There are some fundamental misunderstandings here about what journalism is and how it's produced. > [H]ere’s how I see push journalism: The reporter has a hun

There are some fundamental misunderstandings here about what journalism is and how it's produced. > [H]ere’s how I see push journalism: The reporter has a hunch about a newsworthy story that hasn’t being told yet Most journalism doesn't start with a reporter's hunch; it starts because something happened somewhere. President Trump offended somebody; two soldiers were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan; the local factory announced it's laying off 10% of its workforce; the city council voted against filling the pothole on Main Street. Something happened, an editor decided that thing was newsworthy, and now the reporter's task is to tell the reader about it. Because of this, most reporters don't spend time thinking Big Thoughts about long-term trends. They tell a story of something that happened, and then move on to the next thing that happened while they were writing about the other thing. Hence the saying that "journalism is the first rough draft of history" (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/on-the-trail-of-the-question-who-first-said-or-wrote-that-journalism-is-the-first-rough-draft-of-history.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/on-the-trail-of-...). Explaining long-term trends is what historians do. Journalists do something different; they tell people what happened. Most of the other misunderstandings in the piece fall out from this one. Journalists don't look for solutions to problems, they don't even look for problems; they look for things that happened. (Which is why problems like "the President offended somebody" get more coverage than problems like "in twenty years climate change will drown us all" -- the President's offense is something that happened, the creeping, inexorable apocalypse is something that hasn't happened yet.) Journalists have neither the time nor the need to consult twelve sources for every story; they're not looking to determine the ideal response to some problem, they're just looking to tell people about something that happened, and you only need two or three independent confirmations that something happened to be able to say with reasonable certainty that it did in fact happen. And most journalists aren't "PUSH[ING] LIKE HELL to get the story in front of as many people as possible"; when they've told the story of one thing that happened, they move on to the next one. Things are always happening, after all. None of which is to say that this process is necessarily ideal, of course. (Few things in the world are.) Just that, if you want to reform journalism, you have to start with a firm grounding in what journalism is. And journalism is not a quest for product-market fit, or a flavor of historiography, or an attempt to figure out What It All Means. Journalism is telling people about things that happened, and the further you get from that elemental task, the less what you're doing can be considered journalism.