Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
> So their outlook is not rosy. Instead, I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.
I think this is right. I'd like to see more public media funding, but at least right now there is an explosion of independent media business models being explored recruiting some very good journalists and smart people.
I'd like to hear about anyone else's updated media habits. In my last… 20ish years of "gathering information about my community and interests," I've gone from paper NYT subscriber to RSS feed reader to social aggregators to social media to podcasts to newsletters to doomscroller... I've tried it all.
But to stay sane I've settled on simply following the voices I trust and find interesting across different media, and the best ones are navigating their own publishing and distribution journey. I pay some of them real money. Some are being acquired by bigger media outlets, too. I have hope in journalism's survival.
I've stopped paying attention to the news. Almost none of what is reported affects my life in any way.
I do read HN, more than I should actually, and a couple of local bloggers who report on local happenings. Our local paper used to do that but it's now just a USA Today reprint under a local masthead.
Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 15 years - increasingly shittier ad units and user-tracking, SEO-optimized clickbait and formatting nonsense, short-form video, now AI. None of it benefits readers. None of it builds loyalty.
Yeah, well said. Journalism and news is tough because at its core it's a public good, but all of the usual levers we have in modern society for funding and supporting public goods introduce all sorts of other problems. If it's only a voluntary paid service, you limit the reach of the information. If you make it free to access by taking money from advertisers, you introduce conflicts of interest with corporations that journalists might otherwise report on. If you make it state-sponsored, you introduce conflicts of interest with governments that journalists might otherwise report on. Journalists working for free is not right, either.
Obviously journalistic integrity is a real thing and I choose to believe that the vast majority of journalists are out there to report the stories as they are and make information available that otherwise would not be. I do not have the same confidence in the business leaders, like you said. Look no further than Jeff Bezos's WaPo.
Reminds me a lot of the book Manufacturing Consent, where it breaks down the split between 'journalism' and 'propaganda'. As long as there is a monetary incentive to emphasize certain things and ignore others, it will always ultimately be a form of propaganda.
Money isn’t the only pressure which pressures journalism. Access (and exclusion) is a huge pressure on sports, celebrity, and political journalism. A desire for popularity/notoriety cause sensationalism. There are countless other influences which confuse (or corrupt) the nobility of the profession.
Journalism today is a joke. More like 'what journalism? that heavy manipulative gossip masquerading as journalism?'
Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large enough to drive, we're in this emotionally driven circus for the duration.
Journalism needs to believe in itself, passionately, and put that passion out there. For every individual and every organization, whoever you are, you set the ceiling: nobody will have more passion or believe in you more than you do.
In my anecdotal experience, journalism goes along with the detractors and naysayers: It's an archaic industry from a past era, they're mostly ineffective, social media makes it mostly irrelevant, journalistic principles aren't really valued, hard news isn't valued, not many will ever read it and the audience won't come back, it's more for comfort and entertainment, don't challenge people too much, etc.
Imagine a blogger who, for their post, flew to the location of whatever they were talking about and saw it for themself. Interviewed dozens of people with direct experience, including the people directly affected, the people who did whatever happened, the local leaders, people on all sides. Found and read actual documentary evidence. Combined that all in a blog post and then ran it by several other people for editing, verification, ensuring nothing exceeded the evidence, etc. That would be an amazing - an almost unheard of - blogger and blog post.
That's everyday professional journalism. You can get it pretty cheaply.
They just don't market themselves. They don't believe in themselves. Someone told them that they are outdated and they believe it: Look at the NY Times front page, still trying to look like an actual old newspaper. Still with a banner at the top like the newspaper, with a typeface that was impressive in the era of metal type (what do younger who never saw the metal type output think? My guess: 'that's something old, for old people, before my time.'). Still mostly black-and-white and text (print!), with multimedia a very secondary extra rather than a normal, first-class part of the reports - articles with significant multimedia are special events done (afaik) by a special staff! Even lone bloggers can do better, and the NY Times has far more resources.
When is the last time you saw someone passionate about what is a truly noble, sometimes heroic profession? When was the last time someone was talking about how they were going to make it better than ever? How they were going to change the world? By being swept along by the zeitgeist rather than standing up and defining it and themselves, they are killing another essential institution (what institution has risen to this moment?).
I think the problem is traditional news journalism tried to be middle of the road. Which worked fine when you needed to run a tv channel or print edition that needed to appeal to most consumers and consumers had limited choices.
But with the internet everything got hyper specialized.
Want the entertainment & tabloid-esque factor? Well social media, certain subreddits are going to serve you better, for free.
Want the in-depth analysis. Well youtube, if you know how to be media critical, serves you better (yes YT is full of bullshit but if you truly want in depth analysis coverage, you probably know how to filter out the bad channels and find high quality). Not to mention specialist sites. Like compare the in depthness of isw (https://understandingwar.org) vs your average news broadcast when it comes to what is happening in current wars.
Heck even wikipedia tends to be more in depth and provide better context than most news reports.
Where does that leave us? Traditional news becomes an expensive product that has subpar quality. Then it becomes a vicious circle where either they go full clickbait to feed ads where quality goes in the dirt, or they go paywall which keeps them out of the digital conversation and errodes their publicitly which ultimately prevents them from acquiring new users.
"NEWS" outlets are competing against social media and are doing things to get your attention.
Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention
Your post is a good description of how journalism has operated for hundreds of years. Maybe we're seeing that the twentieth century was just a (positive) blip and now we're regressing to the mean.
How are you going to do that when the audience is braindead and can't focus their attention for more than a paragraph or watch a video longer than 30s? There's just not much room for reinvention unless everything becomes a Tiktok feed.
Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience is at least slightly above average for these sorts of things.
Newspapers have always been written under the assumption that the entire article won't be read: articles start with the most important information, and get into more detail as the article progresses.
The difference now is that we can track this for every article and every reader.
A significant portion of the population DOES want to read and engage with long-form content and discussions. They simply don't want it to be drivel. Traditional corporate/state journalism produces drivel. Substack is flourishing for a reason.
There probably is no substitute for the state paying for it. We just need to balloon NPR/PBS into BBC scale (relative to the size of the US, so even bigger) and hope for the best.
Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.
I don't disagree, but given the ideological opposition towards NPR/PBS right now from Republicans, the only way we might accomplish that is by promising to turn them into fox news.
The future of journalism is indie journalism. Just like indie web, indie games and indie art. It's the only way to fight against corporate slop and AI slop.
It's not going to reinvent itself when it is compromised of few, like minded people. Government would need to step in, but the current US admin is in bed with media, so we'll be here a while, at least.
Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
> So their outlook is not rosy. Instead, I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.
I think this is right. I'd like to see more public media funding, but at least right now there is an explosion of independent media business models being explored recruiting some very good journalists and smart people.
I'd like to hear about anyone else's updated media habits. In my last… 20ish years of "gathering information about my community and interests," I've gone from paper NYT subscriber to RSS feed reader to social aggregators to social media to podcasts to newsletters to doomscroller... I've tried it all.
But to stay sane I've settled on simply following the voices I trust and find interesting across different media, and the best ones are navigating their own publishing and distribution journey. I pay some of them real money. Some are being acquired by bigger media outlets, too. I have hope in journalism's survival.
I've stopped paying attention to the news. Almost none of what is reported affects my life in any way.
I do read HN, more than I should actually, and a couple of local bloggers who report on local happenings. Our local paper used to do that but it's now just a USA Today reprint under a local masthead.
Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 15 years - increasingly shittier ad units and user-tracking, SEO-optimized clickbait and formatting nonsense, short-form video, now AI. None of it benefits readers. None of it builds loyalty.
Yeah, well said. Journalism and news is tough because at its core it's a public good, but all of the usual levers we have in modern society for funding and supporting public goods introduce all sorts of other problems. If it's only a voluntary paid service, you limit the reach of the information. If you make it free to access by taking money from advertisers, you introduce conflicts of interest with corporations that journalists might otherwise report on. If you make it state-sponsored, you introduce conflicts of interest with governments that journalists might otherwise report on. Journalists working for free is not right, either.
Obviously journalistic integrity is a real thing and I choose to believe that the vast majority of journalists are out there to report the stories as they are and make information available that otherwise would not be. I do not have the same confidence in the business leaders, like you said. Look no further than Jeff Bezos's WaPo.
I'm not sure what the solutions could be.
Reminds me a lot of the book Manufacturing Consent, where it breaks down the split between 'journalism' and 'propaganda'. As long as there is a monetary incentive to emphasize certain things and ignore others, it will always ultimately be a form of propaganda.
Money isn’t the only pressure which pressures journalism. Access (and exclusion) is a huge pressure on sports, celebrity, and political journalism. A desire for popularity/notoriety cause sensationalism. There are countless other influences which confuse (or corrupt) the nobility of the profession.
Journalism today is a joke. More like 'what journalism? that heavy manipulative gossip masquerading as journalism?'
Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large enough to drive, we're in this emotionally driven circus for the duration.
Journalism needs to believe in itself, passionately, and put that passion out there. For every individual and every organization, whoever you are, you set the ceiling: nobody will have more passion or believe in you more than you do.
In my anecdotal experience, journalism goes along with the detractors and naysayers: It's an archaic industry from a past era, they're mostly ineffective, social media makes it mostly irrelevant, journalistic principles aren't really valued, hard news isn't valued, not many will ever read it and the audience won't come back, it's more for comfort and entertainment, don't challenge people too much, etc.
Imagine a blogger who, for their post, flew to the location of whatever they were talking about and saw it for themself. Interviewed dozens of people with direct experience, including the people directly affected, the people who did whatever happened, the local leaders, people on all sides. Found and read actual documentary evidence. Combined that all in a blog post and then ran it by several other people for editing, verification, ensuring nothing exceeded the evidence, etc. That would be an amazing - an almost unheard of - blogger and blog post.
That's everyday professional journalism. You can get it pretty cheaply.
They just don't market themselves. They don't believe in themselves. Someone told them that they are outdated and they believe it: Look at the NY Times front page, still trying to look like an actual old newspaper. Still with a banner at the top like the newspaper, with a typeface that was impressive in the era of metal type (what do younger who never saw the metal type output think? My guess: 'that's something old, for old people, before my time.'). Still mostly black-and-white and text (print!), with multimedia a very secondary extra rather than a normal, first-class part of the reports - articles with significant multimedia are special events done (afaik) by a special staff! Even lone bloggers can do better, and the NY Times has far more resources.
When is the last time you saw someone passionate about what is a truly noble, sometimes heroic profession? When was the last time someone was talking about how they were going to make it better than ever? How they were going to change the world? By being swept along by the zeitgeist rather than standing up and defining it and themselves, they are killing another essential institution (what institution has risen to this moment?).
I think the problem is traditional news journalism tried to be middle of the road. Which worked fine when you needed to run a tv channel or print edition that needed to appeal to most consumers and consumers had limited choices.
But with the internet everything got hyper specialized.
Want the entertainment & tabloid-esque factor? Well social media, certain subreddits are going to serve you better, for free.
Want the in-depth analysis. Well youtube, if you know how to be media critical, serves you better (yes YT is full of bullshit but if you truly want in depth analysis coverage, you probably know how to filter out the bad channels and find high quality). Not to mention specialist sites. Like compare the in depthness of isw (https://understandingwar.org) vs your average news broadcast when it comes to what is happening in current wars.
Heck even wikipedia tends to be more in depth and provide better context than most news reports.
Where does that leave us? Traditional news becomes an expensive product that has subpar quality. Then it becomes a vicious circle where either they go full clickbait to feed ads where quality goes in the dirt, or they go paywall which keeps them out of the digital conversation and errodes their publicitly which ultimately prevents them from acquiring new users.
"NEWS" outlets are competing against social media and are doing things to get your attention.
Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention
Your post is a good description of how journalism has operated for hundreds of years. Maybe we're seeing that the twentieth century was just a (positive) blip and now we're regressing to the mean.
How are you going to do that when the audience is braindead and can't focus their attention for more than a paragraph or watch a video longer than 30s? There's just not much room for reinvention unless everything becomes a Tiktok feed.
Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience is at least slightly above average for these sorts of things.
Newspapers have always been written under the assumption that the entire article won't be read: articles start with the most important information, and get into more detail as the article progresses.
The difference now is that we can track this for every article and every reader.
A significant portion of the population DOES want to read and engage with long-form content and discussions. They simply don't want it to be drivel. Traditional corporate/state journalism produces drivel. Substack is flourishing for a reason.
There probably is no substitute for the state paying for it. We just need to balloon NPR/PBS into BBC scale (relative to the size of the US, so even bigger) and hope for the best.
Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.
I don't disagree, but given the ideological opposition towards NPR/PBS right now from Republicans, the only way we might accomplish that is by promising to turn them into fox news.
The future of journalism is indie journalism. Just like indie web, indie games and indie art. It's the only way to fight against corporate slop and AI slop.
It's not going to reinvent itself when it is compromised of few, like minded people. Government would need to step in, but the current US admin is in bed with media, so we'll be here a while, at least.