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>People don't want to pay for quality journalism despite what journalists and media like to tell themselves. I'm not sure that's really true. We simply have n

>People don't want to pay for quality journalism despite what journalists and media like to tell themselves. I'm not sure that's really true. We simply have no option. There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality".

noxToken 10y ago
> There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality". I don't know if I'd quite go that far. I don't remember when the phenomenon started, but a lot of online platform shifted from news organizations to news orgs with blogs. The first instance I noticed was some years ago when the WSJ, Bloomberg, or some similar organization had a noticeable decline in the quality or articles that had been shared in my circles. It wasn't that the quality was down. They had integrated user blogs that required no clout to contribute. The only way to distinguish between an actual article and the no-name blog contributor was a /pages (or something similar) in the URL. At that point, you may as well have been reading a Medium post. I do think there is plenty of quality journalism online. I think one of the main issues is that the blog side of organizations has been deeply intertwined with the actual news content. We are so used to blog spam being passed as an official news story from the companies we trusted.
- CM30 10y ago
  Forbes is probably the worst one here. It's gone from a relatively well respected to publication to one that seemingly publish just about anything, and that's without even getting into their advertising issues.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality"." This is a real problem, I agree. That said, there are some online news outlets that at least try to offer a better class of journalism. The Intercept is one such outlet: https://theintercept.com https://theintercept.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept
ThomPete 10y ago
Define quality journalism and you will come up pretty short I think :) What most people mean with quality journalism really is stuff like investigative journalism or opinion pieces by people like Thomas Friedman. And there is plenty of that online. The idea of quality journalism beyond that really doesn't exist in anything but the journalists heads.
- Retric 10y ago
  How often have online Journalists exposed as in first reported corruption among powerful well connected people in the US? That's the single most important function of the free press and they more or less stopped. Losing celebrity gossip, reworded press releases, and vastly misinterpreted scientific research is not a sacrifice we should care about.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Thats been taken over by the likes of WikiLeaks and other public interest groups now that most of the corruption trails are available online.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Assuming the goal is to both investigate and report I don't think this can be punted. Looking at the past there is likely corruption of one form or another at more or less every single county in the US, every major city, all states, and of course every major federal department. Saying 'not my job' is fine if you accept you might not have a job.
      - ThomPete 10y ago
        I don't really care about the goal I care about the reason why journalism should exist. It used to exist because we didn't have other means to get to this information and a lot of issues were so complicated and the access to those who could explain them limited. These days, this is all open on the platform. There are experts far better than the ones your local newspaper can get a hold of, there are people far closer to the issues than journalist who help expose much of the corruption. Today most things leave a digital trail behind it that hackers far smarter than any investigative journalist can be, get access to. I would say in many ways journalism have been freed from it's former obligations. Not because it isn't good enough but because it isn't needed anymore.

noxToken 10y ago

> There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality". I don't know if I'd quite go that far. I don't remember when the phenomenon started, but a lot of online platform shifted from news organizations to news orgs with blogs. The first instance I noticed was some years ago when the WSJ, Bloomberg, or some similar organization had a noticeable decline in the quality or articles that had been shared in my circles. It wasn't that the quality was down. They had integrated user blogs that required no clout to contribute. The only way to distinguish between an actual article and the no-name blog contributor was a /pages (or something similar) in the URL. At that point, you may as well have been reading a Medium post. I do think there is plenty of quality journalism online. I think one of the main issues is that the blog side of organizations has been deeply intertwined with the actual news content. We are so used to blog spam being passed as an official news story from the companies we trusted.

CM30 10y ago
Forbes is probably the worst one here. It's gone from a relatively well respected to publication to one that seemingly publish just about anything, and that's without even getting into their advertising issues.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

> "There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality"." This is a real problem, I agree. That said, there are some online news outlets that at least try to offer a better class of journalism. The Intercept is one such outlet: https://theintercept.com https://theintercept.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept

ThomPete 10y ago

Define quality journalism and you will come up pretty short I think :) What most people mean with quality journalism really is stuff like investigative journalism or opinion pieces by people like Thomas Friedman. And there is plenty of that online. The idea of quality journalism beyond that really doesn't exist in anything but the journalists heads.

Retric 10y ago
How often have online Journalists exposed as in first reported corruption among powerful well connected people in the US? That's the single most important function of the free press and they more or less stopped. Losing celebrity gossip, reworded press releases, and vastly misinterpreted scientific research is not a sacrifice we should care about.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Thats been taken over by the likes of WikiLeaks and other public interest groups now that most of the corruption trails are available online.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Assuming the goal is to both investigate and report I don't think this can be punted. Looking at the past there is likely corruption of one form or another at more or less every single county in the US, every major city, all states, and of course every major federal department. Saying 'not my job' is fine if you accept you might not have a job.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      I don't really care about the goal I care about the reason why journalism should exist. It used to exist because we didn't have other means to get to this information and a lot of issues were so complicated and the access to those who could explain them limited. These days, this is all open on the platform. There are experts far better than the ones your local newspaper can get a hold of, there are people far closer to the issues than journalist who help expose much of the corruption. Today most things leave a digital trail behind it that hackers far smarter than any investigative journalist can be, get access to. I would say in many ways journalism have been freed from it's former obligations. Not because it isn't good enough but because it isn't needed anymore.