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Explaining the Lack of Quality Journalism In the Internet Age (gawker.com)
schnell writes: While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article argues that the inescapable problem is that you need a paying (in some form) audience (of a large enough size) to do it. There are plenty of free "news" sources to be found online, especially blogs simply regurgitating and putting a spin on wire news reports. But as the article notes, "The audience for quality prestige content is small. Even smaller than the actual output of quality prestige content, which itself is smaller than most media outlets like to imagine." Even highly respected news sources like the New York Times are resorting to wine clubs, and the Washington Post is giving free subscriptions to Amazon Prime members to drive more corporate synergy and revenue. Rich parent companies are giving up on boutique, high-quality, niche journalism projects like ESPN's Grantland and Al Jazeera America because there simply aren't enough TV viewers/online ad clickers to pay the bills. So how do we reconcile our collectively-stated desire for high quality journalism with our (seeming) collective unwillingness to pay for it?
While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article
Ok, stopped reading here.
We never had quality journalism in the first place. People look at history through rose colored glasses, yet journalists have been lying to the people for years.
I think despite our best efforts to track down the issue, be it money or advertiser influence or lack of truly independent editorial staff, one thing remains true. The answer to a lack of quality journalism in the internet age should always and forever be directly attributed solely to Timmy.
now let us all turn our heads and cast our neverending gaze of shame and distrust upon him.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Stop asking questions! We make the news!
Who cast the first stone? Did people stop reading newspapers because they were becoming shit filled with advertisements and no content, or did the newspapers become shit filled with advertisements and no content because people stopped reading them?
The trend I've observed was that people used to buy newspapers, but then free newspapers, and later online newspapers, filled with ads and ADHD-quality content started becoming a thing, and they rather quickly eliminated their competition, or at the very least forced the competition to fight on their level, which in the end hasn't turned out well for anyone.
Real journalism is hard work. Hard work costs money. People found out that they could put up blogs like Gawker, HuffPo, Tmblr, and Slashdot where they could copy free stuff for use as clickbait. It cost them little or nothing and the clicks/ads made them rich.
Everyone else tried to follow that model. Now there are few real journalists and even fewer good investigative journalists, so we're fed a contrant stream of click bait like Kim Kardashian's ass.
For those non-Americans who didn't or don't plan to RTFA, this is opinion piece on American journalism only.
This recent book (The Internet is Not the Answer) by Andrew Keen covers this area -- call it "the death of journalism" -- pretty well. A very good, but very sad, read.
NYC has some tabloids, but decades ago there were a lot more of them around the USA. people would buy two newspapers a day and the tabloids would compete with the more outrageous covers to get a sale. Same with blogs. take some story someone wrote, put a click bait spin and title on it and then post the links around the internet and share them out on social media. if you follow tech then you know all about BGR and Ars Technica and the crap they post
People aren't willing to pay for it, because they don't really want it. It was subsidized as a sort of "tax" on people paying for access to news, i.e. the newspaper used some of it's revenues for in-depth articles that only a tiny portion of its reader base actually read. Now that news is pretty much free across the board, nobody wants to pay to read twenty pages of someone else's opinion, especially with the plethora of other entertainment out there. They'd rather watch a cable news anchor argue about it for twenty minutes with a guest instead.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
I'm perfectly happy to pay writers for well-researched well-written content. I'm not happy paying an aggregator for access to what they think is good writing. Good writers are rare; the internet has made aggregation cheap and easy, with the expected outcome that there are lots of terrible aggregation sites out there.
online advertising business models cannot support the salaries and infrastructure of a proper formal news organization, therefore the quality drops to a level that is supportable by the business.
The rise of "social justice" has meant that good journalism is deemed "intolerant", "bigoted", "racist", "sexist", "homophobic", "transphobic", and any number of similar false accusations.
Take what's happening in Europe right now. We see an influx of young men, many of them clearly with violence and rape on their minds (as we've seen in Cologne, Paris, and other cities), entering Europe illegally. Yet despite this being a form of an invasion by hostile foreign invaders, we never see it described as such in the media. Instead, they try to sugarcoat the reality by using terms like "migrants" or "refugees", because not doing so would result in these media outlets getting attacked by the "social justice" crowd.
We see it happening in America, too. Lately there have been a small number of cases of black youth violently attacking police officers, typically after being confronted for some crime these youth had committed, and then the police officers do the only reasonable thing and defend themselves using their guns. Not wanting to be falsely accused of being "racist" by the "social justice" supporters, the media ends up putting more focus on blaming the police officers, and they only briefly, if even at all, mention how the youth were fully responsible for what happened.
The media should start to report on the whole "social justice" situation itself. This would help free them from the shackles that "social justice" currently imposes on the media. The media should make it more widely known that the "social justice" community is very loud, yet actually quite small. It's mostly made up of failed academics, angry lesbians and transsexuals, and weak white men who feel guilty about incidents that happened decades or centuries before they were even born. Emphasis should be put on their hypocrisy, and how their tactics are an extreme form of the bullying that they claim to despise.
When they're seen for the failures that they are, the "social justice" community starts to look like a total joke, and the media won't have to worry about putting politically correct twists on stories. They can just go back to reporting the facts, even if it makes a small number of "social justice" folk feel "offended".
Gawker was never a good news outlet even when ads were paying the way. They've always been sensationalist clickbait crap.
those republicans have put in prison, it's shocking there's any left.
The first 15 minutes explain everything. The average person is not interested in a thought provoking article on a politicians policy on government spending, details on a new medical procedure, or common sense advice on how to eat better. They want to know who the politician slept with (and what techniques they used), how someones plastic surgery went horribly wrong so they look like John Merrick, or what drug they can take to lose weight while stuffing their faces with fast food and Ding Dongs. (Ding Dongs are OK every so often ;-) People will buy or watch the latter material and ignore / not understand the other.
Archive link for those who prefer not to support the reprehensible Gawker: https://archive.is/PP7q2
IMHO Gawker is an absolutely vile clickbait machine that portrays itself as a progressive voice while selling outrage.
It undermines what I consider valid, socially responsible goals by trivialising most of them, generating needless conflict by labelling "bad" people and maintaining a ludicrous left-wing good, right-wing evil narrative. It produces propaganda and hatred for cash.
Nick Denton - the CEO of Gawker - has admitted that the company has a severe empathy problem and tried to relaunch it:
http://www.thewrap.com/nick-de...
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/2...
The problem with journalism is not that one needs an audience, the problem with journalism is that factual reporting is no longer the main goal. Truth is secondary to page-views. Nolan suggests that people are the problem because they won't pay for factual material, http://www.private-eye.co.uk/ demonstrates that one can successfully run a publication that focuses on the pursuit and publication of truth (with a healthy injection of humour).
TFA is an attempt to blame absolutely shitty "journalism" on the audience, what in fact is happening is that those of us who do care about quality journalism recognise Gawker for what it is and don't give it ad-revenue or page-impressions.
What you should try is:
youtube-dl
http://rg3.github.com/youtube-...
A lot of people post to [The Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?
Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.
I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB (Tor Browser Bundle), but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):
chmod a+rx youtube-dl
^ the chmod command only once, then:
torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo
Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.
Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.
##
"We also provide a Windows executable that includes Python.
youtube-dl should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like."
- Supported Sites:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-...
Crime is worse than it's ever been! Kids can't walk to school safely these days!
Except not, and we all know that. We just talked about it earlier this week. As media became national, then international, they started reporting every little thing that happened as though we should care, and maybe we've all started to realize that we don't actually give a shit what's happening in East Bumfuckistan.
In my perfect world if the story is important - and it better be, else why are you wasting my time telling me about it - then take the time to explain why I should care. "Because we have adorable photos of the missing girl" doesn't count.
John Oliver takes on serious issues on a weekly basis and gets ratings doing it. What he doesn't do is pander to fear-mongering and scare tactics, which just get old. Can someone other than Comedy Central please start doing this?
Nope, no sig
Will newspapers die? Hopefully not.
Are they dying right now? Yes.
Or, more accurately, they're being killed from within. What you have to remember is that newspapers aren't run by journalists, they're run by managers and salesmen who don't seem to understand their target market (readers) or their product (quality reporting). They don't seem to look further than the next issue -- if that hits the streets then great, job done. Who cares how it's achieved.
Here in the UK, so many quality journalists and photographers are being let go because managers see staff as an expendable resource. Got 20 journalists working their arses off to produce the paper? Cool, sack 10 of them and use agency copy. The public will never notice, right? That's £200,000 saved per year. When the readership halves because of rubbish content, we'll dream up some other excuse to explain that away. And then we'll sack more staff. Never the managers. They're not expendable. Always the journalists.
I'll give you an insight in to where the power lies at newspapers. About 2 years ago I was working at a great bi-weekly city newspaper. We were working on a story for the next day's paper and I went over to talk to the news editor. He told me that there might not be space to run the story anymore, because four news pages had been dropped. Why? Because the paper liked to have a 50/50 split between editorial and adverts. The ad sales team had sold a full four pages less adverts than they were meant to. So to make everything look right with the upper management, the manager of the ad sales team simply had four news pages dropped.
It wasn't like we were short-staffed that week or there had been a shortage of stories. The news was written, the photos had been taken, the pages were being made up. And four pages were wiped out, just like that, to make one sales guy look good.
Ask anyone who works in newspapers if they've ever heard of the editorial team having ad pages dropped to make space for news. Go on, have a guess how often that happens.
tl;dr: Newspaper sales are dropping. Managers try to save money by making the newspapers worse. Sales drop further. And so on.
Many people don't recognize it but journalism is power and people think nothing about lying. Power will always corrupt. Just look at "Gamergate", I haven't recognized so many "journalists" lie and be such total scum bags as then about what happened and their role in it. It was a pivotal moment for me.
Journalist brand power of the crowd for personal agendas. Do not fall in with mob mentality and give them that power. Do not trust single sources, and when using multiple sources, make sure they really are "independent" meaning that not part of the same conglomerate or even same industry. I.E. videogame journalists will have a much different view than journalist of other fields.
Always follow the money. Is it ads? Is it a sponsor? Videogame journalist often get freebies and more for favorable reviews. Always follow the sources. Very few sites have first hand accounts. Like how so much clings off of Reuters and AP. It might be that 1000 sites report something, only stemming from 2 or 3 actual accounts.
Third. Entire sites, like Kotaku, are tainted. Take anything and everything they say with an extra grain of salt than you normally would with anything.
Fourth, if it's government policy or government maintains something, take it with a third grain of salt. Government is politics and it's all bullshit to the third power massaged for 50 different political messages at once.
These days, I look at everything as a unconfirmed with higher levels of likelihood the more firsthand accounts there are and that's it. I have very little stake in what's the truth and what's not. I know what I experienced first hand and that's about it. As Napoleon said: "History is a set of lies agreed upon."
But can the "quality journalism" tell me the 25 things I can do tomorrow to banish my belly fat?
If you can't get the masses to pay, you're essentially back to the Medicis style of patronage for artists.
When al jazeera america started They geoblocked the US from the al jazeera english online stream.
So yeah I'm rather glad that it's gone It means we will get access to the main stream again. Instead of watered down news run through american censors.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Have you ever tried in-depth quality journalism? Not in my lifetime. Maybe you can blame the readers. Or maybe journalism lost value when it lost its methodology of removing the authors' own biases as much as possible. Why would I want to pay money to read some random author's opinion? I don't even know this person. I would, however, pay money to read investigative journalism. Journalists from the 40 years may need to google that term to know what I mean.
Buzzfeed
Not because of it. And the reason is simple: people want what they expect. The unexpected makes many people afraid, but not in a way that you can exploit. And add to that the news is from a very few very big sources and nowhere else, by companies who want REVENUE, whatever the cost, and there's nothing to make quality journalism (which is expensive and doesn't sell well as a product) an attractive option over crap journalism (which is cheap and sells like hotcakes to the demographic it is sold for).
A (very, very small) license fee on all systems (radio, TV, cellular) using PUBLIC FCC regulated airwaves, to be given to NPR, PBS, or equivalent.
This is pure fantasy, as like everything else in our Panopticon, the Industrial-Governmental Complex wishes to very carefully control information for the masses.
"... lack of quality ..."
Quality is like temperature. Everything has it. It can be either high or low, but everything has it.
I love the random news sites/aggregators I visit, and I use ad blockers, but we are the problem. I don't pay for any of the sites I visit, I don't donate money to them, and I get annoyed with bad/aggressive ads, and worry about malware, so I use ad blockers. This means that sites I visit are not generating revenue. Most of us here probably do the same thing. So that means they have less money to do _any_ journalism let alone good journalism.
There are the hardcore people who feel everything should be free, but I doubt they go to work and do their job for free. Now, some random person blogging for fun, yes I get annoyed when they have ads all over the place, and the click-bait sites that put every sentence on a different page. Those are their own categories. But nothing is going to change until all we have is complete crap. Then someone will start charging and it will be seen as an innovation. People will say, "amazing! they charge us money and we get quality things!" but we aren't there yet. We have to hit bottom, or someone has to come up with an actual way to allow the give and take that is fair and non-obtrusive.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
First, the poster uses Al Jazeera America as an example of "Quality Journalism", thereby invalidating everything else he has written as the rantings of a mad man.
Second, even in the "golden age" of journalism there was little "quality journalism". In the US, for example, 90%+ of journalists self-identify as members of one political party, which explains why they all report the very same tiny subset events on any day as "the news" and all with the same viewpoint. The truth is that in the pre-internet era, the press in the US was "fully in the tank" for the Democrats but they did a better job of hiding it; Walter Cronkite, for example, was a personal friend of JFK and hung out with him and his family at their compound on their yacht, etc - and thus he was NEVER going to tell the public about the president's bad health and bad behaviors and never going to be publicly critical of his bad policies. The public considered Cronkite the "most trusted man in America" because they never heard anything about what he was NOT telling them.
Two quotes by a famous newspaperman of the "golden era" are appropriate, for entirely different reasons I leave to the reader to contemplate:
"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.” - William Randolph Hearst
“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst
Journalists report on things they've observed first hand.
Just because 100,000 partisan gossips refer to each other as journalists and publish words that have been strung into paragraphs doesn't make what they do journalism.
Ideal journalism is devoid of opinions, devoid of conclusions. It informs without attempting to lead the reader towards a value judgement, allowing us to make better decisions.
Journalism is dead, and it's the likes of Gawker that killed it in the first place. They put it right in their mission statement:
http://gawker.com/5951868/the-...
If you want people to be well informed with unbiased information, maybe protecting them from the likes of Gawker would be a good start.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Support Good News Sites
http://www.democracynow.org/
There is just a glut of crap that hides the quality.
I think it's a two-fold problem:
1. To quote The Matrix, "The problem is choice." There are tons and tons of choices for news services these days, and they're of varying quality. By quality, I'm referring to well-researched reporting mostly sticking to the facts (I'm well aware that all news sources have some bias.) Quality costs money. You have to pay for an NYT subscription to keep their journalists writing, the BBC has to collect TV license fees to run World Service, and the major news channels need to be paid by advertisers. By nature, people are cheap and gravitate to "free" services. Online, that means random blogger dudes paying the bills using Google ad revenue, or targeted news sites that have an obvious agenda and may be funded by someone without the best of intentions. Random blogger dudes don't have the resources to do actual investigative journalism, i.e. exposing corruption or keeping officials honest. Outside groups have an interest in selling people on their way of thinking, so the bias that's there anyway gets magnified many times over in favor of that group's POV.
2. This leads to Internet journalism becoming a sort of echo chamber for some people. Someone who's conservative isn't going to read the Huffington Post, no matter what they say. A liberal wouldn't read the Drudge Report. This is magnified _again_ by social media honing in on your preferences and likes, and only presenting you content that you would personally be interested in. You may think you're immune to this, but the unfortunate fact is that the Public writ large is not very bright, and many are very influenced by targeted news. (Mainstream examples: MSNBC, Fox News, etc.)
3. Finally, there's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory -- and yes, I never thought I'd ever reference this in a post. People love to tout how awful SJWs are and how stifling political correctness is, but frankly there is a lot less civil discourse of any kind these days. People who make the most bombastic statements are the ones who are listened to. People aren't nice because nice doesn't get noticed in all the chaos. Look at Trump -- agree or disagree with his agenda, but he gets attention because he's loud, angry, and taps into the loud angry conservative mindset. Even the mainstream Republicans are trying to keep things somewhat civil, but people gravitate towards the angriest most outrageous voices.
It's really too bad, because I've been feeling lately like we might as well just pack it in and establish a monarchy to keep order. When people aren't educated in politics, and can't see the compromises that are required to run a civil society that doesn't end up eating itself alive, the only thing to do is just take the decisions out of the hands of the common man. I don't think it should happen, but I think it could if it gets bad enough!
I just want to get the news objectively, without a spin. I don't care for in-depth analyses, opinions, etc. by the pompous selected journalist.
Seriously this has to be a joke.
Gawker of all places.
Gawker who got scolded by the FTC for not even bothering to separate paid advertising from actual articles.
Gawker who doxed all gun owners in new york.
Gawker whose editor once proclaimed that "Nerds should be bullied into submission". (Sam Bidle)
Gawker who was penalized and mentioned by name by Google when explained their new "fact based algorithm" and its benefits.
Gawker who knowingly stole photographs from an amateur and explained to her that she should be happy that her photos were deemed worthy of Gawker.
Gawker who is currently being sued by Hulk Hogan for the leak of his sex tape, by their interns for refusing to pay them anything yet working them like regular employees.(You can read more about the unpaid interns with the hashtag #Fairpay I am told, unfortunately I am not familiar with twitter)
Gawker who is set up using multiple shell companies in New-York, Hungary and the Caymans to avoid all and any taxes.
Gawker who criticized "Charlie Hebdo" immediately after 10 of the employees there were murdered by terrorists with an article titled "How much did we need this blasphemy?"
And of course tons of "Quality" article such as "If you dont want to watch a fish suck a dick, here is a description", "Is the new york post edited by a Bigoted Drunk who fucks pigs?" and lastly "Born this way: Sympathy and Science for those who want to have sex with children".
That is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Gawker should not be read, linked to or even mentioned in any way or form.
Just like technology has replaced many factory jobs with automation and robotics, I am hoping that journalism by automated software will partially replace most human journalist, the remaining will have to retrain and find new careers like the rest of us.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If nobody is willing to pay for it, it doesn't happen.
We never had quality journalism in the first place. People look at history through rose colored glasses, yet journalists have been lying to the people for years.
Maybe... and then again, maybe not.
Consider 60 minutes: a news journal that's gone on since 1968. They post interesting in-depth fluff pieces as filler, punctuated by the occasional investigative journalism. I think the model there is to use the fluff pieces to support the investigations.
Then there's a couple of notable cases of investigative journalism, such as the pentagon papers or watergate.
Then there's things like "Last Week Tonight", which attempts to be a comedy show, but appears to have high journalistic standards. Also "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart".
I see it more as a flawed business model. When the purpose of your paper is to sell ads, then you cater to what will sell those ads. You have to fill the column-inches even if there's not enough news to go around that day.
The 60 minutes model - interesting fluff pieces used to support a handful of important stories - might be a better fit for news reporting.
Or perhaps the model of "Last Week Tonight", which has 35 episodes a year, of 1/2 hour each.
I mean, Internet era. The only difference is, you can read about it as it is happening.
A well resourced, independent, evidence based, articulate, objective and easily available journalism is a requirement for a healthy democracy. The citizenry must have access to rich factual information to be able to make informed decisions when it comes time for voting. Investing in independent public journalism is directly fostering a healthy and free society.
Profit motivated and profit survival based journalism is not independent.
Democracy is not cheep. Democracy is expensive. Transparent bureaucracies with checks and balances of powers and separations of responsibilities to prevent collusion and corruption are expensive. An independent journalism empowered to research corruption in the public and private sectors are expensive. But all this serves the common good and thus it is a worthwhile essential expense.
Slashdot has become an apologist and cover for the machine organization since changing hands.
I know why journalism sucks these days.
Try this point of view.
The journalists haven't changed at all in hundreds of years. The internet and free (mostly) flow of information, changed how people verify the facts, seeing for the first time history being made and written without the artistic slant they call journalism. (read too many "long" articles that start like badly written pulp fiction)
If CNN or NPR are the measure of good journalism, then I will take the remainder.
I wouldn't line the bottom of my bird cage with that.
Playboy subscribers have always touted people read it for the "articles."
Historically, in the USA the news was subsidized by the government to the tune of about 3% of the GDP (if I recall correctly, it was almost half of what we spend on Social Security today) and that wasn't cut off until Lincoln ( due to the civil war. )
The primary argument for public libraries and public schooling was that citizens of a democracy must be competent enough to operate it. Same goes for the press. All three are still not enough to maintain competent citizenry.
Today, Americans are almost totally incompetent and it is not because of their failure to maintain the system which sustains their democracy it is simply a sign of their incompetence. All democracies ALWAYS fail from within, it's a cycle of life - much like Ben Franklin stated when he ended the constitutional convention.
The relatively SHORT life of the USA is likely a result of it's great success. It wasn't earned success either, much of it was luck; perhaps if it was earned it would have been better prepared? (World Wars enriched the US greatly, post civil war corruption and lack of organized labor made it a better place at the time of the industrial revolution, vast territory for expansion and resource exploitation.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Around the dot-com bubble incumbent publisher's found themselves challenged by an increasing number of online news outlets and aggregators like yahoo and (quite a bit later), google. The responded by what in hindsight can be summarised as three strategic failures:
1. Putting all of their content online, hoping to thwart the threat. As a result, readers didn't have an incentive to stick with their daily paper-based newspaper and decided en masse to switch to the online version - and stop their subscription. As a result, subscription revenues dropped, sure enough, advertising revenues followed, small ads moved online anyway.
2. Reducing editorial staff. As a reaction to revenue losses the publishers decided they needed to cut cost, and fast. The most expensive resource for a publisher, at least as a group, are editors and field journalists, and so to cut cost they reduced their correspondent network and most of the central editorial staff. Their second failure. Because without staff, you cannot produce. So they all ended up publishing mostly news agency-generated syndicated content. With the result that by today most news outlets publish the very same news, mostly in the very same words, add or a take the headline. Now, there is nothing that kills margin faster than ubiquity. And that's what news are these days, a ubiquitous commodity, available around the world, around the clock, mostly free, in an endless stream of words and images.
3. Introducing paywalls without first investing in content. Seeing that they start to loose big time, publishers started to introduce pay walls. Some have been quite successful at this, like the Economist, or the NY Times. And that's because they have _kept_, at least, the core of their editorial and journalistic capability. And hence, to this day, these fine brands have kept their value while others' has vanished. For the vast majority of publishers and, in particular, online newspapers, pay walls are yet another strategic failure. Since readers already know that they can get the same news for free from somewhere else, at least in its essence, all the paywalls do is to drive them away. No one pays to read an article that barely provides any added value compared to the next guy's free version of the same news. And even if it doesn't, how would they know? Publishers have taught readers for nearly a decade that they don't produce much more than a reincarnation of news presented elsewhere.
I don't have a solution at hand, but I believe these three failures explain the demise of the (news) publishing industry quite well.
Take the case of Newsweek: a periodical written by journalists for journalists ...
... but they're at the bottom of the barrel because they are just different flavors of people who tell semi-sophisticated lies professionally.
There was a time when people thought, "Journalists follow these things closer than most people do, so we should listen a little closer to them."
Then we started hearing about "The case for killing Grandma" and "The new adultery" and people started realizing there just isn't any enlightenment there. Similar scandals committed overtly by journalists (Rathergate, JournoList) showing journalists were deliberately trying to sway people's opinions poisoned general confidence in the mainstream news.
In terms of real investigative work, journalists abandoned that some time ago. Remember when the press was upset they didn't know where Dick Cheney went? They basically said, "We can't be responsible for digging into these things!" And forget about finding out about what happened in Benghazi.
People view journalists very negatively now, which the Republicans exploit regularly (esp. Gingrich, Cruz, and Trump). This political strategy pays off for them. I have seen studies showing people hold journalists with slighly more esteem than lawyers and slightly less than actors
The blogosphere is the news underground. Some of it is gossipmongery, and some of it is real. The advantage is people can decide who they trust and not just some AP writers semi-disguised opinion that has been syndicated everywhere.
The main reason less than 50% of Americans believe in evolution is because public curriculum enforces that it is the only voice that is heard, which I like because it encourages heavy skepticism from ordinary people. This same mechanism also ensures people will not trust the AGW claims either. Which I am also very happy about.
So, journalism is dead. People can form their own opinions now.
Quality journalism exists, the readership just isn't as high, nor does it get name-dropped in articles like these. By all the counts ChristianScienceMonitor and the Economist is quality.
It's possible that journalists are wrong when they decide what makes good journalism and the public is right.
Why are there a few high-quality news sources still around while a number of others have come and gone? Because the fairly small audience remembers and depends on those long-lived sources. Staying power is all-important. The longer you stay the more solid and loyal the audience. (Though SlashDot is obviously not paying for investigative journalism) why am I here and not in a dozen other forums with similar content? Because this one has been around a long time and hasn't changed all that much over the years and hasn't had any (IMHO) serious lapses in integrity, at least none that weren't mostly fixed in response to user outcry. I can concentrate on the content and comments without having to think about the structure.
That said, how do we finance such organizations when click-bait-infested sites return greater short-term profits? For public goods like roads, we usually have the government provide financing, but that wouldn't work so well for an organization reporting on government affairs. A quasi-independent agency like the US Federal Reserve Bank? Regardless of the conspiracy theories out the wazoo, there's a very high level of professionalism within. But still... board members are appointed by government officials. And part of the secret to the Fed's success has been that they can't be defunded at the whim of Congress or a pissed-off Executive. How would a news organization be funded without the shadow of government or corporate interference?
The history of "Quality Journalism" is filled with well compensated hucksters like Walter Duranty, polluting the world with fictions and lies. When you pay journalists celebrity wages you get celebrity journalists promulgating the views of their powerful allies.
Do not want. We're no worse off with our contemporary "journalism" and we may indeed be better.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
You can try even older things I'm sure.
In france, there is a successful new (well, created in 2008) completely independent news source called mediapart. It only has a website and does *not* have a printed version and runs absolutely no ads.
How do they do it? Well, they somehow managed to get 112,000 paying subscribers on board so far who pay 9 Euros per month.
It really shows that they are independent in the sense that they have unearthed several scoops in the last few years that have shaken the French establishment.
Amongst others for example, they have nailed France's Minister for the Budget, Jerome Cahuzac, in a fiscal fraud case. You got to laugh at the irony...
Even in print journalism, the quality difference between 30 years ago and today is huge. Today's newspapers would have been yesterday's tabloids, in most local markets.
The problem is basic human nature. Before people needed some basic facts about life:
- Weather
- Sports results
- Local events
- Job listings
- Legal announcements
- General news about the world
For historical reasons, these came to be gathered together in one place, the newspaper, about which several good social histories have been written. But as a result of the specialized labor and production involved (half a century ago, not just anyone could "make" print in their own homes) it was a professionalized sphere that had to serve a single, large regional audience with one bundle of print, so it had to be reasonably even-handed. There was a kind of obvious supply/demand synergy. The economies of scale were there to make it viable, if the information was presented at a reasonable level of quality and without prejudice or bias that would result in fragmenting the demand base.
Now people get get everything but the "news" part of this package for free. So now you have to ask people to pay only for "reporting" and not for those other "facts." But at the same time, there are endless sources of free reporting as well. And most of those are of lower quality (by which we really mean biased). So we're asking people to pay solely for material that they are *less* likely to agree with than its *free* alternative.
Most people aren't willing to pay for content that they disagree with when they can select for free only content that they agree with, and that agrees with them. Most people aren't willing to pay to be challenged.
So market conditions and human nature have conspired to make high-quality journalism untenable. It's no longer bundled with other facts that people are willing to pay for as well and that are available only through newsprint or television viewership, and as a result, there are no longer ready-made regional audiences of scale that will support it, and that at the same time drive a necessary professionalization and objectivity. Instead, you have to market just on the value of the prose alone and pick up subscribers where you can find them, which means that you have to segment the market according to interests and prejudices and play to their biases to get them interested, and then, because it's easy to chuck out content that reflects existing interests, prejudices, and biases (as opposed to professionalized reporting, which is research-oriented and often surprising), you're also competing with people that essentially do it for free as "bloggers" and so on.
This is not unconnected with difficulties in politics that we are experiencing. Once research-oriented, regionally-minded print goes away in favor of alacarte, self-selected consumption from the entire global market free and paid, people become more and more different as they consume media over time (and more and more intensely bound to their prejudices and narrow interests) rather than more and more the same (for having all read the same newspaper across a large region for years).
A combined reading of Michael Schudson's "Discovering the News" and Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" gives a good sense for how this all comes together, and the problems for democracy and nationhood that we (and everyone) face(s) now in a post-news era.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Mostly it's because of laziness in writing, and a lack of actually wanting to be impartial, because there's apparently no money in that any more. It's required to be slanted one way or another, in order to make enough money to keep going. They just aren't wearing sponsor patches, like race car drivers do.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Democracy now
Truth dig
Counter punch
All produce more quality journalism per day than other news organizations. i like their reporting and i donate appropriately to their organizations because i enjoy their content. they also keep it low on the click bait reporting and try to make sure all of their facts are correct and issue corrections when it is necessary.
In the end the point is that if someone feels that what they are reading is worth it, they would pay for it. so if Gawker is having problems funding their endeavors, maybe its because they tried to be so much to everyone and then propped up that with shitty advertising deals (which is a rather large chunk of their articles)
when you go populist and try to appeal to the masses, dont act so suprised when the masses changed their tastes and are on to the next major fad...
People watched the weather channel when it covered the weather. When they stopped covering the weather and just showed movies, people stopped watching. So to recap when it had quality content people tuned in, when it had crap content people tuned out.
So no, people did not demand the crap content. It's amazing how millennials talk out of their ass so much.
I did work for a newspaper chain around 1998. The guy was out buying one newspaper after another and what he wanted to do was to reduce his AP costs. The idea was that all the articles put into any one of his newspapers would be readily available to all the others; basically his own internal AP.
Without going into all the details what every one of his ideas were about was to fill the pages with crap for the lowest cost possible to pay back the huge money he had borrowed to buy up all these newspapers.
To a guy like this the whole idea of ethics in journalism and whatnot was complete crap. Also if the local news staff were to really mount a protest he could always shut down one newspaper as a warning to the others. Also since his company was a news machine it was no big deal to shut down the Metro Times and open up the Times Metro in the local business park.
One effect of this was that, while newspapers have often been beholden to certain interests, his newspapers became owned by many of them. His political views were the only political views, the real-estate and car sales advertisers wouldn't tolerate any investigative journalism into their practices. My favourite was that a local house inspector with an engineering degree and a reputation for being the best was not able to advertise in any of the traditional media. It was quite simple, take his tiny ad, lose our steady firehose of ads.
Then you get articles where the real-estate market is in freefall and the newspaper will have a near daily article saying that it is levelling out and that you are stupid if you don't buy now at the very bottom. Then the next month's numbers will come out and it is just worse, yet they will print the same advice.
Then there is this stream of news telling us what we should think. Often this is way way way to the left. I am not advocating Fox news (way way way to the right) but it is all the most PC crap imaginable. This whole new crap about micro aggressions. WTF.
So we now have this thing called the internet where we can choose our news sources. If we start to suspect they are shilling or lying then we move on to the 1 million other choices.
Personally, where I suspect this is going to end is that individual investigative journalists are going to realize that while there isn't enough money to run a newsroom, that if they are really good that there is enough money to keep them sustained as they do what they love. In the end I also suspect that someone is going to start to gather these individuals into a central repository so that any consumer will have a steady menu of interesting stories. I am not talking about a huffpo type crap where they keep all the cookies, but something more like an Uber for news. (yes I went with that one). I can just see its mission statement, "No opinions, just journalism."
There was a point in time (and it's well over a decade past) where Slashdot was the definitive go-to site for smart discussions, both on technical topics as well as society in the larger sense. I use the word "discussions" very deliberately, because then (as now) the articles were really just a jumping-off point for a conversation. Nobody ever actually read the articles; why bother? You had a lot of very intelligent people gathered together to share their experiences and impart their knowledge. That was what made Slashdot what is was.
These days, I very rarely visit this site, and this particular conversation is a prime example of why this is. The grandparent post, which at the current time has a score of 4, suggests that the media establishment is made up of (among others) "angry lesbians and transsexuals." Now, I have no doubt that you personally find this type of discourse to be "in-depth, intelligent, and rational." But there are lots of decent people, people who were here very early on and still remember how great this place used to be, who have simply grown tired of this kind of thing.
Most of the intelligent conversation here has been replaced by spoutings so deranged that they make The Protocols of the Elders of Zion read like the owner's manual to a 1987 Buick Skylark. And I'm not just talking about trolls here (although they've been around since the early days as well.) Today, this kind of semiliterate gibbering is just as likely to have a score of 5 as it is to be at -1. Now, I know what you're thinking; I'm either a unwitting tool of the "SJW establishment" or (gasp! dare one think it?) an SJW myself, and I'm just having troubles coming to terms with the fact that the old rules have been usurped and it's now finally permissible to get out The Truth about minorities, women, gays, etc.
The truth of the matter is that I'm just a regular guy who occasionally thinks about how nice it would be to have the old Slashdot back, before it became dominated by angry, pear-shaped, basement-dwelling virgins. Now, to be fair, there were doubtless plenty of basement-dwelling virgins on 1998 Slashdot as well. It's just that the 2016 variant has made the site essentially intolerable and a hollow shell of its former self.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I'll tell you why I don't pay for quality journalism: I don't see any of it. Even when I read a NY Times or WaPo article, it's always something like this: some court has come to a decision and here is what a ton of people I don't care about think about it. There is never a link to the actual decision, there is never a summary of the legal basis for the decision, let alone an analysis of why the decision may or may not be sound. There are never any links to primary sources if want to follow up. The only links are to other stories by the same organization that I can click on and drive more revenue to the site. Exactly what value are you giving me?Pass.
Thanks to the lower barrier of entry provided by the internets. So there's still quality, but there's a lot more of everything else. Like other low barrier opportunities on the internet they're finding it's not so easy finding that pot of gold at the end of the advertising rainbow.
"It's mostly made up of failed academics, angry lesbians and transsexuals, and weak white men "
And here you have it folks, the anti-SJW crowd needs a safe space to hide from the opppressive strong arm of... transsexuals and weak white guys? I seriously don't get this manufactured oppression, there's no SJW conspiracy. If you're living on Twitter and Reddit, yeah YOUR whole world might be in peril but the rest of us don't need your sensationalist garb. I read about the Cologne attacks on Al Jazeera and they didn't soften it up for Muslims.
If you're feeling powerless, it has literally zero to do with women and minorities. I'm very sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but it's YOU, YOU are going to have to change.
Vice News, FrontLine (PBS), 60 Minutes, and even John Oliver focus on one topic somewhat more in depth than a quick 4 minute story. Now, there should be more reporters, and follow-ups to figure out what is going on now too. I think a lot of journalists have now gone into documentary movie making, where you can make more money and have a bigger impact. I want to see investigative journalism going in that direction, with hour long TV shows and documentary movies on different subjects. I even want to see the talking heads on TV discuss one issue for an hour.
CowboyNeal. 'nuff said.
I have no problem whatsoever with paying a reasonable amount of money for quality news journalism.
The problem is not at my end .... trust me. The problem is you pay your $20 a month (which is all it is worth to me) and you get ...
The same drivel, lack of fact checking, and bizarre typo's from the Spill Chucker (those two words are an example of what the spell checker would pass) that show not only was someone without the required skill to even be writing in a news journal in the first place given the job, but there wasn't an Editor within a thousand miles of the story before it was plublished.
I can get that for nothing, which is just slightly less than what it's worth.
Provide value, and you would get revenue. It's not rocket science (which your journalist would fail at writing about anyway).
I have been following the Syrian Civil War and reading http://reddit.com/r/syriancivi... is about the best there is. It's got a lot better content than anything they write in the New York Times or any other mainstream news. It's basically the perfect news feed: Lots of different opinions from all sides. Occasional analysis, minute by minute updates, etc. I can't imagine how a newspaper could do a better job.
Based on the title, I hope DHI takes the subject material to heart..
where has my /. gone :(
So, are you stating that because DHI re-posted it, they themselves should be taken with a lack of credibility??
Guilt by association, or guilt by distribution (garbage in garbage out)
Dude, I'm not familiar with twitter either, but even I know all you need to do is go to twitter.com and search for Fairplay.
That is how hashtags work. They used to be called "keywords".
The serial comma is of course also known as the "Oxford comma" because Oxford, unlike other British style guides, said it should be used. Now, Oxford says it normally should NOT be used:
University of Oxford Public Affairs Directorate Writing and Style Guide:
Note that there is generally no comma between the penultimate item and 'and'/'or' â" this is sometimes referred to as the 'Oxford comma'
One reason for not using it is apparent in the following dedication:
To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.
With the comma, it appears Ayn Rand may be the writer's mother (an appositive).
Without the serial comma, it's clearly not an appositive, it's a list of three people:
To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.
Whether or not it should be used is of course debateable, and debated. Most styles guides, however, say it should be used only if necessary to avoid ambiguity.
EOM.
BlameBillCosby.com
This won't fly in the USA but in the UK and Australia you tax people for it and then use that money to setup an impartial public broadcaster such as the BBC or ABC. These organisations aren't without their flaws and could do with greater funding but they do provide a level of investigative journalism that is difficult to match unless you are state funded. Given their impartiality the ABC is consistently ranked as the most trusted news source in Australia, significantly ahead of Murdoch owned outlets:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/12/18/trust-in-media-abc-still-leads-telegraph-takes-a-hit/
This really won't make that much a difference. If you were to implement such a system, people will gravitate toward second party reviewers who likely favor their particular ideological bend (e.g. Fox News types will find Fox News type reviewers). Then, they will have access and vote up reporters who favor their ideological leanings. It doesn't really solve the problem.
What the hell are you talking about? You've obviously misread and misinterpreted what was written.
Here, let me quote to you from the post to which you're referring:
The "It's" in the second sentence is obviously referring not to the media, but to the social justice community!
"failed academics, angry lesbians and transsexuals, and weak white men who feel guilty" is obviously not talking about the mass media. But it perfectly describes those in the social justice community.
It's no wonder you have so much trouble finding good content here. You can't read! Or what you think you're reading isn't what was actually written.
Nobody else is to blame when your illiteracy or inability to comprehend basic English causes you to misunderstand what's written here.
The content is good. It's your failed literacy skills that aren't so good!
I would agree. It only looks like we have poor quality journalism because now we have the resources to find out. In the past, if someone reported something, you didn't have much choice but to either accept it or not based on trust. That also exists today, or you could look at any of a 1000 other alternative sources to see if there are mistakes, various perspectives, etc... (or if they just copy and pasted something, or you can read the original some story is based on)
The same could be said with countless other aspects of life. In the past perhaps 50 out of 1000 people might be diagnosed with something, and now in the present 500 of 1000. Does that mean that something has changed in the intervening years that make that thing more common. Many people will jump to conclusions and try to draw some causation from the new environment we live in etc... Or it could be that we are just better able to diagnose said thing and thus are able to see more instances of it.
I deal with a lot of data, statistics, and some of it pretty old. I get data requests from all sorts. Many of which try to draw whatever conclusions they want according to whatever agenda or bias they may have. However much has to do more with how the data was collected, by whom, for what purpose, and may have been altered any number of ways which at the time were perfectly justifiable. Anyway I see more variation due to how things are reported than by any other influence. For example, the particular scarcity or vulnerability of a particular species in a given area. Is that because something in the environment has affected that particular species? Or is in the data collection techniques were better or worse than before. Perhaps the group responsible for collecting the information has 100 staff, and were cut back to 30, then changed their data collection techniques to try and make do with the reduced number of staff? Anyway it is those sorts of very real, but rarely thought about issues that have big impacts on data, particularly for those just looking at the numbers without a lot of context.
When I get home tonight I will only have 3 to 4 hours with which to be entertained. I would rather spend that time playing a videogame or watching a movie than listen to some teleprompter reader cry about someone's rights being trampled on somewhere in the world. I've got my own problems, don't need to waste time caring about yours.
The United States news market is big enough to have a few nation wide networks of reporters (AP being one). There are also lots of think tanks funded by billionares, of different political backgrounds, and individuals whom read the different news sources, and talk up summaries, (Rush Limbaugh). So, yes you get cable news, left network, right network, generic network. Most of the local newspapers will go under, except for a few big national papers (NY Times). I imagine a few networks of bots will be developed to voice recognition city council meetings, and stuff, and analyze them to produce local news (Google? AOL? Facebook?). Most human journalists will have been eliminated.
I agree to an extent that it seems we are often reticent to address the actions of individuals in a group for fear of being called "biased" (racist, sexist, etc) against that group. Certainly that seems to often be the case where police are involved, as any mistake my the authorities is amplified over the conduct of the individuals they are dealing with. That said, there's a reason that things like warrant-less searches, unreasonable detention, etc have traditionally been grounds for dismissing cases, so we also need to consider that one of the reason we focus on the activities of our authorities is that we WANT to hold them to a higher standard.
But beyond all that, perhaps this article from Canada might surprise you. It did surprise me in that they are willing to identify - with photos - people who were behaving suspicous in a mall *and* that they looked "middle eastern."
Now despite the naysayers, it's the latter part that is really unusual. It's not actual that untoward for authorities to be concerned with a group that is taking unusual interest in non-photogenic egress/security points of a public space. The more common concern is criminals potentially "casing" an area for security, a quick exit, and entrance points for the authorities prior to a robbery etc. The middle eastern bend makes it likely that the primary concern in this case is terrorism rather than theft.
Zuckerberg should buy TNR from his old roommate and just run it at a loss. What would be so terrible about that?
I'm gonna bet the vast unseen wastes of the internet are harboring some passionate citizen journalists who are producing quality content without being paid a dime for it.
The main problem with the web, and one of the problems with journalism, is advertisement. With donations or subscriptions, they'd only get income if people thought they were worth something -- but with ads, they get the income as soon as anyone looks at the page. It works similarly with TV, radio, and print. The incentive is merely for more eyeballs, no matter how you get them.
The other problem for news is that a lot of stuff that used to be expensive got really cheap. Now we can get news from across the world as easily as from one's city, so there's a lot of competition. "Journalism" got cheap, just browse the web and copy someone else's work. Pictures and video are cheap, you can photograph any old crap now. Webpages are almost free, or worse with ads they generate revenue. When it cost a ton of money to print something, it was worthwhile having some fact-checkers and editors make sure it wasn't crap. Now crap is more profitable, in fact if it sparks outrage it could rake in a lot of advertisement dollars.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I thought micropayments were supposed to solve this problem. So they don't exist? or they don't solve the problem?
Circa 2000, The editors of the Washington Post, and the New York Time stated that it was no longer possible for their respective newspaper to publish anything similar to those documents.
DRM in the printing presses? Like the stuff in photocopiers, to keep them from producing realistic looking money?
Or were they just afraid of having their dicks smacked with a ruler, since the ruler would obviously miss their non-existant balls?
What a quality Gawker article! ...Which I didn't have to pay to read.
Nor would I have.
There is absolute no lack of quality in Journalism today. The purpose for which the media works is totally achieved, you just have to watch how fast the civilization is crumbling while the people still belives in what the media says. those who belive the title have a naive misconception about what Journalism is about.
The irony of an article on a Gawker site discussing the lack of quality in journalism should not be lost in all this.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
The future of journalism, by david Simmons (writer of The Wire)
...and I said nothing because I had no financial stake in the commercial sale of video games..."
--Love, Legal.Troll (dodging his stupid -1 Karma)
Find me an unbiased news source that's more concerned with reporting the news without any kind of socio-political slant, focus on profit above getting to the truth, and spreading half-truths and blatant lies for the sake of ratings (and dubbing their news programs as "entertainment", which somehow then makes lying OK) and I'd be more than willing to pay for it.
And this goes for newspapers too. No one wants to pay to read a litter-box liner that's 80% ads, 19% loud-mouthed editorial, and 1% actual news.
There was a time when news outlets actually provided the news. But when everything in media became profits-over-substance the news now had to be all about entertainment and ratings -- which led to this ridiculous trend of shock jock mouthpieces, faux-outrage, and fear-mongering instead of, y'know, NEWS.
They made their bed, now it's time to lie in it. The only ones they have to blame are themselves.
These days, any article online is analyzed, picked apart and criticized the minute it goes up on some newspaper web site. In addition, publishing news has gotten so cheap that there is tons of competition and the news cartel has been broken up.
And you know what? We are a lot better off because of the demise of newspapers and professional journalists. The incentive structure of professional journalists has never been in the interests of the people; their primary interest used to be to make their editors and their influential pals in politics happy.
Gawker article misses the point: it's not journalism that is is crisis, it's the business models of media companies that are. To own a printing press, it used to be a license to print money. Some newspapers in 1990's had 40% ebit. Nowadays we have more quality and niche content than ever before. Blogs, social media and startups have forced journalists out from their old role as gatekeepers of news. Interactive journalism, web video, data journalism and other new forms of storytelling have created a golden age of innovation to people who are not thinking print-first or broadcast-only. As a professional journalist in major media outlet, I welcome this change. I just hope that we are able innovate viable business models to sustain what we are doing.
Much of the established media is simply the mouthpiece of whichever billionaire owns it. I'm not paying them to mislead me by distorting my world. This year I contributed $1000 to an independent journalism foundation, as well as subscribed to some much smaller media sources I felt were doing good work. If more of us pay attention and support the good guys with money and by promoting their work then we will begin to solve the problem.
Only boring people are ever bored.
If you know how to find some content that's interesting to you, you don't need someone else to tell you about it in a journalistic way.
How do we reconcile?
We go about dismantling corporate media and setting up a publicly funded democratic media system. https://globalliberalmediaplease.net/
Why does Gawker care when most of their revenue is from bad articles written by the political correctness police?
PRODUCTION HALTED
How about a new agency that reports verified facts without any "spin" or "subjective view" on the information. Eliminate some adjectives.
Instead of "This new policy is cruel to [insert minority group here]" type articles, they simply state "This policy states that all funding for [insert minority group here] will be eliminated in 2016 due to budget constraints from a lack of property tax collection in this area due to low home ownership".
Now let me the reader decide if I think that policy is cruel or fair or whatever. Report the objective facts and let the readers come to their own subjective conclusions about those facts. The way the news is now I have to go to two or more extreme sides (right or left) to find the common ground between the two to help me determine the core facts of the issue, then make my own decision. News today seems 99% editorial.
Grass is free, until the commons (or federal rangeland) is overgrazed. Fish are free, until humans diminish stocks beyond their capacity to breed replacement.