Hacker News Reader

Comment by knowtheory | Hacker News Reader

Shirky's post in 2009 was one of those great clarion calls. Failure is always an option (and not the kind you learn from and pivot off of).

Noting that newspapers aren't necessary (but journalism is) is great, but the problem is that a lot of (most?) journalism is still done in newspapers... and the way the media is currently breaking up, where companies like the Tribune Company and Gannett are splitting their television holdings from their newspapers means that journalism and newspapers may not be inherently tied together... but when it comes down to it, they are still for all practical intents and purposes tightly coupled.

Web based news orgs like Vox, Fusion, Gawker and Buzzfeed are making some moves towards funding journalism (Buzzfeed in particular has great investigative reporters), but they are way too few in number to replace newspapers as a home for investigative journalism even as the industry stands today in its depleted state.

View on HN

Your points about companies splitting TV from newspaper, makes me wonder if we'll ever see a periodical journalism outfit grown out of a streaming provider like Netflix or Amazon Prime.

`Netflix premiers Vice News Nightly`

That's an interesting idea, but again, problem is that most journalism isn't done for video right now (not to say that there's none. There is a fair amount, just definitely not anywhere near the majority of either video produced, nor journalism written)

The bigger problem is that classic journalism of the sort that people lament we don't have enough of is a loss leader. Certainly the streaming services would consider doing something like HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver which is a good example of the news-as-entertainment/journalism hybrids that are probably one of the few things about the (sort of) news business that are doing quite well.

You called out Vice News which is already on HBO. I'd argue that HBO and Netflix are rapidly converging towards direct competition in the streaming market.

Yes - they are competing already. HBO Now is out. https://order.hbonow.com/

Here's a question: How much money goes in to hardcore investigative journalism?

That's a hard thing to disentangle, because investigative reporting isn't just done by people with "investigative reporter" in their titles.

If you want a random waypoint Propublica's staff costs for 2011 were around 5mil$ for a small but very investigative focused news org: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142... (granted they're also not a typical news org).

How much money goes into creating a corporate culture that encourages hardcore investigative journalism?

I recently spoke to a reporter from one of three major newspaper in Israel. I asked her how much investigative journalism they do? She said almost none. The smallest of the 3 papers does a little. The other two do basically none. A little means a lot less than they do of everything else, of course.

So maybe 5% of the combined expenditure for the newspaper industry is probably a generous estimate. It could be <1% I guess.

Most of what journalism does is reporting, commentary, discussion and analysis. Primary, investigative journalism is a relatively small thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com