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by philipkglass
33 days ago
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This reminds me of the decline of the news industry. The best thing that traditional news publishers offered was in-depth investigative reporting. For example, 50 years ago: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1976 You can pick just about any year and find great work. The best newspaper work is hard to sell. Pure investigative reporting is too expensive and slow to keep a newspaper in business by itself. Newspapers relied on geographically limited oligopoly to sell a lot of other cheap page-filler at good margins: weather forecasts, sports scores, political opinions, comics, classified ads, movie schedules... People who just wanted to read the latest Calvin and Hobbes strip were inadvertently, benevolently financing the investigative reporting that their area's newspapers used to support, even if they never actually read those stories. When the Web un-bundled it all, everything but the investigative reporting could be done better and/or less expensively by non-news organizations. News junkies who really care about hard hitting news aren't numerous enough to keep funding the investigative reporting. (And even if they were, most metro areas don't have enough latent scandals to keep newspapers printing regular editions of investigative exposés alone.) |
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In media it seems to be an immediate race to the bottom that converges on dopamine generating chum and slop. A bottomless TikTok-style infinite scroll feed of mindless shit is the ideal form of profitable media.
Good art, in depth investigative reporting done in a disciplined fact based way, those kinds of things are expensive and time consuming to make and don’t tend to sell broadly. It’s not because people don’t want them. It’s because people don’t like paying for something intangible. People will spend $25 in Starbucks for a coffee and a snack but dissolve into rage at paying that for an album, book, or movie, even though those deliver a lot more and cost a lot more to make.