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I'm guessing this is an unpopular idea but is it possible we just don't need as many journalists? I 100% Agree that journalism is important but before the inter
by greggman 9y ago
I'm guessing this is an unpopular idea but is it possible we just don't need as many journalists? I 100% Agree that journalism is important but before the internet, for the most post, every news paper needed people to cover every story they wanted to run. Even if they took a story from the AP or Ruters they still needed someone to dig that up. Now, there is no reason why the AP and Rutere can't just publish their content themselves to the entire world. Similaly a local newspaper doesn't need to pay someone to cover the world news. We don't need every major news paper from every country to have reporters in every other country as they can just use someone else's reporting.
I'm guessing your first thought to that is we need multiple voices and points of view and I don't disagree. I'm just pointing out that in 1975 you probably had 2-5 reporters from Sweden in NYC, 5-15 from Germany, 5-15 from France, 4-7 from Italy, 2-3 from Spain, 5-15 from the UK, 3-4 from Ireland etc etc. Add up all the major countries and their might have been 400+ NYC foreign correspondents. Do we need all 400 or has the internet made it so we only need 10-20? Apply that concept everywhere, even to local papers and it seems like the biggest hit to journalism isn't Google, it's the internet itself. Just like a few wheat harvesting machine replace hundreds of workers the world has changed to one where far less journalists can do the work of what used to take many more?
- icebraining 9y agoWhat specifically did the Internet change that allows for the same coverage with so fewer correspondents?
- temporalparts 9y agoI know I'm a day late, but thought I would provide my perspective. I think there's two aspects to this, is journalism sustainable and is journalism worthwhile. I think publishers are having a hard time with the former, but I think undeniably it is valuable in the latter. As the world becomes more complex and bad actors are becoming more sophisticated, I think the world needs more journalists to uncover truth and reality, especially since there is profit to be made from writing fake news. I think the fact that it's not sustainable now means that we should move to a model where we subsidize news with public funding; not sure what the best structure is, but there is so much good public externalities to journalism that it's worthwhile to fund it with public money.