Greed and corruption are factors in the poor quality of journalism, sure, but so is institutional risk aversity – CBS, ABC, and NBC have a lot to lose by calling it “torture” instead of “enhanced interrogation” because they are heavily regulated by the federal government and rely on good relationships with those in government in return for access in the first place. Conservatives are fond of saying that media has a liberal bias, but I tend to respond that media has an institutional bias and liberals just happen to have run our institutions for the last ~80 years.
But it’s also clear that journalistic outlets are firing reporters and turning to clickbait b/c they cannot rely on advertising and direct sales as much for revenue, and that this heavily degrades the quality of their output.
Now, i think people might be more willing to pay for it than @tlwest laments – I suspect that the real problems have a lot to do with trust and the difficulty of coordinating efforts without trust. For one, a lot of people are highly partisan and have difficulty trusting journalism that doesn’t support their worldview. Others believe that journalists should “tell both sides of the story” even when one side is demonstrably false (or at least exceedingly unlikely).
The result is that people can’t coordinate on any one small group of people who they trust to report without a bias (or, in some cases, with the correct bias). No one can afford to pay their own reporter out of pocket, and doing so would probably create some pretty gnarly conflicts of interest anyway.
(1) There never was a golden age.
(2) Everybody wants everything for free (including me!)
(3) The problem is always greed and corruption, and always has been. There’s nothing new here.
The main difference is now that funding for news gathering has dried up, it’s almost commercially impossible to provide alternatives. News gathering can pretty much only survive by recycling single teams over a multitude of media which means the chains not only have an advantage (they always did), but now single publications are almost not viable.
And I’m not blaming “people these days” - there’s a pretty compelling story that newspapers and news gathering itself is an almost accidental outcome of trying to sell ads. It’s simply that technology has taken apart that accidental partnership that made news gathering commercially viable.
Okay, now you’re just being level header and rational.
One trend that I do find encouraging (and I’ve tossed a few dollars at) is some newspapers have a subscription to long-form journalism. Basically, when their reporters had a lot more to say about a subject than would fit into a typical article, they could write a much larger article that would get some editing, etc. and that would be made available.
My feeling is that this is more for the journalists than the paper, but I quite liked the idea.
You still get the biases of the newspaper, of course, but you get depth to some stories that you’d never get outside of the magazine world. (And while I’m willing to throw $40/month at a newspaper, that’s getting pretty close to my media budget - adding a bunch of magazines is more than I am willing to handle.)
