We should not romanticize journalism of the past too much either. The "old news" subreddit gives some perspective (obviously, it's biased towards funny or unusual stories) https://www.reddit.com/r/OldNews
This may not be what you meant about romanticising, but modern newspapers have deteriorated significantly.
Part of this deterioration is because of competition in journalism (click bait, a race to the bottom). Part of it is a perverse sense of and fundamental abuse of the term Equality. The abuse of the term equality has then lead to unprecedented gender bullying and some extreme revisionist history that largely remains unchallenged. If you pick up a reasonable paper from 1970, you will realise how sexist we have become! The issue today is that you won't find a reasonable (eg. non sexist) newspaper - there is no choice! Sexism and gender bullying ARE the norm.
Newspapers needed to compete with the Internet. In this respect, the article was fundamentally wrong. Failure to embrace the Internet would have allowed others to fill the void (even if you went online but charged money). More people are now used to digesting news electronically and the Internet makes the content dynamic and interactive.
People will pay good money for good news, but it needs to be good quality. That eliminates most of the market.
Think of games. You can still sell the occasional blockbuster (GTA 5 made a billion dollars worth of sales!!). However, most games on iTunes hover below a few $ and many end up free. Compare this to games 30 years ago where there was a small cheap-end market. Or, CDs. Sales have fallen through the floor, but, a 99c track sells well on iTunes. News isn't quite the same, but you can see that a paradigm shift was inevitable for newspapers with the advent of the Internet.
If there was one thing the papers got wrong, it was the increase in nastiness and prejudice. I believe society is much worse today than it has been in a long time. The caring element is what we've lost. We need a new generation of pioneers to undo the carnage.
Other than that, the paper is wire stories and advertisements.
Content algorithms seem to be putting the occasional annoying thing into my feed to keep it fresh, and I keep finding gems of brilliance out of the scope of traditional journalism.
But this is the news world we deserve :)
I subscribe to a couple digital periodicals. My last paper subscription lapsed about four months ago.
My paper subscription lapsed years ago. The local paper is actually pretty good, but I find I don't miss it much anymore.
If a news organization only exists because the Koch brothers own it and it operates at a loss, its primary purpose isn't to serve unbiased news, but propaganda.
Contrast that to a news agency or journalist whose existence is funded only through subscriptions, with zero advertising. These type of agencies are not subservient to a Murdoch, a pharma company, or anybody. They only have to interest their readership sufficiently.
Of course there is still bias. But now you have multiple viewpoints. If the only news you're getting is from papers owned by billionaires or heavily moderated forums owned by billionaires, then good luck.
I would agree with you that sending money to Fox News isn't going to help with the bias much.
Do you really think a trusted news source with corporate overlords is able operate with unlimited autonomy? I would have no issue if there was a large diversity of ownership with conflicting issues. But I don't really see sufficient conflict in corporate America.
However, today, you see a lot more blatant manipulation in the media. People are conditioned to it, which is scary.
Take a subtle example, Ars Technica almost never says Chairman, it says Chairperson, but it will say Chairwoman (which also shows their ignorance of the origin of Chairman). Ars has played all sorts of games like this. It started around the time of Casey Johnson and the introduction of strong gender stereotyping. This was from a once brilliant (and well balanced) site that has never recovered.
Today, very few people will tell you how to think, they will tell you what to think, who to vote for, etc.
True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s."
The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s (when FEW men had the right to vote, let alone women - which is always overlooked for the sake of propaganda). This is an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years, without challenge.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Wom...
There are many areas today where people don't bother to do any fact checking. What's worse are those that purposely manipulate history. They insult and disgrace our grandmothers and grandfathers. Yet, most of us would say that our grandmothers were not wallflowers and our grandfathers not anything like modern media portrays!!!
So, in short, yes. The Internet goes a long way to hiding and misrepresenting information. The signal to noise ratio is a big part of the problem, but special interest groups and political correctness have also contributed significantly.
Where is your evidence for that claim?
Chairwoman - About 272 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairwoman+site%3Aar...
Chairperson - About 179 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairperson+site%3Aa...
Chairman - About 2,960 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairman+site%3Aarst...
> True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s."
> The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s
How does that make it false? It doesn't state that no woman voted in the 1830s, it states that some women gained voting rights in the 1860s. The only way it's false is if no women received voting rights in the 1860s.
It's not "an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years", it's simply an example of nobody who edited that page being aware that some women voted in the 1830s.
If you have legitimate sources demonstrating they did (your link states 1843, BTW, not 1830s) then edit the Wikipedia page and add/correct that info. That's how Wikipedia works.