Another thing that's sort of been a pebble in the shoe of both journalism and education (I mean, at some level they -should- be doing similar things, right?) is

Another thing that's sort of been a pebble in the shoe of both journalism and education (I mean, at some level they -should- be doing similar things, right?) is that they don't necessarily make it easy for readers to find original sources. A counterexample: if I want to know about the origins of our understanding of geometry, Euclid's Elements is a pretty solid place to start. Or Newton's Principia for physics. Now let's look at a news topic like climate change. Give me data I can dig through for myself. I'm sure it's available, but it's not something you'll usually see journalists directing their readers to. Of course, most readers aren't equipped to use the data if they did have it, so on a practical level it makes some sense not to bother including it. But this raises a deeper question: is your Average Joe Citizen (who is not an engineer, but maybe a barista, salesman, banker, etc) equipped to have an opinion about climate change at all? We take for granted incredible access to information, but outside our professional specialty most people rely on other people to tell them what to think, and those people may be accredited by other people, with various biases, agendas, traditions, etc all the way up. And even with the people who are working directly with data, there are occasionally political pressures on them to arrive at certain conclusions (diet research in particular is infamous for this). All that said, I do believe in the value of journalism to educate. But I think a journalism worth paying for will look more like educational material than the journalism we have today.