The News Business Is Cratering

Can we really blame loss of objectivity on the loss of the business model? The NY Times is doing fine and they totally threw out objectivity as a goal. Seems more like a cultural shift to me.

> We didn't lose news, what we lost was editorial oversight, basic ethics, fact checking, the pursuit of an objective voice, the resources to do good work, the courage to stand on principles, and so on

If there was any of those in the press, ever, they wouldnt have lied about nonexistent WMDs for 8+ years.

The entire privately owned 'free' press was just the corporate propaganda arm of the establishment. The illusion of 'quality' was there only because the 'editorial oversight' that you mention was keeping the 'undesirable' news out and 'desirable' ones in, creating a facade of consistency. The moment the Internet broke the blockade, things came crashing down within a span of years.

Indipendent journalists, micro teams publications (<10 people) of hard hitting investigative journalism on topics that go viral on social media to reach millions of potential customers

I don't think it's true that "nobody is willing to pay". As the article points out large outfits like The Washington Post, and smaller ones like Politico and Talking Points Memo, and niche ones like Financial Times, get most of their revenue from subscribers, not ads. What is inarguable is that the old model of ripping off advertisers and misinforming readers is finally dead, but it has taken a long time for the operators of that model to internalize the reality. The death blow was dealt by Craigslist, so we've been waiting quite a while.

Personally, I refuse to listen to pleas to "support local news" coming from outlets that have been trying to destroy everything I value for decades. There may be 1 or 2 worthwhile journalists working at the LA Times, for example, but I will never ever give that organization even one dollar. Those journalists need to leave that paper as far as I am concerned.

>Good journalism isn't free, and nobody is willing to pay.

NYT costs costs $4/mo for the first year, then jacks up to a staggering (by subscription standards for 'digital media') $25/mo. They have almost 10M subscribers.

Wallstreet Journal costs $6/mo for the first year then it goes to $12.50. They and have ~4M subscribers.

For both publications the subscriber counts are mostly online-only while print numbers continue to fall.

My point is there seems to be a healthy market for quality national reporting that use pay-walls especially when the organizations have the revenue to afford international bureaus (NPR being an exception that doesn't have a pay-wall). People will pay for a product they feel hits a certain quality/trust threshold.

However, most major US cities have only 1 single newspaper remaining and those print versions get thinner and thinner due to lack of ads. Where I live, the newsrooms have indeed been gutted and/or eliminated entirely. This has been going on since around 2005 or so. Back then, the first wave was due to the dominance of Craigslist and the evaporation of the Classifieds section, which generated a lot of revenue for papers.

A significant percentage of the stories in the Seattle Times (my local paper) have stories reprinted from NY Times, Washington Post and others. Cheaper for them to pay licensing fees than hire professional journalists to write articles.

It's much, much worse than "nobody is willing to pay".

Good journalism must be available to the masses for a minimal cost if we want to maintain a functioning democratic society.

Think about it: if "good journalism" is only available to people who can comfortably afford to pay $10-30/month for a single subscription, that means that the people who are already the worst off have less and less access to the vital information they need to be able to effectively act to change their circumstances. This applies both to political information and business information: the former is necessary for those who want to try to make the lot of the poor better overall, while the latter is necessary for those who want to try to better their own situations.

Word-of-mouth networks in this sort of thing can only get you so far, especially when the free information out there is so heavily skewed to advertising, propaganda, and other forms of manipulative quasi-disinformation.

I see it as the opposite. With Reuters, AP and a couple others is there a need for (in the USA): ABC, CNN, Fox, NBC, MSNBC, etc.? Sans their editorial* programming, these are all for the most part regurgitating the same "news" from the same POV, etc. And they're all amplifing their commodcommodity-ness by racing faster and faster to the bottom.

Where's the surprise? Why should any of us feel sorry for the Fourth Estate's intentional effort to fail the rest of us?

On the other hand, Local is unique and isn't as easily commodified.

* Yes, they call their editorial content news, but the rest of us would be wise not to be as confused as they are. Journalism and editoral are two very different desks.

Reuters and AP regurgitate garbage DC government complex propaganda, it’s disinfo at best and power-reinforcing evil at worst. The people who work there are lazy and sycophantic if they can’t be bothered to get up, go somewhere, and expose information that actually pisses powerful people off.

This is the reason the narrative positions independent journos on Substack and Twitter as a threat. They’re the only ones left holding power to account and punching up. And the best people in the corporate journalism world inevitably get ejected into the independent sphere with social media as their only outlet.

Who is 'them' here?

Seems like anytime I hear people use 'They', 'Them' as some broad category of some secret organization driving things. It is increasingly hard to decipher what the 'they/them' is referring to? Is it Q-anon? Deep Christian State?

'They' are doing this to 'Us'. But can never really pin it down? Every conspiracy is always shifting to a new 'They'.

This comment should not be downvoted it is both factually accurate and insightful.