Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
Don't know what it's like where you are, but most people nowadays are not so interested in reading a 'newspaper'. It's all online/tv/radio/podcast
Even the local freely distributed papers are hardly read (unless placed near to a train station or similar so someone about to have 30 mins on a train may pick it up).
That deserves some pushback. It's commonly, and more frequently, the case that information is available online; people streaming on the ground right where you want video. It's possible to cultivate online relationships with people nearly everywhere on the planet with people that can serve as a source, or interface with the local people for you.
Good journalism required effort. It used to be really expensive to get news and reporting from around the world, and now it's ubiquitous and nearly free to get news from everywhere.
The hard part about good journalism is critical thinking, and identifying fact, and untangling the thread of truth from the overwhelming flood of information available on nearly every topic. Throw in the motivated bias of modern "style" guides, the politically and ideologically biased influences that govern framing, pacing, which stories get covered and how, thematic and editorial impositions, and it's going to be more or less impossible to do anything resembling "good" journalism in any modern incarnation of the former journalistic institutions.
You can get live streams from nearly anywhere on the planet even during murderously hot conflict. During the middle of Iran's crackdown we were still getting videos from citizens daily, as well as seeing Iranian soldiers videos and the like.
Journalism is a product. It's not a business of itself. The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity. The writing will never be as tangibly valuable on a consistent basis to any of the advertisers.
The value of superb writing and journalism with integrity and a significant story is the perception of institutional integrity, and thereby becoming a better outlet for advertising (and/or manipulation.)
Throw in the fact that every strictly written word platform is in direct competition for time and eyeballs with the likes of TikTok and Twitter, Netflix, Prime, and all the other algorithm optimized timesinks, and the effective marginal value of even the absolute best of the best writing falls to nearly zero.
If all I'm going to get is biased, skewed, ideologically motivated, politically or commercially manipulative narratives, then I'm not only not going to pay, I won't even pirate. I'll find some talking head that does the tedious job of figuring out how things work, de-censors, untangles the manipulative elements, and presents a reasonable facsimile of facts on the ground.
All those talking heads do it for free, and with ad blockers, I'm consuming the video stream resources without contributing to any of the overt commercial mechanisms in play.
The advent of AI also means that I can synthesize, filter, model, and report on any given topic with validated sources and pull in all of the best the internet has to offer.
The era of high paid Pulitzer prize writers and journalists is effectively over, and the only way legacy institutions are going to get people to pay is by tricking them into thinking that value exists where there is, in fact, none.
Look, I agree with some of this. Full disclaimer, I am building that service that pulls in primary sources and aggregates/synthesizes (https://www.forth.news)
But there is more to journalism/reporting than what youre talking about. Reporters cultivate sources. They can do investigations. They go to places so they aren't relying on a stranger with a live stream.
"The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity." is incredibly cynical -- and that i think is the problem. The reporting needs to be valuable on its own -- that is and has been my sole point.
Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.
This is sort of what I mean in one of the other comments regarding biases. This is an entirely subjective take, not to mention vague. Who redefined it? Whose journalism were they redefining? Everyone's, or specific people/outlet?
There's news for entertainment, and news for making informed decisions. I suppose in a healthy democracy, it would be in the people's best interest to have unbiased and thoroughly investigated the news available so voters can make the best decision for themselves and the country. It wouldn't be profitable so it would have to be publicly funded like PBS News, BBC, CBC. And, well, it was good while it lasted but politicians seem hell bent on demonizing anything for the public good.
"it would be in the people's best interest" -- the problem is that as we're seeing, people do not seem to agree, at least not when voting with their wallets.
And who determines what is "unbiased?" If I don't match your biases, am I biased?
Seeking out experts, eye witnesses, and sources of information and reporting on them as plainly and dryly without altering the facts and given statements whether you, your sponsors, the government or audience likes or agrees with them is about as unbiased as one can hope for, no?
Even the basic act of deciding which stories to cover can be seen as bias.
Which experts are we seeking out? What are their agendas?
Altering facts and statements is not bias, it is incorrect reporting. Anything reported as factual that is not is wrong, period, full stop.
But framing? You can frame a story any way you see fit.
And as I was trying to get to in the earlier comment, "bias" is in the eye of the beholder. What might be straight down the middle for one reader could be wildly biased to another.
What is your a priori estimate for the percentage of news that is consumed as entertainment? As in, it does not result in a change of behavior in the consumer beyond engendering neuroticism. I'd put that number at or above 95%. News is gossip wearing a suit.
Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 15 years - increasingly shittier ad units and user-tracking, SEO-optimized clickbait and formatting nonsense, short-form video, now AI. None of it benefits readers. None of it builds loyalty.
Yeah, well said. Journalism and news is tough because at its core it's a public good, but all of the usual levers we have in modern society for funding and supporting public goods introduce all sorts of other problems. If it's only a voluntary paid service, you limit the reach of the information. If you make it free to access by taking money from advertisers, you introduce conflicts of interest with corporations that journalists might otherwise report on. If you make it state-sponsored, you introduce conflicts of interest with governments that journalists might otherwise report on. Journalists working for free is not right, either.
Obviously journalistic integrity is a real thing and I choose to believe that the vast majority of journalists are out there to report the stories as they are and make information available that otherwise would not be. I do not have the same confidence in the business leaders, like you said. Look no further than Jeff Bezos's WaPo.
Reminds me a lot of the book Manufacturing Consent, where it breaks down the split between 'journalism' and 'propaganda'. As long as there is a monetary incentive to emphasize certain things and ignore others, it will always ultimately be a form of propaganda.
Money isn’t the only pressure which influences journalism. Access (and exclusion) is a huge pressure on sports, celebrity, and political journalism. A desire for popularity/notoriety cause sensationalism. There are countless other influences which confuse (or corrupt) the nobility of the profession.
I think Manufacturing Consent is a deeply outdated book. It was fine for the 80s, but if you use it as your source for how the media works today you're going to reach silly conclusions and see outcomes you can't account for.
The biggest problem with it is that distribution costs for media are now zero, so it's easy to "start your own" and it's easy for audiences to switch away from outlets which don't pander to them to ones which do. The market pressure to pander to your audience and never contradict them is massive, which is a dynamic Chomsky never once mentions, because for him the manipulation always flows from the media to the consumer, even though today it's just as often the reverse.
Here's a good example of how outdated the book is: right after the J6 riot, Rupert Murdoch tried to get Fox News to dump Trump completely. He also tried to get the American right all-in on supporting Ukraine. In both cases, Fox's audience furiously revolted, they switched to Newsmax and OANN in big numbers, and Fox had to back off (at which point their ratings recovered). Manufacturing Consent cannot explain this.
Also, it's very hard to tell what the audience is organically rejecting from what various organizations (foreign or domestic) with a vested interest in the coverage are trying to suppress or what seemingly unrelated algorithmic processes are sidelining. There are so many feedback loops and their response time is now on the order of the descsion time that the people "calling the shots" are likely as in the dark as the rest of us.
Meta: It would be really interesting to see comment sentiment vs time of day to get a read on perspective when different parts of the world wake up. For example, "independent journalism is the future" and "independent journalism is dangerous", which are the two extremes in in these discussions.
Journalism today is a joke. More like 'what journalism? that heavy manipulative gossip masquerading as journalism?'
Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large enough to drive, we're in this emotionally driven circus for the duration.
There is still good journalism going on but it is seldom read as it can't afford to promote itself like the propaganda empowered by capital. In LA, we have LA TACO for example. But they don't have much staff, so they don't even publish at a rate of a single article a day, it can be a few days between articles, and they are only able to cover a limited set of topics.
People also of course aren't reading in general, they are watching reels and ticktocks.
> So their outlook is not rosy. Instead, I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.
I think this is right. I'd like to see more public media funding, but at least right now there is an explosion of independent media business models being explored recruiting some very good journalists and smart people.
I'd like to hear about anyone else's updated media habits. In my last… 20ish years of "gathering information about my community and interests," I've gone from paper NYT subscriber to RSS feed reader to social aggregators to social media to podcasts to newsletters to doomscroller... I've tried it all.
But to stay sane I've settled on simply following the voices I trust and find interesting across different media, and the best ones are navigating their own publishing and distribution journey. I pay some of them real money. Some are being acquired by bigger media outlets, too. I have hope in journalism's survival.
I've stopped paying attention to the news. Almost none of what is reported affects my life in any way.
I do read HN, more than I should actually, and a couple of local bloggers who report on local happenings. Our local paper used to do that but it's now just a USA Today reprint under a local masthead.
One of the things I've noticed here in Britain is that journalists don't even try to make sense of events, and instead the 'analysis' is just the opinions of uninformed bystanders.
It has been trying to do that for 25 years. It is hard when on one hand you have people seeking truth and not trying to fleece you, and on the other hand there is actual propaganda that is not caring about the truth and trying to fleece you with every trick out of modern psychological research available to them. Not to say all journalism is good, there have always been rags, but that is the general situation.
It is a completely unbalanced dynamic. And it takes massive financial support. These are professional salaries that need to be paid for in some way. You need a lot of staff to actually meaningfully cover various stories and regularly publish.
Now think of the potential readership. A small fraction compared to the old days when the paper of record was the only way to learn about anything at all. Orgs like NYT that have essentially a national customer base do alright. 5% of the entire united states (made up number) is a lot of damn people. 5% of a single metro region on the other hand just isn't enough to support the demands of the work. It never was enough.
Now you have newsrooms getting bought and commanded from upon high. LA times is a rag now thanks to a conservative billionaire putting his thumb on the editorial board and laying off staff. The newsroom isn't even in LA anymore, it has been reduced to an office in El Segundo. The old newsroom in downtown LA that they were kicked out of has been vacant for 8 years now, presumably the owner (onni group) is doing the commercial valuation shenanigan where they are concerned about the value of the asset to take loans out against vs the potential cash flow opportunities from rent paying tenants.
"NEWS" outlets are competing against social media and are doing things to get your attention.
Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention
Your post is a good description of how journalism has operated for hundreds of years. Maybe we're seeing that the twentieth century was just a (positive) blip and now we're regressing to the mean.
I think the problem is traditional news journalism tried to be middle of the road. Which worked fine when you needed to run a tv channel or print edition that needed to appeal to most consumers and consumers had limited choices.
But with the internet everything got hyper specialized.
Want the entertainment & tabloid-esque factor? Well social media, certain subreddits are going to serve you better, for free.
Want the in-depth analysis. Well youtube, if you know how to be media critical, serves you better (yes YT is full of bullshit but if you truly want in depth analysis coverage, you probably know how to filter out the bad channels and find high quality). Not to mention specialist sites. Like compare the in depthness of isw (https://understandingwar.org) vs your average news broadcast when it comes to what is happening in current wars.
Heck even wikipedia tends to be more in depth and provide better context than most news reports.
Where does that leave us? Traditional news becomes an expensive product that has subpar quality. Then it becomes a vicious circle where either they go full clickbait to feed ads where quality goes in the dirt, or they go paywall which keeps them out of the digital conversation and errodes their publicitly which ultimately prevents them from acquiring new users.
This is about the journalism that is serious. That tells stories, reports, and goes deep into subjects.
My impression is that most media today is nowhere near this. They're just cheap dopamine source, containing only "news", not any serious discussion.
"This ____ grills ______ on his comments about __________." -- this is typical American title, but in other countries this sort of news is abundant, and differs only in wording, not the essence.
A local media news: Lebron James died in a crash. Which happened at the other side of the world in another country, nothing to do with the place itself. Because the media is owned by a holding company, and metrics are measured and aggressively optimized.
Trump became a source of cheap dopamine for every non-serious media in the world. "American president said that X. <insert your tongque in cheek/sarcastic/caustic comment>".
"Traffic jams in city X reached level 9!" (screenshot of a mobile map with traffic layer)
The future of journalism is indie journalism. Just like indie web, indie games and indie art. It's the only way to fight against corporate slop and AI slop.
How are you going to do that when the audience is braindead and can't focus their attention for more than a paragraph or watch a video longer than 30s? There's just not much room for reinvention unless everything becomes a Tiktok feed.
Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience is at least slightly above average for these sorts of things.
Newspapers have always been written under the assumption that the entire article won't be read: articles start with the most important information, and get into more detail as the article progresses.
The difference now is that we can track this for every article and every reader.
Unfortunately, a lot of times articles are kind of full of fluff, or journalists trying to add their own spin.
Partly, that's financial. If Apple makes a product announcement, most people want a link to that, but most news sources don't want you leaving the site, as that reduces ad revenue.
A significant portion of the population DOES want to read and engage with long-form content and discussions. They simply don't want it to be drivel. Traditional corporate/state journalism produces drivel. Substack is flourishing for a reason.
> I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve
I agree with the idea, but there is a lot of subtlety. Journalism is a profession. Journalists must understand context and research while also finding ways to convey often complex concepts in an unbiased and comprehensible way. The average internet voice trying to fill this role is just spouting opinion and often with undisclosed motive.
If we do not solve the credibility gap that currently exists and let professionals be adequately compensated for doing good work in a difficult profession most of the suggestions here are just bandaids on a mortal wound.
There probably is no substitute for the state paying for it. We just need to balloon NPR/PBS into BBC scale (relative to the size of the US, so even bigger) and hope for the best.
Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.
I don't disagree, but given the ideological opposition towards NPR/PBS right now from Republicans, the only way we might accomplish that is by promising to turn them into fox news.
A bunch of investors went on a buying spree of traditional news outlets about 25-30 years ago, hoping to make good money off of them. They also offered free access to the news online at the time.
Well, people stopped buying newspapers and fewer and fewer people watch the local news, so there was no money making happening.
They're still expecting to make the cash off the original investment. There will be no reinventing, civic consequences be damned.
I know there are 4th estate implications, but there's probably an argument made that news media should be a municipal endeavor supported through taxation. Yes there is public corruption all the time but usually it isn't a grand conspiracy sort of corruption, but on an isolated individual level, frequently exposed by staff themselves. In LA these days, the city controller is actually one of the best muckrakers right now. He is a sort of accountant/data scientist who doesn't care if the data he presents is embarrassing for the city leadership.
It's not going to reinvent itself when it is compromised of few, like minded people. Government would need to step in, but the current US admin is in bed with media, so we'll be here a while, at least.
Journalism needs to believe in itself, passionately, and put that passion out there. For every individual and every organization, whoever you are, you set the ceiling: nobody will have more passion or believe in you more than you do.
In my anecdotal experience, journalism goes along with the detractors and naysayers: It's an archaic industry from a past era, they're mostly ineffective, social media makes it mostly irrelevant, journalistic principles aren't really valued, hard news isn't valued, not many will ever read it and the audience won't come back, it's more for comfort and entertainment, don't challenge people too much, etc.
Imagine a blogger who, for their post, flew to the location of whatever they were talking about and saw it for themself. Interviewed dozens of people with direct experience, including the people directly affected, the people who did whatever happened, the local leaders, people on all sides. Found and read actual documentary evidence. Combined that all in a blog post and then ran it by several other people for editing, verification, ensuring nothing exceeded the evidence, etc. That would be an amazing - an almost unheard of - blogger and blog post.
That's everyday professional journalism. You can get it pretty cheaply.
They just don't market themselves. They don't believe in themselves. Someone told them that they are outdated and they believe it: Look at the NY Times front page, still trying to look like an actual old newspaper. Still with a banner at the top like the newspaper, with a typeface that was impressive in the era of metal type (what do younger who never saw the metal type output think? My guess: 'that's something old, for old people, before my time.'). Still mostly black-and-white and text (print!), with multimedia a very secondary extra rather than a normal, first-class part of the reports - articles with significant multimedia are special events done (afaik) by a special staff! Even lone bloggers can do better, and the NY Times has far more resources.
When is the last time you saw someone passionate about what is a truly noble, sometimes heroic profession? When was the last time someone was talking about how they were going to make it better than ever? How they were going to change the world? By being swept along by the zeitgeist rather than standing up and defining it and themselves, they are killing another essential institution (what institution has risen to this moment?).
Black and white text is very readable, and text-based news is very useful. I don't think the NYT will see huge success trying to reinvent itself as a YouTube channel.
I think this trend will only change once institutions like the NYTimes go bankrupt. Younger generations already aren't interested in what they are peddling.
Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
>But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
NYTimes Revenue - $2.9B Daily Mail Group - £1.1Bn
Getting them/advertisers to pay isn't a problem!
"Close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished..." in the last 25 years. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-...
Don't know what it's like where you are, but most people nowadays are not so interested in reading a 'newspaper'. It's all online/tv/radio/podcast
Even the local freely distributed papers are hardly read (unless placed near to a train station or similar so someone about to have 30 mins on a train may pick it up).
They have a pretty broad definition of "newspaper" -- it can be a digital outlet.
That deserves some pushback. It's commonly, and more frequently, the case that information is available online; people streaming on the ground right where you want video. It's possible to cultivate online relationships with people nearly everywhere on the planet with people that can serve as a source, or interface with the local people for you.
Good journalism required effort. It used to be really expensive to get news and reporting from around the world, and now it's ubiquitous and nearly free to get news from everywhere.
The hard part about good journalism is critical thinking, and identifying fact, and untangling the thread of truth from the overwhelming flood of information available on nearly every topic. Throw in the motivated bias of modern "style" guides, the politically and ideologically biased influences that govern framing, pacing, which stories get covered and how, thematic and editorial impositions, and it's going to be more or less impossible to do anything resembling "good" journalism in any modern incarnation of the former journalistic institutions.
You can get live streams from nearly anywhere on the planet even during murderously hot conflict. During the middle of Iran's crackdown we were still getting videos from citizens daily, as well as seeing Iranian soldiers videos and the like.
Journalism is a product. It's not a business of itself. The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity. The writing will never be as tangibly valuable on a consistent basis to any of the advertisers.
The value of superb writing and journalism with integrity and a significant story is the perception of institutional integrity, and thereby becoming a better outlet for advertising (and/or manipulation.)
Throw in the fact that every strictly written word platform is in direct competition for time and eyeballs with the likes of TikTok and Twitter, Netflix, Prime, and all the other algorithm optimized timesinks, and the effective marginal value of even the absolute best of the best writing falls to nearly zero.
If all I'm going to get is biased, skewed, ideologically motivated, politically or commercially manipulative narratives, then I'm not only not going to pay, I won't even pirate. I'll find some talking head that does the tedious job of figuring out how things work, de-censors, untangles the manipulative elements, and presents a reasonable facsimile of facts on the ground.
All those talking heads do it for free, and with ad blockers, I'm consuming the video stream resources without contributing to any of the overt commercial mechanisms in play.
The advent of AI also means that I can synthesize, filter, model, and report on any given topic with validated sources and pull in all of the best the internet has to offer.
The era of high paid Pulitzer prize writers and journalists is effectively over, and the only way legacy institutions are going to get people to pay is by tricking them into thinking that value exists where there is, in fact, none.
Look, I agree with some of this. Full disclaimer, I am building that service that pulls in primary sources and aggregates/synthesizes (https://www.forth.news)
But there is more to journalism/reporting than what youre talking about. Reporters cultivate sources. They can do investigations. They go to places so they aren't relying on a stranger with a live stream.
"The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity." is incredibly cynical -- and that i think is the problem. The reporting needs to be valuable on its own -- that is and has been my sole point.
Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.
Source?
This is sort of what I mean in one of the other comments regarding biases. This is an entirely subjective take, not to mention vague. Who redefined it? Whose journalism were they redefining? Everyone's, or specific people/outlet?
There's news for entertainment, and news for making informed decisions. I suppose in a healthy democracy, it would be in the people's best interest to have unbiased and thoroughly investigated the news available so voters can make the best decision for themselves and the country. It wouldn't be profitable so it would have to be publicly funded like PBS News, BBC, CBC. And, well, it was good while it lasted but politicians seem hell bent on demonizing anything for the public good.
"it would be in the people's best interest" -- the problem is that as we're seeing, people do not seem to agree, at least not when voting with their wallets.
And who determines what is "unbiased?" If I don't match your biases, am I biased?
Seeking out experts, eye witnesses, and sources of information and reporting on them as plainly and dryly without altering the facts and given statements whether you, your sponsors, the government or audience likes or agrees with them is about as unbiased as one can hope for, no?
Absolutely no.
Even the basic act of deciding which stories to cover can be seen as bias.
Which experts are we seeking out? What are their agendas?
Altering facts and statements is not bias, it is incorrect reporting. Anything reported as factual that is not is wrong, period, full stop.
But framing? You can frame a story any way you see fit.
And as I was trying to get to in the earlier comment, "bias" is in the eye of the beholder. What might be straight down the middle for one reader could be wildly biased to another.
Ah, I understand. You're on the demonize train.
Not demonizing. Trying to convey that this is a much more complicated subject than you seem to want to admit.
Feels like https://xkcd.com/793/
What is your a priori estimate for the percentage of news that is consumed as entertainment? As in, it does not result in a change of behavior in the consumer beyond engendering neuroticism. I'd put that number at or above 95%. News is gossip wearing a suit.
It seems strange to assume that you can even put a number on it. What's frivolous to you may be extremely important to another person.
Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 15 years - increasingly shittier ad units and user-tracking, SEO-optimized clickbait and formatting nonsense, short-form video, now AI. None of it benefits readers. None of it builds loyalty.
Yeah, well said. Journalism and news is tough because at its core it's a public good, but all of the usual levers we have in modern society for funding and supporting public goods introduce all sorts of other problems. If it's only a voluntary paid service, you limit the reach of the information. If you make it free to access by taking money from advertisers, you introduce conflicts of interest with corporations that journalists might otherwise report on. If you make it state-sponsored, you introduce conflicts of interest with governments that journalists might otherwise report on. Journalists working for free is not right, either.
Obviously journalistic integrity is a real thing and I choose to believe that the vast majority of journalists are out there to report the stories as they are and make information available that otherwise would not be. I do not have the same confidence in the business leaders, like you said. Look no further than Jeff Bezos's WaPo.
I'm not sure what the solutions could be.
Reminds me a lot of the book Manufacturing Consent, where it breaks down the split between 'journalism' and 'propaganda'. As long as there is a monetary incentive to emphasize certain things and ignore others, it will always ultimately be a form of propaganda.
Money isn’t the only pressure which influences journalism. Access (and exclusion) is a huge pressure on sports, celebrity, and political journalism. A desire for popularity/notoriety cause sensationalism. There are countless other influences which confuse (or corrupt) the nobility of the profession.
I think Manufacturing Consent is a deeply outdated book. It was fine for the 80s, but if you use it as your source for how the media works today you're going to reach silly conclusions and see outcomes you can't account for.
The biggest problem with it is that distribution costs for media are now zero, so it's easy to "start your own" and it's easy for audiences to switch away from outlets which don't pander to them to ones which do. The market pressure to pander to your audience and never contradict them is massive, which is a dynamic Chomsky never once mentions, because for him the manipulation always flows from the media to the consumer, even though today it's just as often the reverse.
Here's a good example of how outdated the book is: right after the J6 riot, Rupert Murdoch tried to get Fox News to dump Trump completely. He also tried to get the American right all-in on supporting Ukraine. In both cases, Fox's audience furiously revolted, they switched to Newsmax and OANN in big numbers, and Fox had to back off (at which point their ratings recovered). Manufacturing Consent cannot explain this.
Also, it's very hard to tell what the audience is organically rejecting from what various organizations (foreign or domestic) with a vested interest in the coverage are trying to suppress or what seemingly unrelated algorithmic processes are sidelining. There are so many feedback loops and their response time is now on the order of the descsion time that the people "calling the shots" are likely as in the dark as the rest of us.
Meta: It would be really interesting to see comment sentiment vs time of day to get a read on perspective when different parts of the world wake up. For example, "independent journalism is the future" and "independent journalism is dangerous", which are the two extremes in in these discussions.
Has anyone made something like this for HN?
Journalism today is a joke. More like 'what journalism? that heavy manipulative gossip masquerading as journalism?'
Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large enough to drive, we're in this emotionally driven circus for the duration.
There is still good journalism going on but it is seldom read as it can't afford to promote itself like the propaganda empowered by capital. In LA, we have LA TACO for example. But they don't have much staff, so they don't even publish at a rate of a single article a day, it can be a few days between articles, and they are only able to cover a limited set of topics.
People also of course aren't reading in general, they are watching reels and ticktocks.
> So their outlook is not rosy. Instead, I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.
I think this is right. I'd like to see more public media funding, but at least right now there is an explosion of independent media business models being explored recruiting some very good journalists and smart people.
I'd like to hear about anyone else's updated media habits. In my last… 20ish years of "gathering information about my community and interests," I've gone from paper NYT subscriber to RSS feed reader to social aggregators to social media to podcasts to newsletters to doomscroller... I've tried it all.
But to stay sane I've settled on simply following the voices I trust and find interesting across different media, and the best ones are navigating their own publishing and distribution journey. I pay some of them real money. Some are being acquired by bigger media outlets, too. I have hope in journalism's survival.
I've stopped paying attention to the news. Almost none of what is reported affects my life in any way.
I do read HN, more than I should actually, and a couple of local bloggers who report on local happenings. Our local paper used to do that but it's now just a USA Today reprint under a local masthead.
One of the things I've noticed here in Britain is that journalists don't even try to make sense of events, and instead the 'analysis' is just the opinions of uninformed bystanders.
It has been trying to do that for 25 years. It is hard when on one hand you have people seeking truth and not trying to fleece you, and on the other hand there is actual propaganda that is not caring about the truth and trying to fleece you with every trick out of modern psychological research available to them. Not to say all journalism is good, there have always been rags, but that is the general situation.
It is a completely unbalanced dynamic. And it takes massive financial support. These are professional salaries that need to be paid for in some way. You need a lot of staff to actually meaningfully cover various stories and regularly publish.
Now think of the potential readership. A small fraction compared to the old days when the paper of record was the only way to learn about anything at all. Orgs like NYT that have essentially a national customer base do alright. 5% of the entire united states (made up number) is a lot of damn people. 5% of a single metro region on the other hand just isn't enough to support the demands of the work. It never was enough.
Now you have newsrooms getting bought and commanded from upon high. LA times is a rag now thanks to a conservative billionaire putting his thumb on the editorial board and laying off staff. The newsroom isn't even in LA anymore, it has been reduced to an office in El Segundo. The old newsroom in downtown LA that they were kicked out of has been vacant for 8 years now, presumably the owner (onni group) is doing the commercial valuation shenanigan where they are concerned about the value of the asset to take loans out against vs the potential cash flow opportunities from rent paying tenants.
"NEWS" outlets are competing against social media and are doing things to get your attention.
Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention
Your post is a good description of how journalism has operated for hundreds of years. Maybe we're seeing that the twentieth century was just a (positive) blip and now we're regressing to the mean.
I think the problem is traditional news journalism tried to be middle of the road. Which worked fine when you needed to run a tv channel or print edition that needed to appeal to most consumers and consumers had limited choices.
But with the internet everything got hyper specialized.
Want the entertainment & tabloid-esque factor? Well social media, certain subreddits are going to serve you better, for free.
Want the in-depth analysis. Well youtube, if you know how to be media critical, serves you better (yes YT is full of bullshit but if you truly want in depth analysis coverage, you probably know how to filter out the bad channels and find high quality). Not to mention specialist sites. Like compare the in depthness of isw (https://understandingwar.org) vs your average news broadcast when it comes to what is happening in current wars.
Heck even wikipedia tends to be more in depth and provide better context than most news reports.
Where does that leave us? Traditional news becomes an expensive product that has subpar quality. Then it becomes a vicious circle where either they go full clickbait to feed ads where quality goes in the dirt, or they go paywall which keeps them out of the digital conversation and errodes their publicitly which ultimately prevents them from acquiring new users.
This is about the journalism that is serious. That tells stories, reports, and goes deep into subjects.
My impression is that most media today is nowhere near this. They're just cheap dopamine source, containing only "news", not any serious discussion.
"This ____ grills ______ on his comments about __________." -- this is typical American title, but in other countries this sort of news is abundant, and differs only in wording, not the essence.
A local media news: Lebron James died in a crash. Which happened at the other side of the world in another country, nothing to do with the place itself. Because the media is owned by a holding company, and metrics are measured and aggressively optimized.
Trump became a source of cheap dopamine for every non-serious media in the world. "American president said that X. <insert your tongque in cheek/sarcastic/caustic comment>".
"Traffic jams in city X reached level 9!" (screenshot of a mobile map with traffic layer)
The future of journalism is indie journalism. Just like indie web, indie games and indie art. It's the only way to fight against corporate slop and AI slop.
How are you going to do that when the audience is braindead and can't focus their attention for more than a paragraph or watch a video longer than 30s? There's just not much room for reinvention unless everything becomes a Tiktok feed.
Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience is at least slightly above average for these sorts of things.
Newspapers have always been written under the assumption that the entire article won't be read: articles start with the most important information, and get into more detail as the article progresses.
The difference now is that we can track this for every article and every reader.
Unfortunately, a lot of times articles are kind of full of fluff, or journalists trying to add their own spin.
Partly, that's financial. If Apple makes a product announcement, most people want a link to that, but most news sources don't want you leaving the site, as that reduces ad revenue.
A significant portion of the population DOES want to read and engage with long-form content and discussions. They simply don't want it to be drivel. Traditional corporate/state journalism produces drivel. Substack is flourishing for a reason.
> I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve
I agree with the idea, but there is a lot of subtlety. Journalism is a profession. Journalists must understand context and research while also finding ways to convey often complex concepts in an unbiased and comprehensible way. The average internet voice trying to fill this role is just spouting opinion and often with undisclosed motive.
If we do not solve the credibility gap that currently exists and let professionals be adequately compensated for doing good work in a difficult profession most of the suggestions here are just bandaids on a mortal wound.
I think journalism has an honesty problem. Too much lying and manipulation has destroyed all trust.
The most egregious offenders never allow reader comments or discussion underneath the story.
This would do a lot to restore trust.
The problem is, they want to restore trust and keep acting deceptively too!
There probably is no substitute for the state paying for it. We just need to balloon NPR/PBS into BBC scale (relative to the size of the US, so even bigger) and hope for the best.
Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.
I don't disagree, but given the ideological opposition towards NPR/PBS right now from Republicans, the only way we might accomplish that is by promising to turn them into fox news.
I wonder how BBC tiptoes this?
Reinvention takes money.
A bunch of investors went on a buying spree of traditional news outlets about 25-30 years ago, hoping to make good money off of them. They also offered free access to the news online at the time.
Well, people stopped buying newspapers and fewer and fewer people watch the local news, so there was no money making happening.
They're still expecting to make the cash off the original investment. There will be no reinventing, civic consequences be damned.
I know there are 4th estate implications, but there's probably an argument made that news media should be a municipal endeavor supported through taxation. Yes there is public corruption all the time but usually it isn't a grand conspiracy sort of corruption, but on an isolated individual level, frequently exposed by staff themselves. In LA these days, the city controller is actually one of the best muckrakers right now. He is a sort of accountant/data scientist who doesn't care if the data he presents is embarrassing for the city leadership.
It's not going to reinvent itself when it is compromised of few, like minded people. Government would need to step in, but the current US admin is in bed with media, so we'll be here a while, at least.
So...it's your impression that the media and the current US administration like each other? Interesting. That is not the impression I've gotten.
Journalism needs to believe in itself, passionately, and put that passion out there. For every individual and every organization, whoever you are, you set the ceiling: nobody will have more passion or believe in you more than you do.
In my anecdotal experience, journalism goes along with the detractors and naysayers: It's an archaic industry from a past era, they're mostly ineffective, social media makes it mostly irrelevant, journalistic principles aren't really valued, hard news isn't valued, not many will ever read it and the audience won't come back, it's more for comfort and entertainment, don't challenge people too much, etc.
Imagine a blogger who, for their post, flew to the location of whatever they were talking about and saw it for themself. Interviewed dozens of people with direct experience, including the people directly affected, the people who did whatever happened, the local leaders, people on all sides. Found and read actual documentary evidence. Combined that all in a blog post and then ran it by several other people for editing, verification, ensuring nothing exceeded the evidence, etc. That would be an amazing - an almost unheard of - blogger and blog post.
That's everyday professional journalism. You can get it pretty cheaply.
They just don't market themselves. They don't believe in themselves. Someone told them that they are outdated and they believe it: Look at the NY Times front page, still trying to look like an actual old newspaper. Still with a banner at the top like the newspaper, with a typeface that was impressive in the era of metal type (what do younger who never saw the metal type output think? My guess: 'that's something old, for old people, before my time.'). Still mostly black-and-white and text (print!), with multimedia a very secondary extra rather than a normal, first-class part of the reports - articles with significant multimedia are special events done (afaik) by a special staff! Even lone bloggers can do better, and the NY Times has far more resources.
When is the last time you saw someone passionate about what is a truly noble, sometimes heroic profession? When was the last time someone was talking about how they were going to make it better than ever? How they were going to change the world? By being swept along by the zeitgeist rather than standing up and defining it and themselves, they are killing another essential institution (what institution has risen to this moment?).
Black and white text is very readable, and text-based news is very useful. I don't think the NYT will see huge success trying to reinvent itself as a YouTube channel.
I think this trend will only change once institutions like the NYTimes go bankrupt. Younger generations already aren't interested in what they are peddling.
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