That is a massive shame, although I stopped reading it a very long time ago, but I have fabulous memories of the place, when Patrick Smith's Ask The Pilot and Cary Tennis' Since You Asked were wonderful staples of my week.
Wow. I'm honestly shocked by this. It's been a mainstay for so long. It's as ad-riddled as other news sites, is it that ad blockers finally did them in?
I think what did them in is that they would not allow you to subscribe without handing over a ton of personal info. I don't remember the details, but I wanted to subscribe in order to support them, but when I tried the process had so much friction that I just gave up. And this is not unique to Salon. I am continually astounded at how many organizations put up intentional obstacles to giving them money.
IDK if this is a salon issue, but another major issue is so many subscription businesses have made it damn near impossible to end your subscription without sitting in a queue for an hour and having their retention specialist give you 900 offers to stay.
That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).
I assume a lot of these organisations pull in some third-party credit card processing, then when asked "do you want high security and low fraud?" they answer "Yeah of course"
Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.
Then a customer like me who is literally on the sign-up page trying to give them money isn't allowed to.
Yeah, I used to work on credit card processing so I'm very familiar with this. I don't remember the details, but my vague recollection is that Salon's process was much worse than just normal card processing set to high security. I remember seeing layers on layers of third-party Javascript with questionable provenance, lots of personal questions. I tried to work around it all for a bit because I really wanted to support them (I've been reading Salon since they launched) but eventually just threw up my hands in despair and figured they were probably doomed anyway because surely I was not the only one having the same experience. :-(
We need as many news organizations as we can get imo. I used to read them in the 2000s. The tone kept shifting towards negativity and vitriol and reporting perception of intentions rather than facts. Not surprised they are winding down.
Punditry is a kind of journalism, but far from the most important kind; what people get from Salon today they can get better from a hundred different newsletters.
I think the most damning fact about the readers of The New York Times is that they're much more interested in the opinion page (which is just Charlie Blow blowing it out his ass) than they are in the actual reporting which might concern some people you don't know in some place you never heard of that did something that involves a lot of explaining.
David brooks was never that heavy on moralizing, imho. He was more of an idealist who saw a vision for society that he conceded could never be realized , but was content with people otherwise acting in accordance with their incentives and preferences.
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
>I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Booming is a relative term. I would have to see how many writers are making a "living wage," a favored term of people in tech circles which generally means a fraction of what they make.
it's just a blogging platform + newsletter service. There was never an expectation ppl would make a living income from it, except for only the top. But it's like this with almost everything in life.
Yes there was. The monetization was why it wasn't medium.com. Friend of a friend is a substack writer. 50k subscribers that pay $10/month for her insights.
I said "except for only the top." With 50k subscribers, presumably this is in the top tier. Similar to medium, the average person who creates a substack blog has to get all the traffic on their own, substakc does not help .
>except for only the top. But it's like this with almost everything in life.
For creatives, however you care to define the term, probably. But there are a lot of professions where fairly run of the mill professionals and even tradespeople still make a pretty decent living even if they're not partners in their organizations or own their own businesses. Of course, you get down to the tier that's doing taxes at Walmart or working in an auto parts stoor, not so much, although probably still more reliable income than the average Substack writer.
yes, I remember reading both Salon and Slate back in the 90s. it was a big deal when Michael Kinsley, the founding editor Slate, moved from the east coast to what was then considered the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest (compared to NY / DC / LA for media). He had had fancy jobs at The New Republic, etc.
it was also the era when Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms as well as into media such as Slate and MSNBC.
> Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms
I think it was more of a defensive play. Keep in mind that Microsoft saw the web as a threat. Gates was worried that the browser will undermine their OS monopoly (which it eventually did). Gates launched a bunch of web sites including Slate, HomeAdvisor, CarPoint, Sidewalk, Expedia, MSNBC and so on, and told the world that he didn't expect any of these sites to be profitable any time soon, which in my opinion, was intended to dissuade others from investing in the web.
A good reminder that if you live in a city that still has an independent news source, throw them a lifeline by subscribing digitally! It's easy and usually doesn't cost more than a couple bucks a week.
I'm in the Seattle area now and the Seattle Times has been a great source of independent local and national news. Most local city news orgs have gone under at this point but I'm glad we still have one here.
Thanks, I was surprised by OP because I thought Salon was already gone. Glad to know it actually was gone before. It was one of my go-tos circa 2000-2002, before really good blogging took over. Everything on it used to be quite well written. Looking back at it, it was the era where well-written trumped actual knowledge, insight or research.
I don't know, I don't see any of the clickspam that the article describes on the frontpage now. No "your cat is a racist" or "relationship with my penis".
On the other hand, I also don't see anything else that's particularly interesting or thought provoking. Which is kind of sad for this US election season.
Is it just me or do others feel like this is a "buy me" ad and inevitably someone will purchase the brand at firesale and do something else with it? Didn't that already happen in the past with Salon?
On my internship the local newspaper wanted a revamped UI and I was asked to present some ideas. After searching around for references found Salon had a really clean UI and added some of its pages to the presentation spec. This was in early 2000s. Their UI is still very clean and readable. I don’t think it has changed that much :) https://web.archive.org/web/20021130080643/http://salon.com/
I used to read Salon every single day, it was great. I'm reminded of this story about living in Japan from 1998 (that now seems pretty politically incorrect):
The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. The vast majority of what was lost were "beat" reporters - foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus from regional publications, statehouse reporters, or regional specialty beats (science, law, etc).
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.
Salon has always been pure opinion/analysis pieces though, they never had a newsroom. They never had much of a moat beyond getting talented people to write thinkpieces for them, and the internet has just inflated the supply of thinkpieces to the point of 0 cost.
There’s still a supply of opinion & analysis writing that people will pay for, but Salon and similar online publications got disintermediated for it by Substack.
Most people can get their celebrity news straight from that celebrity’s insta feed. Unless you’re TMZ breaking the juiciest news about celebrities, you can’t compete with that.
Big newspapers early in the internet age tried explain why journalism was needed - to explain the story behind the story - and that was the correct move, imho.
I suspect it is. I think the real problem was sites like craigslist (and online advertising in general) removing much of the (classified, job listing, etc) advertising that made publishing a newspaper profitable.
I remember in a very early 1990s (maybe '91 or '90) the Utne Reader had an article talking about how journalism outlets were merging at a rapid rate, resulting in layoffs and consolidation. The author feared that by 2000 there would only be 4-5 news conglomerates left. The internet was pretty much for engineering Universities and Tech companies (and all command line at that) so certainly before the 'open internet' as most people think of it.
It is very true. Back in early 2000s , I was in a startup that built publication management tools for newspapers. I recall making about 700 phone calls and speaking to the editorial staff to get them to sign up. And this is where I learnt that only a handful of obscure companies owned nearly all of local newspapers.
Cost effective but soulless. Local news was killed by private equity and consolidation.
> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI and AI"?
2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.
For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media has their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screen" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).
I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.
Let me rephrase it: "long before the decline of the open internet, and the rise of AI".
I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.
I think the open Internet is often said to have begun declining with the rise of walled gardens, notably Facebook, 2010 or so. A further factor was Google's degeneration from relatively fair broker to (biased) "question answerer", with a notable step 2019-2020 but with earlier steps also.
Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first.
But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight.
The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today.
In roughly the same stretch global mobility exploded; from numbers like 2-3 billion flying around to travel, to 6+ billion...almost the entire population
And each of them can journal on their phones
Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers
And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared
All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism
We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.
Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.
It is no coincidence that this has occurred together with an increasing feminization of journalism.
Women, it turns out, do not want to be beat reporters.
And I doubt the pendulum is done swinging. Buckle up! My guess is that journalism will get even more hollowed out, and even more feminized - as with so many other careers (HR, anyone?) it seems we are continuing in the direction of UBI by proxy.
And I learned everything about human relations from Ann Landers and Love Is.
Lord they keep making dudes that do the “if the average person was as smart as me”. Probably time to move to Mars. If only someone would write a newsletter about how to do it.
To be clear, I mean the dude you’re replying to who has seen through the veil the fourth estate cast over our eyes.
What's wrong about what he's saying, though? The media is, largely, a conduit for propaganda. There's very little unbiased journalism, and none of it is free.
What is free and what constitutes unbiased? We have spent a decade defining unbiased as some kind of idealized Michelangelo carved out of what the right insists upon. If the Ancient Greeks felt the right answer was a benevolent dictator, I am ok with a press that reports accurately with their bias toward truth.
Frankly, the pitch of news - the 'moat' - is a lack of bias. You pay to have someone who is not actually an expert in the field being discussed (or even a beginner, in most cases today) give you an unbiased view of the situation. The idea is that the expert is too close to the situation and can be biased, so the journalist is the filter. They supposedly know enough about the subject to ask smart questions about it, and their capability to do that is judged by other journalists with... even less understanding of the subject at hand. If journalists violate this assumption by being so blatantly biased, like they were at outlets like Salon, there is no information being shared anymore AND no benefit to listening to them outside of having your assumptions hopefully reassured by another ignorant person. Journalism moving from a comparably open and meritocratic field to being entirely populated by PMC failsons about as illiterate as their peer majors doesn't help this.
The only other real value-add is that the journalist is a better 'communicator', an assumption mostly based on stereotypes about the people being interviewed, especially with tech journalism. This has broken down too - the largest outlets regularly release pieces filled with run-on sentences and typos now, and often obfuscate the point rather than clarify it. See any NYT article about any hot-button issue over the past ten years or so.
It serves a useful function in the same way that a bar serving alcohol serves a useful function. It's making money by giving people something that's bad for them. They really want it, so it's not going away. But it's a net negative on society and we'd all be better off if they disappeared.
How many of those newspapers are "skins", hollow shells that layer a newspaper shape (printed or virtual) over generic content with minimal human curation or editing?
I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be.
The largest city in the state I used to live in had two daily newspapers. Then it went to one, and some short years later went to none. It was resurrected a few years later, and now runs out of a strip mall. About 10 years ago, I managed to get a copy (I'd moved states), and it was two pages of state/local news, and the rest was filler.
They recently cut production down to 3 days a week and laid off half their already tiny staff.
This is a very correct question to be asking. The Alden Global Capital guys have been pioneers of this, but are not the only ones of course. Of the papers you've heard of, they own a plurality of them. And what they are most known for is (of course, being PE) optimizing shareholder value. Firing people and replacing local content with wire stories and shared material from other papers in the portfolio.
Their current list of formerly great papers includes the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News, East Bay Times, The Orange County Register, and Orlando Sentinel.
They also bought my hometown daily paper, just a small, nowheresville town. The paper went from being respectably sized for a small town, and featuring many local news stories, to being slim and having one randomly selected story from one of the 5-8 papers they own in the region, and a bunch of wire stories. Once a week, they copy and paste the local police blotter.
The outlook on the news industry is exceedingly bleak. :(
The show "The Paper" actually satirizes this. One bit involves pulling articles from an AP feed and putting it to print and how cutting that feed cut their largest revenue source, not that this means much as the paper is funded by a toilet paper company.
the internet made it ~free for anyone to publish to the whole world, which eviscerated the premium of space in the newspaper. it'd have been hard for newspapers to not get destroyed no matter what they did, but losing classifieds to fuckin' craigslist wasn't their finest moment, either.
A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc. The economics of writing for a publication are worse than starting our own blog or channel.
The major publications, e.g. AP, NYTs, WaPo, Economist, FT, Bloomberg all have reporting an seem to be doing well. It's not like beat reporting is going to die.
"The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020" - those jobs were the pipeline for the jobs at the publications you mention. Journalist is hardly the same career path it was prior to the Internet, which pretty much destroyed the business model of newspapers. Lets concede for discussion that it's going awesome for the New York Times of the world - they don't cover local stories, which, will not being relevant to the whole world, are quite relevant to people living where they are occurring. We have also lost a professional class of people who's job it was to find out what's going on. It's definitely a huge loss in my book.
> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc
And the world suffers as a result, IMO. It’s all very thinly veiled opinion rather than original reporting. How many YouTubers are reporting out in the field rather than just reacting to stories other people reported?
More than anything else Substack shows to me how valuable editors are in the journalistic world. So, so many people are in desperate need of an editor to challenge them before they hit publish.
>> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc.
You forgot podcasts which are available on numerous platforms. One of which is YT for video podcasts.
Most of the sports news now are breaking on podcasts. Same with pop culture. News sites now mostly refer to some podcast and the person on the podcast whatever bit of news they have come from there.
As of September: Roughly 478,000 podcasts have released at least one new episode in the last 90 days
Podcasts have become the way a majority of people I know are now getting their news, which is pretty crazy.
podcasts and web venues has allowed reputation to get all loosey-goosey compared to traditional journalism, there is less at stake, less likelihood of an actual blacklisting, and every derisive opinion has a cheerleading squad online to amplify the (usually terrible) opinions.
podcasts and web stuff is where the majority of people go to seek journalism, but I hesitate to say that's what replaced it. I see a void where it once was, and the product offered largely different than what I came to expect from journalism wholly.
>The vast majority of what was lost were "beat" reporters - foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus from regional publications, statehouse reporters, or regional specialty beats (science, law, etc).
People doing actual useful news work, in other terms.
I wish would stop using "journalist" and "reporter" interchangeably.
Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person.
Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do.
I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters.
The profession is journalism. Reporting is a form of journalism. Non-reporter journalists are not just pundits who pontificate. Analysis (based on someone else's reporting) is a form of journalism. Editing and sub-editing are forms of journalism.
> The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. [0]
That was a scary number so I Googled it. You should always check scary numbers. It's misleading.
It's true that newspaper newsroom jobs fell 57% (from roughly 71,000 to 31,000 jobs) over that period. However, newsroom employment across all mediums fell by only 26% (from 114,000 to 85,000).
A lot of hose jobs went digital, they didn't just disappear.
> Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020.
So, if we group digital publications with newspapers we are going from 78k to about 49k jobs, a drop of almost 40%. It would be interesting to see a finer grained breakdown by type of jobs. I would speculate that there was probably an even bigger decline in the number of journalists per se.
The rest of the numbers you are quoting are mostly broadcast TV, with some radio and cable TV folks thrown in. My impression is that quite few of those jobs / stories are serious journalism.
The advent of internet and the notion that news should / could be 'free' has caused a steep decline in quality journalism worldwide, I think.
I have some journalists (for a local newspaper) in my circle of friends and they all complain there's no 'newsroom' anymore for most (dutch) newspapers. All journalists now are supposed to 'self-redact' and their copy is just pasted into the newspaper without anybody else looking at it.
Lots of 'journalists' are freelancers who just send in their piece. Even those often get published with minimal oversight. There just isn't enough money to have a redaction.
Fact-checking is(or should be) done by the one writing the piece. So personal biases are hardly ever caught.
Admitted, all these stories are for a small local newspaper with very tight budgets. But according to my friends it's the same everywhere when they speak to their friends, and even the big national newspapers here have very minimal supporting personnel.
I would love to know what it would cost to subscribe to a newspaper that gets revenue only from subscribers and runs no ads. Is it so high that nobody tries?
Yep. Professional journals can be a few 100s$ per year. So you could get quality journalism, it would just be for very few people compared to the masses.
Historically, public/mass news services were dependent on adverts or classifieds to pay for their running. That business has been consumed by ad tech.
YouTube has become a source for journalism now, but the viability of newspapers and local beats has reduced.
An "ad-free" subscription to The Guardian is $18 per month ($15 starter, students $10 a year).
They aren't funded exclusively by subscribers because that would exclude a source of revenue that enables cheaper subscriptions. But you can have no ads for a reasonable premium.
Yes, and I don't mean to downplay the scale of that human loss. Only to point out that the numbers (as stated) were misleading.
Accuracy is actually MOST important when strong feelings are involved. If we're talking about what time to eat lunch 'noonish' is good enough. If we're talking about about how many people died in a tragedy exact numbers help prevent misinformation, hyperbole, and panic from driving everyone into a frenzy.
> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.
I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world.
This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998!
Cost-of-living crisis. People used to gladly pay for high-quality journalism, because they could. They paid for CDs and VHS/DVDs and cable and movie tickets and cars and houses and long distance phone calls and cigarettes and book-of-the-month clubs, because they could. Not just high-earning professionals. Cashiers. Gas station attendants. Department store employees. Waiters. We had an economy where most people could afford to participate in the consumerist and cultural milieu.
The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it.
When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry.
The federal gov is essentially just entitlement programs for the elderly and the military, and all the wealth of the billionaires wouldn’t pay for it for even a year.
Completely wrong because Salon wasn’t “high-quality journalism”. It was opinion pieces. There’s a zillion free substacks where you can get that today. Salon’s business was commoditized and is now grossly oversupplied.
Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre.
I hate that CEOs make 325x more than an average worker whereas is 1965 they made 21x. But whenever I see something about taxing unrealized capital gains, it makes me wonder: are we also going to give tax credits for unrealized capital losses?
It's really a proxy measure on a couple tax evasion strategies, like the one where you borrow against your shares and default on purpose letting your bank take them. There is no taxable event because legally you're not selling anything. You're just turning shares into money at the market rate.
If you tried to ban all of the known strategies they would just come up with new ones. That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax.
Of course for the long term it would be better to replace traditional shares with time limited ones that give you a percentage of profits for 5 years but no voting rights. Power stays with workers and no one gets unlimited returns on a one time investment. And enforce pay equality where no one can get more than 20x median total comp. But I think that's too radical to pass anywhere today.
"That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax"
The problem with this is that is a good reason we don't tax unrealized gains. Yes, there are people using this as a loophole. But if you tax this, everytime home value goes up, there is a huge wave of bigger tax bills for every home owner and business owner. Which would crash the housing market overnight and probably kill 90% of the job creation in the economy. I'm sure you could make some carve outs for it, but if you do that, you probably won't collect much in tax revenue.
The biggest thing you don't seem to understand is that there is an economic concept called the Laffer curve. It relates tax rates to the total amount of tax a government takes in. And we are already at or near that tax rate. Increase taxes and the government won't take in more revenue. Growing the economy, that increases government tax revenue. But increasing tax rates past the optimum rate DECREASES not increases the tax revenue. Even ignoring the increased rates of tax avoidance, it constricts economic growth which reduces the employment tax revenue.
Basically, you can't tax your way to pay for your desired programs. Either allocate the budget you have or cancel the programs.
PS 1/2 of the federal budget is social spending, 1/6th is military (1/4 of which is the VA), 1/6 is interest on the debt and 1/6 is everything else the government does.
I don't know who "we" is to you, but this article (page 11) plots out position on the Laffer curve for 27 OECD countries, and indicates that the USA can handle a significantly higher tax burden before it becomes revenue optimised or counterproductive.
> We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage.
You don't have to rely on your domestic media for international coverage. Especially with machine translation being so good these days, you can get your international coverage directly from the outlets abroad.
This matters. Our systems of democracy were formed when journalism could be counted on to hold politicians to account. This is no longer true.
We have to change the system somehow so that independent investigative journalism is either funded without compromising its independence (this is difficult, as the recent bullshit coming out of the BBC is proving), or we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what).
Or we have to change our systems of democracy so that politicians cannot abuse them. Something like "no politician, or any members of their family, or their close friends, can ever be employed by any organisation that contracts with the government, or receives government funds, or benefits from government legislation". This is obviously going to be tricky.
The most truth comes from adversarial systems, motivated to find flaws in the other. There's nothing inherently wrong with being partisan. The problem comes when people align themselves to a single news org that only shows one side. Having news orgs in the middle is great too, of course, but the motivation to not rock the boat might be greater.
In theory I agree. In practice, with journalism, different camps tend to create their own information bubbles and then they get filled with propaganda and copium. I'm not sure what the solution is, but there was a high point for journalism and we are well past it now. To call what some organization put out information is doing some heavy lifting these days.
It's not the partisanship that's causing the problem, it's the business model.
Investigative journalism, done properly, takes time and money. And it produces long articles that can be challenging to read and involve the detail that backs the claim. In a clickbait world, this doesn't produce profit.
There's no functioning business model for it now, but we have built our democratic systems on the assumption that there is. Rich folks buying newspapers and then meddling with their editorial policy was always a problem, but with the editorial office completely dependent on the rich folks for their salaries it gets harder to resist.
Another way of looking at it is that we've gained the biggest explosion in expert and first person coverage ever. In the golden era of news, newsrooms essentially had a monopoly on information. If you wanted to get information on e.g. the war in Korea or Vietnam you basically had to turn to the news, at least in the average case. Now if you want to read about e.g. Ukraine/Gaza/Iran/etc, you can read first person accounts from people on the ground, get imagery of things seconds after they happen, and so on.
And then you can also get analysis from people who have dedicated their professional lives to studying the geopolitical, historical, and other issues involved in these conflicts. What does a journalist really bring to the picture here? So really we have more sources of news than ever before, and I think that's largely killed "the news" as an industry, because it's not really clear what their role is supposed to be anymore.
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Robert Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post through its glory years til its purchase by Bezos, wrote a really excellent article about this some time back, 'The Bad News About the News.' [1] It was written back in 2014, but summed up what had happened and accurately predicted where things would be headed:
"[Companies] have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight."
> Now if you want to read about e.g. Ukraine/Gaza/Iran/etc, you can read first person accounts from people on the ground, get imagery of things seconds after they happen, and so on.
That's the good side of the Internet (and smartphones) and what all of us early adopters always said the Internet will be great for.
But then there is the other side of the coin: fake news, fake account, coordinated disinformation campaigns from foreign state actors, bad taste pranks etc. Some of those existed before with classic journalism as well but the scale at which things are now done was simply impossible before.
So, having journalism and journalists as a trusted source, and filter, that can already digest and filter out the fake from the truth are still needed. Or even more than before, I dare to say. The issue is that there are too many monetary incentives to not act like that.
How do you expect journalists to be able to figure out the truth? And how do you not see them as a single point of failure? Let's take an example from the past. The Vietnam War was started because of a false flag. [1] This was a time when there was a much more adversarial relationship between the media and the government/intelligence agencies than there is today. But even in that context, they mostly unquestioningly reported the lie. Because how else could they have known?
In modern times I'll again take the glass half full side here. The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle. And even in the anonymous internet age, there's still the issue of reputation. It's perhaps more important than ever now a days because you can look at some entity's predictions or statements from one time period, see how it played out over the next e.g. 6 months, and see whether they were onto something, or blowing smoke.
I think this is why it's so hard for the government to drum up support for war now a days. They have no ability to control the narrative and so framing invading some country half way around the world as being 'defensive' is a narrative that usually collapses in rapid order. Even during Vietnam it started becoming clear that the narrative around the Gulf of Tonkin was dodgy, but it's a process that took years. By Iraq we were down to lies starting to be exposed within months. Now a days it'd probably take about 24 hours, to the point that with Iran didn't even bother with trying to manufacture consent and we saw the result of that a few days ago.
> How do you expect journalists to be able to figure out the truth?
And how are YOU expected to figure out the truth?
Journalists should be akin to scientists and researcher: specialized in their field, with better connections and expertise and be able to follow a trail to reach ground truth. Now, can and will be they fooled. Absolutely, and there should be still some peer-review of what they publish.
Also this is an ideal scenario, and it's not what happening right now, or at least it happen only for a handful of media outlets all over the world. This model still support (and expect) having biased publications - I mean, it's just how we humans are - and you as a responsible citizen are still required to look at least at a couple of sources and form your own opinion.
I do agree with you that the truth tends to come out at some point because it follows the path of least resistance, but sometimes the lie can be so well written that it takes decades for the truth to come out.
Have you studied a master degree in every field you read casual information about?
For hard science matters, sure, they should, or at very least be very connected to the field to have a very good understanding of it, critical thinking to smell out the bullshit revolutionary researches and a network of actual PhDs working on the field every day that can help them getting to the core of the topic.
Apply the same concept to all the other fields, even the not hard science ones, and you may end up with a web of news and information outlets that you can believe.
Again, this is an ideal scenario, I know, but IMO there is nothing that makes it technically impossible to achieve.
Journalism is, in fact, a university degree program. My journalist friend does indeed have an MFA in Journalism. This is not an unrealistic expectation if regular pay is on the other end.
It's a superficially reasonable objection that elides the crucial detail: Modern journalism is a profession. It has standards of entry, an established mission (fact-finding, truth-seeking), and a code of ethics. We can choose to be cynical about those constraints, but the fact is that none of them apply to a random person on Youtube or Substack.
Journalism had a pretty strong code of conduct and drive to publish the facts. They couldn’t get it right all the time, but they had a stake in doing the best they could and not losing their reputation.
The truth of things doesn’t tend to come out in time. We know the truth about many things now, but after the window in which a change could be made was obfuscated and stopped.
Facts coming out when it is convenient to the people withholding them is not a success. If they come out at all.
The old system of journalism did a surprisingly good job, until people gave up on playing by the rules and decided to play by the trappings of journalism.
Reputation matters to the center and the left of the information ecosystem today. The right has connected its media to its politics entirely, to create a propaganda machine. Part of its routine is to state that journalism and the left are biased, and don’t want to deal with the truth, and then shoehorning their narrative into it.
Journalists figure out the truth better than you - generally speaking - by having more time to do it than you do because that's their day job while yours is coding or whatever you do.
Now that it's gone, I realize that after all these 31 years, I never did conclusively know if the website is pronounced suh-LON (like where hair goes to fall) or SAL-on (like the artsy fartsy gathering)?
Don’t forget Glen Greenwald before he went batshit crazy.
I payed for salon briefly in the late 90s. I used to have bets with how many words it would take Paglia to cite Sexual Personnae in literally every one of here articles.
Then it just turned into everything that is cringe about the anti intellectual left. Don’t get me wrong I’ve always been aligned with progressive politics for all 56 years of my life, but Salon just went off the deep end.
I read Paul Krugman's 1990s columns in Slate (which I always associated with Salon as 2 similar competitors with S-names) before he became a lot better known for writing similar columns in The NY Times!
I haven't visited salon.com in quite a while. I remember way back in the day I'd hop on there to read an article or two and maybe go read suck.com as well. Such a different internet back then, pre-BuzzFeed and YouTube. Less clickbait, more Gen X cynicism.
Totally forgot Salon existed. I guess that’s part of the problem. For anyone interested in independent journalism, I strongly recommend Breaking Points.
The one thing burned in my brain is that when Clinton was president he was interviewed about this "new internet thing" and asked what websites he and Hilary like to read, and his answer was salon.com
It's been probably 15+ years since I visited this site, but waaaaay back in the day they had a pretty compelling lineup of politics, culture, and because they were trying to jump on the web explosion in the 2000s, tech. So I'll post this article, a tribute to one of the great tech writers of all time, W. Richard Stevens. Who would have thought that you would get choked up reading about a person who wrote guides for programming Unix (among other things) but I did when I read this. The early web was a fun time.
The amount of early 2000's forums I can tell a similar story about is incredible ... companies willingly just jettisoning their audience.
It's either killing off forums completely, or "upgrading" to the point of being unrecognisable, or requiring everyone to make a new account and ... I can't even be bothered to write it.
Old-school corporation-run internet forums being killed off in the 2010s was usually due to costs of moderation (IMDB, Amazon) or brand-protection reasons (Lonely Planet) or both.
At the time, I was angry at this as a user. But looking back, the forums would have declined anyway. With most people today using the internet from phones, and younger generations chiefly interested in video, there just isn't the same societal support for thoughtful long-form text typed from a computer keyboard. The surviving independent forums I'm on are greying out at best, or have shrunk to a few cantankerous or dotty people at worse.
231 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] threadThat why Salon is disappearing. I used to read it, and I thought it disappeared around the time Brill's Content and The Standard went under.
I haven't seen Salon in a Google search result in years.
That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).
Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.
Then a customer like me who is literally on the sign-up page trying to give them money isn't allowed to.
Nor can we forget David Brooks, the moralizing conservative who left his wife for his research assistant 24 years his junior.
David French accusing Mayor Pete of fixing bread prices, Lulu Garcia-Navarro with more glasses than good faith questions, etc.
Say what you will, but the NYT has a deep bench of shenanigans. They truly love the game.
I miss suck.com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com
Suck.com Net.Moguls Internet Mogul Trading Cards:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...
Rick Adams, Front:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115113im_/http://www.suc...
Rick Adams, Back:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143444im_/http://www.suc...
And the hard hitting parody of fuckedcompany.com.
Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.
(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41Ttr73TqU
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
>I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT creepy Epstein buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s
>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Brock Pierce's Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Went Deeper Than Anyone Knew:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/brock-pierces-relationsh...
Fucked Company:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
>Sorry.
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164342/https://wayback.a...
Then they went from sorta fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...
To fucked:
For creatives, however you care to define the term, probably. But there are a lot of professions where fairly run of the mill professionals and even tradespeople still make a pretty decent living even if they're not partners in their organizations or own their own businesses. Of course, you get down to the tier that's doing taxes at Walmart or working in an auto parts stoor, not so much, although probably still more reliable income than the average Substack writer.
you mean this?
https://www.google.com/search?q=white%20people%20site%3Asalo...
In fact, you sell it in all colors and make more money:
https://www.google.com/search?q=black+people+site%3Asalon.co...
It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to sell.
But then someone democratizes the publishing (Substack).
Someone else then mechanizes the producing (LLMs).
And you no longer sell.
Bummer.
https://www.salon.com/2015/12/22/white_men_must_be_stopped_t...
knowing that most of them had already been replaced with diverse individuals prompting an inclusive LLM for equitable $2/hr pleases me immeasurably.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210219012551/https://www.polit...
it was also the era when Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms as well as into media such as Slate and MSNBC.
See this 1996 cover of Wired Magazine: https://www.originalmagazines.com/products/wired-magazine-ju...
I think it was more of a defensive play. Keep in mind that Microsoft saw the web as a threat. Gates was worried that the browser will undermine their OS monopoly (which it eventually did). Gates launched a bunch of web sites including Slate, HomeAdvisor, CarPoint, Sidewalk, Expedia, MSNBC and so on, and told the world that he didn't expect any of these sites to be profitable any time soon, which in my opinion, was intended to dissuade others from investing in the web.
And if you bend the rules a bit, Bianca's Smut Shack might sort-of count too - probably the first truly great website of any sort.
FWIW they had it in for Trump from the start.
I'm in the Seattle area now and the Seattle Times has been a great source of independent local and national news. Most local city news orgs have gone under at this point but I'm glad we still have one here.
On the other hand, I also don't see anything else that's particularly interesting or thought provoking. Which is kind of sad for this US election season.
https://www.salon.com/1998/10/30/feature1_6/
Very, very different from what you'd expect from Salon in the later years.
I archived it, because the OP didn't really make it clear if salon.com is going offline or not: https://archive.is/PesDo
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.
Most people can get their celebrity news straight from that celebrity’s insta feed. Unless you’re TMZ breaking the juiciest news about celebrities, you can’t compete with that.
Big newspapers early in the internet age tried explain why journalism was needed - to explain the story behind the story - and that was the correct move, imho.
Cost effective but soulless. Local news was killed by private equity and consolidation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Davies#Bibliography
1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI and AI"?
2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.
For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media has their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screen" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).
I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.
I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.
Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first.
But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight.
The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today.
And each of them can journal on their phones
Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers
And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared
All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism
We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.
Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.
Women, it turns out, do not want to be beat reporters.
And I doubt the pendulum is done swinging. Buckle up! My guess is that journalism will get even more hollowed out, and even more feminized - as with so many other careers (HR, anyone?) it seems we are continuing in the direction of UBI by proxy.
Lord they keep making dudes that do the “if the average person was as smart as me”. Probably time to move to Mars. If only someone would write a newsletter about how to do it.
To be clear, I mean the dude you’re replying to who has seen through the veil the fourth estate cast over our eyes.
The only other real value-add is that the journalist is a better 'communicator', an assumption mostly based on stereotypes about the people being interviewed, especially with tech journalism. This has broken down too - the largest outlets regularly release pieces filled with run-on sentences and typos now, and often obfuscate the point rather than clarify it. See any NYT article about any hot-button issue over the past ten years or so.
I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be.
They recently cut production down to 3 days a week and laid off half their already tiny staff.
Their current list of formerly great papers includes the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News, East Bay Times, The Orange County Register, and Orlando Sentinel.
They also bought my hometown daily paper, just a small, nowheresville town. The paper went from being respectably sized for a small town, and featuring many local news stories, to being slim and having one randomly selected story from one of the 5-8 papers they own in the region, and a bunch of wire stories. Once a week, they copy and paste the local police blotter.
The outlook on the news industry is exceedingly bleak. :(
The major publications, e.g. AP, NYTs, WaPo, Economist, FT, Bloomberg all have reporting an seem to be doing well. It's not like beat reporting is going to die.
And the world suffers as a result, IMO. It’s all very thinly veiled opinion rather than original reporting. How many YouTubers are reporting out in the field rather than just reacting to stories other people reported?
More than anything else Substack shows to me how valuable editors are in the journalistic world. So, so many people are in desperate need of an editor to challenge them before they hit publish.
You forgot podcasts which are available on numerous platforms. One of which is YT for video podcasts.
Most of the sports news now are breaking on podcasts. Same with pop culture. News sites now mostly refer to some podcast and the person on the podcast whatever bit of news they have come from there.
As of September: Roughly 478,000 podcasts have released at least one new episode in the last 90 days
Podcasts have become the way a majority of people I know are now getting their news, which is pretty crazy.
podcasts and web stuff is where the majority of people go to seek journalism, but I hesitate to say that's what replaced it. I see a void where it once was, and the product offered largely different than what I came to expect from journalism wholly.
A lot of punditry has moved to those platforms, but roughly nobody on those platforms is actually doing investigative journalism.
People doing actual useful news work, in other terms.
(I'm joking, but then again, if demagogues can remove specifics to make statements punchier, why can't I?)
Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person.
Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do.
I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters.
That was a scary number so I Googled it. You should always check scary numbers. It's misleading.
It's true that newspaper newsroom jobs fell 57% (from roughly 71,000 to 31,000 jobs) over that period. However, newsroom employment across all mediums fell by only 26% (from 114,000 to 85,000).
A lot of hose jobs went digital, they didn't just disappear.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsr...
> Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020.
So, if we group digital publications with newspapers we are going from 78k to about 49k jobs, a drop of almost 40%. It would be interesting to see a finer grained breakdown by type of jobs. I would speculate that there was probably an even bigger decline in the number of journalists per se.
The rest of the numbers you are quoting are mostly broadcast TV, with some radio and cable TV folks thrown in. My impression is that quite few of those jobs / stories are serious journalism.
https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/new-local-journalist-index-...
(Measured as local journalist equivalent per 100,000 people.)
I have some journalists (for a local newspaper) in my circle of friends and they all complain there's no 'newsroom' anymore for most (dutch) newspapers. All journalists now are supposed to 'self-redact' and their copy is just pasted into the newspaper without anybody else looking at it.
Lots of 'journalists' are freelancers who just send in their piece. Even those often get published with minimal oversight. There just isn't enough money to have a redaction.
Fact-checking is(or should be) done by the one writing the piece. So personal biases are hardly ever caught.
Admitted, all these stories are for a small local newspaper with very tight budgets. But according to my friends it's the same everywhere when they speak to their friends, and even the big national newspapers here have very minimal supporting personnel.
It's no wonder the world polarizes.
Historically, public/mass news services were dependent on adverts or classifieds to pay for their running. That business has been consumed by ad tech.
YouTube has become a source for journalism now, but the viability of newspapers and local beats has reduced.
They aren't funded exclusively by subscribers because that would exclude a source of revenue that enables cheaper subscriptions. But you can have no ads for a reasonable premium.
https://support.theguardian.com/us/contribute
My reaction was a little different. I said "that's it? Only 60%?"
Accuracy is actually MOST important when strong feelings are involved. If we're talking about what time to eat lunch 'noonish' is good enough. If we're talking about about how many people died in a tragedy exact numbers help prevent misinformation, hyperbole, and panic from driving everyone into a frenzy.
I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world.
This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998!
0 - https://link.amazon/B0bh3AKaw
The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it.
When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry.
We don't need to tax them to make up a shortfall; we need to tax them to remove their power to distort government in their favor.
Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre.
If you tried to ban all of the known strategies they would just come up with new ones. That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax.
Of course for the long term it would be better to replace traditional shares with time limited ones that give you a percentage of profits for 5 years but no voting rights. Power stays with workers and no one gets unlimited returns on a one time investment. And enforce pay equality where no one can get more than 20x median total comp. But I think that's too radical to pass anywhere today.
The problem with this is that is a good reason we don't tax unrealized gains. Yes, there are people using this as a loophole. But if you tax this, everytime home value goes up, there is a huge wave of bigger tax bills for every home owner and business owner. Which would crash the housing market overnight and probably kill 90% of the job creation in the economy. I'm sure you could make some carve outs for it, but if you do that, you probably won't collect much in tax revenue.
The biggest thing you don't seem to understand is that there is an economic concept called the Laffer curve. It relates tax rates to the total amount of tax a government takes in. And we are already at or near that tax rate. Increase taxes and the government won't take in more revenue. Growing the economy, that increases government tax revenue. But increasing tax rates past the optimum rate DECREASES not increases the tax revenue. Even ignoring the increased rates of tax avoidance, it constricts economic growth which reduces the employment tax revenue.
Basically, you can't tax your way to pay for your desired programs. Either allocate the budget you have or cancel the programs.
PS 1/2 of the federal budget is social spending, 1/6th is military (1/4 of which is the VA), 1/6 is interest on the debt and 1/6 is everything else the government does.
https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT0...
You don't have to rely on your domestic media for international coverage. Especially with machine translation being so good these days, you can get your international coverage directly from the outlets abroad.
Edit wonder what the verdict will eventually be, he certainly saw the turbulence back then.
We have to change the system somehow so that independent investigative journalism is either funded without compromising its independence (this is difficult, as the recent bullshit coming out of the BBC is proving), or we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what).
Or we have to change our systems of democracy so that politicians cannot abuse them. Something like "no politician, or any members of their family, or their close friends, can ever be employed by any organisation that contracts with the government, or receives government funds, or benefits from government legislation". This is obviously going to be tricky.
Investigative journalism, done properly, takes time and money. And it produces long articles that can be challenging to read and involve the detail that backs the claim. In a clickbait world, this doesn't produce profit.
There's no functioning business model for it now, but we have built our democratic systems on the assumption that there is. Rich folks buying newspapers and then meddling with their editorial policy was always a problem, but with the editorial office completely dependent on the rich folks for their salaries it gets harder to resist.
twitter and facebook were supposed to fill this purpose. oh well
And then you can also get analysis from people who have dedicated their professional lives to studying the geopolitical, historical, and other issues involved in these conflicts. What does a journalist really bring to the picture here? So really we have more sources of news than ever before, and I think that's largely killed "the news" as an industry, because it's not really clear what their role is supposed to be anymore.
---
Robert Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post through its glory years til its purchase by Bezos, wrote a really excellent article about this some time back, 'The Bad News About the News.' [1] It was written back in 2014, but summed up what had happened and accurately predicted where things would be headed:
"[Companies] have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight."
[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...
That's the good side of the Internet (and smartphones) and what all of us early adopters always said the Internet will be great for. But then there is the other side of the coin: fake news, fake account, coordinated disinformation campaigns from foreign state actors, bad taste pranks etc. Some of those existed before with classic journalism as well but the scale at which things are now done was simply impossible before.
So, having journalism and journalists as a trusted source, and filter, that can already digest and filter out the fake from the truth are still needed. Or even more than before, I dare to say. The issue is that there are too many monetary incentives to not act like that.
In modern times I'll again take the glass half full side here. The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle. And even in the anonymous internet age, there's still the issue of reputation. It's perhaps more important than ever now a days because you can look at some entity's predictions or statements from one time period, see how it played out over the next e.g. 6 months, and see whether they were onto something, or blowing smoke.
I think this is why it's so hard for the government to drum up support for war now a days. They have no ability to control the narrative and so framing invading some country half way around the world as being 'defensive' is a narrative that usually collapses in rapid order. Even during Vietnam it started becoming clear that the narrative around the Gulf of Tonkin was dodgy, but it's a process that took years. By Iraq we were down to lies starting to be exposed within months. Now a days it'd probably take about 24 hours, to the point that with Iran didn't even bother with trying to manufacture consent and we saw the result of that a few days ago.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
And how are YOU expected to figure out the truth? Journalists should be akin to scientists and researcher: specialized in their field, with better connections and expertise and be able to follow a trail to reach ground truth. Now, can and will be they fooled. Absolutely, and there should be still some peer-review of what they publish.
Also this is an ideal scenario, and it's not what happening right now, or at least it happen only for a handful of media outlets all over the world. This model still support (and expect) having biased publications - I mean, it's just how we humans are - and you as a responsible citizen are still required to look at least at a couple of sources and form your own opinion.
I do agree with you that the truth tends to come out at some point because it follows the path of least resistance, but sometimes the lie can be so well written that it takes decades for the truth to come out.
That would require them to actually have studied that field in university in a masters degree (or PhD) like researchers have.
Very few journalists have. Some journalists are good, many are talking heads.
Again, this is an ideal scenario, I know, but IMO there is nothing that makes it technically impossible to achieve.
The 'citizen journalist' is at best a part time volunteer and at worst an astroturf'd contractor of a PR department.
And as the quip goes about volunteers -- willing to work for free, altruistic, and competent: pick two.
Occasionally you get delightful humans that combine all three, but they're needles in haystacks.
This is exactly why professional journalists, with employers who can restrict strong pressure, are important.
The truth about things which are widely observable tends to come out over time.
There are many, many things which are not widely observable.
You know the easiest way to do something secretly in government today?
Have an in-person meeting, gloss over it in online-posted minutes, then bury the evidence of it being done in the most detailed, voluminous reports.
Because finding that requires a butt in a seat through boring meetings and tracing / reconciling line items through reports.
And generally speaking, most people who aren't being paid aren't willing to do that for fun.
Journalism had a pretty strong code of conduct and drive to publish the facts. They couldn’t get it right all the time, but they had a stake in doing the best they could and not losing their reputation.
The truth of things doesn’t tend to come out in time. We know the truth about many things now, but after the window in which a change could be made was obfuscated and stopped.
Facts coming out when it is convenient to the people withholding them is not a success. If they come out at all.
The old system of journalism did a surprisingly good job, until people gave up on playing by the rules and decided to play by the trappings of journalism.
Reputation matters to the center and the left of the information ecosystem today. The right has connected its media to its politics entirely, to create a propaganda machine. Part of its routine is to state that journalism and the left are biased, and don’t want to deal with the truth, and then shoehorning their narrative into it.
https://www.tiktok.com/@darntootin85/video/71685843451401372...
I tried to find a source other than TikTok, c'est la vie.
Guess that didn't work out. I enjoyed reading their creative journalism before they went all the way in on dogmatic politics.
I payed for salon briefly in the late 90s. I used to have bets with how many words it would take Paglia to cite Sexual Personnae in literally every one of here articles.
Then it just turned into everything that is cringe about the anti intellectual left. Don’t get me wrong I’ve always been aligned with progressive politics for all 56 years of my life, but Salon just went off the deep end.
I’m imagining the shutdown was timed for right after midterm elections ( and not before ) so Salon could exercise influence through that event.
"Piss in the milk of the oligarchy".
https://youtube.com/@breakingpoints
https://web.archive.org/web/20120217111837/http://www.salon....
One day without warning, they deleted it.
Complete contempt for writers who were frankly far superior to any on staff. I was just a lurker, I've no personal investment beyond that.
I can't remember the last time since that that I visited the site with intent, that's its legacy for me.
It's either killing off forums completely, or "upgrading" to the point of being unrecognisable, or requiring everyone to make a new account and ... I can't even be bothered to write it.
At the time, I was angry at this as a user. But looking back, the forums would have declined anyway. With most people today using the internet from phones, and younger generations chiefly interested in video, there just isn't the same societal support for thoughtful long-form text typed from a computer keyboard. The surviving independent forums I'm on are greying out at best, or have shrunk to a few cantankerous or dotty people at worse.