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
#2Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 15 years - increasingly shittier ad units and user-tracking, SEO-optimized clickbait and formatting nonsense, short-form video, now AI. None of it benefits readers. None of it builds loyalty.
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#3Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 1…
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 journalists might otherwise report on. If you make it state-sponsored, you introduce conflicts of interest with governments that journalists might otherwise report on. Journalists working for free is not right, either.
Obviously journalistic integrity is a real thing and I choose to believe that the vast majority of journalists are out there to report the stories as they are and make information available that otherwise would not be. I do not have the same confidence in the business leaders, like you said. Look no further than Jeff Bezos's WaPo.
I'm not sure what the solutions could be.
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#4"NEWS" outlets are competing against social media and are doing things to get your attention.
Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#5Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 1…
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.
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#6I think the problem is traditional news journalism tried to be middle of the road. Which worked fine when you needed to run a tv channel or print edition that needed to appeal to most consumers and consumers had limited choices.
But with the internet everything got hyper specialized.
Want the entertainment & tabloid-esque factor? Well social media, certain subreddits are going to serve you better, for free.
Want the in-depth analysis. Well youtube, if you know how to be media critical, serves you better (yes YT is full of bullshit but if you truly want in depth analysis coverage, you probably know how to filter out the bad channels and find high quality). Not to mention specialist sites. Like compare the in depthness of isw (https://understandingwar.org) vs your average news broadcast when it comes to what is happening in current wars.
Heck even wikipedia tends to be more in depth and provide better context than most news reports.
Where does that leave us? Traditional news becomes an expensive product that has subpar quality. Then it becomes a vicious circle where either they go full clickbait to feed ads where quality goes in the dirt, or they go paywall which keeps them out of the digital conversation and errodes their publicitly which ultimately prevents them from acquiring new users.
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#7[dead]
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#8"NEWS" outlets are competing against social media and are doing things to get your attention. Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention
Your post is a good description of how journalism has operated for hundreds of years. Maybe we're seeing that the twentieth century was just a (positive) blip and now we're regressing to the mean.
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#9How 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 is at least slightly above average for these sorts of things.
Re: Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
#10It's not going to reinvent itself when it is compromised of few, like minded people. Government would need to step in, but the current US admin is in bed with media, so we'll be here a while, at least.