
Tech Is Eating Media – Now What? - look_lookatme
https://medium.com/@jwherrman/tech-is-eating-media-now-what-807047ad4ede
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mc32
Journalism, "the press", isn't used to being called out. They used to be the
ones beyond reproach, the defenders of the faith.

Now, struggling for readership and revenue /income, they have been riding the
coattails of watered down investigative reporting with a flash of click-bait
and "social mood". That's to say they aren't following an immutable compass
but rather the vagaries of the day, hoping one of those spaghetti strands
sticks one day and saves them.

They are too often chasing acceptance in hopes this will drive up revenues.

I'm not sure they ever were the fourth estate, but certainly now with their
self interested survival on the line, they don't even try to fake it any more.

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feedjoelpie
Does anyone have details on the financial health of The Economist? They don't
play this dumbed down new media game, and while I'm sure they're not
gangbusters, they do appear quite a bit more stable than the other traditional
outlets that _have_ tried to get in on clickbait.

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clusterfoo
The Economist is a prime example that quality still sells, and always will.
Even their new daily newsletters are top-notch.

IMHO they get right what most "old media" are getting wrong: The Economist
isn't trying to compete with new media at what new media does best.

I don't need a magazine for opinion pieces, I have blogs for that; I don't
need my local newspaper to tell me about Lady Gaga's new acting career, I
don't need a magazine to tell me what's new and cool in fashion or music, and
I certainly don't need CNN to tell me what's trending on twitter.

Give it up. You can't compete with the masses for _that_ type of content. What
I _can 't_ get from blogs and twitter is quality journalism: investigation,
inside scoops, quality political analysis, etc.

When traditional media realizes that this is the domain where they excel, they
will be just fine. Instead of cutting down on their investigative journalism
departments, slash the entertainment reporters, slash opinion and talking
heads. Cut your content in half, cut your staff, stop wasting resources on a
hopeless battle, and _focus_ on the one thing no blog or YouTube channel can
do... give me concise, focused, quality _journalism_.

~~~
VOYD
Meh, my manager says quality costs too much. JK

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debacle
The media is eating the media. In their thirst for viewers and money they are
looking for news anywhere they can find it, making them untrustworthy in
reporting both the scope and depth of issues on both a global and local scale.

People are tired of being told by some tart on CNN that bird flu is going to
kill everyone before ISIS has a chance to turn them gay.

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CM30
The biggest problem with the press (and why the internet and technology is
'eating' it) is that their business model is based in a world that doesn't
really exist any more. The old school media offered a quick barrage of
articles on a wide variety of topics. They didn't cover any one particularly
well (just look at a newspaper article about a topic you're in a expert in if
you want proof of that), but they did decently enough at informing people in
an age where information was inconvenient or costly to otherwise get.

The internet changed that. For any important news, you can find better sources
on social media, since people at the scene will probably now be posting photos
and opinions about the goings on as they're happening, no reporter required.
For timely news, social media and aggregator sites simply do better than
journalists, since they don't have to worry about editors or proofing and
there's a large crowd of people looking for stories at the same time (usually
many times larger than the team in a professional newspaper).

And for more informative pieces, you can just go straight to the experts now.
Whereas before you'd have a journalist approach an expert on say, information
security, you can now just find an expert's blog or a relevant forum or
subreddit instead. Bonus points for their words likely not being censored or
altered or anything else.

And the fourth estate thing? Well, for better or worse, now that seems to be
the legions of bloggers and amateur journalists online instead. The
traditional media kind of gave up on that when most of the papers and news
channels were bought by large companies.

You can try paywalls and subscriptions and patreon type systems all you like,
I just suspect the old way of doing news simply cannot work in the internet
era, and the traditional journalist is simply becoming obsolete.

For the article's question about how the relationship is supposed to work and
what media built on newer platforms will be like... it'll be amateurs and
companies reporting the news on their own.

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shockzzz
OP is probably right. Though it doesn't seem radically different than what's
happened with journalism before, as alluded to regarding TV. I'm sure it
happened with print, and I'm sure it happened with whatever existed before
that.

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aet
This piece has left me confused

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7Figures2Commas
This unhealthy obsession with eating in tech is starting to give me
indigestion.

