11–20 of 67 posts
Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.
How are you going to do that when the audience is braindead and can't focus their attention for more than a paragraph or watch a video longer than 30s? There's just not much room for reinvention unless everything becomes a Tiktok feed. Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience…
The difference now is that we can track this for every article and every reader.
There probably is no substitute for the state paying for it. We just need to balloon NPR/PBS into BBC scale (relative to the size of the US, so even bigger) and hope for the best. Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.
Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large enough to drive, we're in this emotionally driven circus for the duration.
I think this is right. I'd like to see more public media funding, but at least right now there is an explosion of independent media business models being explored recruiting some very good journalists and smart people.
I'd like to hear about anyone else's updated media habits. In my last… 20ish years of "gathering information about my community and interests," I've gone from paper NYT subscriber to RSS feed reader to social aggregators to social media to podcasts to newsletters to doomscroller... I've tried it all.
But to stay sane I've settled on simply following the voices I trust and find interesting across different media, and the best ones are navigating their own publishing and distribution journey. I pay some of them real money. Some are being acquired by bigger media outlets, too. I have hope in journalism's survival.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, well said. Journalism and news is tough because at its core it's a public good, but all of the usual levers we have in modern society for funding and supporting public goods introduce all sorts of other problems. If it's only a voluntary paid service, you limit the reach of the information. If you make it free to access by taking money from advertisers, you introduce conflicts of interest with corporations that…
Reminds me a lot of the book Manufacturing Consent, where it breaks down the split between 'journalism' and 'propaganda'. As long as there is a monetary incentive to emphasize certain things and ignore others, it will always ultimately be a form of propaganda.
How are you going to do that when the audience is braindead and can't focus their attention for more than a paragraph or watch a video longer than 30s? There's just not much room for reinvention unless everything becomes a Tiktok feed. Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience…
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?