How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

One of CNN's most embarrassing moments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A

Can anyone fix American news?

He wrote his whole theory up as a book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TP07B0I/

24-hour cable news? Probably not. The fact that they have to be saying something for 24 hours a day, without repeating themselves too frequently, is virtually impossible. There's simply not that much news. Not to mention the fact that young people don't watch the news (the State of the Media report in 2014 said that the average age of the evening news watcher was 53) [1]. Honestly it's painful to watch when I'm at the airport.

You could get all of the news that matters in thirty seconds if someone went through the work to organize it that way.

Print news will die even sooner.

Internet/app news (or print resurrected in Internet form) is also in serious trouble. It's a money problem at the end of the day. News agencies are literally making pennies when they used to make dollars [2]. Turns out if you're making 1/10 of what you used to make it's hard to keep people on staff. Those people on staff were the writers and fact-checkers, so now instead of being able to spend a long time thoughtfully reporting there's a lot of "I need three stories on my desk by the end of the day" going on. Combine that with the fact that now your local newspaper competes with every other newspaper, and most of the industry is pretty much screwed.

Yet, I say that as someone who is starting a news company (https://grasswire.com). I think at the end of the day citizen journalism and fact-checking (allowing more participation from non-paid parties) can not only produce higher quality journalism, but can actually save the news from its monetization woes. (In other words, our thesis is that instead of trying to squeeze more out of the monetization end as a result of increase in supply, we should just let that increase in supply decrease the value of each printed word). Basically we're trying to create an open Wikipedia-like newsroom where anyone can curate and fact-check in real-time. It has been working beautifully in private beta, so we'll see.

[1] http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2012/network-news-the-pace-of...

[2] http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2012/newspapers-building-digi...

Her answer was essentially, "I'm a public official and so I know better than to call you a dumbshit in front of everyone on national TV"

It's the news "editors" that need to be taken to task.