Brill's Content

» see brillscontent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 1998 I was fourteen and getting online at 33.6k, and the internal politics of the American press were not a thing I had opinions about. Brill's Content was a printed monthly you picked up at a newsstand in a country I had never visited, about reporters whose names I could not have produced. It is here for what it tried to do, not because I read a single issue of it.

Steven Brill had a specific record before he started it. He founded The American Lawyer in 1979 and then Court TV in 1991, which put live trials into American living rooms and changed how a generation there understood a courtroom. In june 1998 he launched a magazine whose entire subject was the conduct of the news business: who leaked what to whom, and which corrections quietly never ran.

It opened loudly. The first issue carried a Brill piece titled Pressgate, arguing that Kenneth Starr's office had been the source for a great deal of what reporters were publishing about the Lewinsky investigation. The press then reviewed the magazine about the press exactly as you would expect a press to do. The initial print run was 225,000 copies and another 50,000 had to be ordered when it sold through.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

The bet was that ordinary readers were curious about the machinery. People consumed an enormous amount of news and had almost no way to see how any of it got assembled, and Brill decided that gap was a business. He was half right. The appetite was real, but he was wrong about whose appetite it was.

The circulation that actually showed up was heavily made of journalists and the people already inside the building. That is a readership with status and no scale, and it is close to impossible to sell advertising against, for a reason nobody could design around: the advertisers you would naturally approach are the same media companies whose behavior you are auditing that month.

~ what really happened ~

In january 2001 Brill's company entered a joint venture with Primedia and took editorial control of Primedia's media trade titles. The logic was consolidation, putting the media-about-media properties in one place and spreading the costs across them. It held together for less than a year.

The partnership dissolved and Brill's Content suspended publication in october 2001, a month when American magazines were dying for several unrelated reasons at once. The advertising market had gone down with the dot-com economy that had been buying most of those pages, and after september the country's attention was somewhere else entirely. A monthly about how the press covers the press was not what anyone was reaching for that autumn.

~ what survived ~

The job it invented did not go anywhere. Media criticism moved onto the web almost immediately, where publishing costs nothing and you do not need 225,000 copies for the thing to function, and the beat has been permanent ever since. Most large outlets now keep somebody on it, and the practice of correcting a story in public rather than in a box on page forty descends fairly directly from this kind of work.

Brill kept going. In 2018 he co-founded NewsGuard, which rates the reliability of news sites, and that is recognizably the same idea rebuilt for an internet where the problem is no longer one leaky prosecutor. It is ten thousand sites nobody can place, which is a harder version of the question his magazine was asking in 1998 with a much smaller budget.

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