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I'd argue that you can have a successful news organization through producing lots of profitable content that has poor journalism and poor writing, but is suffic

• danso 7y ago
  This has already been attempted for nearly a decade, by traditional journalists and outsiders (e.g. Demand Media), and the number of successful/sustainable/functional such companies is as infrequent as any tech unicorn, so the empirical evidence does not support your argument. > And that's even not that new, already a hundred years ago there were highly successful news organizations that thrived not despite but because of bad journalism, exploiting misleading sensationalism to its full potential. No argument there. And the golden era of American journalism – e.g. the 1970s to 1990s – produced great journalism and printed money for its owners (30%+ profit margins were not unheard of), but it's because established outlets had a virtual monopoly in their regions, especially newspapers (because TV/radio killed the need for evening newspapers, and in smaller cities, multiple newspapers). But it has never been easy to create a successful/functional news org by just doing journalism. Just as it has never been easy to build a useful tech startup by creating production ready code.