[revelation]

Soo.. can some of the older people around here tell me why this interview by a freelance writer for the Playboy is better and more comprehensive than everything I've read in a month? Just what exactly happened to journalism?

[elorant]

First of all Playboy been as controversial as it was invested a lot in interviews just to show that it wasn’t another porn magazine. They managed to take interviews from people who are generally considered inaccessible.

Second although Jobs was known to be whim back in 1985 he wasn’t as successful as it was when he died so my guess is that the interviewer wouldn’t have any problem to push him a bit and make the best out of an interview. Years later people seemed to be frightened of the idea asking him the wrong question.

Lastly, in 1985 Jobs was like thirty years younger than when he died. He would be burning to express his thoughts and his vision of the future. Plus he was still the underdog back then, there were some huge corporations around and Apple compared to them was nothing.

[graeme]

Playboy actually was serious about good writing, back in the day (so I hear, I'm not old enough to know from experience).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy

See the intro for a description of the short stories and interviews included in Playboy.

[nollidge]

You're using one cherry-picked article from 1985 as representative of all journalism of that era.

Nothing's happened to journalism, there's just lots more of it, so you have to do some work to get your filters in place.

[DanBC]

HN has many links to various forms of blogs. Some of those pretend to be journalistic, and might even have real trained experienced journalists doing the writing. But they use page views and clicks as metrics, and so link bait reigns. They want comments, and they use controversialist hyperbole to get those comments.

This is another reason I want micro-payments for any article I read - content producers will realise that I value good journalism enough to actually pay for it.

Longform is an excellent source of better journalism.