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Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

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Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay? NYTimes Revenue - $2.9B Daily Mail Group - £1.1Bn Getting them/advertisers to pay isn't a problem!

"Close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished..." in the last 25 years. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-...

Don't know what it's like where you are, but most people nowadays are not so interested in reading a 'newspaper'. It's all online/tv/radio/podcast

Even the local freely distributed papers are hardly read (unless placed near to a train station or similar so someone about to have 30 mins on a train may pick it up).

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#52

Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is . 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 nee…

That deserves some pushback. It's commonly, and more frequently, the case that information is available online; people streaming on the ground right where you want video. It's possible to cultivate online relationships with people nearly everywhere on the planet with people that can serve as a source, or interface with the local people for you.

Good journalism required effort. It used to be really expensive to get news and reporting from around the world, and now it's ubiquitous and nearly free to get news from everywhere.

The hard part about good journalism is critical thinking, and identifying fact, and untangling the thread of truth from the overwhelming flood of information available on nearly every topic. Throw in the motivated bias of modern "style" guides, the politically and ideologically biased influences that govern framing, pacing, which stories get covered and how, thematic and editorial impositions, and it's going to be more or less impossible to do anything resembling "good" journalism in any modern incarnation of the former journalistic institutions.

You can get live streams from nearly anywhere on the planet even during murderously hot conflict. During the middle of Iran's crackdown we were still getting videos from citizens daily, as well as seeing Iranian soldiers videos and the like.

Journalism is a product. It's not a business of itself. The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity. The writing will never be as tangibly valuable on a consistent basis to any of the advertisers.

The value of superb writing and journalism with integrity and a significant story is the perception of institutional integrity, and thereby becoming a better outlet for advertising (and/or manipulation.)

Throw in the fact that every strictly written word platform is in direct competition for time and eyeballs with the likes of TikTok and Twitter, Netflix, Prime, and all the other algorithm optimized timesinks, and the effective marginal value of even the absolute best of the best writing falls to nearly zero.

If all I'm going to get is biased, skewed, ideologically motivated, politically or commercially manipulative narratives, then I'm not only not going to pay, I won't even pirate. I'll find some talking head that does the tedious job of figuring out how things work, de-censors, untangles the manipulative elements, and presents a reasonable facsimile of facts on the ground.

All those talking heads do it for free, and with ad blockers, I'm consuming the video stream resources without contributing to any of the overt commercial mechanisms in play.

The advent of AI also means that I can synthesize, filter, model, and report on any given topic with validated sources and pull in all of the best the internet has to offer.

The era of high paid Pulitzer prize writers and journalists is effectively over, and the only way legacy institutions are going to get people to pay is by tricking them into thinking that value exists where there is, in fact, none.

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#53
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished..." in the last 25 years. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-...

Don't know what it's like where you are, but most people nowadays are not so interested in reading a 'newspaper'. It's all online/tv/radio/podcast Even the local freely distributed papers are hardly read (unless placed near to a train station or similar so someone about to have 30 mins on a train may pick it up).

They have a pretty broad definition of "newspaper" -- it can be a digital outlet.

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#54

Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is . 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 nee…

That deserves some pushback. It's commonly, and more frequently, the case that information is available online; people streaming on the ground right where you want video. It's possible to cultivate online relationships with people nearly everywhere on the planet with people that can serve as a source, or interface with the local people for you. Good journalism required effort. It used to be really expensive to get ne…

Look, I agree with some of this. Full disclaimer, I am building that service that pulls in primary sources and aggregates/synthesizes (https://www.forth.news)

But there is more to journalism/reporting than what youre talking about. Reporters cultivate sources. They can do investigations. They go to places so they aren't relying on a stranger with a live stream.

"The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity." is incredibly cynical -- and that i think is the problem. The reporting needs to be valuable on its own -- that is and has been my sole point.

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#55
post #38

Reinvention takes money. A bunch of investors went on a buying spree of traditional news outlets about 25-30 years ago, hoping to make good money off of them. They also offered free access to the news online at the time. Well, people stopped buying newspapers and fewer and fewer people watch the local news, so there was no money making happening. They're still expecting to make the cash off the original investment. T…

I know there are 4th estate implications, but there's probably an argument made that news media should be a municipal endeavor supported through taxation. Yes there is public corruption all the time but usually it isn't a grand conspiracy sort of corruption, but on an isolated individual level, frequently exposed by staff themselves. In LA these days, the city controller is actually one of the best muckrakers right n…

Unfortunately, if it's a municipal endeavor, you will have coloring of the coverage.

I don't trust the current political establishment in the US to not turn newsrooms into pure propaganda machines if public funding is requested.

Besides, I don't know if there is much of a point. The current President, at the very least, bungled the release of millions of documents related to his former personal friend who was under investigation/indictment for sex trafficking.

The public, for better or worse, just doesn't seem to want to make that a sticking point. If that's not a sticking point, what the hell is? What could a newsroom possibly dig up that could motivate people?

And yes, I realize I am being very, very charitable to reducing Trump's possible exposure on Epstein to "bungled the document release", but I think you could at the very least get everyone to agree on that. There was a law passed by Congress, his administration didn't follow it as it had to. Cut and dry.

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#56
People are always talking past each other in the comments here because when some people hear "journalism" they think "national coverage reporting like what you see on TV, NYT, or Twitter maximized for eyeballs and engagement".

They should be thinking "coverage about local elections and politicians, and investigative work".

More Block Club Chicago or Oklahoma Watch.

Less Buzzfeed or CNN.

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#57

Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is . 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 nee…

Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.

Right. Because Fox was fair and balanced before Obama came along...

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.

Right. Because Fox was fair and balanced before Obama came along...

Fox wasn’t! That’s what made the Times worth reading! It was center-left people being objective to the best of their ability. So you could use it as a neutral-ish default, the check out Fox for any stories or angles the Times had overlooked.

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#59
The enitrety of the UK media sat on the Fujitsu scandal and did fuck all. So called foundations dedicated to the craft of journalism said "lol ok" and wrote article number 2342342 on the impact of black trans rights in softball.

The world's become a gambling addict; chasing players in a huge virtual casino of clicks. It's sad.

Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

#60
post #21

Journalism needs to believe in itself, passionately, and put that passion out there. For every individual and every organization, whoever you are, you set the ceiling: nobody will have more passion or believe in you more than you do. In my anecdotal experience, journalism goes along with the detractors and naysayers: It's an archaic industry from a past era, they're mostly ineffective, social media makes it mostly ir…

Black and white text is very readable, and text-based news is very useful. I don't think the NYT will see huge success trying to reinvent itself as a YouTube channel.

I didn't say to replace all text with video, but to use the best tool for the job. Sometimes an image, a graphic, an animation or loop, or a video communicate much better. Right now they seem mostly stuck in what they did on paper.
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