[zzalpha]

Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding.

You are aware that content generation isn't, in fact, a technological problem, right?

You still need folks to write the copy, edit, research and fact check, moderate discussion forums, etc.

Yes, the cost of the actual physical act of publishing copy has gotten cheaper. But high quality journalism costs money. That's unavoidable.

I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere.

I hate to break it to you, but: this was caused by the internet. Two major effects are at play. First, yup, it's a lot cheaper to publish complete drek, hence the Gawkers of the world. This has caused those organizations that actually invested in content generation to have to cut costs (ask any news agency in the world... the investigative journalist is a dying breed, to everyone's detriment). The result is lower and lower quality journalism as investigation, fact checking, and so forth, is thrown out the window.

This is exactly like folks who would complain about the incompetence of government while trying to financially strangle it. And then, when that underfunded government isn't able to react to some disaster or adequately execute some social program, they use that as further evidence that government must be slashed ("look, government is so competent, yuk yuk yuk!"), while conveniently downplaying the fact that they caused the problem in the first place.

Quality journalism is dying because no one will pay for content. And no one will pay for content because of the perceived low quality of journalism. Repeat ad nauseum.

[VLM]

I don't disagree with anything you write in detail, in fact I think we agree that due to a massive mismatch in supply and demand, until about 99% of existing journalism is culled, nobody is going to make any money in journalism.

Maybe a good analogy is the village blacksmith is hurt and angry that he hung up advertisements on his shop wall, but nobody looks at them, and they're all going to be really sorry when there's nowhere left to put new horseshoes on because posting the spam was the only thing keeping the lights on in his shop. Meanwhile the general population drives by his shop in their cars not looking at his ads, and doesn't really care about horseshoes anyway beyond a general knowledge that everyone knows that everyone knows that horseshoes are really important culturally and a vital part of life in and of themselves, although individually no one actually likes it and no one is willing to pay for it.

And my point is something like if you "need" something horseshoe shaped for crafty project or whatever, now a days you download a .scad from thingiverse, run it thru openscad, run the .stl thru curaengine to get a .gcode, then feed the .gcode to octopi on your printer and pick up your shoe in a couple hours at a cost of about fifty cents of filament. I mean, sure, building a village size blacksmith shop to get my horseshoe would be difficult and expensive, but its unnecessary and practically no one wants horseshoes, so I'm not seeing much of a problem.

[zzalpha]

And my point is something like if you "need" something horseshoe shaped for crafty project or whatever, now a days you download a .scad from thingiverse, run it thru openscad, run the .stl thru curaengine to get a .gcode, then feed the .gcode to octopi on your printer and pick up your shoe in a couple hours at a cost of about fifty cents of filament.

You can't possibly be equating the manufacture of a simple physical metal object, something easily automated, and arguably of little valuable in a modern setting, with the creation of high quality, researched journalism, intended to inform the public.

Can you?

I mean, if you think that metaphor is at all appropriate, you've completely missed the point. Of both my own post, and of journalism in general.

[saint_fiasco]

Don't just assert that.

I sincerely believe that most people overestimate (or pretend to overestimate) the value of journalism, and I'm curious about why you think it isn't so.

[zzalpha]

Alas, not to bring ageism into the discussion, but I'm gonna bet that probably just means you were born in, what, the late 90s or later?

Journalism serves a vital function. It's called the "fourth estate" for a reason, and should serve to enlighten the public on the goings on of the government and the world. Journalism is one of the forces counteracting government secrecy and surveillance. Hell, journalism is what brought the Snowden revelations to light to the general public.

To do that well, you need professional writers, researchers, and fact checkers. No, a casual blogger is not a journalist. Twitter is not journalism. Tumblr is not journalism. At best those are news. At worst, gossip.

Unfortunately, we now have an entire generation who doesn't understand what real journalism actually looks like. It's a damn shame... remember, journalism brought down Nixon and helped end the Vietnam war, among many other things. Real journalism can be immensely powerful as a medium.

It is not horseshoe manufacturing.

[VLM]

This is turning into a classic unrecognized theoretical vs practical argument. I propose:

"Journalism could, and historically did, serve a vital function."

Exactly like horseshoe manufacturing. Just not today.

There's space for us both to be correct, in theory journalism, much like western civilization, would be a great idea to try, or maybe we had it in the past, or it would be an interesting goal for the future even if it never existed in the past beyond a mythical ideal, etc. While at the same time, in practice, we can pretty much flush the existing stuff and not miss it. For some definition of "us", we have already decided to ignore it and are not missing it. Some of the percentage of the population stats are pretty dismal.

It IS possible to gain value by debating the "why". I think you're indirectly correct WRT age (although I am quite a bit older than your theory) in that rolling all of media (including journalism) into roughly five giant corporations did very little for the quality of the craft, and the fish rots from the head down.

[saint_fiasco]

>"Journalism could, and historically did, serve a vital function." Just not today.

I agree that journalism isn't serving that function today, but I think that function isn't being served well at all. Not enough cars, so to speak.

What can we do so that the next Snowden doesn't have to teach basic cryptography to some out of touch horseshoe makers?

[saint_fiasco]

Could twitter and random blogs have stopped Vietnam and Nixon too, if they had existed back then?

And if there is something unique to journalists that make them more proficient at stopping presidents and wars, why couldn't they stop the Iraq war?

Because the powers that be coopted that power. I read the "journalists" in the early 21st century and it was depressing.

Then again, the independent bloggers and twitters have also been rendered ineffective and powerless. Nothing much came from Occupy and the Arab Spring, fur example.

We need something different.

[zzalpha]

> Could twitter and random blogs have stopped Vietnam and Nixon too, if they had existed back then?

Go read about Watergate and get back to me (though, ironically, to do that you would need to read the works of investigative journalists...).

Today, the equivalent to Deep Throat might be Snowden, and that, too, required journalists like those from The Guardian to get the story out. That kind of journalism requires resources to research, travel, for legal costs associated with protecting sources, etc.

Regarding Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers would never have been published if the Times hadn't spent their own money going to court to defend their right to publish them.

So no, I don't believe twitter or random blogs have the power of the fourth estate.

> And if there is something unique to journalists that make them more proficient at stopping presidents and wars, why couldn't they stop the Iraq war?

That's a deeply complicated topic.

First, it's worth noting journalists never stopped Vietnam from starting. But as the war was waged, journalism played a role in turning public opinion against the war after it had started, thus hastening its end.

So, with that said, journalists actually played a very similar role vis a vis the Iraq war.

Now, I do believe they were less effective than in the past, but I actually believe that's exactly on point, here: that period is the same time when journalism began to struggle in the face of the ascendance of the Internet.

Which brings me right back to my very original point: Quality journalism is dying because no one will pay for content. And no one will pay for content because of the perceived low quality of journalism. Repeat ad nauseum.

Your mistake is in believing quality journalism never existed, but that's only because of your limited perspective, having only seen the medium as it began its slow decline.

[WaltPurvis]

What the internet has done is remove scarcity from the equation (to a large degree). Prior to the internet, when all we had was magazines and newspapers, there was actual value in providing what you and the previous poster consider "low quality" journalism. If some of the articles in a tech magazine were little more than slightly reworded press releases, those articles still had value to me because I had no other way (i.e., no medium) to ever see a press release. Similarly, when my local city newspaper published AP articles, that had value because that newspaper was the only place I could read those articles.

Now, however, press releases are published verbatim on countless sites, show up in google searches, etc., and AP articles are published on hundreds of sites, plus Google News, and so when any one particular news site publishes any of this stuff they are providing me with essentially zero value. (It makes me laugh when I click on a link at Google News and it takes me to some newspaper's web site like the Akron Beacon-Journal and then that newspaper throws up a paywall barrier preventing me from reading the article, yet I can see that the article is from Associated Press -- why would I pay money to access content that has nothing whatsoever to do specifically with Akron, that the Akron paper had no involvement in creating, when that content is freely available on a hundred other sites?)

The second way the internet has removed scarcity is the well-recognized fact that there's now far, far more high-quality content available than any human being could possibly read, and much of that is free. Which means a publisher better be offering something really spectacularly special and exclusive, because it makes no sense for me to pay money just to increase my list of stuff that I'll never have time to read. The New York Times is an example of a site I would pay for, if they charged a reasonable amount, instead of the completely ridiculous amount they're actually charging (several hundred dollars per year) -- there's so much other good stuff to read that I'm not going to suffer any pain from not being able to read a few NYT articles a week.

Of course, if there was a workable micropayment system in place, I'd probably pay for even mediocre content, I mean, if it was a penny or something to read an ephemeral opinion column about, say, a sports team I follow, I'd do that sometimes. I'd probably pay several dollars a month even for "low-quality" content, if it relieved me of intrusive craptastic ads, but I'd never pay a whole dollar to a single low-quality publisher, let alone the $5-20 per month that a lot of paywalled sites are trying to get.