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Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations. That's a prob

by gizmo 3y ago

Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations. That's a problem for Glenn Greenwald who has always focused his energy on criticizing those in power, whichever party that may be. It ultimately resulted in him leaving the Intercept. Journalism is hard work and it doesn't pay much (unless you're a celebrity reporter like Greenwald) and subsequently people who pursue a career in journalism do so out of idealism. They see wrongs in the world and hope that by drawing attention to these wrongs society will improve. Partisanship in journalism isn't childishness. Journalists overwhelmingly believe that exposing the crimes and malfeasance of "the other" is the most important thing and writing about the failures of their own party is a distraction from that cause. The substack model isn't a solution, either. Substack is fine for intelligent commentary but you can't pay for investigative journalism with a substack model. It just looks like real journalism just isn't profitable and I consider that a serious problem.

mike_hearn 3y ago
> you can't pay for investigative journalism with a substack model Why not? Some of the best investigative journalism I've read has been on Substack. > Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations ... Journalism is hard work and it doesn't pay much That's probably true of e.g. the New York Times, but the Intercept isn't a great example. The history there is quite complicated. When they had Greenwald at the helm they were doing OK and got an audience. Once they booted him out and went fully partisan they lost most of their audience but the editors didn't care because they are/were funded by a billionaire. Even then it was complex. Greenwald technically wasn't cancelled - he quit because his editors didn't want him to write stories attacking their side - and wrote about how Omidyar had successfully divorced his funding from his own political views here: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-of-the?utm_source=publication-search https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-o... no matter how much my attacks escalated on his [Omidyar's] core beliefs and the other groups he was heavily funding — and escalate they did! — I never received any remote signal that my outspoken journalism and commentary were imperiling his ongoing funding of The Intercept. [The Intercept] is a dream job for most of [the employees]: enormous salaries, endless expense accounts, a complete lack of job requirements, and no need even to attract an audience. For years, outside of three or four journalists, articles published by The Intercept produce almost no traffic. With rare exception, nobody reads the site. They have a massive budget to create highly produced videos and yet their videos almost never exceed even 10,000 views: most tiny, from-their-garage, zero-budget YouTubers attract larger audiences. And nobody cares, because the money flows in from Omidyar no matter what.
- gizmo 3y ago
  A single piece of investigative journalism can cost the NYT 500,000 easily. A reporter can work for a year on a single article where every piece of evidence has to to be verified, lawyers are involved to check liability, the journalist(s) and photographers have to travel around the world to follow leads. Then the article needs to be written and illustrated, and coded if it has animated graphics. It's all super expensive but the NYT can afford this because they have a multi-billion dollar annual budget. When you're on substack you have to churn out content or your subs will cancel. The only way to consistently create content is to write editorials. See for example "These Journalists Spent Two Years and $750,000 Covering One Story": https://archive.ph/L7PA2 https://archive.ph/L7PA2
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    All that shows is that the NYT does some very expensive things. It doesn't prove that all investigative journalism costs that much. Many useful investigations are essentially a series of FOIAs and working through source documents, don't require a year of work and don't require animated hand-coded graphics. Newspapers also have to churn out content or else their subs will cancel. That's inherent to any form of recurring subscription journalism.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Why not? Some of the best investigative journalism I've read has been on Substack. Do you have examples of important stories broken on Substack? Greenwald has broken a few huge stories in his life, but in general he's not an investigative journalist. Rather, he's a political commentator, and that's what he does on Substack. In fact neither Greenwald nor Laura Poitras was an investigative journalist; that's not why Edward Snowden selected them.
1oooqooq 3y ago
didn't Glen made bank criticizing everyone (with quality) and then left when they sold the intercept, which now got to this point with the new owners?

by gizmo 3y ago

mike_hearn 3y ago

> you can't pay for investigative journalism with a substack model Why not? Some of the best investigative journalism I've read has been on Substack. > Most news organizations have figured out that partisan coverage helps grow your audience while criticizing your own team results in cancellations ... Journalism is hard work and it doesn't pay much That's probably true of e.g. the New York Times, but the Intercept isn't a great example. The history there is quite complicated. When they had Greenwald at the helm they were doing OK and got an audience. Once they booted him out and went fully partisan they lost most of their audience but the editors didn't care because they are/were funded by a billionaire. Even then it was complex. Greenwald technically wasn't cancelled - he quit because his editors didn't want him to write stories attacking their side - and wrote about how Omidyar had successfully divorced his funding from his own political views here: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-of-the?utm_source=publication-search https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-o... no matter how much my attacks escalated on his [Omidyar's] core beliefs and the other groups he was heavily funding — and escalate they did! — I never received any remote signal that my outspoken journalism and commentary were imperiling his ongoing funding of The Intercept. [The Intercept] is a dream job for most of [the employees]: enormous salaries, endless expense accounts, a complete lack of job requirements, and no need even to attract an audience. For years, outside of three or four journalists, articles published by The Intercept produce almost no traffic. With rare exception, nobody reads the site. They have a massive budget to create highly produced videos and yet their videos almost never exceed even 10,000 views: most tiny, from-their-garage, zero-budget YouTubers attract larger audiences. And nobody cares, because the money flows in from Omidyar no matter what.

gizmo 3y ago
A single piece of investigative journalism can cost the NYT 500,000 easily. A reporter can work for a year on a single article where every piece of evidence has to to be verified, lawyers are involved to check liability, the journalist(s) and photographers have to travel around the world to follow leads. Then the article needs to be written and illustrated, and coded if it has animated graphics. It's all super expensive but the NYT can afford this because they have a multi-billion dollar annual budget. When you're on substack you have to churn out content or your subs will cancel. The only way to consistently create content is to write editorials. See for example "These Journalists Spent Two Years and $750,000 Covering One Story": https://archive.ph/L7PA2 https://archive.ph/L7PA2
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  All that shows is that the NYT does some very expensive things. It doesn't prove that all investigative journalism costs that much. Many useful investigations are essentially a series of FOIAs and working through source documents, don't require a year of work and don't require animated hand-coded graphics. Newspapers also have to churn out content or else their subs will cancel. That's inherent to any form of recurring subscription journalism.
lapcat 3y ago
> Why not? Some of the best investigative journalism I've read has been on Substack. Do you have examples of important stories broken on Substack? Greenwald has broken a few huge stories in his life, but in general he's not an investigative journalist. Rather, he's a political commentator, and that's what he does on Substack. In fact neither Greenwald nor Laura Poitras was an investigative journalist; that's not why Edward Snowden selected them.

1oooqooq 3y ago

didn't Glen made bank criticizing everyone (with quality) and then left when they sold the intercept, which now got to this point with the new owners?