Quality journalism just doesn't make any money because everyone expects such content for free by now.
Also outrage sells more and bad journalists outclass good ones by clicks. The "modern activist type" of journalist rarely writes anything substantial or interesting, only very few master the balancing act between helpful news and entertainment.
I remember articles that more often than not could really broaden your understanding on a topic. Sometimes research for a short text took months. I have no idea how you could finance such endeavors anymore.
The news stand price or subscription price for a newspaper wasn't a big chunk of the publisher's revenue even back in the 20th century. The big money maker was ads. Papers had a regional monopoly or oligopoly over a certain advertising channel. They could make excellent margins on classified ads when they charged people to list a used truck for sale, a duplex for rent, or an open job position that needed an employee.
They also made good (if not quite so excellent) margins on ads interspersed in the main body of the paper for department stores, auto dealerships, restaurants, and most other kinds of local/regional businesses.
On top of that, people didn't just buy the paper to get investigative journalism. They were also buying low cost content like the funny pages, movie reviews, weather forecasts, and sports scores. Even with limited competition for advertising, few newspapers in the 20th century could have turned a profit while filling their pages with nothing but investigative journalism. In-depth reporting is too expensive to make up the bulk of a paper.
Investigative journalism was a kind of expensive spice that gave zest to the rest of the lower-cost content. Newspaper owners took pride in it and tried to steadily produce it but there was no way to fill daily issues with nothing but investigation.
Craigslist killed the margins for classified ads. A million sources killed the newspaper's allure for delivering weather forecasts, sports scores, and other low cost information. Keyword and geo-targeted advertising on major digital platforms added fierce competition for print display ads.
The main thing people miss from the newspaper is investigative journalism. But investigative journalism, unbundled from cheap filler and high margin advertising, can't be delivered at prices most people are willing to pay. There are a few maybe-outliers like the New York Times and Los Angeles times that survive on a reputation for depth and a national audience. But the days of every mid-sized American city having a local newspaper or two with investigative reporters on staff has passed, unless someone can come up with a new business model.
> Quality journalism just doesn't make any money because everyone expects such content for free by now.
I don't see the connection. My parents and grandparents watched news everyday on television and it was all free.
> Also outrage sells more
This is may or may not be true, but I think you are hinting at the actual underlying reason - news often isn't compelling. My parents and grandparents didn't have the near infinite number of choices for how to spend their time at 6pm. They were probably going to watch tv, or at least have it on, and the three available channels were all playing a newscast, so that's what they watched.
Keeping up with local and world events might be important, but it also has a real eat-your-vegetables vibe to it. There are so many other things I'd rather do than read or watch reporting on what happened today.
There are some segments of journalism that I think are doing quite well. For example, sports writing is still turning out great stuff and attracting an audience.
Ignoring issues of funding there are serious questions about audience reach to consider. There appears to be little market for thoughtful, well-researched, long-form journalistic content. This feels similar to how folks raised seven shades of hell about fast food chains not having healthy food options on the menu until McDonalds added a salad option. Predictably nobody bought the salad so they got rid of it.
I think this isn't true; it might be that people might not read an eight-part expose on a topic, but they do resonate with many people, some of whom may even pay or choose to subscribe based on it.
To pick up your McD's analogy, I'm sure they did focus groups and test runs to gauge interest and build the product up. If memory serves, they did this in the context of many low-end buffets adding a salad bar and "healthier" alternatives becoming available. I think they added this option as popularity of salads started to decline. I'm sure many people bought them, but it wasn't profitable enough so they discontinued it, in favor of other healthy options.
Now, to pivot back to news, they used to be awash in print ads, both classified and throughout the copy pages, which subsidized their operations a great deal. There are lots of demand for news, but the challenge is how you pay for it. I think it would have been great if the big players (FB, Google) had set up revenue shares with legit outlets; but they don't want to share their $$ pie so we are all worse off.
The phrase "if it bleeds it ledes" hasn't been an industry cliche for 50+ years for no reason. Engagement numbers don't lie. Hyperbolic opinion pieces attract as many or more views as painstakingly researched journalism at a fraction of the price.
wrt money: It appears facebook and google profited, like, imeasurably through serving or linking to news. How come news media itself gets so little of those monetary benefits?
That's a huge problem that hasn't been adressed since governments have been asleep at the wheel for 20 years.
Almost everything listed in this article is a downstream effect or side issue. Yes journalism is expensive and hard work, but that's not why people aren't reading/watching. People aren't reading because they don't trust mainstream news to deliver true facts. Journalists have consistently lost that trust over time and need to reckon with why that is.
Some people might, sure. But studies have shown that a majority of people don't trust the news anymore, across the spectrum of views. If you pay attention and remember what you hear, it does not take long to find examples of the news confidently communicating false reports.
Bias in news has always been a problem, and I think you just have to listen to a variety of sources with different biases to find out the truth.
"""Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” similar to last year’s 32%. Americans’ trust in the media -- such as newspapers, television and radio -- first fell to 32% in 2016 and did so again last year."""
Such studies sometimes ask about the outlets; for some reason conservatives feel Fox news isn't the MSM, while CNN and MSNBC are.
Asked about their "non-MSM" outlet, suddenly it is VERY trustworthy.
And these stats hold for liberals as well; they feel their outlet isn't the "MSM", but that Fox is and is untrustworthy.
Since the job of news is now to sell ads and not tell the truth, a lot of "supporters" only hear what their side wants them to hear, and not the facts.
The real problem of course is that each party has different policies; but if we as citizens don't agree on the facts and problems facing us, then there is no way to evaluate the strength of the policies against the problems.
Even the "facts" are politicized. Government statistics are falsified or manipulated at the source. Then the media picks and chooses what to report so as to favor the view they want to push. Honest media outlets hold government accountable. I think the best thing for the average person to do is listen to a variety of sources, and compare the news to their own and their friends' experiences. If you're up for research then you can do that along with seeking out true journalists.
People are supporting politicians because there is literally nothing else to do but not vote. Also, personally, I expect a politician to lie while holding a journalist to a higher standard. We need proper journalism to hold the government accountable.
We do have that but there is strong bias towards not trusting journalism. Everything in the US is capital based and no one wants to pay for journalism. So journalism relies on ad-tactics to get eyeballs looking at their stuff.
This in turn causes low trust because if one type of article is manipulative then the other types must be right?
If people weren’t so anti-capitalism then the journalism would have incentive to be less manipulative across the board.
Furthermore the politicians want manipulative journalism, there is no incentive on either side to do the right thing. If there was we wouldn’t have the political candidates we do today.
Instead we invest in the weakness because be uneducated means you don’t actually have to understand just vote emotionally.
> If people weren’t so anti-capitalism then the journalism would have incentive to be less manipulative across the board
I'm struggling to put into words the thoughts this sentence triggered. We're on HN, not reddit, so I'm going to assume good faith.
What reasons over the past 30-50 years have capitalists given the population to root for them? When your business model is to fuck over everyone in your path in a race to the bottom for the gain of a select few at the top, why would anyone expect anything else from the people capitalism stomps all over?
"Politicians" and "Journalists" aren't specific enough to discuss this problem, people haven't been suddenly believing politicians in general they've latched onto specific politicians in specific political parties and believe them. Similarly, you can have people who say they think journalists are all liars but believe specific journalists or specific news outlets. It's like how congresspeople are re-elected pretty consistently despite the national approval of congress as a whole being in the dirt, people like what _their_ guy is up to but not what everyone else is doing.
Supporting sure, but I don't know about believing.
The most fascinating part of Trump's success is that his supporters know he's lying, exaggerating and making stuff up on the spot and are ok with it. They believe he supports the things they support in a general sense and they believe all politicians lie and cheat, so they don't care even about his most egregious stuff.
I think there's a Dunning-Kruger effect, where people think they're being savvy about a corrupt system. The belief is that the whole edifice of American institutions is really just a facade on top of a corrupt system controlled by elites, and that Trump is being honest in a sense by exposing the corruption, but that his own obvious corruption is just a requirement to succeed in the way the game is played.
And of course Trump makes great use of this. The more he can get people to believe that the other side are liars and crooks, the more they'll tolerate his corruption and lies.
Oh it’s definitely a one way street. I realized all the talk coming out of the Trump camp isn’t really about the other side but about themselves. A common repeated phrase is “the other side doesn’t listen to me” which really means “I don’t listen to the other side”.
Does it matter? In the modern sellout world, by the time something can be considered "Mainstream", it's already well on the way to abandoning the principles that made it successful in the first place and replacing them with "Cost Effective" practices and monetization, what used to be called Selling Out and is now termed "Enshitiffication".
It does not matter whether you're talking about the broadcast and cable television media (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox), the new wave media of online-first reporting (All the properties of Conde Nast and Ziff Davis, incl. Wired, Vice, Cracked, Buzzfeed, etc.), or even the third-generation blogosphere (Substack, Medium). There's no trust because success is inversely correlated with trustworthiness.
Folks specifically don't trust journalism because they willfully switched to low quality news sources that intentionally spread hyperbole, propaganda, and opinion pieces in lieu of actual journalism. The market has spoken. Folks like this shit.
Of course not. The government reports that lots of articles are based on are free. LibGen (which anyone this service would target likely knows of) holds most of the other reports of objective facts. If people were interested in reading the reports, they wouldn't need the paper, and if they need help interpreting the source, that's just a way for readers to scream about bias.
Anything real-time can't be reported on either, because choosing what to report on is a form of bias - even reporting on the latest mass shooting is "Giving coverage to someone that shouldn't be glorified", or "Only showing negatives for the second amendment". There is no way to please people without admitting bias, and then detractors will use tgat to tear down your "unbiased, facts-only" source.
A litmus test for recent journalism is the hunter Biden laptop story.
And the reason is that most journalists nowadays believe that presenting other views is harmful[1]
Most boomers and their children grew up in an unusual period in news when broad and balanced coverage was expected, and even somewhat required in the TV news. "Yellow journalism" is back, though, and we haven't quite adjusted (compare abc news coverage of Biden's plagiarism and lying in the 1980s to their coverage of his mental decline during his presidency)
Tabloids? Not when 51 intelligence professionals sign a letter, claiming the laptop to be false when in fact it was not. I think the laptop story is a classic example of why people distrust a journalists. You had many media outlets, backed by government officials, essentially covering up for Hunter Biden and lying to the public. The laptop exists. It's contents exist. But for years all we heard was that this was a false flag operation from Russia.
> Not when 51 intelligence professionals sign a letter, claiming the laptop to be false when in fact it was not.
No, that's not what they said. Here's what they said: "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case." https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...
> The laptop exists. It's contents exist.
So what?
Several Republican-led Congressional committees found no wrongdoing by Joe Biden in the matter. So yes, it's nothing but a tabloid story.
The cynicism in the 51s statement is what's wrong. And the media taking the expected cynical take. The 51 can say we didn't say it was fake we simply strongly implied it. And the media reported the implied lie. The media is either ignorant or more likely complicit.
The laptop has emails communications showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that Joe Biden was involved in his business deals, contrary to what Joe Biden was saying.
That was known to any journalists who chose not to report on it
At the time there were two clear and obvious issues; the provenance was sketchy (material may easily have been added or deleted), and the source (Hunter) was a drug addict.
The "Yeah, my dad's totally on board with this" suffered from both, it may have been fake material added to discredit Biden (hindsight suggests not) OR (just as damning) it's the utterance of a crackhead bignoting an endeavour for credability.
What followed was one partisan media wing endlessly blowing up nothing of substance into a fabricated conspiracy, the other arm either ignoring the nothing of substance or lamely addressing why it was nothing.
You yourself acknowledge this in the framing you used: "showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that .."
The two problematic italics were precisely why knowledgable and honest journalists chose to not endlessly report on it.
Yeah, they did work the italicized parts at the time .. with a sketchy evidence chain chasing back to the emails of a drug addict that was pretty much it for the day for journalists .. the new day saw plenty more stories with actual meat on the bone.
That's an example of a story not going anywhere, it's commonplace.
What is less common is partisan hacks circling back like a dog to its own vomit and spending months of news cycles pumping up a cardboard outline as a real live bit of news.
It's a good thing HN readers aren't foolish enough to grasp immediately for identity-based outrage while ignoring all valid points and surrounding context.
> The destruction of patience is one of the most dramatic cultural shifts we’ll probably experience of our lifetimes, and it pervades everything — journalism, music, comedy, the works. I was at a dinner party recently with a film studies professor who said some of her own students didn’t really watch movies anymore.
A 29 year old whom I spoke with recently made the same comment: they don't have the patience to watch movies.
I can feel the same atrophication happening to my(older)self, to a lesser extent. Though I still love watching movies and reading books, I find it difficult to finish uninterrupted. During a movie, I usually take one or two breaks, and not simply to go to the bathroom. With books, I tend to read a chapter at a time and then stop, sometimes taking weeks to finish a long book. I remember when I was young, I would tear through an interesting book in one day; you couldn't tear the pages away from me.
I think "journalism" would have an easier time surviving if it got unbundled from endless p̶r̶o̶p̶a̶g̶a̶n̶d̶a̶ editorial opinion pieces it gets bundled with.
There is a demand for bias free news. Or at least news that doesn't come bundled with editorial opinion.
If we're going to be force fed opinion, it's only natural that individuals will gravitate towards channels with opinions they agree with.
Investigative journalism in the past wasn't all as great as we like to think. Yes, there was some outstanding work, but there was also a lot of junk from lazy writers. The news hack who hung out in bars and generated stories from bits of rumor was a stereotype.
My own experience with the press was during Gulf War I. Traveling around the Mid-East, it was eye-opening to me seeing how many reporters mostly hung out at the hotel, swapping gossip, and adding datelines for wherever they supposedly had been. It was a joke among photojournalists that they were the only ones who actually had to go there.
> The truth is going out of business as technology turns us into a folk-story society, ripe for influence by a demagogue.
Talk about hubris.
Thomas Jefferson: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."
My hope is that from the "death of truth" a more diverse group of media rises from its ashes.
Do you think Jefferson consulted a more diverse group of media? I suspect that in his time it was actually less diverse, and perhaps Jefferson considered only books to be worthy of trust.
The core problem is that factual reporting is not enough as factual reporting can be hyper-partisan based on where you point the spotlight, so they’ve just given up, because it’s more profitable to just tell a story or narrative.
You only need to go visit r/journalism to see why we are in a post (traditional) journalism society. No one wants to be preached to be activists. They want factual neutral reporting. The industry got captured, resorted to clickbait to chase money, and is in a doom spiral. But there’s great content on podcasts, substack, YouTube, etc.
There are many topics on which Fox News reporting can be more truthful than others. I remember this during the peak of BLM protests and riots, for example. They also tend to cover stories that others like Reuters ignore. So they have SOMETHING worth paying attention to even if some or most is not. But I don’t read them regularly so I can’t answer really. My feeling is Fox + a left leaning equivalent like Vox + a more neutral source (WSJ, Reuters, etc) would make for a decent news diet.
> The channel was created by Australian-born American media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to appeal to a conservative audience, hiring former Republican media consultant and CNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO.
Fox news was founded to support a specific worldview. People "want" neutral reporting. What they "pay" for is to be outraged (pay with their attention).
> there’s great content on podcasts, substack, YouTube, etc.
There's almost zero shoe-leather ground truth reporting in any of those places. Is YouTube going to send a foreign correspondent to Crimea? Are podcasters going to start attending the mayor's press conferences?
Agree. But there are people who report from within Crimea who aren’t outside journalists visiting as well. The internet creates lots of access. And I guess I am separating the collection of facts, often by people like AP, from the rest of journalism, which to me has devolved into activism.
People want to be preached to by activists or advocates for the human cause. This plays a part in whatever we mean when we refer to the present-day decay of public institutions.
Respectfully, I challenge you to ask yourself how you can argue to the contrary and then say that there's great content on platforms and mediums that essentially exist to preach and serve as surrogates for certain institutions (journalism being one of them).
Humanity is at odds with objective truths (i.e., neutral facts) because the fundamentals that support contemporary notions of objectivity were erected by people with implicit biases.
The problem with journalism is that it harkens to an idea of the world that is effectively dead. Journalism is just a string upon strings keeping the marionette-corpse of modern civilization erect. Its own survival depends on Journalists convincing "consumers" that what's dead is alive or rather, just "sickly".
But people who know better are tired of being treated like "consumers".
You would be better off getting your content from mainstream news outlets than relying on podcasts, substacks, blogs etc. for factual neutral reporting. Specifically I'm referencing the news divisions of the mainstream outlets that offer actual reporting and not the opinion jockeys that dominate prime time.
The alternative news sources you mentioned are merely opinion echo chambers that serve to reinforce preconceived ideas and inflame passions rather than offering up any kind of neutral reporting.
What a lot of people find refreshing in podcasts, etc. is that they don’t hide their biases. They might tell the truth, or maybe they lie, but at least they tell you (or clearly signal) their position.
People I’ve spoken to are sick of media that pretends to be neutral, while they are clearly serving the interests of the rich. In that sense it’s really refreshing to have someone tell you what they really think.
I don’t have any solutions, but I can certainly understand the thought process.
Describing those who have lost trust in journalists as "postliterate" is not going to engender any reconciliation between the two. I for one, roll my eyes whenever journalists elevate themselves as the keepers of truth and democracy. Despite all of their self-aggrandizement they're just writers and citizens like the rest of us.
You are likely not a professional writer, unless that happens to be your job, but then you are not “like the rest of us”. Also, journalists are held to the standards of their organization, unlike “the rest of us” who have no standard.
I always assume something a random citizen says is 99% false because yes, most people know very little.
> I always assume something a random citizen says is 99% false because yes, most people know very little.
That's one way to look at it. Another is, a random citizen has no reason to lie to you. A journalist working for an "organization with standards" does.
It has nothing to do with someone lying to me, rather that the average person is very uneducated on any given topic and these days largely consumes propaganda from people who DO have a reason to lie to me. Thus, random people are not to be listened to.
My hierarchy of trust is random people 10, government 40, journalists 60, science papers 80, scientists talking about their own area 88. Everything else 0.
Also outrage sells more and bad journalists outclass good ones by clicks. The "modern activist type" of journalist rarely writes anything substantial or interesting, only very few master the balancing act between helpful news and entertainment.
I remember articles that more often than not could really broaden your understanding on a topic. Sometimes research for a short text took months. I have no idea how you could finance such endeavors anymore.
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