Sports Illustrated implosion shows the ugly, ongoing collapse of U.S. journalism

One upshot here is at least SI will stop spamming me via snail mail.

It doesn't take a genius to know alienating the majority of your audience is bad for business.

Except by a firehose of falsehoods, which was cheap even before LLMs: https://xkcd.com/1019/

What we perceive today as bias and censorship are symptoms of the loss of independently funded journalism, which is now captured by corporations due to how they direct ad dollars towards narratives which support their own public relations. This started with the loss of the Fairness Doctrine under the Reagan administration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

Its loss was so important because it removed the payment stream which was previously provided by other programs on a media network. In other words, the news now had to pay its own way through ads shown during the broadcast, rather than from the network's general fund. Which gives guests leverage to remove those ad dollars when interviews don't go well.

Then the Telecommunications Act under Clinton removed the barriers separating broadcast from print news, allowing one corporation to own all of the news in a city/region, which led to the rise of today's handful of wealthy multinational media conglomerates which mainly broadcast infotainment/propaganda:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

The fix is to do the opposite of the pieces of legislation that created this situation, mainly:

1) Bar advertisers from influencing journalism

2) Create independent funding sources for journalism by giving it special treatment as the Fourth Estate (branch) of our government of the people and by the people, for the preservation of the American way of life

The main barrier to these is the political right in the US, which doesn't want any limitation on free speech, or any taxes supporting nonessential government programs. The political left also silently maintains the status quo by profiting from it. Which pushes both parties towards a one-party equivalent where corporations determine government policy by framing debates in ways that steer people towards voting against their own self-interest to relieve their cognitive dissonance.

So the real problem is how to convince a disenfranchised, overworked and overtaxed population that the answer is more regulation and taxes. I feel that other solutions won't work, because they don't address the fundamental issues. Meaning that they would favor dogma over fact-based analysis and historical understanding.

We also have to remember that news has always spread regardless of medium, so the existence of the internet is a red herring. Funding is the real issue.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-o...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555

Private Eye would have more money and more eyeballs if it had a sufficient online presence but the simple answer is Ian Hislop doesn't want that and I would imagine he would say "We're doing just fine, having not invested a lot in to online presence for Private Eye" and he'd be right.

What works for Private Eye might not work for the New York Times.

But when they report on something, it's gone from the public view in a few weeks as the only place you could find it would be your own archive, assuming it goes back that far (and you wish to dedicate the space in your house), or a major library of which there are only a handful in the country that would maintain an indefinite archive.

Something more impactful than a report on another suspiciously "bungled" contract by a councillor would be to be able to see the other articles they've done on that person over the decades. Even if there was, say, a year-long delay in putting them in the archive, there's a difference between "Eyes passim" (doubly irritating as there's also no thematic index and hundreds of back issues you'd need to look in) and seeing the older reports in front of you.

“Since The New York Times Co. acquired The Athletic for $550 million in January 2022, the site has had a total operating loss of more than $43 million, even as subscribers have more than doubled to 3.27 million over the same span.”

Source: https://frontofficesports.com/the-athletic-lays-off-20-journ...

And here's a WaPo example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2023/take...

Similarly, The Guardian on the Panama Papers: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/panama-papers

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Somebody has the report "the news" and that's both untrustworthy and commoditized at this point, but it's not like traditional newspapers aren't also doing any investigative journalism, or intentionally not adopting multimedia methods of presentation.

And I probably dropped many of them before the quality deterioration became obvious. They just didn't fill a real need any longer and they were just piling up on my coffee table.

Long form sports journalism already has a large, struggling entity: The Athletic. Beyond that, every major publication in the country covers long form sports stories in some shape or form.

Highlights and analysis can be found on YouTube (for free) and the websites, podcasts, and social media accounts for each league/team. Not to mention the heavyweights like ESPN and TSN, who also focus more on the entertainment side of it.

Then you have discussion, which already freely happens on Reddit, various blogs, Twitter, and other social media.

The market is incredibly saturated from every single angle. Even with the brand value of Sports Illustrated, finding a profitable niche would be incredibly difficult.

What is the definition of "journalism"? Are there particular examples that you are thinking of for these 'amateurs'? How many 'amateurs' have broken stories which involved going into archives, chasing down leads, interviewing the principles involved, etc?

As compared to [vb]logs (re-)reporting a story that was originally broken by a 'non-amateur'?

I see it as a net positive, you have a decentralized distributed group of investitive journalists who are directly reliant on their subscriber base rather than the political whims of the institution. So they are more incentivized to do good work and are harder to silence when the go against the powers-that-be.

It's a shift to merit (are you a good journalist) from credentialism (the BigPublisherCo gives you a job as a writer).

Print used to have dedicated sales people who had relationships with agencies and brands and could connect those organizations with a dedicated and defined audience. Both sides were vetted. And if any problems occurred there was a responsible and responsive party to fix things. Marketing people could rest easy at night knowing their ad for khaki pants would not be next to photos of white supremists marching in New York wearing khakis.

They gave that all up for the opportunity to show ads for the CatTurd NTF at $0.50 per thousand impressions. You know what defeats ad blocking? Serving the ads from your own servers.

In the end they gave it all away to Google and Meta because they were shortsighted. Just like Sears ended their catalog operations leaving the field open for an Amazon.

I’m waiting for someone to propose gathering all of the quality posts from Medium and Substack on a specific topic or interest area and publish them together for a dedicated audience. They could do this on a periodic basis.

I don't understand how younger people demand obese models. Is it a "loud pc minority" making that demand?

It's totally against the natural instinct and mating attractiveness of fit vs unfit. Especially teenagers who tend to be fitter than adults.

I don't think that's universally true. I may not trust Amazon user reviews a whole lot. I least I need to interpret them. But, in my experience, something like Wirecutter won't lead you that far astray. Probably not Consumer Reports either although I don't subscribe.