Success Quote by Chris Hughes

Hughes is describing a market correction that feels less like innovation than attrition: the internet didn’t just add a new distribution channel, it rewired the incentives that used to subsidize slow journalism. “Competitive” is the polite word; “hostile” smuggles in the moral argument. He’s not claiming readers suddenly hate long-form reporting. He’s pointing at the ecosystem that punishes it: ad rates that reward volume, feeds that privilege novelty, analytics that turn editorial judgment into a real-time performance review.

The phrase “resource-intensive” does a lot of work. It frames investigative reporting as infrastructure, not content - something you build and maintain, not something you casually crank out. That’s a subtle rebuke to the web’s prevailing rhetoric of frictionless creation and “democratized” media. Hughes is also, quietly, distributing responsibility. By saying “the web has introduced” this landscape, he implies structural causation rather than individual failure: it’s not that editors lost their nerve; it’s that the business model moved under their feet.

Context matters because Hughes isn’t a newsroom lifer; he’s an entrepreneur associated with the platforms that helped create the attention economy. That gives the line a confessional edge, or at least a clear-eyed admission from someone who understands how product decisions become cultural weather. The intent is less nostalgia than warning: if you treat journalism like any other scalable content vertical, the parts that don’t scale - time, expertise, legal risk, patient reporting - get priced out. The hostility isn’t personal. It’s systemic.