[joebuckwilliams]

Agree there’s no quick tech fix to the journalism industry’s problems. But let’s be real - most of the actual journalists in newsrooms know that it’s all about community - that’s how we report stories. The business leaders are the ones who are totally disconnected from the value of journalism, and are also perhaps not coincidentally the ones who’ve jumped on every tech-platform-driven distribution model of the last 15 years - increasingly shittier ad units and user-tracking, SEO-optimized clickbait and formatting nonsense, short-form video, now AI. None of it benefits readers. None of it builds loyalty.

[jakeydus]

Yeah, well said. Journalism and news is tough because at its core it's a public good, but all of the usual levers we have in modern society for funding and supporting public goods introduce all sorts of other problems. If it's only a voluntary paid service, you limit the reach of the information. If you make it free to access by taking money from advertisers, you introduce conflicts of interest with corporations that journalists might otherwise report on. If you make it state-sponsored, you introduce conflicts of interest with governments that journalists might otherwise report on. Journalists working for free is not right, either.

Obviously journalistic integrity is a real thing and I choose to believe that the vast majority of journalists are out there to report the stories as they are and make information available that otherwise would not be. I do not have the same confidence in the business leaders, like you said. Look no further than Jeff Bezos's WaPo.

I'm not sure what the solutions could be.

[jun_lung]

Reminds me a lot of the book Manufacturing Consent, where it breaks down the split between 'journalism' and 'propaganda'. As long as there is a monetary incentive to emphasize certain things and ignore others, it will always ultimately be a form of propaganda.

[nickff]

Money isn’t the only pressure which influences journalism. Access (and exclusion) is a huge pressure on sports, celebrity, and political journalism. A desire for popularity/notoriety cause sensationalism. There are countless other influences which confuse (or corrupt) the nobility of the profession.

[Analemma_]

I think Manufacturing Consent is a deeply outdated book. It was fine for the 80s, but if you use it as your source for how the media works today you're going to reach silly conclusions and see outcomes you can't account for.

The biggest problem with it is that distribution costs for media are now zero, so it's easy to "start your own" and it's easy for audiences to switch away from outlets which don't pander to them to ones which do. The market pressure to pander to your audience and never contradict them is massive, which is a dynamic Chomsky never once mentions, because for him the manipulation always flows from the media to the consumer, even though today it's just as often the reverse.

Here's a good example of how outdated the book is: right after the J6 riot, Rupert Murdoch tried to get Fox News to dump Trump completely. He also tried to get the American right all-in on supporting Ukraine. In both cases, Fox's audience furiously revolted, they switched to Newsmax and OANN in big numbers, and Fox had to back off (at which point their ratings recovered). Manufacturing Consent cannot explain this.

[MarkusQ]

Also, it's very hard to tell what the audience is organically rejecting from what various organizations (foreign or domestic) with a vested interest in the coverage are trying to suppress or what seemingly unrelated algorithmic processes are sidelining. There are so many feedback loops and their response time is now on the order of the descsion time that the people "calling the shots" are likely as in the dark as the rest of us.