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In my mind - if you treat news as entertainment, you're finished. There are just too many entertaining things to do, that are free or almost free. The only ne

In my mind - if you treat news as entertainment, you're finished. There are just too many entertaining things to do, that are free or almost free. The only news I'm interested in surviving, is intelligent, well educated people, talking to domain experts. HackerNews is a good example - I'm far more interested in getting the occasional insight from a quality comment, than anything that's actually posted on here. If only I didn't have to sift through 100 comments to encounter 1 gem - that should be the journalist. Trouble is - people view journalism as a job, it's not. Having education and life experience in a field, combined with decent journalism, is a job. Journalism on it's own is just not interesting - being a wordsmith is not more valuable than actually knowing what you're talking about.

jancsika 8y ago
> Journalism on it's own is just not interesting - being a wordsmith is not more valuable than actually knowing what you're talking about. Knowing what you're talking about and informing the public are two different things. Both are necessary parts of journalism, with neither sufficient alone to fulfill the vital role of the press as a check on the three branches of government.
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raarts 8y ago
I agree. In addition to this I think that - since getting clicks is the business model - they will move towards publishing content that gets more people to click, enraging being the most profitable form of engaging. This has resulted in articles that put more value on getting an emotional response from as many people as possible, than putting out an honest, balanced and fact-checked news story. A good example of this would be the recent slandering of PewDiePie. And he debunked that quite effectively on his channel which has 83 million subscribers. This resulted in many people now looking at Vox, Buzzfeed with suspicion. Personally I went through a similar process when people I care about asked me what I thought of Jordan Peterson and I started looking into him, which for me ended in changing a lot of my views on the mainstream media. Which I now look at with a very suspicious eye.

jancsika 8y ago

> Journalism on it's own is just not interesting - being a wordsmith is not more valuable than actually knowing what you're talking about. Knowing what you're talking about and informing the public are two different things. Both are necessary parts of journalism, with neither sufficient alone to fulfill the vital role of the press as a check on the three branches of government.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

raarts 8y ago

I agree. In addition to this I think that - since getting clicks is the business model - they will move towards publishing content that gets more people to click, enraging being the most profitable form of engaging. This has resulted in articles that put more value on getting an emotional response from as many people as possible, than putting out an honest, balanced and fact-checked news story. A good example of this would be the recent slandering of PewDiePie. And he debunked that quite effectively on his channel which has 83 million subscribers. This resulted in many people now looking at Vox, Buzzfeed with suspicion. Personally I went through a similar process when people I care about asked me what I thought of Jordan Peterson and I started looking into him, which for me ended in changing a lot of my views on the mainstream media. Which I now look at with a very suspicious eye.