[lotsofpulp]

Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?

[sb057]

That's part of the issue; there is no need for commercial first-hand accounts anymore. If someone on social media is talking about a news event and provides a video documenting their presence, that is about as verified and accurate as you can hope for.

[jandrese]

Which is incredibly susceptible to someone with an agenda who wants to spin an narrative and knows how to leverage social media.

It's tailor made for propaganda. Joe Schmoe who is actually there doesn't know how to inflate his likes and SEO his account. His voice gets drowned out by the people who are getting paid to push a particular viewpoint. There is no editor providing oversight. No ethics board. No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first.

[brokenkebab]

No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first.

And that's exactly how news industry worked always, since invention of press (actually even before, though it wasn't industry back then).

[CM30]

You're being downvoted, but to a large extent, you're probably right here. For many topics journalists used to cover, you genuinely don't need them any more, since enthusiasts posting Patreon/donation funded content is at least as good in terms of quality. Tech, games, TV, music, sports, celebrity gossip, all of them can be covered just as well or better by some random guy on YouTube or some online blog site.

And that in fact be another reason why the media as a whole is doing so poorly. In the old days, a fair few people read the papers for this stuff. Nowadays they can get the same information elsewhere, without the stories they're less interested in taking up space.

[lotsofpulp]

There absolutely is a need for multiple, verified, consistency and fact checked first hand accounts. One person on social media does not provide an objective and difficult to falsify viewpoint.

[emiliobumachar]

Deepfakes are getting more and more accessible...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake

[iagovar]

Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us!

I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.

[lotsofpulp]

The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.

[TeMPOraL]

Ultimately, both views are true. We do not "demand" it with regular market means, but it's important to remember that free markets tend to structurally favor incrementally cutting corners. Even assuming we've demanded good journalism in the past (which is doubtful), we'd still end up where we are. As for media self-inflicting it upon itself, well, they shouldn't have started cutting corners. But since "media" is really a lot of competing actors, "not cutting corners for short-term gain" was an impossible outcome anyway - the whole thing has dynamics of a Prisoner's dilemma.

My conclusion is that it's less about demanding - the way we fund news, i.e. open and competitive market, is structurally unable to support good journalism. Usually problems like these are solved by governments setting standards and giving funding, but journalism is a special case (it's perceived by many as protection against government overreach), so with that option out, I have no idea how to even begin solving it.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Maybe not, but it's still a problem.

Of course it's still a problem. The point is that it's actually a much bigger problem than you implied. People blame the media like it's all just down to some greedy jerks making malicious decisions, and if only we could replace them with someone with integrity, everything would be okay.

The fact is that we've created an environment where it's nearly impossible for honest, non-sensationalized news to exist. Putting all the blame on the media is like blaming a starving man for stealing bread. They're culpable, certainly, but you're missing the root cause.