It's insane to me just how much of the news content is taken directly from Twitter while newsrooms and investigative journalism is systematically defunded. How can this be reversed?
Granted, Twitter is still a horrible place for long-form news (which is why it links to the full articles) and an even worse one for discussions. Which is why a different platform for instant updates could be beneficial, since news will have to adapt anyway.
If only there was a really simple way to syndicate all this content that all websites could follow and multiple clients could consume...
The reason is that publications no longer have the benefit of the doubt when they publish something wrong. If a story with a malicious source runs, that publication can't argue that they were duped by a bad source. The community will automatically accuse them of pushing fake news, regardless of whether or not it was intentional. The media no longer has any benefit of the doubt due to the intense political opposition.
Also contributing to this is a publication's desire to be first to run a breaking story. This creates a scenario where a publisher has to decide between waiting for additional sourcing to corroborate a big story or risking losing out to a competitor who may run the story first.
It's one of the main reasons that I try not to actively support Twitter-driven journalism and instead put my journalism dollars towards publications that do long-form writing that takes time and patience to produce. The late-breaking Twitter world is just too often a Kobayashi Maru situation for publications.
Which is why Twitter is probably the GoTo for news.
An article from vice on any company will mention at least three of their own previous posts and rehash company evil before getting to the point. They will add a paragraph full of questions with no answers and another one for speculations that are only somewhat related.
Why bother with that when you can get to the point using a small tweet?
There is something online news agencies are doing wrong otherwise you wouldn't see so many startups opening news sumarizers, curation etc.
There's always going to be people who're interested in insightful, well researched articles and opinions. Isn't a part of the problem connecting these people, to the actual individuals doing posting in a more transparent way than a news-paper?
Having this as the default would pose problems of it's own, and make some of the deeper journalism requiring months/years to complete more difficult though.
It's also totally different than most journalists who push out stories left and right on topics they have layman understanding of. The quality and depth of work is significantly higher. I would pay for news reporting from gwern than random journalist.
I pay $5/month to get Matt Taibbi’s emails, usually about two a month with in depth research and reporting.
In general I like to spend about five minutes a day quickly reviewing news on Apple News+. Otherwise I read good books, with a little time on HN. I use Twitter and FB for shamelessly plugging my books. Anyway, this works for me.