

Alexis de Tocqueville on American Newspapers - ryan_j_naughton
http://priceonomics.com/alexis-de-tocquevilles-anti-buzzfeed-rant-of-1835/

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vidoc
Ultimately, mass media journalism is losing audience because it is missing on
its number #1 mission: information.

Let's remember 2003. It doesn't matter that not a single metropolitan
newspaper was against the war in Irak. After all, that's just opinion. What's
really bad is that serious newspapers such as the NYT actually sold grotesque
articles about links between Sadam Hussein and Al Qaeda, or uranium tubes
being sold secretly in Nigeria... Any semi educated person in any other
country were laughing about those ridiculous assertions.

Over the last couple of years, the coverage on Ukraine and Syria hasn't been
much different. In a way, I think that what's scary is that this was achieved
without a dictatorship.

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superuser2
The less money newspapers have, the less independent work they can do.

When you're a newspaper hemorrhaging revenue, what do you cut? Not sports. Not
style. Not the stuff people read. Not the ability to report rumors faster than
the next guy. That's your bread and butter.

Editors. Fact-checking. You can clean up your balance sheet without
threatening business continuity by "improving efficiency" and getting all
those layers out of the way.

Validating claims about Hussein and Al Qaeda basically amounts to foreign
intelligence work. That costs expensive people's expensive time with a very
high risk that they won't be able to arrive at any conclusions. Do you expect
a manager to authorize a sat-phone when he can't even make payroll?

Newspapers in general do the best they can afford to. They're not the world's
advertising platform anymore, so what they can afford to do is of course
declining.

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Spooky23
The thing that wasn't relevant in the de Tocqueville era is that markets for
media were hyper-local in those days and more responsive to the user base.

This phrase and the thinking behind it are key: "Papers without a global brand
have bled money and jobs, and subscribers only provide one quarter of
newspapers’ funding."

Newspapers traditionally provided a service, and the popularity of the service
attracted patronship via advertising. If the content of the newspaper was
drivel, people would move on. Reporting mattered.

Today, media is different, they create brands -- often by capturing uses via
portals or other services unrelated to the content. The actual content is a
necessary evil. When the brand is global, it doesn't matter that the content
is garbage, most of the audience is too lazy to change the channel or update
their homepage.

IMO, the only vital media in America are weekly newspapers.

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dang
We changed the title to take out the linkbait. If anyone can suggest an
improvement, we're happy to change it again.

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imacomputer2
I wouldn't call that title linkbait or embarrassing. It's clever, fun, and
obviously a joke. It doesn't hurt the article either. IMO in order to be
linkbait it must pump up your excitement with very little substance. For
example: "French Guy Goes To America. What He Learned About BuzzFeed Will Blow
You Away!" would be linkbait. It excites the reader by over promising that
they will have a strong reaction to the piece, but the article can never live
up to the hype. We are rarely "blown away" by a blog post or news article.

Your title dips below inciting the reader; It's totally drained of any color
or interest. It doesn't excite the reader at all. That is also a problem
because reading should be fun AND informative.

It's only a title, but I think titles should have fun too.

~~~
alexmayyasi
Author here. While having fun coming up with titles, other options included:

This French Guy Hated on Blogs Back in 1835

and

People Have Been Hating on Buzzfeed For 180 Years

(I thought I already nixed the linkbait title!)

