[juniper_strong]

I've stopped caring about institutions' reputations because I don't need them to gatekeep for me anymore.

If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to the Economist, FT, or the WSJ, all of which are great, all of which I grew up reading.

But I think I'm done with their gatekeeping now, I don't need it.

WaPo and NYT are trash and that was made nakedly obvious in 2016. It's more blatant now than it was then, but I guess if you didn't notice it then, you won't notice it now.

[tremon]

Ok, so what are your experts on housing policy? On agrarian policy? On international trade? On Newfoundland state politics? On medicine?

The number of areas where you can personally vet your experts is very small. For the rest, you must either choose to be uninformed or you can choose an organization to vet those experts for you. Trust is transitive.

[michael1999]

This may be true in general. But the these particular. organizations have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy. So now what? Trusting known liars is a foolish path.

[nojito]

Those are opinion writers not journalists.

It’s a sad state of affairs when people confuse the two.

[bart_spoon]

You’ve been downvoted but I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s lots of debate in these comments about how journalism is dying due to various monetization schemes, organization and lower dynamics, etc. But I personally think the issue is that we, as news consumers, are becoming lazier and are simply looking for someone to tell us what to think, rather than a comparatively dry report on the facts that then requires the reader to make do their own analysis. Opinion articles seem to be what dominates traditional media outlets like the NYT and WP, while 24 hour news networks don’t even label it as opinion, they just bring on pundits to comment on every single thing that happens.

Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened. Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the internet has accelerated and further enabled it to the point where it feels like journalism as an institution is collapsing.

[tremon]

Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened

And on the other hand, it's about reporting what might happen. What I'm seeing around me is that "news reporting" is more often than not speculation about tomorrow's events, rather than reporting about today's events. Maybe it's for the same reason, reporters feel that today's events have already been covered to death because of the hype news cycle, so they turn to speculation rather than confirmation and contextualization?

[dragonwriter]

> Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened.

No, it hasn't become any more about that than it has been for centuries. How it's changed within the recent past is it's become more diverse in the ideological slant of outlets, so every major outlet isn't telling you the same thing to think about what happened, regardless of slight divergences in the information they select to include about what actually happened. So, more of the difference in outlets is on narrative/spin than fact details. This makes the spin more noticeable.

[ece]

For general news, I would still prefer the common touchstone, and diversity of an Economist, FT, Post or NYT. Each of these papers has their weak and strong points (ie. some have covered tech better than others).

In more specialized fields, sure nothing beats an expert.