[bloke_zero]

What I don't get in these conversations is why no one mentions the role of the editorial team?

Expecting even a great journalist to write consistently interesting and clear pieces on their own is like letting a musician record without a producer. It might be good for a while but the chances are a great producer is going to even out the output and make a tremendous difference in depth, quality and accessibility. To say nothing of checking the wilder excesses.

These discussions which focus on the stars ignore the team so necessary for consistent and readable articles. I suppose the lone genius idea has an inexorable fascination.

[gambler]

Most people don't understand what editors do. Or what they used to do. These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement. But when editors do their job properly, they are part quality control, part coordinators, part peer review. The notion that all of that is just a waste of time is quite misguided, since it's the lack of those exact things that caused modern corporate media to go to shit. But in the short tem fleeing traditional publications to something like Substack does make sense right now, precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic.

[iworshipfaangs2]

> These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement.

> ... precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic

Could you provide some evidence about what you mean? In these two sentences, you seem to be implying that there's some observable trend where editors have gone from:

1a. Not enforcing the political stance of their paper and 2a. Being indispensable to the writing process

to:

1b. Enforcing the political stance of their paper and 2b. Becoming adversarial to the writing process

This is very interesting. Could you provide some examples?

[gambler]

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

And not directly related, but relevant overall:

https://odysee.com/@AlisonMorrow:6/death-of-journalism-by-mo...

[iworshipfaangs2]

Thank you for taking the time to provide links! I read through the Weiss article, and I'd already read the Greenwald one. However I don't believe either can credibly used to point to any kind of historical trend.

The Weiss article isn't even about any local editorial change: the paper found someone to provide a contrarian voice; that contrarian met frequent disagreement with the editors; that contrarian resigned--regression to the mean.

The case of the Greenwald and Reality Winner is much worse. But at the end, it's just a case of an editorial board taking control of story, nothing historically unprecedented.

I've been politically conscious since 1996 or so, and I don't think I can ever recall a single time where editorial boards didn't work to push through the position of their publication. I think I became acutely aware of "position" in 2003, with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and Fox news, etc. But using the media to hype up war on false pretenses is a venerable tradition in the history of journalism, which, at least in the US, is a business and a political enterprise.

Everything I've described in the last paragraph is socially harmful, and I think it's very important to have underground media and alt media as a counterweight to the mainstream. But there is also a strong need for professional, organized journalism, and I'm sure it still exists in at least some pages the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc, and even local Tribunes throughout the country.

I don't think the proportion of quality fact checkers and editors has somehow degraded in the last x* years. The only things that I think have changed are the _widely-held perception_ that journalism is somehow terrible now, and the explosion of news being distributed in social media. The first is just standard tongue-clucking about the decline of democratic society; the second is about information being distributed at a totally new velocity and availability. I have no idea how the future will deal with that, the effect is only just beginning.

* I'm not sure over what time period your proposed decline is supposed to have taken place.

[gambler]

I provided examples of high-level resignations with detailed explanations as to their reasons. A famed founder of the paper leaves it because he's stopped from publishing a major election story. A decidedly left-wing opinion writer is attacked by peers as if she's some sort of right-wing extremist and decides to resign. Both say this sort of thing couldn't happen just a few years ago. If you claim that this was commonplace since 1996, where are your examples of such occurrences?

[iworshipfaangs2]

Sure, all of these are examples of journalists leaving for ideological or ethical disputes with their employer.

For her frustration with liberal bias: https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/03/sharyl-attkisso...

For a feeling that the paper is blocking his investigation: https://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/paul_watson_may_be_the.php

For disagreement about Israel: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/cnn-anchor-resigns-after-c...

For concerns about corporate interests: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...

For feeling that he cannot write about Sheldon Adelson: https://www.salon.com/2016/04/27/journalist_resigns_after_ba...

I didn’t go too far back, but heres one from 1998, for disagreement about revealing personal details: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-30-mn-27898...

[gebruikersnaam]

In addition to this: traditional media organizations provide a training space for new writers, journalists etc. You can argue that that strengthens the status quo, but Substack provides nothing to promote new talent.

[dcolkitt]

Isn’t escaping editorial teams exactly the reason that many migrated to Substack?

A big reason people are on the platform is because they want to read Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan or Matt Yglesias in a way that’s not filtered by their previous editorial teams.

[bloke_zero]

I take the point for sure, and escaping constraints can be valuable - but we must all be familiar with the 'great wo/man' syndrome where everything they say is right and doesn't need editing or even questioning...

[blackshaw]

Many of the top-paid Substack writers do use part of their revenue to pay an editor.

[iworshipfaangs2]

Surely Scott Alexander is not because lord of mercy is he verbose.

[smsm42]

If you're reading an article with a title "Much more than you ever wanted to know about..." then you can't claim you haven't been warned. For people that can't deal with it there's always twitter (and insane people that publish a full-size article as a thread of 285 tweets, God bless thread aggregators).

[iworshipfaangs2]

What about all the other articles, which are not titled "Much more than..."?

What about the individual paragraphs, with their unendurable periphrasis and opacity?

[blackshaw]

If the writing style bothers you that much then why do you read it?