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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
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.
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.
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