Slashdot Mirror
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?
There are ways to have quality journalism... but it starts with having people that are trusted to actually do fair and accurate reporting as opposed to the usual stuff we encounter.
This isn't going to be solved by a business. Want good news, we will have to move to a decentralized structure, similar to PGP's reputation, and in some ways, similar to Slashdot's moderation system.
First, articles would be signed by their maker. This can be a nym or real name, poster's choice.
Second, there would be people who sign that the person's content is up to par, and this would be a positive or negative value, rating the person (not the article.)
Third, someone reading it can place their trust in the second set of parties. As said in a previous Slashdot posting, the trust level would be a floating point value from 0 to 1, where 0 means the trust is ignored, a 1 means it is heeded.
This way, anyone can post, but in general, it would allow people to have a set of trusted article reviewers, and filter out the signal from the noise fairly easily. Since there is no single point of failure, it would be resistant from various attack methods.
As for a method of moving articles, why not just go back to a NNTP-like protocol, store, forward, and expire when disk space allocated hits a high water mark. Any modifications to the articles posted would be immediately detected by a broken signature. For signatures and reputation, OpenPGP packets can easily handle this.
tl;dr, decentralize things, have multiple parties vet news article writers in a secure fashion.
The problem is that the old journalist media and the new journalist media is having problems making money.
I think that is part of it. The financial concerns are also related to the larger number of news outlets, the 24/7 news cycle, instant online publication, and search engine rankings.
Let's review a few decades ago, back when there was a better ratio of good journalism to bad journalism...
A few decades ago to get all the news outlets an individual could talk to the local affiliate of CBS, NBC, ABC, and possibly a few additional locals that weren't affiliated with the big three. For a big public statement that meant a few phone calls to schedule a common time, up to six reporters come visit bringing their photographer, and you were done. For a smaller public statement it meant talking to even less, maybe just the local unaffiliated reporters or only one major reporter. There might be a few calls from distant papers that want to run the story, but those few initial interviews all generated high quality original reports for the networks. The reporters actually came out to interview, news stories via phone calls were rare. Since there were limited news outlets they each had a fairly big piece of the pie when it came to revenues from ads and subscriptions, so they could pay more for better reporters. All of them combined to give much better journalism. When one outlet wanted to cover something done by another sometimes they would rewrite the stories off the wire, but generally there was an actual discussion to those having the newsworthy experience.
Contrast with today.
If something is big news there are a huge number of media companies that want to talk about it. There are so many outlets that each one individually gets a tiny sliver of the interested viewers, so they have less money to invest in the story from relatively fewer advertisement eyeballs. Instead of investing time and money doing investigation and contacting the original sources (tending toward better quality journalism), they quickly rewrite the existing story and publish it immediately in an effort to show up early in web searches, giving worse quality journalism. For the individual or company with the newsworthy event, instead of being contacted by a handful of local reporters they get calls and emails from hundreds of them across the globe, each asking for a statement immediately for publication. Generally there is no opportunity to get back to them, no opportunity to leave a message; if they cannot provide a statement with that first phone call the article gets a line "company was not immediately available for comment." From discussions with some reporter friends in the past, today's reporters frequently write the story first and then contact the newsmakers for a quote in the hope to fill in a quote that meets the story they wrote rather than talk to the people first and write the story based on what was learned.
So summing it up:
Generally when you get a low quality news article you can figure out who the original source was, who it was that actually sent a real live human being reporter to talk in person with another real life human being, and that version of the article will have quality journalism.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
It's true that the garbage journalism has always heavily outweighed the quality journalism. It's also true that there have been periods in the past that were either worse or nearly as bad as the current state of events.
OTOH, it's also true that quality journalism is usually only recognized retrospectively. Some exceptions are "the muckrakers", like Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) and, at a much later date, Racheal Carlson (Silent Spring). Currently there seems to be almost no memory of prior quality journalism, which *is* a change that is probably attributable to a combination of TV and the Internet. When people are drowning in information, they tend to set their filters too tight, so weak signals are lost.
But I *don't* think it's a matter of economics. I think it's a matter of "it's easier to generate garbage than quality" and "information overload". When people were hungry for news they not only tended to trust it more, they tended to think about it more. This doesn't happen when you're checking your e-mail every 5 minutes. (Or twitter, or facebook...supply your favorite noisy media channel.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.