[heavenlyblue]

Maybe we should all accept that nobody has to be a journalist (or content creator) and that most of journalism is actually pretty useless trash.

Nobody promised you to “this single mother had been making money from her living room for the past 10 years - click here to learn how to do that, too”

For example, you don’t need a human being dramatising the situation is a third-world country, you just need to learn a few new pieces of news from there. This is why I read newspapers - not for their opinion pieces.

[TheOtherHobbes]

And why does this apply to journalism and not other pretty useless trash like BTC or ad sales or stock price speculation or content marketing or most local and national politics or startups that only sell gourmet pet food?

The irony is that if someone pitched the old newspaper and print magazine model as a startup today - thought leaders, high quality fact-checked journalism, commercial independence but solid relationships with advertisers - it would be branded incredibly exciting and disruptive.

[theamk]

Of course this applies to all those things as well. And we even have very similar threads about other topics -- like "is SEO evil" or "should we adblock"

This post is about journalism though.

[pdpi]

"Trash" journalism pays for the deep investigative stuff, though.

[cafard]

Advertisement have always paid for most of journalism. If the equivalent of classified ads magically vanished from the internet, there would be a rebirth of small newspapers, and the big ones would become much healthier.

[pdpi]

Right, but ads only pay for journalism insofar as newspapers sell, and papers only sell insofar as readers are interested in buying.

[moron4hire]

With the number of newspapers closing every year, apparently trash journalism doesn't even pay for itself.