When a 9 year old consistently does your job better and more thoroughly than you do purely out of enjoyment maybe it's a sign that you should try harder.
They're incentivized to do things like clickbait, and outrage/yellow journalism to keep people spreading it, whether they agree with the viewpoint, or dispute the facts, because it's better to get the eyeballs than have any kind of integrity or skill at the profession.
Isn't Hilde's example exactly the opposite? That motivated individuals can do the basics as a hobby?
Two observations:
1. The barriers to entry have been dramatically lowered. i.e. Cost of distribution is slightly about $0.
2. For basic stories most people only care about the tldr: some drunk driver killed a man on ...; Or about aggregations of tldrs: i.e. 5 people we killed last week due to gun violence in ...
Regardless of the talents of Hilde or her more experienced competitors. When I'm only reading tldr, I really doubt I can tell a 9 year old, from a 90 year old, from some software.
Given the above: With enough motivated hobbyists, all we need is better software news summarizers/aggregators and you can have great aggregations at the local, regional, and global levels.
If your concern is the lack of substance, I would ask, what percentage of the time do you actually care? I'm willing to bet, its a small percentage of the time. I'd also be willing to bet that you only really care about substance for stories that hit the top of news aggregators (i.e. "viral" stories)!
Given that: It should be relatively easy for "real journalists" to pick and bring substance to this small number of stories deserving substance.
Actually, there could even be a BugBounty type exchange. How much do you care about this story? $10, $20? If we collectively reach $1000 a Bloomberg journalist will spend a day on it and so forth.
Without wishing to be offensive... perhaps that's a sign that stories like that aren't really newsworthy. Lots of things happen on any given day, including thousands of deaths, isn't the purpose of news outlets to select stories that have significance to their audience rather than going for stories where the main substance can be found in the title?
Also, sourcing and vetting clearly take time, which could instead be spent producing more "clickbait" stories. Unless you're oversaturating the market, producing more "clickbait" is the rational action over producing quality journalism.
Furthermore, quality journalism requires expertise, which costs more. Compared to that, "clickbait" stories require adopting a certain writing skill which is in much larger supply. Thus follows that you would hire "clickbait" writers instead of journalists, because you'd be paying them less for more profit.
Really, pretty much every incentive in journalism fights the naivety of "professionalism" and "integrity", so it's little wonder that the state of journalism is as it is.
I am reminded of a short anecdote I read on HN the other day. People say they want sugarless yogurt, but every market research shows that they actually prefer the sugared variant. "We" say we want "good journalism", but clearly more people are reading tabloids and "clickbait". Whether that is because "we" are the minority, or because "we" are hypocrites is unclear, but that's reality.
Doesn't say how many subscriptions, but it wouldn't take too many for her to contribute to rent. Impressive for a 9 year old.
The average journalist nowadays seems to have far less fear of being wrong due to not fact checking or poor sources, because it seems consequences for them are nearly non existent.
This young woman does; Glen Greenwald, Dan Ellsberg, Bernstein & Woodward do.
Telling truth to power is hard labour, maybe jailtime & surveillance, or intimidation to reveal sources.
Real journalism is only produced by a passion for truth, it is dangerous work.
There are few true believers among those who choose the title journalist.
Journalism is not about money; rather determination & cojones.
This:
> Often journalists aren't given the time or resources to dig up stories and vet them thoroughly.
(my emphasis)
is not a response to the fact that she's publishing stories faster than they are.
You make a good point about the time competition, but I was responding re: "better" not "faster".
Maybe it's a sign you should find another job.