[snicksnak]

It is amazing how journalists from mayor outlets and even institutions have so much contempt for independent substack journalists. They think it's beneath them because somehow only working for those outlets gives their reporting legitimacy and a form of entitlement to publish therefor they try to demonize substack and delegitimize its writers because they are independent. I saw it being labeled as "onlyfans for journalists". That's mostly coming from mediocre journalists who probably secretly envy substack writers for their huge profile.

Matt Taibbi recently wrote a piece about it that's worth reading https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack

[hntrader]

A lot of journalists have gone down a very tracked and credentialed path, having gone through prestigious institution after prestigious institution to end up in another prestigious institution.

To see someone bypass all the gatekeepers and yet become more of a success than them must really grind their gears.

[NotSammyHagar]

I doubt they care. I'd never hard of several of the "special substack successes". Who has time to go out searching the world for journalists who write things they like? I read newspapers in part because I don't want to search the world. I'm aware that no one is perfect. Just like I don't say cultivate the best people on twitter to follow. Who has so much time to waste on that? I'm sorry but all this comes across as people just searching for someone who tells them what they want to hear.

[hntrader]

  "I doubt they care"

Jealousy and envy is often what's behind bitterness and resentment

[JeremyNT]

I like both Taibbi and Greenwald on occasion, but what they do hardly qualifies as journalism.

Let's be honest, substack is just another editorial page. These guys don't have fact checkers and seldom do more than cursory research themselves. The ultimate goal is to generate clickbait. All of which places them... well, just about exactly at the same level of rigor as the editorial pages of the NYT or WSJ.

Editorials are a dime a dozen. They can be fun when they tell you what you want to hear, or introduce you to an interesting new concept, but they're purposefully held to a lesser standard than the news departments.

[brokenkebab]

I see here obvious misunderstanding of what fact-checking is in media biz. F-c is not some sort of tool, or pre-requisite for truth. Neither it's a part of imaginary high standard for reporting. It's a corporate defence line to reduce the risk of an unscrupulous, or just stupid employee damaging corporate brand. In one-man gig such as a Greenwald does, he himself cares for his reputation because unlike majority of journos employed by big media who are names in bylines covered by ad-propelled brand identity, he is brand himself, and cannot make an oopsie, and then find a job in other place after a short vacation.

[jfengel]

But it also means that his allegiance is to the brand, not the truth. People who like his brand are consuming it for the brand, and are not necessarily seeking out alternatives. Errors that would harm the reputation of an ordinary journalist don't do anything to a journalist who can simply reiterate false claims to build their brand.

I'm not speaking specifically of Greenwald here. Just pointing out that independence is no guarantee of trustworthiness, either. People love news that affirms them, regardless of the truth, and sometimes rigid, prominent rejection of the truth can be very good for the brand.

[brokenkebab]

There's a lot in your comment I can agree with, but it all sounds as if corporate media brands make journalists acquire allegiance to truth while small/personal brands do not. In real world both don't. Such allegiance as well as preference for truth from readers' side is rather rare thing in general, not because everybody's bad, but because group allegiance, and comfortable biases usually trump moral rules. Typical news business model is not about pursuit of truth, or guarding democracy. It's about catering to tastes of a particular audience. And all media - big or small - has a strong incentive to skew things to pleasure their readers (and let's not forget inciting tribal outrage which increases loyalty to a brand). This naturally at times leads to rigid, prominent rejection of truth. And fact-checking observably doesn't stop it - because it's not its function. No difference in this field between big, and personal brands in general.

[jfengel]

Oh, I'm certainly not defending corporate media brands. I have stopped reading the news entirely. In large part I've found that even proper news really isn't as important as it's presented[1]. Even before news media became a nightmare, most national and international news simply isn't relevant to me.

You can still get something a lot like the old, boring news from wire services. When I need it, that's where I go. But it's boring, so I don't keep up with it. Real news at that scale would be expected to be boring.

I should pay more attention to the local news, which has long had the same problem -- the motto was "if it bleeds, it leads". Local violent crime is at least a little relevant. But the important stuff is often even more boring: plans for a new park, a forthcoming road closure, a report from the school principal. Relevant and dull, just what I want.

There's still plenty of room for tribal garbage, but at least it's easier to put into perspective.

[1] I feel weird writing that in a rare period where the news actually contains actionable information -- though that's partly because it happened at a time when the government should have been giving me the information and I should have been able to trust it. But I'm setting aside pandemic as a rare case, hopefully to not be repeated soon.

[kyrra]

I'm not sure how much you've read WSJ editorial pages, but many of their pieces involve a lot of research. As a recent case (I forget the exact article), but I was listening to a podcast of a man that recently had a commentary piece in the WSJ opinion section, and as part of it he had interviewed around 20 people for the piece (talking with various state governors about their covid policies). Just because they don't dive deep into each interview, many of their pieces are backed up by lots of research.

[tensor]

I personally value opinion very little. For me, the quality of a news source is my primary concern, both in factual correctness and minimizing bias. With a collective such as traditional news organizations, at least historically they lived and died by their reputation for quality. Fact checkers finding a single poor article affected the reputation of everyone writing within that organization. This makes it much easier for consumers to figure out which institution to trust.

Now with the internet, anyone can publish. Unfortunately it has become infeasible to fact check every single person. Even fact checking one individual often doesn't pay off, you spend a ton of time checking them, only to get a very small stream of information.

This is the primary problem with self-publishing. Because of this I've pretty much given up on reading most self-published material. Unless the author comes from a well regarded institution or otherwise there is an easier way for me to judge accuracy I'm just not interested.

No doubt this viewpoint will offend most people here, but to me this is the biggest problem society now faces. Probably even more dangerous than pure opinion, is content that is mostly factually correct, but contains a small lie. This sort of biased content or intentional misinformation is both very hard to identify, and the very effective at propagating lies.

These days I mostly use academic journals, as peer review is at least some form of quality checking. I do also use a few select large news sources, though with less trust. I've given up on medium articles and similar.

[nradov]

Lack of fact checking on the Internet is a bigger problem than nuclear weapons or anthropogenic global change? I doubt it.

[snicksnak]

And who checks the fact checkers? Just 20 years ago the news media landscape was very different, the outlets had so much power, so much in fact, that they played a vital role in convincing the american public to go war. Totally unchecked. Now the lost their monopoly and therewith their power and they don't like it.

[wombatpm]

I would love an automated way to submit articles to googlish fact checker. Something that auto categorized opinion from facts and provided links to support fact classification from a user selected list of sources.

[tensor]

It is, because misinformation is the biggest factor in stopping humanity from addressing these big issues.

[jfengel]

There used to be a time when editorials were the insights of people who had spent decades in the news business. They could reasonably be thought to know more than the average person on the subject. A newspaper should offer facts, but it offers only the new facts, not the history needed to judge the facts. They just can't; there's too much. That's for textbooks.

Editorials were supposed to provide a leg up on that. They were journalists working in the field, who would often know even more information than appeared in textbooks. They would have spoken to all of the major players and knew not just what they'd said and done, but what their personalities were like.

It wasn't supposed to be a substitute for your own education and judgment. But it could provide a counterbalance to it. It puts perspective on what your own education and experience amount to. It provides a convenient checkpoint against Dunning-Krugerism.

Unfortunately, editorials no longer serve that function. Opinions aren't even a dime a dozen; they're a dollar per thousand impressions. Young journalists don't get the experience to become old journalists and then editors.

Which kinda leaves us stuck. Academic journals are great if you can read them, but they assume even more background than newspapers. They're the cutting edge of a field, written for others at the cutting edge of the field, and simply don't address anybody who isn't at least working towards a PhD.