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I found David Perell's podcast interview with Robert Cottrell a fascinating discussion of the economics of journalism: https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-co

I found David Perell's podcast interview with Robert Cottrell a fascinating discussion of the economics of journalism: https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell On a different topic, why don't I subscribe? Lots of reasons, I suppose, including other priorities for my income combined with a horrible value/dollar ratio. But that's not really it. Before I'd even consider paying for journalism, I'd need to trust that I'm learning things that are true. A couple of recent examples of sloppiness that make it not worth subscribing, from my area of expertise (chosen to avoid anything controversial). There was an article in the NY Times about problems in the economics profession, focused on academic economists and similar non-academics like Fed economists. To make their point, the authors tossed in a comment by Larry Kudlow that was widely viewed as horrible. Why is that sloppy? Because Larry Kudlow is not an economist and has no connection to the economics profession. He got an undergrad degree in history, worked on Wall Street, worked in politics, and got a job as a TV commentator. Less than a minute of research would have found this. What are you paying for if they don't even do the easy fact checking? A second example occurred in the aftermath of the first labor market report after the pandemic hit in the US. Economists were trying to resolve the numbers on the unemployment report with the unemployment claims data. A prominent individual from CNN was quick to question the integrity of the economics profession. "You have to trust the numbers even if you don't like them!" he scolded the economists. What a reasonable position. Who could argue with that? Well if he had actually read the report he would have seen that two paragraphs of the report itself talked about problems with the data. No retraction of the tweet either. Again, what exactly are you paying for if you're talking about someone that's going to tweet something like that without even reading the labor report? I can write a platitude generator in a couple hours that would be just as useful.

toyg 6y ago
It's a vicious circle: * the world is getting more and more complex with every day * people are getting more and more "informed" through the internet, everyone can basically fact-check anything you write, almost in realtime * news orgs are under economic pressure, so they cut specialized roles and force journalists to be even more generalist than they were before and work even faster than before, with an inevitable fall in quality * people notice the fall in quality and stop reading, increasing economic pressures. Goto 1.

toyg 6y ago

It's a vicious circle: * the world is getting more and more complex with every day * people are getting more and more "informed" through the internet, everyone can basically fact-check anything you write, almost in realtime * news orgs are under economic pressure, so they cut specialized roles and force journalists to be even more generalist than they were before and work even faster than before, with an inevitable fall in quality * people notice the fall in quality and stop reading, increasing economic pressures. Goto 1.