Good news reporting is an essential part of democracy. We don't have it anymore. Nobody wants to pay for it.
We'll see how it goes.
We'll see how it goes.
It wasn’t that news got bad or people got more evil, it’s that the value of information cratered and now it’s not even expensive enough to come with editors.
Which one are you talking about?
There is plenty of news that affect me, it just happens to (mostly) not be covered in the news. And when it is it is often propaganda rather than even remotely unbiased reporting.
It gives ratings on headlines and it helps to get an overview of the news.
Someone please tell 'em about alt tags.
If people actually paid for them they might have a chance to hire competent people and do investigative journalism.
But now they're being paid mostly by ad revenue and a handful of subscribers. So they have to publish trash to optimize for clicks.
There are taxpayer-supported, nonprofit news sources. They are not any better, spewing the same type of opinionated stuff (propaganda, really).
The need to make money is not the culprit there.
>And its not even the government's money (from taxes) but my money
If you're a tax payer the government's money is your money, no?
In my case here is Germany, yes.
> If you're a tax payer the government's money is your money, no?
Indirectly, yes but the details are very different.
With taxes the government decides on how much tax you pay for various things and then the money goes into the general budget from which the government again allocates funds for various things. Allocating more money towards overpaid entertainment personalities and greedy sports organizations in this model would mean less money the government has to pay for other things so you'd hope they would put some thought in what expenditures are really needed. The budget is also periodically re-evaluated. Taxes are also generally either based on something you choose to do or based on income, meaning they are means tested and usually increase progressively in order to put less of a burden on those that already have less. Taxes are also collected by government institutions which means whatever organizatons are involved in providing the services the taxes pay for won't need to know my banking details or place of residence.
The TV fees are very different. Here the legacy media companies get a flat sum from everyone (with some exceptions) without consideration for either what burden this places on the individual payer or what funds are really needed to provide the respective services. Politicians only ever have to think about the amount when the companies involved ask for bigger handouts. Instead of considering of these legacy media companies are still needed with the internet and available, or if we need the current excess (with a separate TV station per state plus two for the country overall), these media companies and the politicans that enable them have decided that making their services available online means that everyone is a potential user and must pay. Unlike taxes these fees are not collected by the finace ministry but by a separate organization representing the media companies which automatically receives the place of residence for everyone registered in Germany.
I laugh (read: cry) everytime I hear a wannabe "journalist" lament the "threats to Democracy", not realizing - or at least not acknowledging - that they and their ilk have been leading that effort, shamelessly, for years.
If there's any group that knows first hand about what "the threat to Democracy" looks like, it's contemporary "journalism".
I'd pay for a good, reliable news source, but I can't find one at all, and I don't pay.
Spoken on a popular site that routinely uses pirate mirrors to circumvent news site paywalls. :)
News should be free in a way.
But piracy of paywalled content just provides a relief valve for whatever demand there is for accessibility, and keeps the 'news' a property of parties like Rupert Murdoch (in the case of WSJ).