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Really glad Sueddeutsche Zeitung is getting international attention. They traditionally were vastly important for the intellectual life in Munich (e.g. many fam

Really glad Sueddeutsche Zeitung is getting international attention. They traditionally were vastly important for the intellectual life in Munich (e.g. many families had a subscription for the printed version and get it delivered to their doors in the morning). They do do excellent jorunalism, including on the local area around Munich. So, even though I have lived abroad, I am still a paying subscriber. Quality journalism is useful and great, as are the investigative projects they have been engaged in. Moral? Do support quality journalism in your area if you can.

mschuster91 9y ago
> Do support quality journalism in your area if you can. And to be fair, the "clickbaiters" from Buzzfeed and friends also do some high quality investigative pieces, financed by the mentioned clickbait. Makes me wonder if this will be the future of journalism...
- Maarten88 9y ago
  Where do you think they will cut costs when their clickbait income disappoints sometime in the future? Also, I think that given enough financial interest, media businesses like that can be pressured into not publishing/investigating something. They won't take on big financial interests, because in the end, readers are their product, not their reporting. So I sure hope that will not be the future of journalism.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > They won't take on big financial interests, because in the end, readers are their product, not their reporting. That's the problem we have with nearly all media businesses these days. The exception are the various public media institutions (eg NPR, BBC, ARD/ZDF) because they do not depend on advertising, but they are subjected to pressure by politicians in leadership positions...
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Eh, they might have an eye to "graduate" to journalism. Ego can get involved. Plus, clickbait might not work forever.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > the "clickbaiters" from Buzzfeed and friends also do some high quality investigative pieces, financed by the mentioned clickbait. Makes me wonder if this will be the future of journalism... In a way it's the history of journalism. Much of what we take for granted now has long served the same purpose. The NY Times added op-eds in the 1960s as a way to drive readership with provocation.[0] They added many of their non-news sections in the 1970s, IIRC the history, as a strategy to drive readership and revenue in order to fund hard news - the click-bait of the time, now normalized and therefore invisible to us. For most newspapers, classified ads long served the same purpose; craigslist and other Internet resources are possibly the leading reason for financial troubles in journalism today. [0] A Profitable Public Sphere: The Creation of the New York Times Op-Ed Page by Michael J. Socolow, U. of Maine: http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cmj_facpub/2 http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cmj_facpub/2
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > For most newspapers, classified ads long served the same purpose; craigslist and other Internet resources are possibly the leading reason for financial troubles in journalism today. Well, that's inherent in capitalism: something inefficient (which non-instant, non-searchable classifieds certainly are, compared to CL and friends) gets driven out of the market in favor of the more efficient solution. Generally, this principle works fine from an evolutionary point of view. The problem is that we as a society have not yet figured out what to do with the losses that originate from the implosion of the "obsolete" infrastructure. With the manual labor replaced by machines in the early industrial history and even with pre-Internet modernizations, societies could shift the labor resources into other jobs that could absorb the load. At the moment, however, there are no labor-intensive "new" jobs available any more for all those whose jobs have been/are/will be replaced by automation, and we do not yet have a concept what to do with societally important stuff such as journalism. This is a significant factor in current politics, actually - the "flyover states" voted for Trump, and "bloggers" without any journalistic knowledge or even journalistic ethics are a massive counterforce to actual journalists and newspapers... after all, it's easier to spew out fake stuff and nonsense fabricated in minutes than real journalistic articles backed by sometimes thousands of hours of research and work. The Internet drastically lowered entry barriers (no matter if for journalists, for politicians or for startups), maybe more so than any technological progress before in history... and that has its upsides as well as its downsides.

mschuster91 9y ago

> Do support quality journalism in your area if you can. And to be fair, the "clickbaiters" from Buzzfeed and friends also do some high quality investigative pieces, financed by the mentioned clickbait. Makes me wonder if this will be the future of journalism...

Maarten88 9y ago
Where do you think they will cut costs when their clickbait income disappoints sometime in the future? Also, I think that given enough financial interest, media businesses like that can be pressured into not publishing/investigating something. They won't take on big financial interests, because in the end, readers are their product, not their reporting. So I sure hope that will not be the future of journalism.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > They won't take on big financial interests, because in the end, readers are their product, not their reporting. That's the problem we have with nearly all media businesses these days. The exception are the various public media institutions (eg NPR, BBC, ARD/ZDF) because they do not depend on advertising, but they are subjected to pressure by politicians in leadership positions...
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Eh, they might have an eye to "graduate" to journalism. Ego can get involved. Plus, clickbait might not work forever.
forapurpose 9y ago
> the "clickbaiters" from Buzzfeed and friends also do some high quality investigative pieces, financed by the mentioned clickbait. Makes me wonder if this will be the future of journalism... In a way it's the history of journalism. Much of what we take for granted now has long served the same purpose. The NY Times added op-eds in the 1960s as a way to drive readership with provocation.[0] They added many of their non-news sections in the 1970s, IIRC the history, as a strategy to drive readership and revenue in order to fund hard news - the click-bait of the time, now normalized and therefore invisible to us. For most newspapers, classified ads long served the same purpose; craigslist and other Internet resources are possibly the leading reason for financial troubles in journalism today. [0] A Profitable Public Sphere: The Creation of the New York Times Op-Ed Page by Michael J. Socolow, U. of Maine: http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cmj_facpub/2 http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cmj_facpub/2
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > For most newspapers, classified ads long served the same purpose; craigslist and other Internet resources are possibly the leading reason for financial troubles in journalism today. Well, that's inherent in capitalism: something inefficient (which non-instant, non-searchable classifieds certainly are, compared to CL and friends) gets driven out of the market in favor of the more efficient solution. Generally, this principle works fine from an evolutionary point of view. The problem is that we as a society have not yet figured out what to do with the losses that originate from the implosion of the "obsolete" infrastructure. With the manual labor replaced by machines in the early industrial history and even with pre-Internet modernizations, societies could shift the labor resources into other jobs that could absorb the load. At the moment, however, there are no labor-intensive "new" jobs available any more for all those whose jobs have been/are/will be replaced by automation, and we do not yet have a concept what to do with societally important stuff such as journalism. This is a significant factor in current politics, actually - the "flyover states" voted for Trump, and "bloggers" without any journalistic knowledge or even journalistic ethics are a massive counterforce to actual journalists and newspapers... after all, it's easier to spew out fake stuff and nonsense fabricated in minutes than real journalistic articles backed by sometimes thousands of hours of research and work. The Internet drastically lowered entry barriers (no matter if for journalists, for politicians or for startups), maybe more so than any technological progress before in history... and that has its upsides as well as its downsides.