On the internet there's a ridiculous amount of content available completely for free. You don't ever buy content because why would you? All you have to do is click on what you want to read and it appears in front of you with some ads which you'll ignore 99% of the time.
That 1% is significantly less valuable than what that old print ad space was worth, but it still has value. So the entire game becomes centered around that click. So the company tumbles in value because no one will buy print and no one clicks on headlines which don't indicate something that will absolutely captivate their attention.
So the company is steadily becoming worth less and less, and in order to squeeze out some revenue and stay afloat you have to target those clicks, or should I say, bait those clicks.
I know you probably asked "What happened?" rhetorically, but this is what happened and if you were in the same position running the company, you'd probably make the same decisions or go out of business 6 years ago. I agree that it's unfortunate, and we all need to find a way to support in depth journalism.
I have a stack of Wired for example - early Wired in particular every now and again had fantastic articles. But the ones I've kept are from many months apart, and each one of them I've kept for one article.
A magazine like Time with the reputation time has, tends to have that reputation because of the occasional articles and images that are outstanding enough to be remembered, and because their baseline quality is high enough not to detract from the successes, not because everything is consistently good.
In print publishers got away with that. People would read it because they often had no competing content available pre ubiquitous internet (most of my remaining paper magazines were bought for transatlantic flights). Online, if the articles don't draw in enough eyeballs, it serves little purpose.
Ever since that incident, I’ve been very skeptical of Time articles, and if I do read them, I read them very carefully with my friend’s experience in mind.
Time?
This is how the entire media works.
Some are credible, some are not.
They all spin.
It's a rough game for them, there aren't enough interesting things going on frankly. The world would be fairly boring were it not for the 'adaptive' way in which we tell stories.
I think that so-called 'fake news' is good because it allows people to expose themselves to two extreme opposite views.
If people want to live in a filter bubble then they can go ahead and do that but it's nice to at least have the option to see alternative views.
I think that there is often a grain of truth behind fake news. If people feel that they're getting screwed over by the system and then an article comes along and tells them "you're getting screwed by the system, this is why...", even if the reason is a poorly researched guesstimate, it's still much more useful in terms of driving social change than articles that just say "the economy is booming, low unemployment all around, everything is great...".
That said, I do prefer reading printed versions of text books and maybe some novels.
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