Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?

Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.

If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?

Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large enough to drive, we're in this emotionally driven circus for the duration.

Some "NEWS" outlets are leaning towards activism and the others are leaning towards entertainment. NEWS companies are now either Media or Technology companies. And journalism has taken a backseat to doing things to get attention

Has anyone made something like this for HN?

I think this is right. I'd like to see more public media funding, but at least right now there is an explosion of independent media business models being explored recruiting some very good journalists and smart people.

I'd like to hear about anyone else's updated media habits. In my last… 20ish years of "gathering information about my community and interests," I've gone from paper NYT subscriber to RSS feed reader to social aggregators to social media to podcasts to newsletters to doomscroller... I've tried it all.

But to stay sane I've settled on simply following the voices I trust and find interesting across different media, and the best ones are navigating their own publishing and distribution journey. I pay some of them real money. Some are being acquired by bigger media outlets, too. I have hope in journalism's survival.

My impression is that most media today is nowhere near this. They're just cheap dopamine source, containing only "news", not any serious discussion.

"This ____ grills ______ on his comments about __________." -- this is typical American title, but in other countries this sort of news is abundant, and differs only in wording, not the essence.

A local media news: Lebron James died in a crash. Which happened at the other side of the world in another country, nothing to do with the place itself. Because the media is owned by a holding company, and metrics are measured and aggressively optimized.

Trump became a source of cheap dopamine for every non-serious media in the world. "American president said that X. <insert your tongque in cheek/sarcastic/caustic comment>".

"Traffic jams in city X reached level 9!" (screenshot of a mobile map with traffic layer)

It is a completely unbalanced dynamic. And it takes massive financial support. These are professional salaries that need to be paid for in some way. You need a lot of staff to actually meaningfully cover various stories and regularly publish.

Now think of the potential readership. A small fraction compared to the old days when the paper of record was the only way to learn about anything at all. Orgs like NYT that have essentially a national customer base do alright. 5% of the entire united states (made up number) is a lot of damn people. 5% of a single metro region on the other hand just isn't enough to support the demands of the work. It never was enough.

Now you have newsrooms getting bought and commanded from upon high. LA times is a rag now thanks to a conservative billionaire putting his thumb on the editorial board and laying off staff. The newsroom isn't even in LA anymore, it has been reduced to an office in El Segundo. The old newsroom in downtown LA that they were kicked out of has been vacant for 8 years now, presumably the owner (onni group) is doing the commercial valuation shenanigan where they are concerned about the value of the asset to take loans out against vs the potential cash flow opportunities from rent paying tenants.

A bunch of investors went on a buying spree of traditional news outlets about 25-30 years ago, hoping to make good money off of them. They also offered free access to the news online at the time.

Well, people stopped buying newspapers and fewer and fewer people watch the local news, so there was no money making happening.

They're still expecting to make the cash off the original investment. There will be no reinventing, civic consequences be damned.

They should be thinking "coverage about local elections and politicians, and investigative work".

More Block Club Chicago or Oklahoma Watch.

Less Buzzfeed or CNN.

The world's become a gambling addict; chasing players in a huge virtual casino of clicks. It's sad.

But with the internet everything got hyper specialized.

Want the entertainment & tabloid-esque factor? Well social media, certain subreddits are going to serve you better, for free.

Want the in-depth analysis. Well youtube, if you know how to be media critical, serves you better (yes YT is full of bullshit but if you truly want in depth analysis coverage, you probably know how to filter out the bad channels and find high quality). Not to mention specialist sites. Like compare the in depthness of isw (https://understandingwar.org) vs your average news broadcast when it comes to what is happening in current wars.

Heck even wikipedia tends to be more in depth and provide better context than most news reports.

Where does that leave us? Traditional news becomes an expensive product that has subpar quality. Then it becomes a vicious circle where either they go full clickbait to feed ads where quality goes in the dirt, or they go paywall which keeps them out of the digital conversation and errodes their publicitly which ultimately prevents them from acquiring new users.

The most egregious offenders never allow reader comments or discussion underneath the story.

This would do a lot to restore trust.

The problem is, they want to restore trust and keep acting deceptively too!

I agree with the idea, but there is a lot of subtlety. Journalism is a profession. Journalists must understand context and research while also finding ways to convey often complex concepts in an unbiased and comprehensible way. The average internet voice trying to fill this role is just spouting opinion and often with undisclosed motive.

If we do not solve the credibility gap that currently exists and let professionals be adequately compensated for doing good work in a difficult profession most of the suggestions here are just bandaids on a mortal wound.

In my anecdotal experience, journalism goes along with the detractors and naysayers: It's an archaic industry from a past era, they're mostly ineffective, social media makes it mostly irrelevant, journalistic principles aren't really valued, hard news isn't valued, not many will ever read it and the audience won't come back, it's more for comfort and entertainment, don't challenge people too much, etc.

Imagine a blogger who, for their post, flew to the location of whatever they were talking about and saw it for themself. Interviewed dozens of people with direct experience, including the people directly affected, the people who did whatever happened, the local leaders, people on all sides. Found and read actual documentary evidence. Combined that all in a blog post and then ran it by several other people for editing, verification, ensuring nothing exceeded the evidence, etc. That would be an amazing - an almost unheard of - blogger and blog post.

That's everyday professional journalism. You can get it pretty cheaply.

They just don't market themselves. They don't believe in themselves. Someone told them that they are outdated and they believe it: Look at the NY Times front page, still trying to look like an actual old newspaper. Still with a banner at the top like the newspaper, with a typeface that was impressive in the era of metal type (what do younger who never saw the metal type output think? My guess: 'that's something old, for old people, before my time.'). Still mostly black-and-white and text (print!), with multimedia a very secondary extra rather than a normal, first-class part of the reports - articles with significant multimedia are special events done (afaik) by a special staff! Even lone bloggers can do better, and the NY Times has far more resources.

When is the last time you saw someone passionate about what is a truly noble, sometimes heroic profession? When was the last time someone was talking about how they were going to make it better than ever? How they were going to change the world? By being swept along by the zeitgeist rather than standing up and defining it and themselves, they are killing another essential institution (what institution has risen to this moment?).

Yeah yeah, there are plenty of ways this could go wrong, but those pitfalls are not guaranteed, whereas the ways private sector journalism can go wrong have occurred in practice. So we might as well try it.

Arstechnica did some testing, years or maybe even a decade ago, and found that most people don't even read past the first page of their multipage articles. And I imagine their audience is at least slightly above average for these sorts of things.