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Not quite. It’s only in the 20th century with the rise of pass production that every paper had strong advertising income, and thus the need to expand circulatio

Not quite. It’s only in the 20th century with the rise of pass production that every paper had strong advertising income, and thus the need to expand circulation to a geographically defined group (with ad-reading partisans on both sides). This is what made them compete with quality differentiated investigative news content, and that is how you get the news culture in question. If anything today’s decline has produced a regression to the earlier days of the 18th and 19th centuries, where you sold the content itself, reaching for sensationalism - often overtly political sensationalism, which sells great - and yellow journalism. Ad based papers traditionally hated opinion pages because advertisers didn't really want to be next to controversy. But readers love them. Now that you once more need to sell to readers more than advertisers, now that you have a million choices of news instead of maybe two per city, the whole news medium turns partisan, whether it’s the NYT or Fox.

liability 6y ago
Rose-tinted glasses seem to often filter out yellow journalism in discussions concerning journalistic decline. In the late 19th century yellow journalists were largely responsible for starting the Spanish-American War. And mainstream publications were hardly saints in the past either, for instance in the mid-20th century the NYTimes made themselves an uncritical mouthpiece for Stalin with denial of the Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter... It's hard to have a meaningful conversation about the present state of journalism with such a sanitized inaccurate understanding of the history of journalism. From my perspective, modern journalism isn't doing great, but neither does it seem to be unusually bad. You might say the American press participated in starting the Iraq War, but in that case they were uncritically parroting what a US president was telling them, rather than pressuring a president who wanted peace into declaring war, as the yellow journalists did in the 1890s. Relative severity of these wars aside, it seems to me that journalism is presently better now than it was then.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  “The declining capacity of newsrooms to investigate potential stories not only renders newspapers less valuable to news consumers, but also results in a newspaper that is less valuable to its community.” https://www.brookings.edu/research/local-journalism-in-crisis-why-america-must-revive-its-local-newsrooms/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/local-journalism-in-crisi...

liability 6y ago

Rose-tinted glasses seem to often filter out yellow journalism in discussions concerning journalistic decline. In the late 19th century yellow journalists were largely responsible for starting the Spanish-American War. And mainstream publications were hardly saints in the past either, for instance in the mid-20th century the NYTimes made themselves an uncritical mouthpiece for Stalin with denial of the Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter... It's hard to have a meaningful conversation about the present state of journalism with such a sanitized inaccurate understanding of the history of journalism. From my perspective, modern journalism isn't doing great, but neither does it seem to be unusually bad. You might say the American press participated in starting the Iraq War, but in that case they were uncritically parroting what a US president was telling them, rather than pressuring a president who wanted peace into declaring war, as the yellow journalists did in the 1890s. Relative severity of these wars aside, it seems to me that journalism is presently better now than it was then.

wombatmobile 6y ago
“The declining capacity of newsrooms to investigate potential stories not only renders newspapers less valuable to news consumers, but also results in a newspaper that is less valuable to its community.” https://www.brookings.edu/research/local-journalism-in-crisis-why-america-must-revive-its-local-newsrooms/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/local-journalism-in-crisi...