Then I realized after seeing what has happened as the masses all came online, while many of us here can probably distinguish between a reliable news source and a hack site or a propaganda outlet—a disturbingly large segment of the population can not.
And to make matters worse, there seems to be a huge number of people who don’t realize they don’t have what it takes to do reliable research to write a story and they don’t have what it takes to understand nuanced subjects in order to explain the subject to readers. Or even worse, they fully realize how ill-equipped they are but don’t care because vulnerable people will still click their ads.
Long story short, I now have just short of 20 subscriptions. Including a few that I rarely read but to me it’s worth it. The collective We really need to increase the signal levels in order to hear over the noise.
Journalism is definitely one of those cases where The Market can easily lead to a race to the bottom situation. Hopefully we’ll see it correct and good journalism will overtake trash, but wow what a rough spot.