Agreed.
If you believe that you should not read main stream news (like I do) this is one of the sources to get 'good' news from.
If you believe that you should not read main stream news (like I do) this is one of the sources to get 'good' news from.
First, longform articles such as this one usually come months or years after the fact and don't help with the primary mission of journalism, which is to keep you abreast of the goings on around you. (Of everything from "what your local government is doing and how that affects you" to "what the financial markets in another continent are up to and how that affects you.") This is my opinion, but I think that the pejorative "mainstream media" is often used as a substitute for "media that doesn't write a story how I want it written."
Second, The New Yorker is owned by Advance Publications, which is about as "mainstream" of media as you're going to find. One of their larger publishing subsidiaries is Conde Nast, which publishes The New Yorker alongside Architectural Digest, Vogue, Golf World, GQ, and several other publications. You may also know them as the publisher of ArsTechnica. They also own more than 40 newspapers.
Just my two cents, for what that's worth these days.
I think there are many facets to the mission of journalism. In-depth and investigative journalism are very important as well as being kept up-to-date on what's happening in the day-to-day. In some cases I prefer these more in-depth pieces as they have some perspective on how the events they're describing are affected by historical context and how they are affecting what's going on in current events. Consider the Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage or the Boston Globe's coverage of the child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Boston.
Different events and issues can be served by different forms. For a piece like this, I have a hard time imagining it being served better as a short piece of a couple column inches in a paper or a 90 second segment on the evening news. Not all events need coverage like this, of course, but it doesn't make the long-form pieces any less an important and vital aspect of journalism.
I agree and I should have written more words that are like what you wrote. The New Yorker is great for what it is, in-depth coverage of a complicated or unfamiliar topic. I suppose my point was that other, more general sources ought, in my opinion, to be part of a "balanced diet" of news coverage.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
I think journalism needn't only tell you what happened, but also why (in the opinion of the journalist) it happened. The latter requires reflection and/or research, so it cannot come directly after the fact.
I even think the why is more important than the what, as what doesn't give you enough information to react. For example, "X threatens to go to war with Y over Z" may mean just that, but also "X wants to show Y they are really concerned over Z" or "X wants to win the next elections, so it shows the electorate what it wants to hear". How other countries should react is quite different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications#Former_an...
That magazine and The Economist (which I loved but couldn't afford a subscription to) kept me much better-informed than I am now, when I'm old and jaded and happier being ignorant.