Where are we going to get our news from after all the news organizations shut down? From our friends on Facebook who already agree with us? From propaganda mills that hire people to write fake social media posts?
The industry may not have been perfect, but on its best days it uncovered important stories, and backed it up with fact checking and an attempt at being fair and balanced.
Over the past couple of decades, I've watched as media companies with legacy business and editorial structures are (largely) unwilling or unable to adapt to new channels of disseminating important information or driving revenue. At the same time they've eroded trust with their audiences through efforts like advertorials in magazines and over-reliance on syndicated national/regional content in newspapers...and pandering in both. The ones that haven't are doing well.
I remember a few years back reading a great piece by the great late writer David Carr who talked about SXSW and the local paper in Austin that spawned it as a great counter-example for how modern journalism as a business can be done well and successfully:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23carr.html
Those running the big media properties are either going to finally wake up and adapt or die off...meanwhile, there are lots of niche publishers (and I use that term very broadly in terms of channels) will step up and successfully fill the voids they're leaving behind.
* LWN https://lwn.net/
* Harper's Magazine http://harpers.org/
* Nautilus http://nautil.us/
I'm not interested in paying for any current-news journalism because as far as I can tell nobody does a good enough job to warrant my money.
First Commercial: "Coming up after the break, we did some investigative journalism for once"
Second Commercial: "Coming up: That investigative Journalism"
Third Commercial: "Still after the break: What you actually want to see"
45 minutes and 10 commercials later: "And after this break, the investigative piece."
And the investigative piece is 30 second long, says that the one person of interest wouldn't comment, and has less information than you could find out using a public portal on your local government's website.
Then you get a 2 minute clip of a funny video from the internet chopped the hell up, with the anchors talking over it the entire time. "Tune in next week. More Americans get their news from ABC News than any other source."
I don't think that assertion holds water, and if you broaden beyond "broadcast" to "mainstream," even less so. I love Last Week Tonight, and they do some genuine investigative work, but a lot of their news coverage is parroting/spinning other people's coverage that they find especially insightful. I'm glad that they're giving broader voice to some of that material, but it would be much more expensive were they to produce it all themselves.
Foreign coverage, in particular, is extremely expensive, and almost nobody in the new media space is throwing serious money at it; it's super important and kept afloat almost exclusively by old-media behemoths who maintain scores of foreign bureaus all over the world -- CNN, NYT, NPR, etc. (Vice is the one possible new-media-company exception, here, in that they do foreign investigative work at all, but they don't maintain a permanent presence anywhere, I don't think.)
Umm, have you actually read a copy of _Self_ magazine? My wife gets them before plane flights. It's the print equivalent to the listicle. Keep in mind that the print "journalism" you see at the checkout stand and at airports is just targeted advertising. The articles are there simply to draw the target demographic.
The industry may not have been perfect, but on its best days it uncovered important stories, and backed it up with fact checking and an attempt at being fair and balanced.
Which doesn't describe _Self_ magazine at all. Now, if CN was shuttering, say, _The New Yorker_ then we'd have reason to express dismay. But as I read it, CN is getting rid of the crap that we could probably all do just fine without.
I have stopped reading them or watching tv a while ago, and even started to actively avoid mainstream media. My life has not been impacted in any way except having a little more free time.
News is not necessary. It doesn't enrich your life. It's just something to put on and feel smarter than if you put on a sitcom.
Try this, I do it every time I'm home: watch people watch the news, and then ask them what was on. Pretend you didn't hear some segment or just flat out ask them to summarize. Most people most of the time won't be able to tell you. And they're perfectly functioning, intelligent adults.
At best it doesn't matter. At worst it's actively harmful by giving you these easily accessible stories that bear no relation to your life. Good riddance.
Do you think that's unique to television news, or do you think the same is true of people reading newspapers (analog or digital)?
The useful news is usually not 'up to the minute', not particularly eye catching or entertaining, and is very well sourced. It usually takes the form of things like journal papers, voting records, or the results of careful document audits. It rarely is concerned with any single person and is much more concerned with the actions of many people over time.
Basically, 'news' now seems mostly about entertainment, and telling people "you have an obligation to follow this particular form of entertainment" seems like a very silly thing to say.
it directly affects how much money i make, how much inflation my assets will enjoy or suffer from, how much i will be taxed, and under what circumstances (i.e., should i decide to sell my company this year? should i sell my house now or next year?)
it also directly affects the rights that i or my friends may or may not have as a citizen. i.e. gay marriage, gun ownership, abortions, marijuana legalization, etc.
if you don't think any of this really matters, then uhh, i guess we disagree.
again, if anyone thinks none of this matters, i am just going to say, okay, great, but it matters to me.
Something in the news actually changed who you would vote for?
>where i put my money/investments
Okay, granted.
>whether or not i sold my company 2 years ago
You sold your company because you saw something in the news? And if you didn't watch political news you would still own it? Sorry, but I have hard time imagining how that worked.
>in the next 2 years, it's going to 100% determine where i live.
If you know in advance that something will determine where you live, it's by definition not something you need to watch news for. You can just wait for two years and run a search for the info you need.
Here's the thing. It's a bit like herd immunity. It almost doesn't matter if you in particular read the journalism or not. It matters if nobody reads it. (Mostly for the social effects, but partly because then the industry can't afford to do real journalism for anybody).
At that point things start to fall apart; that's when ill-informed power-brokers put dangerous options like Brexit in front of even-less-informed voters.
Not reading a newspaper may not have impacted your life much. Living in a world where vastly fewer people are reading them already is.
From what I gather nobody has any idea how traditional publishing houses are going to dig themselves out of this. Native ads, a quality-over-quantity ad experience for advertisers and premium services (paywalls) are the holy trinity that everyone hopes will save the industry.
You can probably get 100,000 people in a small city to buy that (given proper branding/marketing), and that's enough to hire a local newsroom of about 100 people.
It's good stuff. I could spend hours.
The advertising will continue. The subscriptions are only meant to define the audience demographics. Lots of print media companies actually limit their audiences to only marketable demographics, especially magazines. Magazines often say they're oversubscribed if they don't hit certain demographic profiles, so their advertisers aren't being wasted. For example, if a bunch of poor college males were subscribing to Vogue, it doesn't help their advertisers. And those subscriptions costs a ton of money in mailings, so they tighten their audience to be core advertiser friendly.
After Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek it became better than The Economist. If Condé Nast is in blame the industry mode, or if it's going to start making short-sighted decisions claiming necessity, hopefully someone else can take care of its best properties.
I follow local emergency services on Twitter for alerts in my area. If shit gets real, all I want to know is where to avoid. Don't need to sit and gawk at CNN to get all the gossip.
I reach out to instructors/professors and discuss the work of those that reply (usually in STEM). Occasionally receiving copies of papers that are paywalled after being "officially" published.
Why do we need an aggregator like CNN, where a bunch of paid shills, spin out of context quotes leaving it no more useful than Facebook anyway? If you believe CBS Evening News and the rest haven't been propaganda mills all these years, I know of a bridge...
It's trivial to find the useful information if you want to know what's happening around you. And it can often, if not always, be had straight from the horses mouth.
Sure the newspapers can have a bias or conflicts of interest but the journalism industry at least attempts to mitigate these, there is a code of ethics.
You can only do so much on your own, and through one on one interactions.
Some people find it valuable to have others do this for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sure it's imperfect, because there is always bias, but t's a lot easier to read a newspaper story about an issue than to redo all the work the reporter would have done, on every conceivable issue.
You can even do your own fact checking after reading the paper.
I'm mostly talking about newspaper reporting, and from high caliber sources, but your local community paper can be a good source of info as well.
[1] http://english.stackexchange.com/a/244277 (Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect)
I tend to lump magazines in with more entertainment than journalism. The quality ones will stick around. Do we really need teenVogue and Cosmopolitan? There are a lot of magazines competing for a limited number of readers as it is.
That being said, 'Self' magazine was hardly news. It's the kind of self-help mag often found in doctors' offices, and maybe shoved into a purse for a quick flight somewhere.
It's sad for the employees involved and a few die-hard readers, but not a massive loss.
EDIT: My wife is a subscriber, and typically reads it while lying in bed one night out of the month.
I'm close to someone in the industry, but honestly you don't have to be to see the decline if you look for it.
I worked at InfoWorld when InfoWorld was still a print pub. The print side died when I was working there, and we were the 1st IDG pub to go full online-only. It was rough, to say the least. I don't envy the small core team that will stay behind. the print pub often over-inflated the value of the online offering. Once that piece is lobbed off, the remaining team eventually gets whittled down to a skeleton crew. It can be profitable, but margins are thin and cost-cutting is everywhere.
All good things for any business to do, but it can also be a massive change in culture and morale.
I also worked at AFAR, the travel pub. Getting online mags to profitability is no easy task. And print mags can cost a fortune. When print ad dollars go elsewhere... well, you can see what's going on.
Today, I think for major stories at a state, national, or international level, there are still lots of journalists and reporters doing quality work. Even derided publishers like Buzzfeed are doing some really good work among the listicles.
I'm more worried about the local level. Who's going to cover local school board meetings or neighborhood news? Maybe that stuff doesn't need to be covered, I don't really know, but it feels like a loss.
For the first time in about 20 years, I'm thinking about subscribing to my local paper again.