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Holy crap, The Atlantic has gone down hill in the past few years. It feels like they try to become the next Huffington Post. A couple of years ago it felt like

Holy crap, The Atlantic has gone down hill in the past few years. It feels like they try to become the next Huffington Post. A couple of years ago it felt like a serious competitor to magazines like The New Yorker or The Economist. Then they rebranded themselves from The Atlantic Monthly to The Atlantic and started their "social media revolution". This is an incredibly shoddy article, it even closes with an absolutely brain-dead "what if"... the way average high school students close their essays.

tjic 14y ago
You've hit the nail right on the head. I'm a huge believer in the free market, but the economics of journalism really do seem to be pushing a lot of serious periodicals into a crappy direction. Salon was never excellent, but it was good at times. Now it's utter crap. Slate was pretty good, now it's sliding fast. The Atlantic? Yep, just as you say. Most of these places are ditching the "serious researched journalism" and even the "serious political opinion pieces" and going with fluffy bloggy chit-chatty crap. "Round tables" are getting more an more popular, especially round tables that are just emotional reactions to lifestyle news. Four women discussing birth control. Five guys talking about Breaking Bad (Slate: I'm looking at you for BOTH of these). And now the Atlantic is headed down the huffpo route. All markets "clear" at some price and some volume. It may just be an unfortunate fact that in the Internet age the market for real journalism clears at $0 for 0 volume. Again, my philosophical / political inclination is to deny this, to say that there's never a market failure, that everyone can always buy the magical pony they want at a price that sounds fair...but journalism seems to be giving me really good reasons to not say that.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  > I'm a huge believer in the free market, but the economics of journalism really do seem to be pushing a lot of serious periodicals into a crappy direction. To throw out a glib generalization, it seems that the free market is best at producing things people want, not necessarily things people need.

tjic 14y ago

You've hit the nail right on the head. I'm a huge believer in the free market, but the economics of journalism really do seem to be pushing a lot of serious periodicals into a crappy direction. Salon was never excellent, but it was good at times. Now it's utter crap. Slate was pretty good, now it's sliding fast. The Atlantic? Yep, just as you say. Most of these places are ditching the "serious researched journalism" and even the "serious political opinion pieces" and going with fluffy bloggy chit-chatty crap. "Round tables" are getting more an more popular, especially round tables that are just emotional reactions to lifestyle news. Four women discussing birth control. Five guys talking about Breaking Bad (Slate: I'm looking at you for BOTH of these). And now the Atlantic is headed down the huffpo route. All markets "clear" at some price and some volume. It may just be an unfortunate fact that in the Internet age the market for real journalism clears at $0 for 0 volume. Again, my philosophical / political inclination is to deny this, to say that there's never a market failure, that everyone can always buy the magical pony they want at a price that sounds fair...but journalism seems to be giving me really good reasons to not say that.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
> I'm a huge believer in the free market, but the economics of journalism really do seem to be pushing a lot of serious periodicals into a crappy direction. To throw out a glib generalization, it seems that the free market is best at producing things people want, not necessarily things people need.