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If good reporting isn't commercially viable, but can be sustained through private donations, doesn't that just mean that journalism becomes a specialty product for a small audience, ignored by society at large? Given that good reporting has pretty obvious benefits to society, even if you can survive on small non-profits how do you actually build a meaningful audience?
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 19:34 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 23:39 |
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If anyone still has passion for real journalism, I strongly suggest reading and donating to Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer This is their flagship article, and it's an incredible piece that shows what journalism can really accomplish. Especially in light of the federal government ending the use of private prisons. Hopefully states and others follow suit.
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 19:54 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:If good reporting isn't commercially viable, but can be sustained through private donations, doesn't that just mean that journalism becomes a specialty product for a small audience, ignored by society at large? Given that good reporting has pretty obvious benefits to society, even if you can survive on small non-profits how do you actually build a meaningful audience? That's traditionally how journalism operated. There were a million different newspapers and none of them really had extensive readership. Then you got the media empires of the late 19th century which created the modern system.
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 21:19 |
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Brown Moses posted:In my experience it's not commercially viable, that's why Bellingcat is now a non-profit NGO on the hunt for funding, which fortunately isn't going too badly. The question then becomes who you are willing to take money from. Does it also affect the things that you can viably report on? For example, if you started reporting more on atrocities committed by the USA or close allies rather than countries that the foreign policy establishment is hostile to like Syria and Russia, how would it affect your funding?
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 21:26 |
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Once upon a time I started out on journalism studies at the university. I had high hopes that I'd finally be on a path to doing something good for society. Truth and democracy and all that. I was so loving disappointed, and I lasted a year before switching to someting real. Click whoring is nothing new. It was part of the curricullum even back then. Dumb it down. Create conflict. Take something insignificant and make it a scandal. Suicide.
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 21:58 |
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tekz posted:Does it also affect the things that you can viably report on? For example, if you started reporting more on atrocities committed by the USA or close allies rather than countries that the foreign policy establishment is hostile to like Syria and Russia, how would it affect your funding? Well funding applications I've done generally require you to detail everything you plan to do with the money and have strict reporting requirements after you receive the money, so I guess that would depend on who you're approaching. The Google funding I received last year was an exception, that came as general funds with no reporting requirements. I've never encountered any funder trying to put anything in contracts or implying at meetings certain things shouldn't be reported, and approaching a range of funders means you don't end up relying on keeping one person happy (and it's something funders prefer as well so projects they fund don't live or die depending on their continued funding). Personally for Bellingcat I avoid government funding, be it direct or through government orgs like USAID, although we do workshops and training at journalism events funded by various government organisations. I can see why some journalism organisations take that money, especially in the last 5-10 years where funding for journalism NGOs was extremely hard to come by.
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 22:14 |
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Toplowtech posted:Now guess what will happen to their new online model when the current tech bubble explode. Any day now!
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 22:18 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:How do you stop the power of the purse from becoming de-facto censorship? NPR only receives a tiny fraction of their money from the federal government, but that still gets threatened every time they report something a congressman doesn't like. License fees or taxes on say, advertising, has worked pretty well for the rest of the western world. Coupled with regulatory bodies that uphold the laws barring any politicians, government, lobby groups or other interests from interacting with the editorial decisions of the media and newspapers.
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 22:19 |
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computer parts posted:That's traditionally how journalism operated. There were a million different newspapers and none of them really had extensive readership. Then you got the media empires of the late 19th century which created the modern system.
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# ? Aug 20, 2016 22:55 |
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It strikes me as a false binary to put the investigative journalism of the Mother Jones variety opposite to ideological reinforcement/clickbait news. I think it's tempting to do so because it reinforces the belief that people are inherently rational and, if we could just get Fox News off the air, everyone would suddenly be interested in fact-checking Presidential budgets or whatever. Personally, I just don't buy that people who read Breitbart etc. are potential consumers of Harper's or Mother Jones essays. When considered as products, they have completely different markets which I don't think compete with each other as much as people like to suggest. Sure there is some middle ground, but one story about a Pulitzer winning local news team doesn't really exceed the level of anecdotal evidence. In general it seems fair to say that mainstream media in the 90's spent plenty of time playing their version of the clickbait game; I'd argue that the main reason for their shellacking in the digital age is that they painted themselves into a corner where they had no choice to but to try and compete with organizations like Gawker, etc which just do those things better, rather than trying to differentiate themselves. If you're making money in the 90's on sound bite journalism are you really the opposite of some intern-driven twitter-feed "news" site? Isn't the current state of digital media just the apotheosis of the same ideas that were behind 24 hour news and 30 second "interviews?" Putting that aside, i think real investigative journalism is valuable and needs to be more differentiated from news-as-entertainment - not seen as in competition with it, but as its own product altogether. Since there are some journalism people itt, I'd be interested to hear opinions on Vice. Last I checked Vice is worth a few billion and they do seem pretty committed to video reporting and investigative journalism (of variable quality, sure, but lots of people I know when asked to describe Vice would probably say "investigative journalism"). Obviously the way they got there is problematic since by many accounts they seem to have zero problems cozying up to advertisers. But it leads me to think that if you don't want to do NPR's model, and subscriptions don't work, and advertising isn't the answer, someone needs to figure out another way to get to this stuff to market in a way that will make money, and just give up on the distracting fallacy that Mother Jones is somehow competing with Fox News. TheresNoThyme fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Aug 21, 2016 |
# ? Aug 21, 2016 00:38 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:Okay, but some of that is due to population changes and the ability of information to spread very quickly. Part of the mission of good reporting is to get people to actually pay attention to it. How does one do that today and into the future? It basically has to be interesting enough for people to care about. If no one in Whitesville Suburbia cares about black people getting shot by police, then you won't hear it. In the good ol' days, no one would hear about it period, because one person decided what went on the air and more often than not they didn't want to upset the status quo.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 03:09 |
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I've watched a lot news media (or at least used to until very recently) and noticed that European news media tends to be a lot better, more objective. Euronews for example. US news media is a poo poo show in comparison. Facts and statistics are so foreign to them to the point where I'm not sure if most of them have ever grasped the concept of a standard deviation. Numeracy should be just as important as literacy if you're reporting news about a world with 8 billions people.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 04:16 |
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tsa posted:
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 06:12 |
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Nevvy Z posted:If we had a GMI, for real, would it solve this problem? no
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 07:27 |
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wide stance posted:I've watched a lot news media (or at least used to until very recently) and noticed that European news media tends to be a lot better, more objective. Euronews for example. I don't think they're more objective. They simply express their bias via what they do and do not report on rather than having as many openly partisan news outlets.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 07:54 |
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In 2010 I went to school for journalism, after getting out in 2012, I re-entered school for graphic design after a year of trying to get a paying journalism job (I secured a graphic design job straight out of school.) There were a lot of reasons, including finding graphic design during layout courses in journalism and certainly falling in love with that career as a possibility, but a lot of it was the dying formats across the board. Want to do radio? gently caress, you better just do pod casting, most radio jobs are hard held and want you to already have years of solid radio experience if you want to get into a possible open position. This is also true of pretty much everything, any attempt to get a job post school required having a massive amount of experience, or you work for free. I stress that many places expected you to simply work for free for the experience, and not in a hold another job sort of way, you needed to have the time to devote your entire being to that free "job". Working for blog journalism doesn't help, because most big news blogs wanted three years experience at a syndicated newspaper. Never mind that most good journalism died with free bloggers doing it just because. Maybe it's the death of journalism as a job and it's now an extended hobby for people to simply report on things, but real journalism is part investigation, it is about digging deep into a story. But that's not what people are interested in these days. So yeah, I think the bottom line is really the internet has stifled a lot of good journalism. I won't say all journalism, but... it's certainly a lesser creature now. People also enjoy the cult of personality a lot more these days, so columnist style writing is often just given the free ride as journalism, with all the bias an opinion that come from column writing, but being taken at journalism face value. Will it stay that way? I don't know, I think journalism is largely still in a mode of transition and transformation. Many people, myself included, are pretty uncomfortable with digital subscriptions, but that market is far more penetrated now than it was when I got out of school and younger people hold less value on the physical over the digital ease. Ezines are still small and usually part of an existent physical medium. I guess it boils down to the fact that I think we need to separate blogging from journalism again, because the waters are muddy and shallow. I can't think of how many websites are just push the press release with some writer added fluff=news story. I doubt all my concerns are fully founded, many are from that one year in which I worked my rear end off to try to get into something (with several in school journalism awards and a 4.0, which I point out not out of a pride of those accomplishments, but that you'd think that with those under my belt I could have been afforded a point to start that wasn't "work for free and we will see" ) with no successful end of a paying job doing what I spent time getting an education in. Rabble Rabble, that's my opinion and experience therein, I offer it as strictly that.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 14:49 |
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Syfe posted:In 2010 I went to school for journalism, after getting out in 2012, I re-entered school for graphic design after a year of trying to get a paying journalism job (I secured a graphic design job straight out of school.) In my experienced opinion, media organisations are using the internship model to keep poors away feom their professions, and thus eliminate any potential dissent or ideological divergence.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 17:15 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:If good reporting isn't commercially viable, but can be sustained through private donations, doesn't that just mean that journalism becomes a specialty product for a small audience, ignored by society at large? Given that good reporting has pretty obvious benefits to society, even if you can survive on small non-profits how do you actually build a meaningful audience? I think the only way forward is to view journalism as a fundamental public good that serves the interest of maintaining a well-informed electorate and have state-sponsored media like the BBC and, like the BBC, there need to be charters, provisions and safe-guards that both ensure quality of reporting and prevent such media from just becoming a mouthpiece for the regime that holds the purse-strings.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 18:01 |
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Paolomania posted:I think the only way forward is to view journalism as a fundamental public good that serves the interest of maintaining a well-informed electorate and have state-sponsored media like the BBC and, like the BBC, there need to be charters, provisions and safe-guards that both ensure quality of reporting and prevent such media from just becoming a mouthpiece for the regime that holds the purse-strings. Sure, fifty years ago it was important, but not because journalists are better and smarter and less biased than anyone else, because they had a printing press and a distribution network. Now I have one of those. So do you, so does about 80% of the world. 5 billion people have more reach than William Randolph Hearst ever had. So why are the opinions of journalists worthy of government funding when mine and yours aren't? Why should I pay to know what Joe Somebody of the NYT thinks is going on in Syria when I can go ask a bunch of actual Syrians for free?
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 20:57 |
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Rent-A-Cop posted:What is journalism and why should we care? Because reprinting quotes from a primary source is only a small part of journalism, and investigative ability as well as being able to put together a coherent picture from disparate pieces of evidence are not skills that random assholes on the internet are likely to have developed. Now if you said that clickbait journalism for idiots specifically deserves to be taken out back and shot, I would agree.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 21:02 |
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A piece I wrote on bullshit clickbait journalism (links to the articles I write about in the link):quote:Misattribution, Verification, ISIS, and Madaya
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 21:13 |
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blowfish posted:Because reprinting quotes from a primary source is only a small part of journalism, and investigative ability as well as being able to put together a coherent picture from disparate pieces of evidence are not skills that random assholes on the internet are likely to have developed. The vast majority of what goes on in journalism seems to be wild speculation based on very little information, followed a day later later by more-or-less skeptical parroting of government or corporate press releases. Two tasks that both YouTube and Twitter are fantastic at, do for free, and spend less time trying to convince me to buy gold during. Half the time anything interesting happens CNN just goes straight to loving Twitter anyway, and I don't think any of us really benefit from having Wolf Blitzer be our national tweet filter.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 21:16 |
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When Journalism is let off the leash it can still be extremely effective. Just look at when the press was given free reign to go all-in on Donald Trump in the US, they dug up so much poo poo unbelievably quickly. Unfortunately everyone recognizes this which is why the press are always chained in like 400 layers of bullshit.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 22:10 |
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From someone who saw the whole gamergate incident happen live, there is a big issue in most big journalist companies and sites not trying to get a balanced perspective. In video game journalism, the gamergate scandal was minor to most gamers who did not care about the indie game reporting scene, but the moment something around 10 different major gaming journalism outlets published similar articles on the same day declaring 'gamers are dead', there was a huge idealogical split between the major video game press sites, and their viewers. You had all these big video game journalism sites calling anyone who disliked and did not support Zoe Quinn a basement dwelling fat mysoginist, when she was known as pretty awful person in video game circles before the scandal because of her personality and actions. The mainstream press never took a look at the gamers side, and usually reported the 'victim of mysoginist male gamers angle' when the incident entered the public eye. Breitbart was the only big outlet that dug into the scandal and gave the perspective of the gamergate side. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 22:10 |
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Pharohman777 posted:From someone who saw the whole gamergate incident happen live, there is a big issue in most big journalist companies and sites not trying to get a balanced perspective. Source your quotes, please.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 22:41 |
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Has Journalism ever not been hosed? There always seems to be traces or outright currents of yellow journalism, personal/national bias and following political narrative the more you dig into an era of news.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 22:55 |
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Rent-A-Cop posted:What is journalism and why should we care? Because yellow journalism is alive and well, and thrives even moreso in an environment where fact-checking and curation are not valued. In the modern world there is simply too much information and too many world events for an individual to sift through on their own in order to determine what is salient, let alone evaluate for truth and bias. The tendency of social media to latch onto and spread yellow journalism is a "failure of the crowd" that IMO self-evidently states the case for the profession of journalism in the internet age.
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# ? Aug 21, 2016 23:18 |
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Yinlock posted:When Journalism is let off the leash it can still be extremely effective. Just look at when the press was given free reign to go all-in on Donald Trump in the US, they dug up so much poo poo unbelievably quickly. When you let it off the leash, you end up with stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Tavern And goddamn, in a city like this, sometimes you do need to go off the record.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 00:03 |
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Just have the state fund journalists.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 00:21 |
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Pharohman777 posted:From someone who saw the whole gamergate incident happen live, there is a big issue in most big journalist companies and sites not trying to get a balanced perspective. lol if you think the mods here aren't biased as all hell (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 04:54 |
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qnqnx posted:lol if you think the mods here aren't biased as all hell Yeah that should be a week easy
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 06:28 |
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Crabtree posted:Has Journalism ever not been hosed? There always seems to be traces or outright currents of yellow journalism, personal/national bias and following political narrative the more you dig into an era of news. Toplowtech fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Aug 22, 2016 |
# ? Aug 22, 2016 07:14 |
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OP, I contest your use of the term "hosed" to describe what is happening to our primary data channels. That term is inadequate to describe the five-dimensional Martian clusterfuck which is media today. I hold that the ever-increasing bandwidth of the modern world allows nearly infinite disinformation (AKA bullshit) to travel faster and wider than the limited amount of actual information that is available. It is no longer necessary to suppress the truth: it needs only to be diluted and drowned out. Signal to noise ratio and all that. Feel free to quote the "Boots On " metaphor. ... Zimboe's Law: Bullshit expands to fill the bandwidth available. ... We have a Systems problem here. E: It is critical that we find a way to troubleshoot and fix the Bandwidth/Bullshit problem, or our civilization will devolve into endless shouting without any trace of reason. Owait... ELECTION 2016. Man, it's already happening. ... How can we fix the BW/BS problem? We must, we simply must. There must be a way to immunize our channels against pernicious disinformation. We must find it. Some inventions are a blessing and a curse, like Atomic Energy, or the Internet. ... Bullshit is cheap. So we buy it. zimboe fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Aug 22, 2016 |
# ? Aug 22, 2016 08:53 |
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zimboe posted:OP, I contest your use of the term "hosed" to describe what is happening to our primary data channels. Please talk like a person and take your meds.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 14:28 |
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Ahh, some homegrown BandwidthCube. Nice!
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 14:53 |
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Journalism has always been dumb and I wouldn't be surprised if the first piece of journalism ever published was cuneiform clickbait and the second was "Is journalism dead?" Also love it how every four years we get "Election 20XX it's the most partisan ever! Is this the end of democracy!?" When Election 1860 directly resulted in the bloodiest conflict in American history, a million or so deaths, and the concept of total war.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 15:34 |
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Journalism has always been dumb and I wouldn't be surprised if the first piece of journalism ever published was cuneiform clickbait and the second was "Is journalism dead?" I don't think anyone is saying journalism is dead. In fact, the title of the thread is "Is journalism hosed?" which it's looking more and more likely. Reason being that more and more journalism outlets are being purchased by conglomerates that are more interested in page views than anything else. Journalism will always exist, whether it be celebrity tabloids, sports columns, or anything that appeals to the national level. The bigger concern is the local press is going to get more and more marginalized with tighter budgets, and maybe in the future there's not gonna be a journalist sitting at a budget meeting at your state's capital when your state's congress decides to completely blow up your state's education budget.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 16:04 |
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Liquid Communism posted:The utter death of the ad funded model of Web content would be a good start. Click bait is a cancer, and pay walls make people quit giving a poo poo about their local news in the first place because they can't effectively access it. Well, how was journalism paid for before the internet? In the case of print, it was paid for by buying individual newspapers or buying a subscription (effectively a paywall), and basic TV news is paid for by advertising. The problem is that the way in which people consume media has changed, as has their willingness to pay for content. Now that it's trivial to skim the complete range of headlines for as many news organizations as you want and you can go directly to any particular story you want without going through the main website at all (via Google or external links, for example), people feel less tied to a particular brand, and the ability to seek out exactly what they want both puts a lot more importance on the headline itself and concentrates the potential profit into the story itself. The days of sitting in front of the TV waiting through a few stories you wouldn't have sought out on your own and sitting through a couple commercial breaks as you wait to see if any news pertinent to your interests comes up is over - on the internet, news organizations are lucky if you even bother to skim the headlines on their main site, rather than just googling "Trump gently caress-ups of the last six hours" and clicking the most hilarious headlines regardless of origin. It's easier than it's ever been before to get articles from a wide variety of news sites, and individual news organizations are the big loser from that. If the LA Times or the Miami Herald or the Boston Globe or the Times of Israel come out with a particularly good story, I can easily go read just that story, without even glancing at the rest of their site (and they're unlikely to have too many other unique stories anyway) - so they just get the ad impressions from that one view, and there's no particular incentive for me to subscribe or anything. Even if news as a whole continues to be consumed, it gets harder and harder for small organizations to get enough of a share of the money to survive. Crabtree posted:Has Journalism ever not been hosed? There always seems to be traces or outright currents of yellow journalism, personal/national bias and following political narrative the more you dig into an era of news. The Daily Mail is over a century old, so no.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 16:07 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Well, how was journalism paid for before the internet? In the case of print, it was paid for by buying individual newspapers or buying a subscription (effectively a paywall), and basic TV news is paid for by advertising.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 17:00 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 23:39 |
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Journalism, in the journalist-as-gatekepper sense, is increasingly obsolete. There has never been greater access to information than what we enjoy today, and the hand-wringing I'm seeing on this thread seems to bemoan that 'incorrect' information is no longer being filtered out from what is available to the hoi polloi. The industry itself is undergoing a necessary reinvention, as the mass audiences formerly available for advertising are no longer there, but I am confident that it will reinvent itself. Recent developments, like the work we've seen Brown Moses do, would never have been possible even ten years ago. That's where the future is, not with some hidebound paper of record that still resists making online content available to the public.
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# ? Aug 22, 2016 17:40 |