This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.
That was a scary number so I Googled it. You should always check scary numbers. It's misleading.
It's true that newspaper newsroom jobs fell 57% (from roughly 71,000 to 31,000 jobs) over that period. However, newsroom employment across all mediums fell by only 26% (from 114,000 to 85,000).
A lot of hose jobs went digital, they didn't just disappear.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsr...
I have some journalists (for a local newspaper) in my circle of friends and they all complain there's no 'newsroom' anymore for most (dutch) newspapers. All journalists now are supposed to 'self-redact' and their copy is just pasted into the newspaper without anybody else looking at it.
Lots of 'journalists' are freelancers who just send in their piece. Even those often get published with minimal oversight. There just isn't enough money to have a redaction.
Fact-checking is(or should be) done by the one writing the piece. So personal biases are hardly ever caught.
Admitted, all these stories are for a small local newspaper with very tight budgets. But according to my friends it's the same everywhere when they speak to their friends, and even the big national newspapers here have very minimal supporting personnel.
It's no wonder the world polarizes.
They aren't funded exclusively by subscribers because that would exclude a source of revenue that enables cheaper subscriptions. But you can have no ads for a reasonable premium.
Historically, public/mass news services were dependent on adverts or classifieds to pay for their running. That business has been consumed by ad tech.
YouTube has become a source for journalism now, but the viability of newspapers and local beats has reduced.
> Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020.
So, if we group digital publications with newspapers we are going from 78k to about 49k jobs, a drop of almost 40%. It would be interesting to see a finer grained breakdown by type of jobs. I would speculate that there was probably an even bigger decline in the number of journalists per se.
The rest of the numbers you are quoting are mostly broadcast TV, with some radio and cable TV folks thrown in. My impression is that quite few of those jobs / stories are serious journalism.
https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/new-local-journalist-index-...
(Measured as local journalist equivalent per 100,000 people.)
Accuracy is actually MOST important when strong feelings are involved. If we're talking about what time to eat lunch 'noonish' is good enough. If we're talking about about how many people died in a tragedy exact numbers help prevent misinformation, hyperbole, and panic from driving everyone into a frenzy.
My reaction was a little different. I said "that's it? Only 60%?"
1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"?
2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.
For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).
I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.
I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.
Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first.
But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight.
The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today.
And then you can also get analysis from people who have dedicated their professional lives to studying the geopolitical, historical, and other issues involved in these conflicts. What does a journalist really bring to the picture here? So really we have more sources of news than ever before, and I think that's largely killed "the news" as an industry, because it's not really clear what their role is supposed to be anymore.
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Robert Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post through its glory years til its purchase by Bezos, wrote a really excellent article about this some time back, 'The Bad News About the News.' [1] It was written back in 2014, but summed up what had happened and accurately predicted where things would be headed:
"[Companies] have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight."
[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...
That's the good side of the Internet (and smartphones) and what all of us early adopters always said the Internet will be great for. But then there is the other side of the coin: fake news, fake account, coordinated disinformation campaigns from foreign state actors, bad taste pranks etc. Some of those existed before with classic journalism as well but the scale at which things are now done was simply impossible before.
So, having journalism and journalists as a trusted source, and filter, that can already digest and filter out the fake from the truth are still needed. Or even more than before, I dare to say. The issue is that there are too many monetary incentives to not act like that.
In modern times I'll again take the glass half full side here. The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle. And even in the anonymous internet age, there's still the issue of reputation. It's perhaps more important than ever now a days because you can look at some entity's predictions or statements from one time period, see how it played out over the next e.g. 6 months, and see whether they were onto something, or blowing smoke.
I think this is why it's so hard for the government to drum up support for war now a days. They have no ability to control the narrative and so framing invading some country half way around the world as being 'defensive' is a narrative that usually collapses in rapid order. Even during Vietnam it started becoming clear that the narrative around the Gulf of Tonkin was dodgy, but it's a process that took years. By Iraq we were down to lies starting to be exposed within months. Now a days it'd probably take about 24 hours, to the point that with Iran didn't even bother with trying to manufacture consent and we saw the result of that a few days ago.
And how are YOU expected to figure out the truth? Journalists should be akin to scientists and researchers: specialized in their field, with better connections and expertise and be able to follow a trail to reach ground truth. Now, can and will be they fooled? Absolutely, and there should be still some peer-review of what they publish.
Also this is an ideal scenario, and it's not what happening right now, or at least it happen only for a handful of media outlets all over the world. This model still support (and expect) having biased publications - I mean, it's just how we humans are - and you as a responsible citizen are still required to look at least at a couple of sources and form your own opinion.
I do agree with you that the truth tends to come out at some point because it follows the path of least resistance, but sometimes the lie can be so well written that it takes decades for the truth to come out.
That would require them to actually have studied that field in university in a masters degree (or PhD) like researchers have.
Very few journalists have. Some journalists are good, many are talking heads.
Again, this is an ideal scenario, I know, but IMO there is nothing that makes it technically impossible to achieve.
The 'citizen journalist' is at best a part time volunteer and at worst an astroturf'd contractor of a PR department.
And as the quip goes about volunteers -- willing to work for free, altruistic, and competent: pick two.
Occasionally you get delightful humans that combine all three, but they're needles in haystacks.
Journalism had a pretty strong code of conduct and drive to publish the facts. They couldn’t get it right all the time, but they had a stake in doing the best they could and not losing their reputation.
The truth of things doesn’t tend to come out in time. We know the truth about many things now, but after the window in which a change could be made was obfuscated and stopped.
Facts coming out when it is convenient to the people withholding them is not a success. If they come out at all.
The old system of journalism did a surprisingly good job, until people gave up on playing by the rules and decided to play by the trappings of journalism.
Reputation matters to the center and the left of the information ecosystem today. The right has connected its media to its politics entirely, to create a propaganda machine. Part of its routine is to state that journalism and the left are biased, and don’t want to deal with the truth, and then shoehorning their narrative into it.
This is exactly why professional journalists, with employers who can restrict strong pressure, are important.
The truth about things which are widely observable tends to come out over time.
There are many, many things which are not widely observable.
You know the easiest way to do something secretly in government today?
Have an in-person meeting, gloss over it in online-posted minutes, then bury the evidence of it being done in the most detailed, voluminous reports.
Because finding that requires a butt in a seat through boring meetings and tracing / reconciling line items through reports.
And generally speaking, most people who aren't being paid aren't willing to do that for fun.
Most people can get their celebrity news straight from that celebrity’s insta feed. Unless you’re TMZ breaking the juiciest news about celebrities, you can’t compete with that.
Big newspapers early in the internet age tried explain why journalism was needed - to explain the story behind the story - and that was the correct move, imho.
I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world.
This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998!
Deregulation and consolidation started hurting the business in the 90s, the pure margin classified business started taking body blows ~2002 here (Craigslist wasn't everywhere) and salaries started tanking. Then the smart reporters flipped to PR.
The smartphone was the death blow as the sweet business of being an ad-delivery courier started to erode. Many people subscribed to the Thursday/Sunday paper to get the supermarket flyer and retail ads/coupons.
I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be.
They recently cut production down to 3 days a week and laid off half their already tiny staff.
Their current list of formerly great papers includes the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News, East Bay Times, The Orange County Register, and Orlando Sentinel.
They also bought my hometown daily paper, just a small, nowheresville town. The paper went from being respectably sized for a small town, and featuring many local news stories, to being slim and having one randomly selected story from one of the 5-8 papers they own in the region, and a bunch of wire stories. Once a week, they copy and paste the local police blotter.
The outlook on the news industry is exceedingly bleak. :(
Now like 5, who also do editorial, and make peanuts.
People doing actual useful news work, in other terms.
Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person.
Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do.
I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters.
(I'm joking, but then again, if demagogues can remove specifics to make statements punchier, why can't I?)
We have to change the system somehow so that independent investigative journalism is either funded without compromising its independence (this is difficult, as the recent bullshit coming out of the BBC is proving), or we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what).
Or we have to change our systems of democracy so that politicians cannot abuse them. Something like "no politician, or any members of their family, or their close friends, can ever be employed by any organisation that contracts with the government, or receives government funds, or benefits from government legislation". This is obviously going to be tricky.
Investigative journalism, done properly, takes time and money. And it produces long articles that can be challenging to read and involve the detail that backs the claim. In a clickbait world, this doesn't produce profit.
There's no functioning business model for it now, but we have built our democratic systems on the assumption that there is. Rich folks buying newspapers and then meddling with their editorial policy was always a problem, but with the editorial office completely dependent on the rich folks for their salaries it gets harder to resist.
You look at multiple perspectives, and tease out reality from all the information, understanding that it's all biased. This has always been required.
twitter and facebook were supposed to fill this purpose. oh well
The major publications, e.g. AP, NYTs, WaPo, Economist, FT, Bloomberg all have reporting and seem to be doing well. It's not like beat reporting is going to die. The death of journalism is way premature.
And the world suffers as a result, IMO. It’s all very thinly veiled opinion rather than original reporting. How many YouTubers are reporting out in the field rather than just reacting to stories other people reported?
More than anything else Substack shows to me how valuable editors are in the journalistic world. So, so many people are in desperate need of an editor to challenge them before they hit publish.
A lot of punditry has moved to those platforms, but roughly nobody on those platforms is actually doing investigative journalism.
You forgot podcasts which are available on numerous platforms. One of which is YT for video podcasts.
Most of the sports news now are breaking on podcasts. Same with pop culture. News sites now mostly refer to some podcast and the person on the podcast whatever bit of news they have come from there.
As of September: Roughly 478,000 podcasts have released at least one new episode in the last 90 days
Podcasts have become the way a majority of people I know are now getting their news, which is pretty crazy.
podcasts and web stuff is where the majority of people go to seek journalism, but I hesitate to say that's what replaced it. I see a void where it once was, and the product offered largely different than what I came to expect from journalism wholly.
And for a reason. It's expensive. Only the tiny handful of winners of the digital transition (including The Atlantic) can now afford it.
The Atlantic and the NYT are now quite flush. IMO people should be subscribing to local newspapers instead, to fund local reporting, which is in a dire state.
You don't have to rely on your domestic media for international coverage. Especially with machine translation being so good these days, you can get your international coverage directly from the outlets abroad.
Edit wonder what the verdict will eventually be, he certainly saw the turbulence back then.
The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it.
When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry.
We don't need to tax them to make up a shortfall; we need to tax them to remove their power to distort government in their favor.
If you tried to ban all of the known strategies they would just come up with new ones. That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax.
Of course for the long term it would be better to replace traditional shares with time limited ones that give you a percentage of profits for 5 years but no voting rights. Power stays with workers and no one gets unlimited returns on a one time investment. And enforce pay equality where no one can get more than 20x median total comp. But I think that's too radical to pass anywhere today.
The problem with this is that is a good reason we don't tax unrealized gains. Yes, there are people using this as a loophole. But if you tax this, everytime home value goes up, there is a huge wave of bigger tax bills for every home owner and business owner. Which would crash the housing market overnight and probably kill 90% of the job creation in the economy. I'm sure you could make some carve outs for it, but if you do that, you probably won't collect much in tax revenue.
The biggest thing you don't seem to understand is that there is an economic concept called the Laffer curve. It relates tax rates to the total amount of tax a government takes in. And we are already at or near that tax rate. Increase taxes and the government won't take in more revenue. Growing the economy, that increases government tax revenue. But increasing tax rates past the optimum rate DECREASES not increases the tax revenue. Even ignoring the increased rates of tax avoidance, it constricts economic growth which reduces the employment tax revenue.
Basically, you can't tax your way to pay for your desired programs. Either allocate the budget you have or cancel the programs.
PS 1/2 of the federal budget is social spending, 1/6th is military (1/4 of which is the VA), 1/6 is interest on the debt and 1/6 is everything else the government does.
https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT0...
Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre.
And each of them can journal on their phones
Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers
And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared
All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism
We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.
Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.
Cost effective but soulless. Local news was killed by private equity and consolidation.
Yes, newspaper circulation had been declining since the late 1980s/early 1990s. The real economic damage came as classifieds, recruitment, real estate and advertising moved online. Craigslist and other online marketplaces ate the business model long before social media and AI entered the picture.
So "open internet" doesn't refer to a specific historical moment, but in this context I'd place its emergence in the early to mid-1990s.
My shallow, poorly worded, comment was aimed at time of the "open internet".
Newspapers took large revenue from advertising that had little to do with journalism. That subsidized foreign bureaus, statehouse reporters, investigative work and specialized beats. When those dollars moved elsewhere, the economics of reporting collapsed. The 2008 recession accelerated that.
That 60% figure is specifically newspaper newsroom employment, not journalism employment.
It would be nice to have a populus informed about what's going on in local government and actually understand the issues. But nobody really wants to be informed. They want biased ragebait.
Journalism pretends like it's fair and balanced while simultaneously only reporting part of a story that's much longer than presented, in order to provide the reader a specific perception. In other words: manipulation. Ignorance is a better outcome, because then at least people aren't overconfident in their wrongness.
The only other real value-add is that the journalist is a better 'communicator', an assumption mostly based on stereotypes about the people being interviewed, especially with tech journalism. This has broken down too - the largest outlets regularly release pieces filled with run-on sentences and typos now, and often obfuscate the point rather than clarify it. See any NYT article about any hot-button issue over the past ten years or so.
Lord they keep making dudes that do the “if the average person was as smart as me”. Probably time to move to Mars. If only someone would write a newsletter about how to do it.
To be clear, I mean the dude you’re replying to who has seen through the veil the fourth estate cast over our eyes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210219012551/https://www.polit...
RIP Salon. When it launched in 1995 it was a total breath of fresh air and it launched at a time when the optimism for the future was through the roof.
I’d like to see a better way to shutter journalism. Some kind of entity, possibly distributed, similar to archives that: holds domain names, fixes link rot, removes all formatting caused by dead ads, and hosts the actual content that had been abandoned or donated;, while also offering new navigation and discoverability through the collections. Ideally a single CMS replacing for all the articles.
It could be partially funded through libraries similar to perma.cc and look a bit like Wikipedia/longform/longreads.
it was also the era when Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms as well as into media such as Slate and MSNBC.
See this 1996 cover of Wired Magazine: https://www.originalmagazines.com/products/wired-magazine-ju...
I think it was more of a defensive play. Keep in mind that Microsoft saw the web as a threat. Gates was worried that the browser will undermine their OS monopoly (which it eventually did). Gates launched a bunch of web sites including Slate, HomeAdvisor, CarPoint, Sidewalk, Expedia, MSNBC and so on, and told the world that he didn't expect any of these sites to be profitable any time soon, which in my opinion, was intended to dissuade others from investing in the web.
A sticker, a suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom, and something else that I can't recall right now. (I still have the sticker on an old ammo can.)
Solid collectible, right there.-
It was delivered in a regular business-sized envelope.
The clamshell got squished between themselves and myself, and the combination of squish-damage, sharp edges, paper abrasion, and otherwise-unadorned latex condom made me cast serious upon its efficacy in co-partner use.
The three parts were largely loose inside of the envelope: Front half of sharp clamshell (with suck logo sticker), rear half of sharp clamshell, and a condom just kind of hanging out in there somewhere.
I don't remember what teenager-me did with the actual (and seriously mostly-useless) non-lubricated latex condom that was inside of that tiny thin-metalled tin, and it may be likely that it would have been something that is positively inappropriate to discuss in polite company even today.
But I do know that its potential transport damage did not meet the much, much higher standards that were in-keeping of the rubbers that I was using with my girlfriend of that time.
So whatever came of it, I am quite sure in saying that its efficaciousness was untested by my behest.
And the tin was surely discarded. (I probably tried to keep the well-matched gold foil sticker with the suck logo, but I must have failed.)
All of the condom parts arrived, and none of the important ones were trustworthy. 1/10 on that particular freebie item.
(The orange-pink transparent is still holding on very well.)
And if you bend the rules a bit, Bianca's Smut Shack might sort-of count too - probably the first truly great website of any sort.
FWIW they had it in for Trump from the start.
The big difference though is that Slate has always had corporate ownership, first by Microsoft and then by Graham Holdings. It's never really had to stand on its own feet.
I'm in the Seattle area now and the Seattle Times has been a great source of independent local and national news. Most local city news orgs have gone under at this point but I'm glad we still have one here.
I subscribe to Apple News and get most of the stories from them now. They basically push 2-3 stories a day.
On the other hand, I also don't see anything else that's particularly interesting or thought provoking. Which is kind of sad for this US election season.
My project had a brief window of modest profitability from about 2012 to 2020. Before and after that time, I've mostly operated at a break-even or a loss because I love doing it, and it gives me a sense of purpose, and the thought of packing it up is deeply depressing. But the past few years have been an extreme drought of donations, which leads to extreme drought in ambition and energy. I sometimes wonder if my mental health would improve if I turned out the lights and moved on to something else. I don't want to, but sometimes we humans fail to want what's good for us.
I'm sure it doesn't help that I reject advertising and rely solely on donations. But perhaps the only thing more depressing than shutting down is slapping ads on everything. Blah.
I am sorry. I hope things work out.
It changes at some point, no doubt triggered by the crash of journalism, but it didn't try to be interesting and I gave up on it so far back I don't remember when.
https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2016/02/founders-of-s...
"Piss in the milk of the oligarchy".
It was ahead of it's time in terms of it's model for publishing large sites with staging, editorial desks, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120217111837/http://www.salon....
https://www.salon.com/1998/10/30/feature1_6/
Very, very different from what you'd expect from Salon in the later years.
I archived it, because the OP didn't really make it clear if salon.com is going offline or not: https://archive.is/PesDo