The pursuit of digital readership at the New Republic

The standard assumption is that you need to make money through advertising which favors maximizing clicks and page views over quality. But at least in a number of cases, thought(ful) leadership by platforms is overlooked as a source of serious journalism. Goldman Sachs and McKinsey put out a lot of free research because this thoughtful leadership help establish them as an authority for their main business.

It's a good view but fairly one-sided. I think the digital transformation also showed some pretty severe flaws underlying the model of journalism. I can think of at least these:

1) When the entertainment and information alternatives are much poorer the bar is much lower. Newspapers were used to this and then the internet raised the bar quite high. Whereas a bunch of friends might get their banter on by reading a sports newspaper at their bar they may now get a steady stream on twitter, or read a specialized blog if they're nerdier, or...

2) We romaticize journalism way too much. These days if I want the reality of the government budget I'll more easily head online to a specialized blog or read the well organized state stats page than read the newspaper. The newspaper article on the same thing is often wrong, sometimes comically so (e.g., missing the scale of the national debt by a factor of a 1000). If we get to topics I really know about I'll definitely get much better information, and a nice discussion to boot, in a specialized forum like this one than in a newspaper. And these kinds of places pop up more and more.

3) The kinds of things I'd really like an investigative journalist to do are just not done and probably never were. I don't see anyone going through the published laws explaining things, running through government spending and explaining where the problems are, and a million other things that are now easy to do because the data sources are available. The closest they come is doing "factcheck" articles which are nice to try and keep politicians in check but are an extremely biased source of news. I don't want you to be driven by whatever the current soundbite is, I want you to drive the news cycle by picking the things that actually matter to people, running through them methodically and reporting on that original output.

Pointing towards the current US president as an example of how journalism shows its worth seems shortsighted. The challenge of Trump is what they are actually setup to do. Challenge a few shallow narratives and keep pushing until things unravel. It's the actual challenge of educating the population on important topics that I don't see a way for journalism to get enough resources to turn around and actually do. But maybe I was expecting too much from it.

> Goldman Sachs and McKinsey put out a lot of free research because this thoughtful leadership help establish them as an authority for their main business.

That is, those departments are the advertising and PR branches for their main businesses. How can I trust the veracity of their claims knowing that their ultimate goal is to give me a favorable opinion of their parent organizations? This is the exact problem news organizations have always faced, but in the past attempted to counter with different sources of income and spreading advertising income between many clients.

What we have here is the equivalent of a technology newspaper fully owned and subsidized by Oracle. How much should I trust their assessment of different RDBMS systems? Should I trust articles in Facebook's equivalent that are telling me that all the concern over React's license are overblown?

Reminds me of an old tweet I made several years ago:

"The internet will do to society, what highways did to the landscape"

We see cheap fast food establishments scattered everywhere with bright signs while healthy whole food is being quietly digested by individuals and families amongst themselves after patient cooking (researching).

The Atlantic itself, where this piece was published, had its own rocky transition to the digital world. I was a longtime print subscriber, and around 2012 or so I found that the cover of the book was becoming more and more offputting. Not the art, but the titles of the articles. They were deliberately provocative, to the point of being irrelevant to the actual content. Clickbait without the clicks. I got so tired of that, along with the shady antics of their subscription department, that I eventually stopped renewing my subscription. By shady antics, I mean requiring a credit card for subscription renewal, so they could auto-renew you every year thereafter. I had been happy to send a check for several years' worth of the Atlantic in advance, but I'm not going to sign up for automatic charges to my credit card. Their attempts to grow or at least maintain their subscriber base cost them my subscription.