Suddenly everyone wants New Yorker style content. Who is going to write it?

Journalism and creative writing are not the same thing. Journalism of the form found in the New Yorker requires financial investment, in the form of funding travel, and in the form of funding full-time fact checking.

Also, if you think that startups are not-immediate-money-driven, I would disagree.

I worked in local TV journalism for about five years; an industry thrashing around to find its new footing to be sure. There are very few people there who are willing to do serious journalism. They don't know how to Google, or who to call. Many of those fresh out of college simply have no curiosity, and little imagination.

It's not unusual to talk to some and find out their dreams of being the next Oprah or Brian Williams. (I'm not knocking those people or celebrities mind you. Even then often the reporters don't realize the work and dedication those people put into their craft. They just know success when they see it.) These people are chasing the popular respect, popularity in culture, and money. Of course, not all. Just many.

There are some people who really do have an interest in the work. I say this as a producer with five years experience, who has been looking for a job just over a year now[0]. The three times interviews with top 80 markets have gone far enough to talk money the offers were around $20k. I'm going to have to take the next job like this offered to me.

[0] I lost my last job because I visited 4chan. My boss said the news wires we subscribed too had enough information, and there was no excuse to try to look at the site myself. Therefor, I was obviously going to look at porn. Which I assume there were thumbnails of on my harddrive.

At work, we recently put out a press release on some technology we had developed. I got to witness first-hand how so much of the online publishing world is just a slightly rearranged copy of the press release. Depressing.

Perhaps the model of full-time fact checking needs to change?

I've been a fact checker at a magazine. My job consisted of calling sources up, and asking them each line of identifiable facts - to see if they actually said this, or whether this person's birth date is actually x month, y day, z year. Whether the moon really was waxing on this time of this month like the writer said in the article. Whether Nasa did publish this photo on this day, and where?

I'd say make mandatory fact checking a prerequisite of the writer's submission. All forms of public/recordable and fact-checkable (inventing a new word here) resource must be recorded, logged, delivered in electronic form for searching and listening.

For those cases where you can't keep these records, you won't be able to "fact-check" them anyway.

For actual facts and events, historical records, etc - I'd say we have a whole internet that is waiting to connect us with the actual people who it happened to. Use skype to call direct contacts, heck, I'd even support the New York Times creating their own verified wiki. Fork wikipedia and create a journalism-standard wiki.

I can't believe that the NYT hasn't actually done this yet. It's so obvious - they have teams of people on fact-checking duty. Create places where these facts that are gathered don't just disappear into the air after this issue is printed. Keep everything. With the cost of electronic storage so cheap, I highly believe that we can keep every single fact that we check, together with references and probabilities of accuracy and correctness (ie this factoid came from a scientist, maybe it's true. But now, I have found this paper that shows these equations and has been peer reviewed by these additional scientists and debated by these media and these researchers, then perhaps I can rate this to be more believable than just what the scientist said.)

These are all doable things with the amount of resources we have.

Just missed opportunities.

I think you're painting all of writers with a single brush. I just can't imagine that a good understanding of the basics (which can be taught out of school, but should always be taught in school) doesn't help most people in their art. And we know that not all people learn the same way.

I didn't go to journalism school. I don't even have a degree. (I dropped out of CompSci.) But I did work in news for five years (I pointed that out in another post. I know, it's starting to sound smarmy. Sorry.), and the vast majority of people did go to school for journalism.

I disagree with the general tone of your post. I regret not going to school for this. I think it would've made me an even more capable writer than I am now. That said, I do think that a slim majority of people I've met who did attend aren't great writers. As a TV news producer I spent a fair amount of time editing others' work and working with my reporters to help them better communicate what they mean. I often felt that some of the things we talked about were not only things probably covered in college, but some were definitely covered in grade school. I met an adult (well, a 22yo, which I consider an adult,) who had trouble with their/there/they're.

At least one person actually stopped seeking input from me after they found out I didn't attend school in the field.

And then I've met a few people, who also attended college, who could write circles around, well, any other people I've ever met. On in particular credits his school, and a couple of professors and friends he met there. He has no trouble being published when he takes the time to write something, but just prefers being on TV.

I think that some students better know how to take advantage of what schools provide, and that some schools, in their current form, aren't teaching. Both allude to problems that need to be addressed, but neither suggests to me that schools are completely worthless. Instead it says to me that some schools are really ineffective for the students they haveand that should be addressed, and we need to try to make sure all students know how to utilize the resources available to them.

That said, I think your second section is dead on. We do need to be better about encouraging people to tackle fields that interest them. School shouldn't be some thing that people feel labored by. I think that's why so many are ineffective, not proof they can't work.