What happened to these startup-covering sites? Where did they go wrong (or did they), and are there any replacements?
Are successive $100M Series Z rounds from PE funds somehow more interesting than pre-seed investments in scrappy startups?
Given the combination of wide spread ad blocking and reluctance to pay for subscriptions, why would anyone set their money on fire to cover startups today?
There is a fair bit of decent material out there but you have to seek it out to some extent. And most people still won't pay. You may not like The Economist for whatever reason but you can't really argue it's not good journalism.
Journalism is very nearly dead.
The only information sources I find worth my time these days are a very short list of blogs, YouTube (almost entirely on Lex Fridman's channel) and random links found here on HN.
Of course many would argue that even journalism of the 60s or so mostly represented a very Ivy League east coast view of the world.
No money in journalism -> no investment in journalism -> poor quality journalism -> no payment for journalism -> no money in journalism
There must be a way out, eventually?
Same thing is happening with Hollywood and that has little to do with money - at least as far as production. "The Message" is more important than solid storytelling so people are checking out.
Seems to me the way out is to get back to basics. Stuff your opinions and indoctrination and just report the facts or tell a good story. Guess these industries will have to totally collapse before they reset back to something more reasonable. Oh well.
You end up with perverse incentives left and right when you make media primarily a for-profit venture.
Herman/Chomsky's propaganda model - essentially. There's no way to "just report the facts or tell a good story" when the primary motive is profit-seeking.
When it stops selling, it'll die down. These US media companies are very simple minded.
They get what they pay for. And then complain about it.
Another possibility is due to success of newspapers, the craft of journalism was still known and practiced with skill, these days it's basically just fresh college grads without any on the job training cranking out stuff they read on social media and whatever a PR rep emails them that morning. But that's also related to the economics.