“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. . . The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Because of this, they can't pay to send a journalist overseas anymore. Most news has become conjecture, rumors, and anything that can be done in the comfort of a nice office.
Nearly all large, independent news organizations (Breitbart, Huffpo) were started by wealthy individuals with a political axe to grind. The rest have been grandfathered in from before the days of social media (CNN/Foxnews) and can survive based on pure momentum.
We need real journalism again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-nove...
Another great quote in there is:
>“We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
And they wonder why people are starting to question the narratives they're given. I consider myself a liberal, but the mainstream media really is terrible a lot of the time. When talking about science, they only misconstrue the message, and when talking about policy, they happily forward whatever the government is saying. Folks like the New York Times are better than the Daily Mail or Breitbart, of course, but that's not a high bar.
Today, subscriptions don't exist and advertising barely keeps the lights on. That kind of economic corruption is seen on all level of news and reporting.
Journalism in this country has become a bit of a joke, and that's all on the lack of oversight by lawmakers. These giant media conglomerates should never have been allowed to form in the first place for the very reasons we are discussing now; poor journalism and nearly worthless commodity reporting.
In addition to the simple fact that advertising is down, it's because newspapers were/are bundles. When they had local monopolies (or at least duopolies) on information and certain advertising, this let them do things like fill a lot of cheap column inches with sports scores and wire copy while maintaining (in many cases) prestige investigative units and foreign bureaus. These never came close to paying for themselves in the sense that subscribers would pay for them as standalone writing. But they lent gravitas to the paper as a whole, helping to make the paper as a whole a moneymaking proposition.