[pudo]

I don't really follow the "quality will save us" argument. It combines two very weak ideas into an even weaker one: the elitist news thing and the Britcannica argument.

The elitist reasoning goes like this: MSM are only reporting MJ death stories etc. and this low-quality populism has cost them their readership. If they were to start doing serious reporting, all the clever people would come back and pay for their services. Of course, that's BS. The current reporting is directly created to reach the biggest audience, and it does. It works. The elites may go away ... but that's just a few eccentrics, who cares?

The Britannica argument is that distributed groups on the internet can never produce anything that is nearly as good as the stuff that is produced by experts. This is certainly true for art, but for Britannica it simply didn't work out: Wikipedia did produce quality articles and content.

[ubernostrum]

Quality is not a sufficient characteristic, only a necessary one. And saying that people who want to make money need to offer a quality product or service does not imply that only large and powerful companies can provide quality products and services.

Also, I can't help noting the contradiction in your comment: you claim that "mainstream" news organizations are simply doing whatever will bring them the widest audience, with the implication that this is how one turns a profit. Yet it seems quite clear that those same organizations are not quite so financially sound.

[pudo]

There certainly are a lot of areas in which the model you propose has been and will continue to be extremely successful: providing a specific group of people - preferably domain experts of some sort - with the knowledge they need remains a business model. In a way, this is also what the 'hyperlocal' people are trying to do; everyone is an expert on their immediate neighborhood and thus information about that should have a great value to them.

But there's another side to news: it's also the glue for society and this part depends on not being targeted at any specific group but at the "mass" as a whole. That's the part mainstream news has been trying to serve. But now that eyeballs are only worth something if you know who they belong to, this model is collapsing. In my previous post, I wasn't trying to argue that what these organisations are doing is sustainable, but thus far it seems to be the only pattern we have to commercially serving the whole of society. This mechanism failing is the real problem, because it's a central part of our democracy and culture.

Also, the quality criteria in this area are only tangentially related to factors like "truth" and "depth of reporting". A lot of the emphasis, instead, is focussed on aspects of commonality and actuality. Yet, when people argue that "good reporting" is what we need, this is often not what they mean.