My god, this is scathing, sad, and hilarious and fucking depressing all in one brilliant stroke. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-14-2013/investigating-investigative-journalism
Journalism is done, period. As it happens, I have some perspective on this, having done the web writing thing and also being friends with many journalists who are turning into full-time alcoholics. The collapse of journalism is a long-running problem in general, tied primarily to the lack of willingness of people to actually pay for journalism in whatever form (subscriptions, advertising, tithing to the Church of Frop, whatever). - Competitive newspaper markets are a thing of the past in almost every city. Once competition died there was no need to spend money on quality reporting. People stopped buying newspapers in general so advertising dried up and print news has been in a death spiral ever since. - Traditional newspaper enterprises that changed ownership to include those in charge with forward-thinking notions such as, the Internet is going to subsume print as a medium if we don't get ahead of that game and use print as a supplement to the web instead of the other way around. They then forgot that the web was actually harder to monetize than print. Whoopsie. - Far too many print media outlets are owned by really, really old people who don't want to reinvest if there's a chance to cash out before they die. - Television news has dropped beyond lowest common denominator into either tinfoil hat conspiracy or who's Kim Kardashian sleeping with today territory, depending on which channel you watch. - Internet news has no standards of ethics or expectation of actual journalism. See: Drudge, Breitbart, Daily Kos, etc... - Localized advertising on the Internet is still not something that's done very well, meaning that local business loses out on a targeted local audience that reads and cares about products such as local car sales and other retail. This means that advertising on the Internet is even more useless than everywhere else. - Lobbying groups have figured out that it's fairly cost effective to seed media with advocacy "journalism". See: the entire climate change 'controversy'. - Lunatics and loudmouths like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones are much better at building audiences that like their worldviews reflected back at them. - New enterprises that aim to make newsgathering a nonprofit public service instead of a for-profit business such as the Texas Tribune are too slow in filling the gap. - The combination of all of the above has made news gathering an endangered species, where even the marquee news brands are becoming worthless. The Washington Post is almost a joke now compared to ten years ago in terms of reporting. The New York Times is going through another round of layoffs as I write this. - The key problem is that no one really cares. Given all that, expecting actual journalism is kind of like asking your puppy to sing Aida in the original Italian.
Excellent and depressing summary, Lum. I'm not sure why this was thread was posted in the Santorum, though.
Maybe 5 years ago the local paper came to our college and other colleges in the area for ideas on how to make itself relevant. The local paper is owned by the Boston Globe, which, in turn, is owned by the New York Times. So the Worcester Telegram and Gazette was going to be a test bed of how a local paper could be revivified for the 21st century. We had a bunch of meetings. It was pretty much assumed that print was dead and we were looking at new ways to get people to go to their website. I threw out a bunch of ideas for reorganizing the website with overlays so they weren't even committed to the new ideas. They still got to keep their reporting, and even the old way of organizing stories, these would just be new ways to present things that people could choose. If one of them became really popular, voila! Go with that one. After all this brainstorming, they ended up going with a one-year study/survey to ask the community how to change. I asked them to contact me once they were ready to make stuff and try stuff. They never did.
Having grown up as someone with journalists as her idols and heroes, watching the death spiral of american journalism has been unspeakably depressing. When I was 15, I knew what I was going to do with my life - I was going to get my degree, and then I was going to be a reporter! I worked at the school newspaper, and got my first job writing for a professional outlet when I was something like 17 years old. What's happened since then has utterly broken my heart, just straight up torn it out of my chest. Lum's list doesn't even get to the horrifying problems with media consolidation - in many, if not most, markets, every major news outlet is owned by the same conglomerate. At first, stories that were potentially damaging to the owners got spiked - now, they never get written at all. People know the score, and don't make waves. The slow slide into acceptance of the new godawful status quo has been one of the most depressing parts of the last two decades. I say one of, because the effect that the degeneration of journalism has had on our democracy is even worse. There was a reason politicians carefully dismantled the legal protections surrounding news - the fairness doctrine, equal time requirements, prohibitions against monopolization of all the news organs in a market - and they've reaped major dividends. When facts no longer exist, and every story starts out as the 'he said / she said' of dueling opinions, you can get away with nearly anything. There's no one left to hold anyone accountable. And that's the most depressing goddamned thing of all. And now, I think I need a drink.
I'm gonna go find myself a length of rope and a sturdy crossbeam. Thanks, Lum and quatoria! More despressing numbers, illustrated!
That's the truth of it. And it doesn't even start touching the greatly enhanced potential for collusion, when so few people are in control of so much.
As someone who used to work on a newspaper, I'll have to disagree. It's not that bad... Ah fuckit. You're right. It is. Just one of the reasons I left.
I was headed down the path to become a reporter after college in 2002, but quickly turned to the much more lucrative career of nonprofit donor database management/poetry.
Yeah that's what I thought. You can leave out the "technically," because being a minority partner in a business venture with another company is nothing at all like owning that company. God damn it infographics! Will you never learn that you should have some infofactchecking along with your infoslickpresentation?
That's not necessarily the case. Do they get to vote all of their shares? What are the terms by which board members are elected, and who are those board members? It's entirely possible to have a minority partner running the show.
This makes sense as a hypothetical explanation of why NBC still shows up under the GE banner in that graphic. It makes no sense as an explanation of why Comcast does.
<3 <3 <3 Anyway this or that error aside, journalism is truly boned, at least US-wise. The conglomerations are part of the problem but only part. Same goes for the internet, the extra-divisive partisanship, etc. It's a perfect storm of crap. I hope someone figures out a way to save us sometime, because it's a serious, serious problem... but my hopes aren't exactly too high.
A fully government-funded national broadcaster, and government subsidies for any organisation that provides serious journalism, would do wonders. Relative to the value of the work, the cost would be tiny. Oh, right, but subsidies of anything = Stalin. My bad. Seriously though, the ABC costs Aussies 8c a day. I imagine Brits pay something similar for the BBC. It's madness that there's no real American equivalent. I mean, PBS is great and all, but it's not in a position to single-handedly take up the slack of the collapsing news business.
It's bad here as well. The company I work for started owning 1 newspaper in Sweden, and now own papers, cinemas, tv-stations and a few game companies all over the world - and with 10.000 employees we're still small fish. (My little corner is purely news-you-can-use, so we've always been commercial in nature). But more and more of our papers are either closing or being bought by international conglomerates. Some are still run by non-profit foundations and thus somewhat immune to commercial interference, but they still have to make a profit and numerous cut backs has hurt quality a lot. And our national television has been under political fire for ages and is more and more being run as a competition with the commercial stations for the lowest common denominator (but at least still manages some shows, that people in other countries praise... I haven't seen any of them yet). But their news coverage sucks.
That, and you get constant accusation that the broadcaster is in the government's pocket. I used to work for Channel News Asia, which is a regional news network for South East Asia. Part of it was subsidized by the government, which meant that coverage of government events was neutered. Partly due to the legacy fear of government reprisals, partly because we didn't want to bite the hand that fed us. Local events was always covered with a cautious hand, and almost always favoring the government narrative. Because, hell, I live in Singapore, which ranks about 135 in the press freedom index, making us the worse in terms of developed countries. To be honest though, in the time I was there, I rarely felt governmental interference in the work that I was doing, as I was on the international politics and economics desk. Most of the time. (I also left right before our 2010 elections, so there is that) But the worse part was that half the funding would be commercial, because the network was trying to gain more international exposure. Which meant a lot of our documentaries, and infortainment were sponsored by corporations. Cooking shows sponsored by Miele, Environmental shows sponsored by Green Asia or something. I don't remember. I do remember that for 3 weeks out of a month, I'll be on politics and economics news, producing editorial and research on gun-running in Indonesia, Nuclear Energy development in South Korea, or Politics in London. But once a month, I had to produce a reality cooking show. The reality cooking show got the prime time slot. I used to joke to anyone that accused us of being the government's lackeys that no, we actually weren't. We didn't sell our souls to our government, we sold it to the corporations for pocket change.
I don't know if I just have despair fatigue or what but I'm less depressed about this sort of thing than I am about other socio-political structural apocalypses (wealth/power inequality, political disengagement, a dearth of readership for investigative or any other sort of journalism, chicken-and-eggish though that may sound) In part there's the no-one-I-talk-about-current-affairs-with-watches-CNN factor. I appreciate that, yes, I actually lose out even when other people read the Sun or the NYPost (and that shitloads of people do) but are we assuming that these people would have tuned into the BBC World Service if only it weren't for media consolidation?
The thing is, though, Jason - the death of investigative journalism directly contributes to most of those other issues you talked about. A vital and aggressive fourth estate is absolutely key to the healthy functioning of a republic. Which is, indeed, one of the reasons why moneyed interests have worked since Nixon to dismantle and destroy that kind of journalism.
If anything I think I'm on the Lippman-was-right end of things in thinking that honest, professional idea synthesis is vital to the operation of representative democracy. And I don't underrate the extent to which movement conservatism bought itself a big hunk of the public discourse. I don't think moneyed interests made people want infotainment, though, or that they tricked people into being too cheap to pay for quality journalism once cable news and the internet brought them journa(ma)lism a la carte free of charge.
A pretty solid example of the failure of modern journalism when there is an axe to grind. A Most Peculiar Test Drive http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive You may have heard recently about an article written by John Broder from The New York Times that makes numerous claims about the performance of the Model S. We are upset by this article because it does not factually represent Tesla technology, which is designed and tested to operate well in both hot and cold climates. Indeed, our highest per capita sales are in Norway, where customers drive our cars during Arctic winters in permanent midnight, and in Switzerland, high among the snowy Alps. About half of all Tesla Roadster and Model S customers drive in temperatures well below freezing in winter. While no car is perfect, after extremely thorough testing, the Model S was declared to be the best new car in the world by the most discerning authorities in the automotive industry.To date, hundreds of journalists have test driven the Model S in every scenario you can imagine. The car has been driven through Death Valley (the hottest place on Earth) in the middle of summer and on a track of pure ice in a Minnesota winter. It has traveled over 600 miles in a day from the snowcapped peaks of Tahoe to Los Angeles, which made the very first use of the Supercharger network, and moreover by no lesser person than another reporter from The New York Times. Yet, somehow John Broder “discovered” a problem and was unavoidably left stranded on the road. Or was he?
Is this the new FOX News thread of fine journalism? Take a look at this fucking gem: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013...ter-meteorite-falls-in-russia-ural-mountains/ FOX's coverage on the meteor in Chelyabinsk. Seems all well and good, just a typical report with some commentary from a resident in Russia, two pictures of the event, no links to any of the videos since FOX still doesn't understand the internet. Then you get to the last line, a completely out of the blue comment by some idiot Russian "journalist" that, even though the author states makes incendiary comments, still gives him a quote to end the article in typical fear-based fashion, in case the diligent and intelligent FOX News reader ever forgot that Russia was our enemy. Fucking pathetic.
Yeah, there's a whole thread about it. Things aren't as clear cut as the rich luxury car maker and would like you to believe.
The Day in the Life of a Freelance Journo in 2013 tl;dr: You expect to be paid for writing? HAW HAW HAW
The Thayer thing is interesting; it speaks to the degree to which freelance journalism is dying. The Atlantic does maintain a staff of reporters, but the net result is they generate all their reporting internally; they simply don't pay freelancers for web content.
