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Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- raxxorraxor 2y agoQuality journalism just doesn't make any money because everyone expects such content for free by now. Also outrage sells more and bad journalists outclass good ones by clicks. The "modern activist type" of journalist rarely writes anything substantial or interesting, only very few master the balancing act between helpful news and entertainment. I remember articles that more often than not could really broaden your understanding on a topic. Sometimes research for a short text took months. I have no idea how you could finance such endeavors anymore.
- Tarsul 2y agowrt money: It appears facebook and google profited, like, imeasurably through serving or linking to news. How come news media itself gets so little of those monetary benefits? That's a huge problem that hasn't been adressed since governments have been asleep at the wheel for 20 years.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoIgnoring issues of funding there are serious questions about audience reach to consider. There appears to be little market for thoughtful, well-researched, long-form journalistic content. This feels similar to how folks raised seven shades of hell about fast food chains not having healthy food options on the menu until McDonalds added a salad option. Predictably nobody bought the salad so they got rid of it.
- cloudsec9 2y agoI think this isn't true; it might be that people might not read an eight-part expose on a topic, but they do resonate with many people, some of whom may even pay or choose to subscribe based on it. To pick up your McD's analogy, I'm sure they did focus groups and test runs to gauge interest and build the product up. If memory serves, they did this in the context of many low-end buffets adding a salad bar and "healthier" alternatives becoming available. I think they added this option as popularity of salads started to decline. I'm sure many people bought them, but it wasn't profitable enough so they discontinued it, in favor of other healthy options. Now, to pivot back to news, they used to be awash in print ads, both classified and throughout the copy pages, which subsidized their operations a great deal. There are lots of demand for news, but the challenge is how you pay for it. I think it would have been great if the big players (FB, Google) had set up revenue shares with legit outlets; but they don't want to share their $$ pie so we are all worse off.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoThe phrase "if it bleeds it ledes" hasn't been an industry cliche for 50+ years for no reason. Engagement numbers don't lie. Hyperbolic opinion pieces attract as many or more views as painstakingly researched journalism at a fraction of the price.
- criddell 2y ago> Quality journalism just doesn't make any money because everyone expects such content for free by now. I don't see the connection. My parents and grandparents watched news everyday on television and it was all free. > Also outrage sells more This is may or may not be true, but I think you are hinting at the actual underlying reason - news often isn't compelling. My parents and grandparents didn't have the near infinite number of choices for how to spend their time at 6pm. They were probably going to watch tv, or at least have it on, and the three available channels were all playing a newscast, so that's what they watched. Keeping up with local and world events might be important, but it also has a real eat-your-vegetables vibe to it. There are so many other things I'd rather do than read or watch reporting on what happened today. There are some segments of journalism that I think are doing quite well. For example, sports writing is still turning out great stuff and attracting an audience.
- philipkglass 2y agoThe news stand price or subscription price for a newspaper wasn't a big chunk of the publisher's revenue even back in the 20th century. The big money maker was ads. Papers had a regional monopoly or oligopoly over a certain advertising channel. They could make excellent margins on classified ads when they charged people to list a used truck for sale, a duplex for rent, or an open job position that needed an employee. They also made good (if not quite so excellent) margins on ads interspersed in the main body of the paper for department stores, auto dealerships, restaurants, and most other kinds of local/regional businesses. On top of that, people didn't just buy the paper to get investigative journalism. They were also buying low cost content like the funny pages, movie reviews, weather forecasts, and sports scores. Even with limited competition for advertising, few newspapers in the 20th century could have turned a profit while filling their pages with nothing but investigative journalism. In-depth reporting is too expensive to make up the bulk of a paper. Investigative journalism was a kind of expensive spice that gave zest to the rest of the lower-cost content. Newspaper owners took pride in it and tried to steadily produce it but there was no way to fill daily issues with nothing but investigation. Craigslist killed the margins for classified ads. A million sources killed the newspaper's allure for delivering weather forecasts, sports scores, and other low cost information. Keyword and geo-targeted advertising on major digital platforms added fierce competition for print display ads. The main thing people miss from the newspaper is investigative journalism. But investigative journalism, unbundled from cheap filler and high margin advertising, can't be delivered at prices most people are willing to pay. There are a few maybe-outliers like the New York Times and Los Angeles times that survive on a reputation for depth and a national audience. But the days of every mid-sized American city having a local newspaper or two with investigative reporters on staff has passed, unless someone can come up with a new business model.
- veggieroll 2y agoAlmost everything listed in this article is a downstream effect or side issue. Yes journalism is expensive and hard work, but that's not why people aren't reading/watching. People aren't reading because they don't trust mainstream news to deliver true facts. Journalists have consistently lost that trust over time and need to reckon with why that is.
- travisporter 2y agoHow does one define mainstream news?
- ElevenLathe 2y agoStuff your grandma has heard of.
- GauntletWizard 2y agoDoes it matter? In the modern sellout world, by the time something can be considered "Mainstream", it's already well on the way to abandoning the principles that made it successful in the first place and replacing them with "Cost Effective" practices and monetization, what used to be called Selling Out and is now termed "Enshitiffication". It does not matter whether you're talking about the broadcast and cable television media (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox), the new wave media of online-first reporting (All the properties of Conde Nast and Ziff Davis, incl. Wired, Vice, Cracked, Buzzfeed, etc.), or even the third-generation blogosphere (Substack, Medium). There's no trust because success is inversely correlated with trustworthiness.
- xnx 2y ago> People aren't reading because they don't trust mainstream news to deliver true facts People of all stripes seem quite happy to trust news as long as it delivers facts that already fit their worldview
- kbutler 2y agoNot really. """Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” similar to last year’s 32%. Americans’ trust in the media -- such as newspapers, television and radio -- first fell to 32% in 2016 and did so again last year.""" https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoYou only need to go visit r/journalism to see why we are in a post (traditional) journalism society. No one wants to be preached to be activists. They want factual neutral reporting. The industry got captured, resorted to clickbait to chase money, and is in a doom spiral. But there’s great content on podcasts, substack, YouTube, etc.
- ForHackernews 2y ago> there’s great content on podcasts, substack, YouTube, etc. There's almost zero shoe-leather ground truth reporting in any of those places. Is YouTube going to send a foreign correspondent to Crimea? Are podcasters going to start attending the mayor's press conferences?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoAgree. But there are people who report from within Crimea who aren’t outside journalists visiting as well. The internet creates lots of access. And I guess I am separating the collection of facts, often by people like AP, from the rest of journalism, which to me has devolved into activism.
- rgbrenner 2y ago"They want factual neutral reporting." If that's true, why is Fox News so much bigger than Reuters.
- Covzire 2y agoDifferent business model and/or more credible to most people?
- the_sleaze_ 2y ago> The channel was created by Australian-born American media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to appeal to a conservative audience, hiring former Republican media consultant and CNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO. Fox news was founded to support a specific worldview. People "want" neutral reporting. What they "pay" for is to be outraged (pay with their attention).
- TimedToasts 2y ago>we’re already trying to climb out of a hole of historically serving affluent/whiter audiences Imagine saying this in the US about any other race. They write this stuff and then blame us for not wanting to read their other output.
- ForHackernews 2y agoIt's a good thing HN readers aren't foolish enough to grasp immediately for identity-based outrage while ignoring all valid points and surrounding context.
- dirtyhippiefree 2y agoI saw what you did there. - Mr. Saturday Night
- BitwiseFool 2y agoDescribing those who have lost trust in journalists as "postliterate" is not going to engender any reconciliation between the two. I for one, roll my eyes whenever journalists elevate themselves as the keepers of truth and democracy. Despite all of their self-aggrandizement they're just writers and citizens like the rest of us.
- tensor 2y agoYou are likely not a professional writer, unless that happens to be your job, but then you are not “like the rest of us”. Also, journalists are held to the standards of their organization, unlike “the rest of us” who have no standard. I always assume something a random citizen says is 99% false because yes, most people know very little.
- stonesthrowaway 2y ago> I always assume something a random citizen says is 99% false because yes, most people know very little. That's one way to look at it. Another is, a random citizen has no reason to lie to you. A journalist working for an "organization with standards" does.
- tensor 2y agoIt has nothing to do with someone lying to me, rather that the average person is very uneducated on any given topic and these days largely consumes propaganda from people who DO have a reason to lie to me. Thus, random people are not to be listened to. My hierarchy of trust is random people 10, government 40, journalists 60, science papers 80, scientists talking about their own area 88. Everything else 0.
- beej71 2y agoI dispute that random people have no reason to lie. There's a ton of money to be made blogging lies, for one thing. Notoriety, attention...
- daft_pink 2y agoThe core problem is that factual reporting is not enough as factual reporting can be hyper-partisan based on where you point the spotlight, so they’ve just given up, because it’s more profitable to just tell a story or narrative.
- ForHackernews 2y agoJournalism might be improved if they all actually quit twitter like they've been threatening to do since Musk bought it. https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-became-way-too-important-to-journalists-let-it-die/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-became-way-too-importa... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/27/twitter-is-the-go-to-social-media-site-for-u-s-journalists-but-not-for-the-public/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/27/twitter-i...
- lapcat 2y ago> The destruction of patience is one of the most dramatic cultural shifts we’ll probably experience of our lifetimes, and it pervades everything — journalism, music, comedy, the works. I was at a dinner party recently with a film studies professor who said some of her own students didn’t really watch movies anymore. A 29 year old whom I spoke with recently made the same comment: they don't have the patience to watch movies. I can feel the same atrophication happening to my(older)self, to a lesser extent. Though I still love watching movies and reading books, I find it difficult to finish uninterrupted. During a movie, I usually take one or two breaks, and not simply to go to the bathroom. With books, I tend to read a chapter at a time and then stop, sometimes taking weeks to finish a long book. I remember when I was young, I would tear through an interesting book in one day; you couldn't tear the pages away from me.
- stonesthrowaway 2y ago> The truth is going out of business as technology turns us into a folk-story society, ripe for influence by a demagogue. Talk about hubris. Thomas Jefferson: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." My hope is that from the "death of truth" a more diverse group of media rises from its ashes.
- lapcat 2y agoDo you think Jefferson consulted a more diverse group of media? I suspect that in his time it was actually less diverse, and perhaps Jefferson considered only books to be worthy of trust.
- drewcoo 2y ago> Do you think Jefferson consulted a more diverse group of media? Yes. We live in a new gilded age, a new age in need of anti-trust reforms. https://www.cabletv.com/entertainment/americas-favorite-news-networks https://www.cabletv.com/entertainment/americas-favorite-news...
- lapcat 2y agoWhich TV network did Jefferson watch?
- wrp 2y agoInvestigative journalism in the past wasn't all as great as we like to think. Yes, there was some outstanding work, but there was also a lot of junk from lazy writers. The news hack who hung out in bars and generated stories from bits of rumor was a stereotype. My own experience with the press was during Gulf War I. Traveling around the Mid-East, it was eye-opening to me seeing how many reporters mostly hung out at the hotel, swapping gossip, and adding datelines for wherever they supposedly had been. It was a joke among photojournalists that they were the only ones who actually had to go there.
- lordfrito 2y agoI think "journalism" would have an easier time surviving if it got unbundled from endless p̶r̶o̶p̶a̶g̶a̶n̶d̶a̶ editorial opinion pieces it gets bundled with. There is a demand for bias free news. Or at least news that doesn't come bundled with editorial opinion. If we're going to be force fed opinion, it's only natural that individuals will gravitate towards channels with opinions they agree with.
- beej71 2y agoAnd it's so just as "factual" now. People trust the pundits giving ill-thought-out opinions and distrust the anchors delivering the news.