As long as the business model of journalism is running on fumes, there isn't going to be a renaissance in journalism quality. Truth-seeking is time-consuming an

As long as the business model of journalism is running on fumes, there isn't going to be a renaissance in journalism quality. Truth-seeking is time-consuming and will always be inherently trading off against other local incentives, like writing quickly, writing exciting things, and writing things that your audience will like. If almost all journalists have to bust their ass just to survive, a truth-seeking culture won't thrive. I think there are three main ways I can see things getting better: 1. Governments and academia have lots of money, but the money gets fed into a system of incentives that make academics not that good at either truth-seeking or popularizing their own work. This could change. 2. There is a large population of smart people who collectively can do a lot of truth-seeking and writing in their spare time, without needing to make money from it. However, right now there's not a particularly coherent way that those people can work together and produce collective information that is as easy to find and understand as mainstream media outlets. Improving technology to let amateurs work together and aggregate their opinions could be powerful. 3. The funding model for journalism could continue to evolve so that people who choose to do so can more directly fund truth-seeking journalism. Crowdfunding and self-publishing platforms are in this direction. This seems to me like it's already working fairly well in some cases to fund people's work, but then the attention market is not great at highlighting the more reliable voices, which is similar to the problem in point #2.