On March 5, Chris Hayes on the Why Is This Happening? podcast put out an episode, "A Mediapocalypse? with Ben Smith." Hayes has been working as a journalist since about 2001, when he was 22 years old. He was there when print publications first began to go online, and he saw the invention of social media. It used to be that reporters were needed to record facts, but now everyone has smartphones and can do their own reporting.
He says that while many outlets shuttered due to the 2009 financial crisis, the layoffs and closures of 2023 felt worse to him. He says he no longer understands where people in general find their fact-based news. Where can people get not just some information, but high-quality, true information? Social media platforms aren't reliable for this, and these days many people are retreating to group chats.
Blaming the messenger by calling it "fake news," even if it is, may not be a successful tactic. (Does anyone care if you make that analysis or judgment? Fake news is at least as profitable as real news, if not more so.) And now there's so little real news to which to turn instead.
[As I've heard other people put it: For conspiracy theorists, facts don't really matter. If most their claims prove false, it doesn't matter, because — like someone who pretends to be psychic — they'll gain fame and money from the few things they said that proved correct. This is how credulity and conspiracy-theory thinking works. It goes by "vibes."]
If news becomes a weird personal hobby for some people and isn't an essential part of the culture, democracy may not survive.
In this podcast episode, he interviews Ben Smith, former editor of BuzzFeed, now of Semafor. Smith believes that national and international news is healthy, but local news is disappearing. Local newspapers sued to be ad-supported by local businesses, but in the early 2000s Google disrupted that model because newspapers were no longer needed to announce what the local businesses were. Perhaps as a result, U.S. politics is becoming more focused on national rather than local issues. Politicians work at the level of Washington, commentators comment at the level of Washington, and that's how individual people understand it, rather than thinking about their home district.
(That's an argument, I'd insert, against the Electoral College. Votes don't need to be counted state-by-state if individuals aren't voting as residents of a state but simply as citizens of the same country.)
One big problem is that, in the pivot to online publication, 21st-century newspaper owners decided to give away their reporting essentially for free when in fact it costs money to make. They seemed to be running on an assumption that most publications will go under anyway, but the biggest one will survive and will somehow make money, so it's important to grow your readership so you can be the last newspaper standing. Well, that's what has manifested, and most local newspapers have died off.
For cable TV news, though, especially in the case of Fox, some of this process is happening in reverse: young people aren't turning on a specific news channel. They're instead turning to various smaller media outlets (podcasts, etc.) that are individually viable.
Online publishing platforms — especially the ones that work more as closed systems — tend to mystify their data and algorithms, and this provides an opening for people on those platforms to write lots of articles that position themselves as experts about how the system works. When their "expertise" begins to look attractive to others, they promise to teach others to become similar experts and stand apart from the crowd of experts. This does not add much value to society, especially if the site's algorithms aren't really that complicated or interesting and will probably change in a few months.
But that's all that a publication is going to get if they don't pay people to report news or increase their expertise on a specific topic. People will write about their existing expertise until they exhaust it or get bored of talking about it, and then the only additional expertise they will have developed along the way is their experience publishing on that platform, so they start talking about the platform.
Takeaway: Think about your values, what kind of platform you want, and how you'll feel when you use that platform.
On March 6, Talking Points Memo explained that in 2016 they took in nearly $1.7 million from third-party ads, but when they saw that number begin to collapse, they decided to pivot to a subscription model. The subscribers were there when ads no longer provided any significant income. In 2023, their income from third-party ads was less than 5% what it was in 2016. Had they timed this differently or not had cash to invest in it, it won't have worked.
Takeaway: If your business was like that, that's what you needed to have done then.
On March 7, Fernando Alfonso III for NPR quotes Graciela Mochkofsky, the dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, as saying: "I was trained as a journalist with this very, very strong, very, very strong sense that journalism is something that is not a given; it's something you fight for every day, just like democracy." ("Is journalism disappearing? These top educators have a lot to say about that")
Takeaway: Journalism professors don't know what to tell their students about how to work in journalism because there are few traditional jobs right now.
Jeff Jarvis wrote on January 24, "Is It Time to Give Up on Old News?" By "old news," he means journalism as it historically has often been practiced in the United States and as it has been perceived.
Yes, he says, it's time to give up. He's personally done with "old news’ wishful doomsaying, its credulous coverage of politics as sport, its bothsidesing and normalization of the rise of populist fascism, its refusal to call racism racism, its chronic lack of diversity, its dependence on access to power, its moral panic about technology, and the resource it wastes on copying and clickbait." As "our attention" isn't "a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold," neither are newspapers supposed to be in what's called "content business."
We don't have to deliberately kill off what's dysfunctional, but we should "stop throwing good money and effort after bad."
Instead: "support the emergent reinvention of journalism occurring in communities everywhere." Journalism ought to be "a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration." People need to think across academic disciplines and take leadership.
Jarvis writes:
"I say we must fundamentally reimagine journalism and its role in a society under threat of authoritarian, anti-Enlightenment, fascist takeover. I recently wrote about a journalism of belonging. With my colleague Carrie Brown, I helped start a degree program — a movement carried on by our alums — in Engagement Journalism. There are other movements seeking to remake journalism: Solutions Journalism, Collaborative Journalism, Constructive Journalism, Reparative Journalism, Dialog Journalism, Deliberative Journalism, Solidarity Journalism, Entrepreneurial Journalism, and more. What they share is an ethic of first listening to communities and their needs and an urgency to innovate."
Takeaway: Put your values first, and place much less emphasis on monetizing other people's attention spans.
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