
For News Outlets Squeezed from the Middle, It’s Bend or Bust - Osiris30
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/business/media/for-news-outlets-squeezed-from-the-middle-its-bend-or-bust.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all
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InclinedPlane
This is the bed you made, by hitching your wagon to ad revenue. I understand
why you did it, it was oh so lucrative, and oh so easy. When you were the gate
keepers of news and the primary communications conduit for an entire community
you could rake in mountains of cash with very little work. Just rewrite those
wire reports; zombie through the motions of reporting local weather, crime,
and bullshit; and keep on publishing family circus and cathy strips. The crux
of it is that you thought that was noble, that you think it was any different
from what buzzfeed does today.

The fall has always been happening, and it didn't start from such a great
height either.

The fact is that the news has long been about gathering eyeballs, not about
generating quality content. In fact in so much as that happened, it happened
by accident or happenstance. Indeed even buzzfeeed does some good work. The
difference between you and they is you define yourself by your good work,
while you define them by their bad work. And when eyeballs are the measure of
success and of revenue, you do whatever is cheapest that gets the most views.
Remember the OJ Simpson trial? Remember the news industry descending into
tabloid journalism even more so over the past 2 decades? Remember "it bleeds
it leads" and disaster-porn?

For the most part the media establishment has become a parody of what a robust
media should be. It doesn't do investigative journalism well (usually issues
have to be forced down their throats by an already knowledgeable public before
they are covered). It doesn't educate the public well on almost any subject
(and in some cases, as in Fox News, it demonstrably makes people less well
informed). It has a ghoulish relationship with tragedy and disaster (as the
movie Nightcrawler so well portrayed). And due to its success it no longer
represents the interests of the majority of the public, instead siding with
establishment or elite interests most of the time.

You can't merely erect some arbitrary barrier and say that journalism should
stick to some particular frozen moment in time as it slides along the same
trajectory its been on for ages. You need to get out and build a new
trajectory by establishing new standards and developing new revenue streams
that reward high quality content instead of low effort content. It's actually
already happening without you, but you're too blind to see it. And the answer
is not to dumb down hard hitting investigative journalism and add fancy
infographics. How do I know? Because that's been what you've been doing for
_decades_ and it hasn't worked yet has it?

~~~
chc
You seem to be implying there is something else they could have hitched their
wagon to that would have worked better. I can't see any, and you don't seem to
have any better ideas, so it seems like you're effectively criticizing them
for trying to exist.

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privong
There's something very meta about "serious" news organizations writing about
how much trouble they're having, competing with "silly" organizations like
buzzfeed. I guess this is a minor, backpage story (actually, not quite: [0]),
and consists of a nearly-negligible fraction of the NYT's output and
resources.

But I wonder what the purpose is of these articles? Is it an attempt to write
news with themselves portrayed as simply another exterior subject to write
about? Is it an attempt to shame readers into abandoning Buzzfeed with a
"shouldn't you be spending your time reading about _real_ news?" piece?

[0] From the bottom of the article: "A version of this article appears in
print on April 18, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline:
For News Outlets Feeling the Squeeze, It’s Bend or Bust."

~~~
matt4077
The purpose is... <drumroll> informing the readers? Why should the media be
prohibited to write about the media and, more importantly, who should do it if
they can't?

And of course they'll be reporting from a certain perspective, which is
probably going to assign a higher value to the Watergate leak than the ice
bucket challenge. But it's unlikely to be a conspiracy - nicely exemplified bt
the fact that the "real news" in this article would be Fox News. I doubt the
NYT has a secrect pro-Murdoch agenda.

------
kough
Seems like whoever should have edited this piece has already been fired. Long,
rambling, and surprisingly myopic -- barely any mention of the Times'
response, and full of classic "blame Buzzfeed" insight.

~~~
matt4077
It's just not an AP-style news bulletin and more of an essay with about 2.5%
Hunter S Thompson thrown in. Nothing wrong with that, some people enjoy it.
And and article in the NYT is not a press release by the NYT management. Their
reaction to a changing market has exactly as much relevance in such an article
as the WSJ's reaction.

