[zpeti]

Journalists should have realised a long time ago that their opinions are a commodity, and they will destroy their entire industry by focusing on opinions and not on on-the-ground reporting. But they doubled down, and decided to be as opinionated as possible. Of course this was tempting, because emotional propaganda gets more clicks.

But I think there would still be a market for a 1990s BBC style on the ground, completely opinion free reporting, and someone could fill this niche because a lot of people WOULD actually pay for this. But it would take a big investment and it's a big risk.

[rgavuliak]

If no-one cared about opinions you would be fine with having just one newspaper that writes down the bare facts. The whole appeal of people paying for media is because they value the opinions on top of the facts that should ideally come from relevant experience/knowledge.

[HDThoreaun]

News publishers saw that they needed to differentiate to retain market share. If theyre just reporting news why wouldn't everyone just switch to the AP or reuters?

> But I think there would still be a market for a 1990s BBC style on the ground, completely opinion free reporting, and someone could fill this niche because a lot of people WOULD actually pay for this. But it would take a big investment and it's a big risk.

AP and reuters are still doing this today

[specialist]

"They"? Assuming you mean shareholders, publishers, editors. Not the rank & file journalists, right?

(I have no idea how to describe, categorize most (opinion) columnists. Vishy? Quislings? Judas goats? Gossip columnists?)

[iudqnolq]

The problem is that opinions are way cheaper.

Look at the article currently promoted at the top of Post opinion page: "Trump is off to a good start with an AI action plan" https://archive.is/ERCme

Regardless of what you think of the quality of that opinion, it took very little effort to make.

Compare the sources they used to the work it would take go out on the ground and do novel research:

- Their own news article about it (itself based on press releases and an off-the-record comment that obviously would have come from someone in the White House press office assigned to promote the press release)

- Their own past opinion pieces

- Reuters.com

- WhiteHouse.gov

- Online govt statistics

- CNN.com

- NeurIPS' blog

- Columbia Business School blog

- Matthew Yglesias' blog

- Greg Lukanioff's blog

I could have found those sources based on vague memories of tweets I've seen by following journalists on Bluesky and a few hours of googling. I suspect they did the same, except they used X instead.