Since I was in school for journalism in 2007 I’ve been saying the same thing — instead of continuing to produce episodic articles, the news media could have shifted to providing context that helps people keep track of long-running processes that affect them. I do that for my friends, because I listen to the news all the time, and I can explain how events in the news today are part of much longer series of events. They find it very valuable. But if the news media ever does this, they tuck it in to existing article formats, but unless you are very attentive over years, its not possible, easily, to keep track of why something is happening or what led to it.
Hypertext and databases were made for this, but the news media can’t see it. I tried, for years, in school, at conferences and in various journalism jobs, to get people to see how this could make journalism more useful and powerful, but here in 2024, we’re still doing “articles, except on the internet”. And I can’t afford to keep working in the news media long enough to be in a position to try it out. Nobody can, unless their actual livelihood is coming from somewhere else.
So here we are, in total context collapse, and a dying news media whose slow disappearance, especially at the local level, is actively hurting people, and our democracy.
It’s bad, and its going to get a lot worse as AI makes it cheaper and cheaper to lie convincingly. But what can anyone do?
This sort of feels like what Wikipedia does for ongoing events? Here's an example I'm thinking of with background, prelude, timeline of events with links to more articles on different aspects:
Problem is we need the same for local news. A place where all the research gets archived, and events are tracked. Seems like nowadays the only people with a complete-ish picture of what's going on at a local level are the people directly involved themselves.
Anywho, things aren't looking good. One of the media giants in my country just cut 4,800 jobs across the country:
I've held on to my 2002 Wikipedia account, and have been SCREAMING "this is the way" since way back when Microsoft was still trying to sell an encyclopedia [on CD-ROM!]. I remember industry "experts" in my own academic village questioning "but how will you TRUST something that anybody can edit?"
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January 2023, I finally had an LLM cite one of my own written contributions when I began asking about a nuanced technical database which I maintain the article on wikipedia (which was really cool/eerie). This was over a year ago, and every day I continue to be floored by genAI capabilities in discussing published dataset complexities.
I know several lowkey published authors (one whose autobiography I copyedited) that have been terrified by what LLMs know about their own lives, based on commonsense associations/deductions.
to get people to see how this could make journalism more useful and powerful
Did you ever consider news media is structured the way it is by design? It's inherently a distraction and engagement tool crafted to influence public perception to the whims of those behind the companies.
What you propose is nearly the opposite of that and would likely incriminate some powerful actors.
yeah man I took many semesters of courses on this exact thing, and then felt it personally over the course of several acquisitions and layoffs. I know. Anyone who’s worked in journalism knows. The profession has always been at war with whatever provides the professional’s livelihood. Right now the powerful are winning that war in a way we haven’t seen since the turn of the last century, and the consequences of that aren’t going to be good.
The "context" approach was the whole "Explainer" period that happened in journalism, most famously done by Vox (as another commenter mentioned)--but also many others.
What you end up getting is the approved narrative of "how things are" by the same class of people who all hobnob with each other.
Glad to see it's end. Look forward to what's next.
No, that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s presenting context in the same episodic format as news articles, and it only works to explain the thing that was published on that day, up to that point.
Do you have examples of what context-oriented media like this would look like? After watching news about the pandemic, I found it interesting to see how short the collective public memory about the event was, and how little we remembered about the reasons for the decisions that were made early on. I wonder if a more context-oriented media might help people recall the sequence of decisions and their justifications at the time?
I think Wikipedia does a good job of being updated quite quickly with relevant news while also providing the context as deep as desired. I am not sure it is reasonable to expect each article to provide anywhere near sufficient context for anything remotely complicated.
I agree that context is sorely missing in a lot of news reporting these days. However I don't think there's enough content in the form of 'context' to justify a typically-staffed news outlet. I'd love to be proven wrong.
It also seems like journalism is suffering a similar problem as software engineering, in that people think they can take shortcuts. "I'll just walk around and ask people questions" is not the same thing as journalism, just as "I'll write a To Do app" is not the same thing as doing software engineering. These are disciplines with exacting standards, quality levels, and rigor, and require years of diligent study and practice.
And in the case of well-practiced journalism, it really is "the fourth estate", and we should be fearful of what our world becomes should that fourth estate ever crumble.
They were also trying to do it at a national level, with stories that are incredibly well-covered already. If someone did this for San Francisco, so frustrated people could get deeply-reported, verifiable answers to “why is [x] like this,” you would create an enormous amount of value.
P.S. if anyone wants to give me a million dollars to do this, I am both an experienced news editor and a senior-level software engineer, email in profile
Vox also tried too hard to stick to a coherent narrative that fit their own political outlook, which is normal for journalism but I think falls apart even more quickly when you try to provide context over time.
Ya ive been hoping to see something similar emerge. Both in terms of putting the story within big picture numbers and a chain of stories to explain what and why it happened as more time passes.
> Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience.
Is there some material that explains why news websites are against aggregators that provide news from a variety of sources, such that I don't have to pay a hundred news outlets?
This, to me, seems like a much better model since the revenue can be distributed to whatever set of publications I've read for that month.
Traditionally your local newspaper was exactly this. They paid exorbitant sums of money to _wire services_ for the right to republish their stories, and readers had access to both the local reporting and the national/global/interest content with a single local subscription.
If you used such an aggregator, it would quickly become obvious that original reporting is only a small fraction of what news outlets publish, with the rest being made of slightly edited newswires and press releases, as well as fast-follow reporting on other media reports.
In other words, all news sources are already aggregators, and exclusive content is how they attempt to differentiate themselves and win market share from their competitors.
I mean, overtly a market place with lower friction of customer mobility is bad for the sellers because they have to compete more (a counterpoint is that a race to the bottom to write "clickbait" is the end state as well, so it's not all self-interest).
> The model was, the financial journalist Felix Salmon wrote, in 2010, “looking increasingly like a race to the bottom, where publishers desperately try every trick in the book to boost their pageviews and ad impressions, just to compensate for the fact that their revenues per page are very small. The results—sensationalism, salaciousness, and slideshows—only serve to further erode the value of the sites in the eyes of advertisers.”
Journalism will still be relevant in the world, but the vast majority of these outlets have been forced into a race to the bottom for sure. For corners of this industry to survive, they will likely need to form a symbiotic relationship with a more lucrative adjacent industry.
Meanwhile the outlets pushing meaningless, clickbait-first content will hopefully wither away.
It's already in progress. I haven't watched mainstream news for years now. Independent podcasts/youtubers have taken their place. You can also usually get breaking news on Twitter/social media now, without ever having to turn on your TV or going to cnn.com.
Honesty, in an ideal world wide web, there isn't a need for much paid journalism. The metamorphosis that's happening now is natural and needed. Following a story, making summaries of ongoing events or even doing investigative reporting can be made as a side job by people interested in a subject (like Australian history, astronomy or the life of Britney Spears), most probably better than a run of the mill reporter who's being thrown across topics. They can build their follower base and span out on topics or staff up organically. Special needs reporting like war reporting or a documentary on rainforest destruction, like the above, can also be freelancing work and licensed to larger networks.
It's not really "media" that dies, but generic news channels and editorial teams. The concept of "notable news" is too diverse to be covered in these formats.
I tried to read the article, but received a popup in the face asking for a subscription. I guess the answer is, "Yea, a media extinction event has already happened".
So if AI gathers the "facts" (as it finds them) and puts them into a summary for you, who will provide the commentary or "context". Who will help us make sense of the world around us? And connect the dots?
Will AI provide "insight" or "perspective"? Will AI predict "what might happen next?" And will AI help us make sense of the world around us? Or just a summary (in whatever "voice" or "style" you like)?
Maybe the media could all chip in to elect a Donald Trump-like figure to boost revenue through subscriptions and ads? It seems like a model that could be replicated all over the world.
The media's ability to adapt has been abysmal. They were all bankrupt before Trump got in, he saved their bacon, but that's not a sustainable business model.
These companies don't even have the skills to put their own ad blocker solutions together. There is no capability, no innovation, and no future for any of them.
A new breed of news companies will emerge, the old guard is done.
Why not? Trump's 2016 election alone seems to have caused subscriptions to places like the Washington Post and New York Times to increase, and led to a small but fervent industry in creating Trump- and MAGA-related merchandise outside the news industry.
It seems like there should be potential for a company or cartel to market elections more like WWE or boxing matches, pitting a hero against a heel, selecting hype men and women to be VP picks, and selling merchandise along the way.
There are only so many Wordle's that the NYT can buy, but you can fly at least five Trump flags from the back of a pickup. I think the industry could easily adapt (or at least, new media companies could form) by making a greater spectacle of elections and bankrolling the campaigns of those they think could drive views and subscriptions should they be elected.
I've seen what Fox News has done to the political discourse in this country, and I think we could go WAY darker as these legacy media companies continue to fight the dying light.
Good riddance. Journalists and the media have abandoned their roles as truthful arbiters forcing everyone into their biased corners (msnbc, Fox News, etc).
I want non sensationalized, truthful reporting and it’s clear only Ai can get me that. Human reporters are too emotional and it’s shown during the Trump era, and continued now.
Have you tried any leading LLM? Something better than GPT 3.5. Given the same source data AI will write with far less bias (and often more insight) than your average human journalist.
Isn’t this customer driven though? Biased sources telling some group what they want to hear get way more engagement than journalists trying to be objective.
Fox kind of proved this business model out and since then we now have others they cater to either further right or left wing audiences.
Of course now more independent and even less trustworthy sources are taking audiences by cranking this model up even more. Now it’s random rage bait trolls on social media providing “news” to hordes of infinite scroll addicts.
Who cares if something is customer driven? Ethics is still a thing. You can't just sell a ship where the front falls off because your customers want it.
Bad journalism clearly causes societal harm, and it's time we regulate it. Passing the buck to social media by saying "it's what people want" is simply a way for these people to rinse their hands of any accountability.
So people create bunkers with multi-year food supplies and other necessities for extinction level event. Will media create bunkers to hoard multi-year news articles and opinion pieces for that?
Almost entirely self-inflicted by greedy media corporations and "journalists" with no sense of ethics.
Somehow we put these journalists on an unassailable pedestal with zero accountability, while we enforce professional ethics in nearly every other profession on the planet.
There are very few journalists left actually providing a positive benefit to society. I cannot wait for GPT-4+ to put the rest out of job. Given the same source data, it writes better articles, with less bias, more closely sticking to the facts.
No, I'm discussing LLMs replacing "journalists" (ie the ones that churn out worthless sensationalized article after article), not journalists (the ones with actual boots on the ground experience or real insight). The former could easily have their jobs automated away.
Replace, maybe not; but put out of a job, absolutely. So in a way, that's a replacement in the sense that the end user gets the same product (infotainment) but from an LLM
Hypertext and databases were made for this, but the news media can’t see it. I tried, for years, in school, at conferences and in various journalism jobs, to get people to see how this could make journalism more useful and powerful, but here in 2024, we’re still doing “articles, except on the internet”. And I can’t afford to keep working in the news media long enough to be in a position to try it out. Nobody can, unless their actual livelihood is coming from somewhere else.
So here we are, in total context collapse, and a dying news media whose slow disappearance, especially at the local level, is actively hurting people, and our democracy.
It’s bad, and its going to get a lot worse as AI makes it cheaper and cheaper to lie convincingly. But what can anyone do?