Journalists won't report news unless it can drive page views
siliconvalleywatcher.com
siliconvalleywatcher.com
Don't forget in all this fun handwringing that we're still a lot better off than we were just fifteen years ago. Back then it was a serious challenge to hear any news that didn't appear in a newspaper printed in your town, or didn't show up in one of the handful of TV/radio outlets you could pick up. Now you're two seconds away from reading any newspaper in the world.
... or maybe four seconds if you don't speak whatever language it's in and need to click Chrome's "yes, autotranslate this" button.
No true - the people capable of filling that niche might find a more profitable job elsewhere leaving this one niche dry. It will play out like this:
1) start a "serious" newspaper
2) realize that you have plenty of people who are not in fact serious but like to think of themselves as "serious"
3) realize that above people like pseudo-serious fluff
4) realize that above people are generating you plenty of money
5) realize that fluff is easier to produce
6) start producing fluff, click-bait headlines etc, but try to retain appearance of serious
7) Slide into being a second-rate publication, but keep riding the reputation wave until it's dead.
8) Rinse, repeat.
This path is unavoidable, for anyone who made it to step 2 will follow through the end, or get ousted by profit-seeking shareholders.
Note that public media companies are relatively new, and their biggest problem is Craigslist, which is deliberately not maximizing revenue. (CL isn't public, so it isn't legally obligated to do so and Newmark has control.)
Also, the "fact" that incumbents will tend to leave a niche does not imply that new players won't enter. As a result, the niche can stay filled even though the occupants leave.
There is a large group of people who don't do startups but only think about doing startups. Since they lack the requisite experience they will upvote what looks compelling and inspirational to them, rather than what's useful or representative (the latter looks dull and muddy). And since this majority will upvote the sexy narrative, the rest of us will end up reading it. It's what I call "a narrative tar pit" and it's why I never look at the front page, only at the RSS feed. Frighteningly, at some point a random sample of submissions is bound to produce more useful reading material than the front page.
It would be even better if I could only see stories upvoted/commented by a couple of people here whose taste I trust, but whose names I will not call out to avoid another stampede. I hope that pg considers this modest proposal.
But now that viewers "pay" by the story with advertising, we hit a Tragedy of the Commons - everyone incentivizes the fluff, and hopes someone else will incentivize the important research. We've removed the "all the news that's fit to print" standard and traded it in for "whatever you want to read about".
Put this way, it seems less like a new development, and a lot less surprising. Nobody ever voluntarily wrote a story with the idea, "This will be totally uninteresting!" True, a lot of stories are totally uninteresting, but that is usually a mistake, not a moral stance. Editors and publishers have always wanted stories that would attract readers. (And, of course, this is also what readers want.)
If you print more stories that people don't read, you really are just wasting your time.