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by Spivak 2509 days ago
The popularity of investigative journalism podcasts from NPR, Gimlet, ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting, etc. seem to disprove this theory.

Outside of a few exceptional pieces the typical content on print "news" sites is utter garbage. The pressure to have a bunch of different columns publishing multiple stories a day seems like it really drives the quality down. All the super cool long-form investigative journalism gets totally buried by "stories" or "updates" that are basically just a headline and a sentence or two of actual content.
2 comments
sumedh 2509 days ago
> The popularity of investigative journalism

Pretty sure sites like buzzfeed and other tabloid news would more popular than the sites which you mentioned.

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Spivak 2509 days ago
So? Tabloids have always been popular because they're entertaining. Movies are probably more popular than news too.

And BuzzFeed is a no different than NYT it WaPo at the macro scale. They just have a different idea about what the filler content should look like. Print news is really behind and have been fruitlessly playing catch-up due to a prestigious culture that holds reporting the most boring least relevant news as the highest ideal. The paper should be pushing a handful of super in-depth issues and putting the 'reporting' straight in the archive for news nerds.

NYT's Wirecutter is the most interesting innovation from an old guard news org I've seen in a while and is a good candidate to be some of that filler -- relevant, useful, and sometimes genuinely interesting.

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manigandham 2509 days ago
The people who listen to those are the same people who would be reading it in the first place. They are a fraction of the population.
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Spivak 2509 days ago
Other than a few long-form pieces from investigative journalists that show up in my Twitter feed I would never actually read a newspaper. Print news 'content' is uninteresting, unimportant, irrelevant to anything that actually matters most of the time, just as sensationalist as the tabloids, mostly rage bait, and disempowering.

Podcasts where the format is they have to pick a single story to tell for the whole week gets this right. A daily book where on a typical day you can shread the whole thing without looking and not feel like you missed anything is only being kept alive by feaux prestige.

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