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I think journalism is falling into a death spiral of “publish-popular-clickable-articles” or perish. Journalists no longer have the time to truly dig into a sto

I think journalism is falling into a death spiral of “publish-popular-clickable-articles” or perish. Journalists no longer have the time to truly dig into a story, to fact check it, and to make sure it’s written accurately. They get behind, they get desperate, and they fall into these traps - self-made or otherwise.

unreal6 6y ago
It also seems that there is generally a shorter collective memory about veracity in news stories. The prime example to me is Bloomberg's seemingly baseless story alleging Chinese hardware-level hacking of US computing equipment. More than two years later, and Bloomberg still has not retracted the story [1]. It doesn't seem to me that Bloomberg has been discounted as a reliable source of news in the general discourse due to their reluctance to admit to their mistakes in their reporting of this story. At least in this case there is an apology. [1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/07/bloombergs-big-crap https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/07/bloombergs-big-...
markus_zhang 6y ago
And sometimes jounalism is just a small part of politics.
Traster 6y ago
Frankly, I think this view is incredibly popular, and misinformed about the state of journalism. There was a time, about a little over a decade ago where ad-supported journalism was considered the future, and companies like Buzzfeed started to emerge. Companies started optimizing for page views to boost their revenue and the explosion in clickbait happened. However, even by 2011 Buzzfeed had started to try to pivot to more long-form content hiring the former editor in cheif of Politico. By 2015 we saw the "Pivot to video" where outlets had identified that this clickbait stuff had really run it's course and were now moving to video as a way to bring in viewers and revenue. Of course that notoriously failed - having cut editorial staff to focus on video production, it was only about 24 months before they were cutting video production too because it produced no revenue. Vox Media cut 5% of their staff at the beginning of 2018. So let's look at what actually is happening in the news media today: The Atlantic, TNR, NYT, WashPo. All of them are marketing themselves as high value premium products that are funded almost exclusively by subscription revenue. The new media companies that are still persisting with an advertising strategy are bringing their ad-networks in house and attempting to hit scale in a way that let's them compete with Facebook. The jury is still very much out on whether that's viable of whether they end up being forced to merge or being bought out by a large player like Spotify. We aren't in the death spiral of chasing views anymore, we're very much back in a stable area where high quality content is available if you're willing to pay for it. The problem is that people are still judging the NYT by what they see on Buzzfeed - because they don't pay for the NYT and assume it's like Buzzfeed. It's going to take a while for the reputations to recover but we do need to actually understand the business as it is today.

unreal6 6y ago

It also seems that there is generally a shorter collective memory about veracity in news stories. The prime example to me is Bloomberg's seemingly baseless story alleging Chinese hardware-level hacking of US computing equipment. More than two years later, and Bloomberg still has not retracted the story [1]. It doesn't seem to me that Bloomberg has been discounted as a reliable source of news in the general discourse due to their reluctance to admit to their mistakes in their reporting of this story. At least in this case there is an apology. [1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/07/bloombergs-big-crap https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/07/bloombergs-big-...

markus_zhang 6y ago

And sometimes jounalism is just a small part of politics.

Traster 6y ago

Frankly, I think this view is incredibly popular, and misinformed about the state of journalism. There was a time, about a little over a decade ago where ad-supported journalism was considered the future, and companies like Buzzfeed started to emerge. Companies started optimizing for page views to boost their revenue and the explosion in clickbait happened. However, even by 2011 Buzzfeed had started to try to pivot to more long-form content hiring the former editor in cheif of Politico. By 2015 we saw the "Pivot to video" where outlets had identified that this clickbait stuff had really run it's course and were now moving to video as a way to bring in viewers and revenue. Of course that notoriously failed - having cut editorial staff to focus on video production, it was only about 24 months before they were cutting video production too because it produced no revenue. Vox Media cut 5% of their staff at the beginning of 2018. So let's look at what actually is happening in the news media today: The Atlantic, TNR, NYT, WashPo. All of them are marketing themselves as high value premium products that are funded almost exclusively by subscription revenue. The new media companies that are still persisting with an advertising strategy are bringing their ad-networks in house and attempting to hit scale in a way that let's them compete with Facebook. The jury is still very much out on whether that's viable of whether they end up being forced to merge or being bought out by a large player like Spotify. We aren't in the death spiral of chasing views anymore, we're very much back in a stable area where high quality content is available if you're willing to pay for it. The problem is that people are still judging the NYT by what they see on Buzzfeed - because they don't pay for the NYT and assume it's like Buzzfeed. It's going to take a while for the reputations to recover but we do need to actually understand the business as it is today.