4 ms·
This is a massive oversimplification. The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time.
by philwelch 7y ago
This is a massive oversimplification.
The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time. It was called "yellow journalism", it incited the Spanish-American War, and it was the business model of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In other words, if you are an excellent journalist, you get a prize named after the guy who founded and ran the Gilded Age equivalent of Buzzfeed.
Each US city used to have maybe dozens of newspapers of varying quality and bias. (This is similar to the UK newspaper landscape--in fact, the lower end of that landscape includes the Daily Mail, which translated its tabloid journalism model rather seamlessly to the era of clickbait.) What started killing print journalism was radio and later TV journalism, which were far less substantial (because they lacked the information density of the written word) but far more appealing (because of the ease of consumption and the stimulation of sound and video). This is what culled the vast newspaper markets down to the city-wide monopoly or duopoly system. And because the remaining newspaper readership consisted of the more literate and invested members of the population, print journalism briefly had more journalistic value.
Then cable news disrupted the broadcast networks, talk radio disrupted the editorial oligopoly of the major newspapers and TV news, and finally the internet broke the whole thing wide open. Including the glorious period of time when "blogs" were considered a serious threat to "legitimate journalism".
- lonelappde 7y agoIn your theory, why did literate and engaged people abandon print journalism for Internet but not TV?
- Spivak 7y agoBecause this theory gets the timeline right but the value judgements wrong. The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away. People who were previously “engaged” with local newspapers are now the commenters on news sites.
- philwelch 7y ago> The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away. Sorry, but it is. Functionally literate people can read and comprehend many more WPM than are typical for human speech. As a consequence, written media are fundamentally capable of much higher information density than visual or audial media, with the exception of certain types of visual or spacial information which can still be printed or included with the written word.
- Spivak 7y agoAnd that would matter if the goal of writing was maximizing information density. Surely you wouldn't say that gzip is the highest form of the written word.
- mistermann 7y agoThis is a good point. Communication, across various mediums, propogates ideas. Information density is interesting, but this style of thinking overlooks persuasive impact.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoI don't watch videos online if I can help it, because they're too slow. If I do, because there's no transcript available, I crank up the speed to x2 or x4 to mitigate the frustration. Any "persuasive" impact from video is lost on me because I'm bored and frustrated after about 30s of watching (and that's after skipping the first 30s of "welcome to my youtube channel, today we'll be doing what the title says we'll be doing, as you know because that's why you clicked on this link" waste of time).
- philwelch 7y agoThat’s such a fatuous analogy that I have to conclude that you are deliberately missing the point.
- philwelch 7y agoBecause the written word is more sophisticated and information-dense than the spoken word, which means print had to be displaced by another written medium.
- JohnL4 7y agoPlus Craigslist. Reuters and the WSJ are old proofs that people ARE willing to just pay for quality news. Note also that national news is fine; it's local news that's in trouble.