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Unfortunately, a vast majority of people seem to cynically welcome the death of professional journalism, while being optimistic enough to be believe some blogge

Unfortunately, a vast majority of people seem to cynically welcome the death of professional journalism, while being optimistic enough to be believe some bloggers will fill the void. It's somewhat schizophrenic, really. See this threat for examples of pure enjoyment of others' failure, justified by the darwinistic logic that anything that dies must deserve it for being insufficiently smart or flexible. While that logic is rooted somewhere in capitalism, they do seem to miss the fundamental idea that this business, like any other, was two-sided: any transaction generated profit not only for the content creator, but also the consumer. If your favourite shop had to close because some local gang found an unstoppable method to steal from it, you and your neighbours would have to switch to what was previously your second choice, which by definition is worse according to your preferences on price/distance/quality/etc. It seems like the big institutions such as Times will survive. But local politics will function about as well as any regulatory system missing one leg of the feedback cycle; imagine air conditioning with a missing temperature sensor. I'm holding out hope for some people to recognise this. It is just as true that the advertising industry went too far in some ways. Maybe an ad blocker takes pride in a sense of taste and moderation could find an opening, blocking the worst ads but considering the ad/ad network/advertiser/site with a willingness to allow some. Or it goes the other way, with ad targeting getting anywhere near what it has been promising, and people getting fewer ads of such quality they consider them interesting more than annoying.

bawolff 7y ago
If a magazine i sometimes read because its free closes shop because they raise prices and nobody wants to pay for it... I probably feel nothing because i was only reading it because it was free, and if the price is no longer worth it that's that. People always bemoan how x is going to die on the internet because of changing trends in advertising. Fact is many of these sites provide ok at best content, and are dying because the value they provide doesnt equal the cost they want to charge.
flukus 7y ago
What's the industry doing to save themselves? Some have gone to the paywall model but they can't even commit to that because they want the benefits of the open web driving traffic to them. Then if you pay you still get bombarded with ads and two dozen trackers. The journalism industry can't seem to accept that most of them were in the distribution business of moving around physical bits of paper and that without that they have no revenue stream. And without the limits of their old distribution model the world needs far less journalists than it once did. There's also more to professional journalism than online newspapers. There's still local news on TV. In most countries there's still state funded organizations providing way better quality than their commercial counterparts ever did. So journalism will survive, they just need to accept that we need less journalists than decades ago and their old business model probably won't survive.

bawolff 7y ago

If a magazine i sometimes read because its free closes shop because they raise prices and nobody wants to pay for it... I probably feel nothing because i was only reading it because it was free, and if the price is no longer worth it that's that. People always bemoan how x is going to die on the internet because of changing trends in advertising. Fact is many of these sites provide ok at best content, and are dying because the value they provide doesnt equal the cost they want to charge.

flukus 7y ago

What's the industry doing to save themselves? Some have gone to the paywall model but they can't even commit to that because they want the benefits of the open web driving traffic to them. Then if you pay you still get bombarded with ads and two dozen trackers. The journalism industry can't seem to accept that most of them were in the distribution business of moving around physical bits of paper and that without that they have no revenue stream. And without the limits of their old distribution model the world needs far less journalists than it once did. There's also more to professional journalism than online newspapers. There's still local news on TV. In most countries there's still state funded organizations providing way better quality than their commercial counterparts ever did. So journalism will survive, they just need to accept that we need less journalists than decades ago and their old business model probably won't survive.