51–60 of 81 posts
I'm fairly tuned into news -- certainly less-so than in the past, but somehow I never even heard of The Messenger.
Yep, I read the news every day, subscribe to several news outlets, keep up with the various issues going on, am even somewhat tangentially aware of the various meta-drama going on in journalism circles, and the shutdown announcement is the first I've ever heard of The Messenger. Whatever they were spending their money on, it certainly wasn't marketing.
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The for profit model of journalism has been the dominant form for over 100 years. During the majority of that time it flourished. Only in the last 25 years has it collapsed. I’d say your view probably needs some updating.
It was a fluke that it worked so well for so long.
fluke - noun - an unlikely chance occurrence, especially a surprising piece of luck. Ex: "their triumph was no fluke"
No, probably not.
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Its more likely to happen in Caifornia than anywhere else imo. Medi cal would just need to be expanded and thats it. The framework already exists and about 30% of the state is already on it.
That "just" is doing a lot of work there. California had a $38 billion budget deficit last year and a $68 billion deficit the year before. I would like universal healthcare as much as or more than anyone, but without fiscal transfers at the Federal level I don't think it is possible - states cannot run permanent debts the way the Federal government can.
I love the title "brunchlord".
The only thing I like about it is that it makes it easy to know whether I should care about this person's opinion. Sure enough, the blog post was completely deranged -- to the point that the author even tried to present it as a given that reporting on both sides of an issue is a bad thing. This moron is legitimately mad that modern journalism isn't propagandistic enough. Incredible.
Not that anyone’s doing a good job of that right now, but it seems like that’s what the author is advocatig for.
From a business perspective the fatal flaw is that the customers don’t really want to read something close to the “truth”, they just want to hear their own preconceptions, or the deliberately uninformed statements of their favorite politician celebrities, repeated back.
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How do you suggest we pay journalist? They certainty shouldn't work for free.
Either form journalist orgs as non-profits (e.g NPR) or modernize journalism content (e.g Morning Brew). The traditional print news model is getting increasingly out of date and it's going to take a bunch of old geezers dying to modernize journalism. It's still "content", and news outlets need to keep up with changing consumer tastes.
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Same. Feels a lot like insider gossip that thought they had more going for themselves? That said, "It’s a radical idea, but we could make meaningful progress if we clawed journalism from the hands of affluent, out of touch brunchlords, and put it back under the control of diverse, hungry journalists and editors who actually understand the news industry and media environment they work and exist in." is also a rather b…
In my opinion, "journalism for journalism's sake" would be what we call reporting the truth, or investigative journalism. Is there a national outlet that invests in pure investigative journalism anymore?
> In my opinion, "journalism for journalism's sake" would be what we call reporting the truth, or investigative journalism. Is there a national outlet that invests in pure investigative journalism anymore?
Investigative journalism can still amount to "gatekeeping and another venue for activism," if the investigative attention is selective and focused (more or less) to support one or more activist programs.
That's actually the most effective kind of manipulation, because it's simultaneously true and misleading.
And I also think that's close to what we've got. To really be "journalism for journalism's sake," I think you'd have to allocated investigative resources roughly equally among factions, with investigations focused on "pro-narrative" ideas and "counter-narrative" ideas.
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It's a-little-ambiguously-coded pro-MAGA how dare people hate the right, the right will have its revenge bit. It doesn't really talk to The Messenger.
I agree that this is what OP is saying. But it's funny that that didn't actually happen? All I saw was mainstream media outlets continuously chiding their own readers for not being sufficiently empathetic to poor, white, Trump voters.
Likewise I've never seen "if you vote for democrats swipe left" on Tinder, but the opposite is extremely common.
No one has any great theories on what to do about info overload. So it's going to suck until someone comes up with something new.
The original Circa had a great approach to this IMO. They chunked up news into smaller pieces of information, and gave you a way to indicate interest in receiving follow-up notifications about a given story.
The effect is pleasantly like the sort of dense, brief topic subscriptions you mention, in a weirdly retrospective kind of sense. The best way I can think to describe the effect is that it feels like having subscribed to the story’s notifications a year or two ago, before I knew I’d be interested in it.
They use a similar technique in their “Signals” products. I’m not sure how they’d describe those, but they seem aimed less at hard reporting and more at delivering context and background by threading together paragraph-sized summaries of mainly other institutions’ reporting.
The few journalists that still exist have in many cases resorted to crowdfunding and personal blogs with difficult discoverability. And the mainstream tries to miscredit them by all means they can, such as the Trusted News Initiative (only listen to us), and fact-checking that many times are ridiculously false themselves.
It's a shame, but I understand why they're clawing to remain in power, people can't know the truth or form their own opinions based on facts. That would be dangerous. And when the facts can't be disputed there are only 2 options, bury or miscredit.