Unfortunately, that also means it's a really terrible time to be a writer for a living. Like every job that is (a) creative and (b) can be distributed digitally, almost all of the money is falling out of it.
Well no money because nobody's paying for it,and since nobody's paying for it the content is usually average at best.
Free information is great,but let's face it,quality news cost money and time. What have we today?in the tech world? content farms (readwrite,thenextweb,techcrunch,mashable...) where writers often know nothing about the subject,or are using social justice warfare to manifacture outrage in order to generate impressions( http://readwrite.com/2014/09/09/apple-no-women-on-stage-dive... ). How can that kind of news scale? readers are not idiots. But most readers ,at the same time,refuse to pay for anything,so the money has to come from somewhere,so we get sponsorised news too...
Real journalists or writers have skills,what's missing is a plateform where pro journalists could monetize their skills to corporations directly,to write serious reports on a specific subject for instance,intelligence,sourcing,or just writing for the web(for commercial purposes,i.e. writing for content for a corporate website).
The idea that quality has decreased is simply an absurd and obvious myth perpetuated by editors and professional writers who are unhappy that their control over the journalism and publishing industries is evaporating. Furthermore, the market has never really paid for journalism, which was always subsidized by ads of questionable efficacy and ownership by wealthy individuals.
Finally, the big secret is the a massive amount of non-fiction by professional writers is embellished, plagiarized, or outright fabricated, and there is almost no real fact-checking in the industry. The regular scandals are just the tip of the iceberg.
Journalism and non-fiction writing as they exist now are in need of a major overhaul. Thankfully, technology is creating a situation where the world is naturally moving forward.
Long form journalism and in-depth reporting is not doing nearly as well, and is not well supported currently.
Immediacy and media quantity have shot up, like you say. It's one of the most amazing things about living in the world today.
Depth and investigation has suffered, and I think accuracy and objectivity have too. Not every story can be revealed with cell cameras in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you have to dig and dig hard.
It is all in the name of page hit, no longer about useful information.
Much like Bitcoin mining, there are only so many pageviews per day. You can optimize certain behaviors to increase your pageviews and ad impressions -- more ad units, auto reloading pages, slideshows, more side links, etc. Publishers doing this increase their slice of the pie. Big brand advertisers appear to not track sales at all so quality publishers basically subsidize the low quality content farms.
Fighting back is possible. If you see a weird article that friends are sharing, look up the writer. Many of these people are amateur writers or college students. Facts are wrong (happens in real journalism too.) Some of the 'controversies' in technology today are almost completely made up but they attract pageviews, so they keep getting written about.
One thing I learned when I was earlier was that a lot of articles in the professional business press where complete trash for an entrepreneur -- Fortune, Forbes, Harvard Business Review. They had some basis in fact but consisted of a lot of noise written by writers who probably didn't know what they were writing about (with exceptions, which is why I kept reading.) What happens when the people who do read get not only noise but noise that no one fact checked? Twitter, Youtube, and fact based organizations (Human Rights Watch, ACLU) publishing material to all instantly balance even this ocean of crap out. I think despite the negatives we remain much better informed than the past.
The wild success of such social justice warfare proves that you are incorrect. Most people are too stupid to read, comprehend and / or care about legitimate news, and so the industry adapted in order to increase revenue. This adaptation started over 100 years ago, and now the transformation is almost complete.
There are still some excellent journalists out there, but they are outnumbered.
That's because magazine publishers are responding to widespread decline in sales with more and more titles, trying to capture every possible niche under the sun.
> seem to be self sustaining
That's less and less true every year.
Try googling "Linux Voice"; read up on their background, what they are doing and why. You'll see how things are really going. The "magazine" format is dying a slow death, in the same way generalist TV is; their death will be slower than the one of newspapers, but it's written in stone in the same way.
I think that's an oversimplification.
I believe the lack of publishing gatekeepers means the bottom end of the bell curve isn't being truncated. The variation in quality has certainly gone up, but I'm not sure if the mean or median have really moved.
Sure, there's a lot of crap to wade through, but there are also a lot of talented people who wouldn't have been able to find an audience going through old publishing systems.
You still have to put in the work in the first place, of course, but I think the situation is slowly swinging around to being able to make a living at it again. But... not everybody is going to be able to make a living at it, and that's just not going to change, ever.
But it's exciting to see a writer like Cara Ellison get enough money to live and work on, or a group like RedLetterMedia get an extra $100k/year to make more and better stuff. People had been talking about direct audience support for years, and Patreon has proven that it can work.
I'm wondering if any journalist has thought about the idea of a subscription model. For example, charging something like $5 a month to read all articles on their site or releasing long-form articles that cost $1 each.
This always struck me as odd. Writers are clearly aware making money in their industry now is an uphill battle, yet in music (which has the very same environment), people seem to think the industry is thriving.
I think what you see is that more and more musicians do it for mainly non-financial incentives. That's been true for most musicians since time immemorial, but it's even more true today.
It turns out you don't really need to pay people much to get them to make and play music. They just need some gear and enough free time to do it.
For example, for me, it's a great time to be a writer. I wrote a book that I'm self-publishing. If I couldn't do that, I would have had to compromise it in ways I don't really like in order to please a publisher.
I probably won't be making as much money (not that I would make much with a traditional publisher), but that's OK. I'm lucky enough to have a decent-paying day job.
The way writing works today is perfectly attuned to what I want to get out of it.