is a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.
Substack has updated its partnership with betting platform Polymarket, “introducing native tools that make it easier to share, discuss, and debate prediction market data directly on Substack.” Additionally, Polymarket will effectively pay “a cohort of creators,” including Matt Yglesias, to use its data though the newsletter platform’s pilot sponsorships program.
“If you get the news before it happens, that should be even more economically valuable.”
This looks like a concerted effort to confuse people about what news is and does. Here’s Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev, one of the leading profiteers from America’s financial nihilism: “I like to think about prediction markets as the next generation of the news. We know the news is economically valuable. People pay for getting the newspaper; they pay indirectly for shows like this [Squawk on the Street on CNBC] through advertising, and so if you get the news before it happens, that should be even more economically valuable.”
Let’s stop for a moment and think about what news is, since the slippage in Tenev’s quote (“if you get the news before it happens”) highlights the problem with his line of thought. It kind of seems like people have recently become confused about the difference between information, journalism, and “content.” The earliest known predecessor to journalism is Rome’s Acta Diurna, which was in circulation more than two millennia ago — basically an official record of events, such as births, new laws, and financial data. (A similar publication circulated in China starting in the Tang dynasty.) In 15th-century Europe, businessmen began disseminating written accounts of important events to their contacts; this is essentially the predecessor to the modern newspaper.
Do you notice anything here? That’s right: News is a record of things that have happened. Weather forecasts and horoscopes aside, newspapers do not traffic in predictions. They tell you, instead, about the very recent past — what happened yesterday. An online news site, not constrained by a printing press, can even tell you what happened 20 minutes ago. But no news organization exists to predict the future. By definition, you cannot know the news before it happens.
The actual function of news, however, can sometimes be obscured by what Daniel J. Boorstin calls “pseudo-events,” which are planned events that can be repeated, such as awards shows, press conferences, political conventions, and earnings calls. Unlike true events — natural disasters, a vote at the city council meeting, an assassination — the outcome of a pseudo-event can be known in advance because it is planned. Its contents can be distributed to reporters “under embargo,” so that when the pseudo-event occurs, reporters can instantaneously run a story.
The conflation of betting markets and news began with political coverage
Lots of publications, including this one, include coverage of pseudo-events — an Apple event is a great example — alongside the accounting of real events. In Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, he suggests that news outlets cover pseudo-events in part because there are not enough actual events to fill out the news cycle. There is also tremendous consumer demand for pseudo-events; celebrities, which are pseudo-events made flesh, are so significantly popular that an entire ecosystem of publications exists for them.
Pseudo-events have overtaken actual events in Hollywood, where they have long been generated to create marketing for movies. The other place where pseudo-events dominate real events is politics. Speeches are pseudo-events, which is why journalists often receive the drafted remarks in advance; so are press conferences, social media beefs, ribbon-cuttings, and the Presidential pardoning of a turkey. I bring this up because I believe the conflation of betting markets and news began with political coverage.
... continue reading