Television news is dying, print news is dead. Online news is driven by what Google, Facebook, and Twitter reward. And they are all influencing it (AMP, labeling, selective promotion, etc).
This has happened because people don’t subscribe to one source of news anymore. Click bait rules the day.
We've simply come full circle.
There’s a bit of a podcast discovery issue, but good ones are extremely high quality and much better than TV news.
I get by on recommendations from friends and internet comments, but I'm just a commute listener. Is your listening throughput on the high side?
We are in very real danger of losing the press as an overseer of local government, which will have major detrimental effects long-term for so many communities, since local government is so much more directly impactful on our lives than the federal government is.
- I've found myself often becoming informed directly from my municipality (Facebook posts, press releases on their website...) rather than news reporting about the municipality. While I feel I'm engaged enough to notice when something seems off, the lack of critical reporting is undoubtedly detrimental.
- AstroTurf faux-local sites with political agendas are springing up to fill the void: https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2019/10...
To whom does one blow the whistle about corruption at City Hall? To the local Sinclair afilliate?
I suspect NPR covers that for a lot of people; it might be correlated with why some politicians are so eager to defund them completely.
It's not a new problem, Rush Limbaugh effectively used radio for the same thing, it's just a serious problem. The so-called radicalization of YouTube is another example.
I agree podcasts on the bad end of the spectrum can be more extreme than TV news, but good podcasts have the time and freedom to discuss a subject in depth with their interviewees.
Good ones that try to be honest also have less spin, but it depends a lot on the podcast.
No one I know under 40 watches TV news period. Pretty sure if you can read English, it’s just faster to consume news on the internet.
As evidence, I give you:
Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, The Information
it's perfectly possible to have a profitable news company. Even hard news. You're not going to get that by spamming AP wires, sports scores, and clickbait though. You get it by paying great reporters to tell me things worth paying for.
News sites aren't going to return SaaS margins that VCs are looking for, but they can be perfectly fine businesses if run well.
Otherwise look for entrenched players to continue winning at the expense of the public interest.
The word common sense here is trying to normalize restricting free speech by employees and companies. That may be "common sense" in more repressive countries, but hopefully it will never happen in the USA.
Fox is doing relatively well within its niche.
Public broadcasting: the PBS News Hour, and NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition flagships, are among the very highest broadcast programmes bar none.
https://tvaholics.blogspot.com/2019/05/weekly-news-ratings-m...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pbs-newshour-ratings_n_58bf12...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...
free news? it'll all be run by comedy organizations
These not only provide a diversified revenue stream, but help (with apparently decreasing success) keep the publication from sliding into the oblivion of clickbait irrelevance, most especially the bespoke service, EIU, the Economist Inteligence Unit:
In general, business-oriented or public-interest publications (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal (somewhat), Craines, Mother Jones, ProPublica) do better than straight "family publication" productions. The subscribers will put up with less bogosity.
I'd done an analysis of mentions of any of the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers, vs. an arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian", back in 2015. The ranking of mainstream and alternative publications by "FP:KK ratio" was illuminating. (Also various online / social media sites.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I think CNN and their ilk have really screwed up by creating these multi-million dollar green screen sets, they focused too much on that infotainment stuff instead of the news.
News organizations pre-Internet got around this by being too big to ignore for marketers, and by attempting to firewall newsrooms and advertising.
that's no different from the status quo. the only thing that changes is that the people paying directly are readers not advertisers.
That's already a huge problem. While these are obviously not news, look at Reddit, the NBA, Hollywood and other organizations which are openly kowtowing to their patrons. Most news organizations already serve an agenda over the truth (and hardly even pretend otherwise), and identifying objective sources is harder than ever.
Interesting...
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_(news_agency)