8 ms·

What if Quality Journalism Isn't?

103 points by wasd 12y ago

Liesmith 12y ago
This is an extremely poorly thought out article. The core idea, that you can't be the best at something and still fail, is so naive that it ruins everything else that the guy says.
- Detrus 12y ago
  Yes, the important thing is getting good information to the right readers, for whom it is relevant. Counting absolute page views is in the interests of SEO wizards and social media specialists. They monetize through page views and spam is a legitimate tactic. It's hard to measure engagement on a news site when someone doesn't "like" and "share" the story because they don't want to share it with their social circles. If only there was a site that kept track of personal bookmarks.
jejones3141 12y ago
He rightly criticizes newspapers for all thinking their only problem is getting their impeccable journalism to readers... but then talks only about ways of letting readers organize and select what they want to read--how is that different? If content is the problem, then ease of access is secondary.
- krakensden 12y ago
  I can imagine getting scared off by trying to address the quality issue- the Grey Lady is an institution, a lot of journalists aspire to work there, and journalism has been done in the One True Way for so long it's hard to imagine alternatives. I remember reading a science article in Ars for the first time, and thinking "wow, this doesn't suck. I thought all articles about science sucked." There was even a link to the paper at the bottom! Ryan Paul wrote articles about programming and open source, and they were nuanced, coherent, and made sense. He could even program! Still, this is all nerd shit, right? Real people don't care. Vox seems to be addressing this in other fields- you read an article about a speech (http://www.vox.com/2014/6/15/5812752/read-obama-s-full-speech-ripping-into-climate-deniers http://www.vox.com/2014/6/15/5812752/read-obama-s-full-speec... chosen by fair dice roll), the same article every other two-bit news outlet hammered together in 45 minutes. Then you go down to the bottom of the page, and you've got a bunch of explanations of every related thing. What, why, more details, links to rebuttals. Still, politics is just nerd shit for innumerate white people. Real people don't care, right? Grantland writes sports articles with heat maps, diagrams, tactical explanations, as well as the usual platitudes about desire, and perfunctory examinations of the politics of sport. Quality is an issue, and it's certainly becoming more pressing. As to whether or not people who are not insiders are interested in the opinions of subject matter experts over professional summarizers, we'll see. Not everyone wants to know more about everything, but everyone wants to know more about something sometimes.
pistle 12y ago
He should rewrite the title. I suggest... 10 Ways Journalism Has Changed You Won't Believe
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ZenPro 12y ago
  ...and you will be amazed at what happens next!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
IvarTJ 12y ago
Here in Norway newspapers more or less survive, although perhaps not with the younger generations. They are generally the best source if you want to follow up on local events. How do Americans follow local news?
- dublinben 12y ago
  >How do Americans follow local news? Local newspapers still dominate the local news field.
- TheCoelacanth 12y ago
  Newspapers that rely solely on local readership are doing okay. NYT is not one of those newspapers. They need national readership to sustain their size.
bitJericho 12y ago
So you could amost say that they are winning at journalism and failing at getting their journalism to readers. The entire article is about how that's not true, but the conclusion was that's true and the way to fix it is for NYT to make a Flipgboard clone. That's actually a great idea, and maybe they already do that I don't know. I use HN to aggregate my news.
randallsquared 12y ago
At the beginning of the article, the point seems, in line with the title, to be that the core problem is the journalism. By the end of the article, he seems to have come around to the conclusion that the problem really is the marketing and/or delivery, with the supermarket analogy, and especially with the example of ostensibly interesting things like the Takei video from the WP. There were a lot of interesting points in this post, but they don't seem to add up to a coherent argument.
zwieback 12y ago
Interesting read but I would disagree that prestige papers aren't like a brand. I use aggregators, mostly, but when I see articles from certain sources (e.g. NYT, Economist or CSMonitor) I'm more likely to click on those. That tells me that quality papers still have some value but maybe only because they have maanged to keep good journalists together. I'm guessing the future will be individual journalists/columnists marketing themselves directly via aggregators.
JonnieCache 12y ago
The future of news is halfway between stratfor and private eye magazine. It should be written from an "out-universe" perspective, unlike the "in-universe" perspective of all current journalism, ie. it should treat the upper two or three layers of PR and realpolitik that cover every aspect of modern life as fictional, and skip straight to the real reasons for things: "control over regional energy markets", "elections in 2 years," "these two celebrities are both managed by the same agency and so they are having a fight to boost sales of celebrity A's new book" and so on. Also it would ignore the news cycle.
- pjc50 12y ago
  But would people pay money to read this? It seems that people don't want a factual news source. Especially not for celebrity coverage. It's the same reason that people flock to talk radio or fringe conspiracy sites: the truth is boring and/or depressing. It's the humor sites that come closest to the bone (the Onion, the Daily Mash etc).
  - GHFigs 12y ago
    It seems that people don't want a factual news source. Ding ding ding! What we call news is mostly consumed for entertainment and identity-reenforcement/social currency, so that's what the news business serves up. It's made out of real-world events and facts, but the actual end product is to reality as "frozen dairy product" is to ice cream.
  - JonnieCache 12y ago
    People seem to pay money for both private eye and stratfor. It's just a case of making them (a bit more) mass marketable. Obviously this is easier said than done :)
ddebernardy 12y ago
The future of journalism is, imho, oceans of random trash (think Business Insider or the Daily Mail) on the one hand side, and rock star columnists and investigators (think popular bloggers like John Gruber or The Macalope) on the other. To succeed as a syndication platform in this, methinks you either need to be very good at satisfying yourself with a fickle audience looking for subpar content while making numbers work in your favor, or syndicate the rock stars in razor focused channels (The Magazine or Flipboard) that your quality audience will value enough to stay around. Whether traditional newspapers will survive this transition any more than music publishers is anyone's guess. I'm not holding my breath for most of them -- quality is simply too low.
- notatoad 12y ago
  I think your placing of John Gruber and theMacalope among the side opposite the "oceans of random trash" really says it all: the future of journalism is not two sides, it's just oceans of trash. the future of actual journalism is probably something like Pierre Omidyar's new venture - Benevolent billionaires supporting actual investigative journalism because it provides some public good, and not expecting it to be profitable on a scale like big media houses such as the New York Times are expected to work.
  - neumann 12y ago
    and yet the Guardian (in Australia) which is owned by a trust spends the centre of its landing page real-estate on tacky opinion pieces to compete with local tacky opinion pieces. Article such as "Can you <insert phrase> and still call yourself a feminist (immediate bingo if there reference is to sex/porn)" and "Twerking - everything you need to know" have begun to appear[1] I am not sure if a Trust, or philanthropic entity solves the problem while we still refer to DailyMail or HuffPo as a 'news site'. 'Trash aggregator' would be more appropriate. [1] Made up titles.
olefoo 12y ago
Journalism is publishing the truth that someone does not want told; all else is stenography and marketing. We, the people formerly known as the audience recognize this. We can tell when we are being lied to. We can tell when the truth is being shaded to benefit the beneficiaries of the status quo. If you hand us shit and call it ice cream we still aren't going to like it, on facebook or anywhere else. We know that our vaunted 'free press' is a bought and paid for lie. We know that much of what passes for journalism is a ham-handed attempt to manufacture social proof for the acceptance of the current order of things. Burn it down. All the way down. We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better...
- pron 12y ago
  > Journalism is publishing the truth that someone does not want told; all else is stenography and marketing. Well, it's certainly that, too. But journalism can also be about uncovering truths that hardly anyone knows about, or telling stories that help us understand the world. > We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better... You're probably being sarcastic, but even if word of mouth never passed straight out lies and total myths, journalism isn't just about reporting facts, but putting them in perspective. Perspective is necessary because there are simply too many facts for you to digest. A professional journalist hopefully keeps track of all pertinent facts of her beat, and reports the most important stories in context. Word of mouth can, at most, be a data collection mechanism. In fact, word of mouth is one of the inputs a journalist works with; it certainly can't substitute the final product.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    > Well, it's certainly that, too. This is a version of a quotation, ""Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." It is usually attributed to George Orwell, but it may be older: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Orwell#Attribution.3F_-_.22Journalism_is_printing_something....22 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Orwell#Attribution....
chondos 12y ago
Partition agenda, bias, selective reporting, covering up, exaggeration, one sided stories and outright lies... That is what I think of when I hear the tern journalism today. I wish that at least one of these organizations would be tackling all of this rather than focusing on digital content. Is there a single news source that we can actually rely on to tell us the unbiased truth today? I realize that this is the way that it has always been... to a degree. But today it is ridiculous. The level of trust is almost zero between Journalists and consumers (and rightfully so). I feel that we have been betrayed far too often.
adamconroy 12y ago
Quality Journalism = oxymoron
InclinedPlane 12y ago
For a very long time newspapers and local television stations had a near monopoly on local media. That put them in a unique position to serve as a conduit not just for news but also for things like business advertisements, all of which was enormously lucrative. Many folks fell into the trap of thinking that because local reporting was highly needed and very popular that it was good. You see that in the way that newspapers and journalists are portrayed through most of the 20th century. And then along came the internet, the king of all disintermediators. First local print news lost its readership and ad revenue, and many thought it was a matter of media, printed matter vs digital matter. Then over many years a lot of newspapers shut down, while others attempted to modernize and enter the digital age. And now we're at a stage where the truth is harder to hide from. The fact is that most journalism just isn't very good, and never has been. But when it was the only thing available it was better than nothing so it was consumed regardless. Now the regurgitation of wire reports, simple duplicate coverage of a story, and uncritical passing on of news releases from 3rd parties holds no value. Those are things that rely on distribution, and in the internet age that is trivial. This puts into sharper focus the kernel of original, serious reporting that journalist do. And it turns out they have historically done very, very little, and even less of it of any serious value. The problem isn't that print journalism uses an outdated media, the problem is that the vast majority of what used to pass for journalism is now largely redundant. And most traditional news organizations still don't realize this or understand that the news organizations which will be able to survive in the 21st century will be very, very different from those of the past, and not just old organizations with a few modernizations bolted on. That's a tough pill to swallow because it means both that most journalists have quite frankly not been doing worthwhile work, it also means that there is no place for the vast majority of traditional journalism jobs. People within the industry naturally flinch away from such hard truths, but it won't stop them from being true.
praptak 12y ago
Doesn't the second part contradict the first? First part: "It isn't about delivering, your product sucks." Second part: "People have narrow interests, they want to see relevant content and you send them everything mixed up". It looks like the second part is about delivering after all - about better filtering in particular.
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
I don't care about the survival of newspapers from a financial or economic perspective, I care about the survival of newspapers from a social good perspective and it's not clear to me that targeted news can supply that since it filters out everything you weren't inclined to already view but was still important. If I bought a newspaper and it had a bunch of stuff in it I didn't care about, I might still pick it up and read an article or two if I got bored enough or was using the bathroom. With targeted news and a smartphone, I don't ever have to do that again.
ASneakyFox 12y ago
The issue is simple. I know what the times is. But I don't know why I would want to read the times. I use news aggregators because other readers seem to be the only ones to know how to deliver what I want to read . Reading the times directly feels like rolling the dice on finding interesting or important news.
stkni 12y ago
Journalism forms a cornerstone of our democracies. It's function is as relevant today as it ever was (perhaps more so in the light of Snowden) so we better think carefully before we write it off. But this is where I think the article falls short. I think if someone is interested in the wider world they will figure out how to get what they want from the newspapers of today. Some news agencies will be bad at it, and some will be good. That's just the nature of diversity. But, to say that a small percentage of online news is relevant to me is only true if I don't go looking for the parts that interest me. This was never true, not even for the old dead-tree news. Whilst I think things can be done to make digital news more engaging, I think the real 'problem' is to be found elsewhere in the ever sub-dividing space of our 'free' time.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  Journalism thinks it forms a cornerstone of our democracies. But then it also seems to believe that we have democracy, which we plainly don't. I like the article. It has weaknesses, but it makes some good points. The bigger issue - to what extent should the media be about political empowerment - is another question. I'd suggest current branding/advertising strategies are entirely about disempowerment, because they train consumers to think and act passively. When you believe that politics is about voting for Product A vs Product B, which is almost like a Facebook like only it lasts a little longer, then you've already lost all your political power. Traditional journalism was sometimes able to hold power to account. We're not going to that from clickbait intent/interest marketing. Can anyone imagine Buzzfeed breaking the next Pentagon Papers? So who's going to hold power to account now? And how?
pron 12y ago
But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers? If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience? You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time. Of course you can. In fact, that's the normal order of things, because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every starving genius writer/artist. If this logic were correct then crack is the "best" product in the world. Everyone who tries it wants more, so much so that it's physically hard to stop. The sad truth is that quality and popularity rarely intersect, especially when it comes to intellectual "goods" or art. In fact, producing the best quality in those fields is almost a certain assurance of failure. I would say, "you can't be the world's best and succeed at the same time". This is also why advertising is failing for newspapers. In a digital world where intent is paramount for advertisers, it's far more valuable to target your advertisers for when people are looking for something specifically, rather than the random 'I don't know what I'm going to get' that we see from the newspapers. Advertising is failing for newspapers because the revenue it generates is lower than the cost of production, and the revenues are low because of competition with sites that have low production costs. On social channels, we define what we are interested in by following people and brands that match what we care about. Yes, and unfortunately quality newspapers and magazines are directed at people with broad horizons and open minds that trust the editors' choices. At people who think, "if the NY Times thinks it's newsworthy then I'd better read it". That actually used to work once. Following The New York Times on Twitter is just like paging through a print newspaper. Each tweet is about something completely unrelated to the tweets before it. And this is the opposite of why people usually follow people and brands online. Yes because people are crack addicts. That's what works in the market, but that's not necessarily what's "good" for us. Today, the newspapers' editorial focus is to create random packages of news. Yes, well unfortunately that's what the world is. A random package of events. They are all over the place, and as such there is nothing that we as viewers can connect with. There is no momentum, passion, or reason for watching any of these videos. With that I actually agree. Of course, if they were to create the journalism they really wish to, they'd fail even harder, but that's another matter.
- cynicalkane 12y ago
pertinhower 12y ago
"You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time." Oh yes you can. You can be the best at providing something people don't want. You can even be the best at providing something people should want but don't. The NY Times is in the same boat as so many smart, literate, thoughtful, and educated communicators before them: either (1) dumb down the content, (2) fight the vain battle of trying to snaz up clever content with whiz-bang visuals and "Tweets" and whatnot, or (3) go out of business. Not a happy choice, but sometimes, when you're surrounded by swine, your pearls have no place to go.
Zigurd 12y ago
Tim Cook hagiography != world's best journalism Neither is war propaganda. Or kowtowing to the government on the Snowden documents. The NYT is the shiniest outlet for establishment "news." At a time when the establishment is so rotten, even the NYT can't make it smell nice.

103 points by wasd 12y ago

This is an extremely poorly thought out article. The core idea, that you can't be the best at something and still fail, is so naive that it ruins everything else that the guy says.

Detrus 12y ago
Yes, the important thing is getting good information to the right readers, for whom it is relevant. Counting absolute page views is in the interests of SEO wizards and social media specialists. They monetize through page views and spam is a legitimate tactic. It's hard to measure engagement on a news site when someone doesn't "like" and "share" the story because they don't want to share it with their social circles. If only there was a site that kept track of personal bookmarks.

jejones3141 12y ago

He rightly criticizes newspapers for all thinking their only problem is getting their impeccable journalism to readers... but then talks only about ways of letting readers organize and select what they want to read--how is that different? If content is the problem, then ease of access is secondary.

krakensden 12y ago
I can imagine getting scared off by trying to address the quality issue- the Grey Lady is an institution, a lot of journalists aspire to work there, and journalism has been done in the One True Way for so long it's hard to imagine alternatives. I remember reading a science article in Ars for the first time, and thinking "wow, this doesn't suck. I thought all articles about science sucked." There was even a link to the paper at the bottom! Ryan Paul wrote articles about programming and open source, and they were nuanced, coherent, and made sense. He could even program! Still, this is all nerd shit, right? Real people don't care. Vox seems to be addressing this in other fields- you read an article about a speech (http://www.vox.com/2014/6/15/5812752/read-obama-s-full-speech-ripping-into-climate-deniers http://www.vox.com/2014/6/15/5812752/read-obama-s-full-speec... chosen by fair dice roll), the same article every other two-bit news outlet hammered together in 45 minutes. Then you go down to the bottom of the page, and you've got a bunch of explanations of every related thing. What, why, more details, links to rebuttals. Still, politics is just nerd shit for innumerate white people. Real people don't care, right? Grantland writes sports articles with heat maps, diagrams, tactical explanations, as well as the usual platitudes about desire, and perfunctory examinations of the politics of sport. Quality is an issue, and it's certainly becoming more pressing. As to whether or not people who are not insiders are interested in the opinions of subject matter experts over professional summarizers, we'll see. Not everyone wants to know more about everything, but everyone wants to know more about something sometimes.

pistle 12y ago

He should rewrite the title. I suggest... 10 Ways Journalism Has Changed You Won't Believe

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ZenPro 12y ago
...and you will be amazed at what happens next!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

IvarTJ 12y ago

Here in Norway newspapers more or less survive, although perhaps not with the younger generations. They are generally the best source if you want to follow up on local events. How do Americans follow local news?

dublinben 12y ago
>How do Americans follow local news? Local newspapers still dominate the local news field.
TheCoelacanth 12y ago
Newspapers that rely solely on local readership are doing okay. NYT is not one of those newspapers. They need national readership to sustain their size.

bitJericho 12y ago

So you could amost say that they are winning at journalism and failing at getting their journalism to readers. The entire article is about how that's not true, but the conclusion was that's true and the way to fix it is for NYT to make a Flipgboard clone. That's actually a great idea, and maybe they already do that I don't know. I use HN to aggregate my news.

randallsquared 12y ago

At the beginning of the article, the point seems, in line with the title, to be that the core problem is the journalism. By the end of the article, he seems to have come around to the conclusion that the problem really is the marketing and/or delivery, with the supermarket analogy, and especially with the example of ostensibly interesting things like the Takei video from the WP. There were a lot of interesting points in this post, but they don't seem to add up to a coherent argument.

zwieback 12y ago

Interesting read but I would disagree that prestige papers aren't like a brand. I use aggregators, mostly, but when I see articles from certain sources (e.g. NYT, Economist or CSMonitor) I'm more likely to click on those. That tells me that quality papers still have some value but maybe only because they have maanged to keep good journalists together. I'm guessing the future will be individual journalists/columnists marketing themselves directly via aggregators.

JonnieCache 12y ago

The future of news is halfway between stratfor and private eye magazine. It should be written from an "out-universe" perspective, unlike the "in-universe" perspective of all current journalism, ie. it should treat the upper two or three layers of PR and realpolitik that cover every aspect of modern life as fictional, and skip straight to the real reasons for things: "control over regional energy markets", "elections in 2 years," "these two celebrities are both managed by the same agency and so they are having a fight to boost sales of celebrity A's new book" and so on. Also it would ignore the news cycle.

pjc50 12y ago
But would people pay money to read this? It seems that people don't want a factual news source. Especially not for celebrity coverage. It's the same reason that people flock to talk radio or fringe conspiracy sites: the truth is boring and/or depressing. It's the humor sites that come closest to the bone (the Onion, the Daily Mash etc).
- GHFigs 12y ago
  It seems that people don't want a factual news source. Ding ding ding! What we call news is mostly consumed for entertainment and identity-reenforcement/social currency, so that's what the news business serves up. It's made out of real-world events and facts, but the actual end product is to reality as "frozen dairy product" is to ice cream.
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  People seem to pay money for both private eye and stratfor. It's just a case of making them (a bit more) mass marketable. Obviously this is easier said than done :)

ddebernardy 12y ago

The future of journalism is, imho, oceans of random trash (think Business Insider or the Daily Mail) on the one hand side, and rock star columnists and investigators (think popular bloggers like John Gruber or The Macalope) on the other. To succeed as a syndication platform in this, methinks you either need to be very good at satisfying yourself with a fickle audience looking for subpar content while making numbers work in your favor, or syndicate the rock stars in razor focused channels (The Magazine or Flipboard) that your quality audience will value enough to stay around. Whether traditional newspapers will survive this transition any more than music publishers is anyone's guess. I'm not holding my breath for most of them -- quality is simply too low.

notatoad 12y ago
I think your placing of John Gruber and theMacalope among the side opposite the "oceans of random trash" really says it all: the future of journalism is not two sides, it's just oceans of trash. the future of actual journalism is probably something like Pierre Omidyar's new venture - Benevolent billionaires supporting actual investigative journalism because it provides some public good, and not expecting it to be profitable on a scale like big media houses such as the New York Times are expected to work.
- neumann 12y ago
  and yet the Guardian (in Australia) which is owned by a trust spends the centre of its landing page real-estate on tacky opinion pieces to compete with local tacky opinion pieces. Article such as "Can you <insert phrase> and still call yourself a feminist (immediate bingo if there reference is to sex/porn)" and "Twerking - everything you need to know" have begun to appear[1] I am not sure if a Trust, or philanthropic entity solves the problem while we still refer to DailyMail or HuffPo as a 'news site'. 'Trash aggregator' would be more appropriate. [1] Made up titles.

olefoo 12y ago

Journalism is publishing the truth that someone does not want told; all else is stenography and marketing. We, the people formerly known as the audience recognize this. We can tell when we are being lied to. We can tell when the truth is being shaded to benefit the beneficiaries of the status quo. If you hand us shit and call it ice cream we still aren't going to like it, on facebook or anywhere else. We know that our vaunted 'free press' is a bought and paid for lie. We know that much of what passes for journalism is a ham-handed attempt to manufacture social proof for the acceptance of the current order of things. Burn it down. All the way down. We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better...

pron 12y ago
> Journalism is publishing the truth that someone does not want told; all else is stenography and marketing. Well, it's certainly that, too. But journalism can also be about uncovering truths that hardly anyone knows about, or telling stories that help us understand the world. > We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better... You're probably being sarcastic, but even if word of mouth never passed straight out lies and total myths, journalism isn't just about reporting facts, but putting them in perspective. Perspective is necessary because there are simply too many facts for you to digest. A professional journalist hopefully keeps track of all pertinent facts of her beat, and reports the most important stories in context. Word of mouth can, at most, be a data collection mechanism. In fact, word of mouth is one of the inputs a journalist works with; it certainly can't substitute the final product.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  > Well, it's certainly that, too. This is a version of a quotation, ""Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." It is usually attributed to George Orwell, but it may be older: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Orwell#Attribution.3F_-_.22Journalism_is_printing_something....22 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Orwell#Attribution....

chondos 12y ago

Partition agenda, bias, selective reporting, covering up, exaggeration, one sided stories and outright lies... That is what I think of when I hear the tern journalism today. I wish that at least one of these organizations would be tackling all of this rather than focusing on digital content. Is there a single news source that we can actually rely on to tell us the unbiased truth today? I realize that this is the way that it has always been... to a degree. But today it is ridiculous. The level of trust is almost zero between Journalists and consumers (and rightfully so). I feel that we have been betrayed far too often.

adamconroy 12y ago

Quality Journalism = oxymoron

InclinedPlane 12y ago

For a very long time newspapers and local television stations had a near monopoly on local media. That put them in a unique position to serve as a conduit not just for news but also for things like business advertisements, all of which was enormously lucrative. Many folks fell into the trap of thinking that because local reporting was highly needed and very popular that it was good. You see that in the way that newspapers and journalists are portrayed through most of the 20th century. And then along came the internet, the king of all disintermediators. First local print news lost its readership and ad revenue, and many thought it was a matter of media, printed matter vs digital matter. Then over many years a lot of newspapers shut down, while others attempted to modernize and enter the digital age. And now we're at a stage where the truth is harder to hide from. The fact is that most journalism just isn't very good, and never has been. But when it was the only thing available it was better than nothing so it was consumed regardless. Now the regurgitation of wire reports, simple duplicate coverage of a story, and uncritical passing on of news releases from 3rd parties holds no value. Those are things that rely on distribution, and in the internet age that is trivial. This puts into sharper focus the kernel of original, serious reporting that journalist do. And it turns out they have historically done very, very little, and even less of it of any serious value. The problem isn't that print journalism uses an outdated media, the problem is that the vast majority of what used to pass for journalism is now largely redundant. And most traditional news organizations still don't realize this or understand that the news organizations which will be able to survive in the 21st century will be very, very different from those of the past, and not just old organizations with a few modernizations bolted on. That's a tough pill to swallow because it means both that most journalists have quite frankly not been doing worthwhile work, it also means that there is no place for the vast majority of traditional journalism jobs. People within the industry naturally flinch away from such hard truths, but it won't stop them from being true.

praptak 12y ago

Doesn't the second part contradict the first? First part: "It isn't about delivering, your product sucks." Second part: "People have narrow interests, they want to see relevant content and you send them everything mixed up". It looks like the second part is about delivering after all - about better filtering in particular.

A_COMPUTER 12y ago

I don't care about the survival of newspapers from a financial or economic perspective, I care about the survival of newspapers from a social good perspective and it's not clear to me that targeted news can supply that since it filters out everything you weren't inclined to already view but was still important. If I bought a newspaper and it had a bunch of stuff in it I didn't care about, I might still pick it up and read an article or two if I got bored enough or was using the bathroom. With targeted news and a smartphone, I don't ever have to do that again.

ASneakyFox 12y ago

The issue is simple. I know what the times is. But I don't know why I would want to read the times. I use news aggregators because other readers seem to be the only ones to know how to deliver what I want to read . Reading the times directly feels like rolling the dice on finding interesting or important news.

stkni 12y ago

Journalism forms a cornerstone of our democracies. It's function is as relevant today as it ever was (perhaps more so in the light of Snowden) so we better think carefully before we write it off. But this is where I think the article falls short. I think if someone is interested in the wider world they will figure out how to get what they want from the newspapers of today. Some news agencies will be bad at it, and some will be good. That's just the nature of diversity. But, to say that a small percentage of online news is relevant to me is only true if I don't go looking for the parts that interest me. This was never true, not even for the old dead-tree news. Whilst I think things can be done to make digital news more engaging, I think the real 'problem' is to be found elsewhere in the ever sub-dividing space of our 'free' time.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
Journalism thinks it forms a cornerstone of our democracies. But then it also seems to believe that we have democracy, which we plainly don't. I like the article. It has weaknesses, but it makes some good points. The bigger issue - to what extent should the media be about political empowerment - is another question. I'd suggest current branding/advertising strategies are entirely about disempowerment, because they train consumers to think and act passively. When you believe that politics is about voting for Product A vs Product B, which is almost like a Facebook like only it lasts a little longer, then you've already lost all your political power. Traditional journalism was sometimes able to hold power to account. We're not going to that from clickbait intent/interest marketing. Can anyone imagine Buzzfeed breaking the next Pentagon Papers? So who's going to hold power to account now? And how?

pron 12y ago

But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers? If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience? You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time. Of course you can. In fact, that's the normal order of things, because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every starving genius writer/artist. If this logic were correct then crack is the "best" product in the world. Everyone who tries it wants more, so much so that it's physically hard to stop. The sad truth is that quality and popularity rarely intersect, especially when it comes to intellectual "goods" or art. In fact, producing the best quality in those fields is almost a certain assurance of failure. I would say, "you can't be the world's best and succeed at the same time". This is also why advertising is failing for newspapers. In a digital world where intent is paramount for advertisers, it's far more valuable to target your advertisers for when people are looking for something specifically, rather than the random 'I don't know what I'm going to get' that we see from the newspapers. Advertising is failing for newspapers because the revenue it generates is lower than the cost of production, and the revenues are low because of competition with sites that have low production costs. On social channels, we define what we are interested in by following people and brands that match what we care about. Yes, and unfortunately quality newspapers and magazines are directed at people with broad horizons and open minds that trust the editors' choices. At people who think, "if the NY Times thinks it's newsworthy then I'd better read it". That actually used to work once. Following The New York Times on Twitter is just like paging through a print newspaper. Each tweet is about something completely unrelated to the tweets before it. And this is the opposite of why people usually follow people and brands online. Yes because people are crack addicts. That's what works in the market, but that's not necessarily what's "good" for us. Today, the newspapers' editorial focus is to create random packages of news. Yes, well unfortunately that's what the world is. A random package of events. They are all over the place, and as such there is nothing that we as viewers can connect with. There is no momentum, passion, or reason for watching any of these videos. With that I actually agree. Of course, if they were to create the journalism they really wish to, they'd fail even harder, but that's another matter.

cynicalkane 12y ago

pertinhower 12y ago

"You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time." Oh yes you can. You can be the best at providing something people don't want. You can even be the best at providing something people should want but don't. The NY Times is in the same boat as so many smart, literate, thoughtful, and educated communicators before them: either (1) dumb down the content, (2) fight the vain battle of trying to snaz up clever content with whiz-bang visuals and "Tweets" and whatnot, or (3) go out of business. Not a happy choice, but sometimes, when you're surrounded by swine, your pearls have no place to go.

Zigurd 12y ago

Tim Cook hagiography != world's best journalism Neither is war propaganda. Or kowtowing to the government on the Snowden documents. The NYT is the shiniest outlet for establishment "news." At a time when the establishment is so rotten, even the NYT can't make it smell nice.