John Battelle is co-founder and CEO of Recount Media. Founded in 2018, they have developed “a new approach to politics” that “won’t waste your time,” by collating current affairs content to create videos that reflect the modern consumers’ shorter attention span. His eclectic career has encompassed two professorships and co-founding Wired magazine. He also wrote the best-selling book, ‘The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture,’ regarded as the definitive take on the subject. In this in-depth interview, John reflects on a long career in the media industry, seeing it lose almost half of its journalists and suggests what must be done to tackle its decline; argues that big tech are stifling smaller companies’ ability to innovate by withholding data from developers and creators; and in the lead up to an election marred by fake news and disinformation, shares his frustrations that “free speech doesn’t mean free reach” – and how the election result may need a ‘recount’ in more ways than one…