going back to his founding of paid content, one of the first blogs to Go Pro, as it were. I did a great episode with Raffaut

on the Internet History Podcast, which I encourage you to look up. So I knew that Raffa could talk about

this stuff, would have a lot to say about this stuff,

would have a pretty unique perspective on the state of the digital media landscape in 2019.

TLDR, it's not good, dire might even be the word. And well, given this week's news,

and since as I said on Thursday this has been a major ongoing story that I feel like I've criminally

undercovered. I thought let's let the great Raffat Ali tell you what the state of digital

media is right now.

One quick note of context we reference in the conversation Jonah Perretti's trial balloon that

he floated a few months back saying digital media companies should combine forces either

in a mass merger or as some sort of collective

bargaining block in order to get better ad rates.

...