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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 |
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Aug 21, 2016 00:38
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 23:57 |
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