I'm going to go on a rant, as I know this is an old piece. But, I feel like it's really sad to see the devolution on journalism quality as it has become digitiz

I'm going to go on a rant, as I know this is an old piece. But, I feel like it's really sad to see the devolution on journalism quality as it has become digitized. Yes, it's always been easier to do an incendiary, low quality hatchet job on a tough subject that you don't know anything about than to do a well researched long-form think piece. But, it seems that all I see more and more of (exacerbated by social media) is low information fluff pieces that make grand, controversial assertions. The problem is, there's no cultural penalty for being wrong, so there's no skin in the game from the authors. Right now, there's little stop the market from being saturated with trash. I had a lot of problems with the Gawker media properties, but I liked how cutting they could be, and how their snark could (at their best) act as a natural check against the cancerous growth of smarmy clickbait. Company ending lawsuit aside, they also did a fantastic job at capitalizing on their snark. Of course, even they had their biases and blind spots, but nowadays, I feel as if we really don't have too much. One of my bosses at a former company used to quip "I love HBR articles. They usually follow the formula of a 2x2 identity matrix of the form of 'You're probably thinking A. Here's why B, which you weren't thinking about, is true while A is wrong.'" But it's really sadly true, and we don't do a great job of exercising the sociolinguistic tools to critique poor choices of A or B. I don't know whether this is a chicken or the egg situation that comes as a result of the factory oriented American education system, but it makes me pretty sad and disappointed.