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?

Comments

Pot, meet kettle

[Anonymous Coward]

While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article

Ok, stopped reading here.

Re:Pot, meet kettle

[lgw]

Ok, stopped reading here.

Oh, you missed the part where the answer was "give Gawker more money so we don't go bankrupt".

The fall in journalistic quality is easy to blame on "SJW!", but that's just a symptom. The larger problem is the abandonment of any pretense of objectivity or journalistic integrity by all the mainstream outlets. For most, any scandal involving a Democrat "isn't newsworthy" or "is a local story" or if the story won't die it can be dismissed as a GOP hit job. Swap that for Fox and the rest.

Stories that "carry the desired narrative" are run without even the thinnest shred of editorial fact-checking, while stories that oppose the narrative are simply buried. This was particularly egregious during the Iraq War, when for example a blatantly-Photoshopped image of a burning hospital (the smoke from a nearby building that was hit was just copy-pasted to make the hospital look like is was burning too) was published by AP and run by a great number of newspapers. Even a glance at the image showed it to be fake - you can't just duplicate smoke for goodness sake - but everyone ran it because everyone was against the US being there, and wanted us to be the villains.

"Truthiness" has replaced truth in journalism, and it's not SJWs or the left or Fox, it's everyone. Turns out people won't pay much for low-quality fiction, and revenue is tanking everywhere. It's not "the internet", it's the "politics first" approach. There's way more entertaining fiction out there, with way better special effects than poorly-Photoshopped images.

Re:Pot, meet kettle

[jedidiah]

Journalism jumped the shark long before they could blame the Internet for their problems. The ability to do your own fact checking and route around your local news outlet just makes it easier to recognize bullshit and the editor's pet political agenda for what it is.

We never had it

[110010001000]

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.

Re:We never had it

[castionsosa]

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.

Re: We never had it

[Frobnicator]

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:

• * Fewer news agencies meant individuals could talk to everyone, versus today's many unanswered phone calls
• * Fewer news agencies meant more filtering of stories, versus today's unfiltered deluge of reports
• * Fewer news agencies meant more money per reporter, versus today's many reporters with no budget
• * Fewer better funded reporters meant better stories with original content, versus today's low-paid reporters who do a quick rewrite
• * Daily publication meant time to write based on the facts, versus today's rush for an early story that doesn't have time for facts

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.

Re:We never had it

[hey!]

Like most generalizations, that's an exaggeration. I know because I'm almost 60 years old now, and I actually remember the way things used to be, and not with rose-colored glasses. Most things are way better than they used to be, but journalism isn't one of those things.

Journalism were never perfect; like any human institution it had its faults and biases. But it used to work far, far better than it does today. Take science reporting; if you lived in a major-ish city the leading newspaper in your town probably had a reporter dedicated to covering science topics -- sometimes more than one (thanks, Sputnik!). When there wasn't a major story like the moon landing those reporters churned out weekly science supplements.

We can actually measure the declinein dedicated science reporting by counting the number of newspapers with weekly science supplements. According to the Columbia Journalism Review in 1989 95 American newspapers had science supplements. By 2008 that had dropped to 35, and as of 2013 there were only 19 science supplements left. So when you have a science related story like climate change, or Ebola, the people the public turns to for information on those things have no more understanding of science or mathematics than they do.

There have been similar measurable declines in foreign affairs coverage as well, and while relatively more people are getting news from non-print media like TV those news sources have been increasingly moving to cheap, profitable, but less informative opinion "journalism".

Now there are some bright spots as well, it's not all doom and gloom. I think some of the better infotainment shows like The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight are tremendous assets, taking the place of news/opinion magazines for younger people today and in often doing that pretty well. I think their obvious snarkiness is actually less dangerous than the implicit biases of journalism back in the day. But there's no substitute for wearing out shoe leather tracking down facts, something that's in decline across the board.

Who cast the first stone?

[skovnymfe]

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.

Obvious anwer

[Bugler412]

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.

"Social Justice" prevents good journalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with SlashDot lately, with all these right-wing idiots coming in, derping their right-wing talking points? Go away please.

Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

That type of attitude from the left is what's going to get Trump into the White House in a year.

The simple fact is GamerGate is a backlash against the idea that being a normal American is evil. Keep in mind there are plenty of minorities in GamerGate. They don't want to see games destroyed "for their benefit" any more than any other Gamer does.

Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's highly amusing to see SocJus'ers prove what the GP is saying through their responses here. The GP made an in-depth, intelligent, rational comment. Yet instead of trying to refute the points, we see people like you and some others here immediately resorting to the abusive SocJus tactics that the GP describes: name-calling and false accusations ("Donald", "right-wing idiot", "idiot"). The best evidence to support the GP's claims is not in the comment itself, but in how SocJus'ers react to the comment exactly as it predicted they would.

Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamergate certainly had an effect. Many people, when faced with hostile dogmatic intrusion into their lives, reflexively polarized to oppose it. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, it was a disaster. Gamers were villainized and social acceptance of gaming lost decades of progress, and social change became a dirty word and many middle-of-the-road people were polarized into extreme positions.

Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism.

[Old97]

The far left and the far right are both autocratic. Taking an extreme view requires a high degree of certainty which correlates to a closed mind.

Re:"Social Justice" prevents good journalism.

[Jawnn]

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.

Oversimplify much? I mean, I get it, nuance is pretty much beyond you, but jeezuz... Do you really have only a brush that paints entire groups of people with the color you chose? You don't consider it even remotely possible that the vast majority of Syrian refugees a fleeing for their fucking lives?

Let's be clear, Middle Eastern culture, in general, has a long way to go when it comes to gender issues. In that culture, unescorted women are fair game for just about anything. In Germany, such an attitude is unacceptable and is, IMO, grounds for tossing their ignorant, mysoginistic asses back on a boat. But to suggest that every single immigrant is possessed of such attitudes and incapable of change is absurd.

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

Generalize much? After a career in emergency services that spanned three decades, I probably have more respect and sympathy for law enforcement than most, and I will be the first to say that pointing a gun, even a convincing replica, at a cop is a good way to get yourself shot. Race has nothing to do with that. On the other hand, the video footage in some of these cases makes it pretty fucking clear that there are some bad cops out there.

Death of newspapers

[Andy Smith]

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.

Gawker complains about the quality of Journalism??

[sciengin]

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.

2016 Slashdot

[cje]

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.

Niche Journalism is better done by reddit now.

[TheNarrator]

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.