The media’s winners and losers of 2022

2022 was a turbulent year for political media in the U.S., and things probably are only going to get worse in 2023 as layoffs and consolidations continue during a long downturn for the industry.

With 2022 becoming 2023, here are a few of the big winners and losers in media of the past year:

Winner: Substack

It was only a matter of time before popular columnists, reporters and podcasters unchained themselves from corporate media and published directly to readers and listeners. Substack leads the newsletter pack and rewards its writers through the essence of supply and demand.

Want to get paid by publishing on Substack? That’s all based on the number and cost of subscriptions. And popular writers from Matt Tiabbi to Heather Cox Richardson, Glenn Greenwald, Emily Oster and Andrew Sullivan are doing quite well as a result, from a compensation perspective. How well? Substack’s top 10 authors collectively earned more than $20 million, even as more writers joined the platform.

Loser: Truth Social

Former President Trump’s version of Twitter is a flop. That’s not an opinion but an assessment based on dubious numbers.

The company lost $6.5 million in its first year. And Google, citing moderation issues, continues to block it from its popular Play Store and, therefore, from 40 percent of the smartphone market.

Trump’s Truth Social account has 4.77 million followers. Context is key here, so before considering that a good number, note that Trump had 87.8 million Twitter followers. 

So, a small percentage of those following the former president on Twitter have followed him to Truth Social.

Earlier this month, several top executives abruptly left the company, including chief financial officer Lee Jacobson and board members Luiz Phillippe Braganza and Rodrigo Veloso. Adding insult to injury, Truth Social’s application for a trademark was turned down by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which cited the company’s name as “confusingly similar” to other company names. The company also reportedly owes a major web-hosting operator, RightForge, $1.6 million in unpaid bills, according to one report.

Winner: Gov. Ron DeSantis 

It’s safe to say Gov. DeSantis (R-Fla.) is the favorite right now to win the 2024 Republican nomination for president if he decides to run, a somewhat-unthinkable prospect one year ago when the odds were firmly with Trump. 

This, despite relentless resoundingly negative media coverage of him.

In the November midterms – when Republicans lost winnable Senate races in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, and as a “red wave” never came in the House with the GOP instead eking out a slight majority – DeSantis won a landslide reelection victory in a gubernatorial race four years after winning by just 33,000 votes. 

DeSantis’s 19-point win extended to heavily-blue Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. 

The rout came despite overwhelmingly negative media reporting at both the local and national levels — especially concerning the governor’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, which prohibits teaching elementary school kids as young as four years old about sexual orientation and gender identification. 

Of course, very few outlets referred to the Parents Rights in Education Bill as that. Instead, they took their cues from Democratic activists and lawmakers who called it the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.” The word “gay” isn’t mentioned once in the bill, but the media ran with it anyway in what seemed like an effort to smear it and him: 

‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – Associated Press

What is Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill? – Washington Post

What Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill actually says – NBC News

There are dozens of other examples, but you get the point. 

DeSantis, for his part, was having none of it when a reporter referred to it as “Don’t Say Gay” during a March press conference. 

“The idea that you wouldn’t be honest about that and tell people what it actually says, it’s why people don’t trust people like you, because you peddle false narratives, and so we disabuse you of those narratives,” DeSantis said, drawing applause from non-reporters in the room. “We’re going to make sure that parents can send their kid to kindergarten without having some of this stuff injected into the school curriculum.”

In a related story, polls showed after the bill was passed that more than 60 percent of Floridians approved of the bill’s language. 

Winner and Loser: Elon Musk

Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his subsequent unveiling of damning internal documents through independent journalists has revealed some disturbing things and verified others: Shadow-banning of conservatives was real under the old regime, and the FBI worked with social media giants to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2022 presidential election. 

Musk has promised that Twitter will no longer serve as an extension of a political party, and that’s a good thing. 

Since Musk took over, he has laid off more than half of Twitter’s staff, and the company has lost 56 percent of its value. Nevertheless, Twitter says it has seen record sign-up numbers, and the platform has seen few outages. 

But the new CEO also has been active on the platform he owns, becoming a lightning rod to the left. Musk certainly can dish it out, but his behavior has scared off advertisers and seemingly hurt his most profitable company, Tesla, which has shed more than 70 percent of its stock value from its peak in 2022.

How much value has Twitter lost since Musk’s purchase? Try 56 percent. 

Per Nasdaq.com: 

“Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund’s stake in Twitter was valued at nearly $8.63 million as of Nov. 30, compared to $19.66 million at October-end, days after Musk closed the acquisition.” 

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/fidelity-marks-down-value-of-twitter-stake-by-56

So, whether Musk is winning or losing depends on how that is defined: through free speech or the bottom line? 

Welcome to 2023, a year that promises continued upheaval in traditional and social media. 

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist and a Fox News contributor