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Comment by ganafagol | Hacker News Reader

"Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back.

Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

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15 to 20 years is long enough to affect journalists’ ability to provide for their family and save for retirement, and signal to other possible high caliber journalists that journalism is not a viable path for them.

Confirmed: I've spent a long time trying to start a career in journalism in the UK and it is simply not possible. Freelance rates have hit close to zero unless you already know editors in person. Jobs are increasingly scarce as newspaper staffs shrink. Local papers which once had fifty employees will now have ten or fifteen. The descent has been brutal, the result is the foreseeable end of journalism as a fully fledged profession. Well, for those who don't know editors personally.

We have dramatically fewer journalists now, but a great deal more news. There's more noise now but there's also more of what journalists traditionally did. It isn't great if you relied on journalism specifically to pay the bills but the rest of the system doesn't seem to have suffered too bad.

How are fewer journalists accomplishing more journalism? It’s a very time intensive, travel intensive task with high risks.

The idea that a system is fine in which the creators have little means to earn money is crazy to me. Lots of places will just go without the deep, investigative journalism we might have benefited from in the recent past.

Replaced by noise, as you say.

> Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

We're all impatient, though. 15 years is about how long I'm an adult. 20 years is about how long I'm able to make use of news. If the way out of this mess is going to take another 20 years, it's not going to be of much use to me :). "In the long run" is good, but "within the productive lifetime of people concerned about it" would be best.

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