| ▲ | zmgsabst an hour ago | |
Those roles seem to be diverging: - crowdsourced data, eg, photos of airplane crashes - people who live in an area start vlogs - independent correspondents travel there to interview, eg Ukraine or Israel We see that our best war reporting comes from analyst groups who ingest that data from the “firehose” of social media. Sometimes at a few levels, eg, in Ukraine the best coverage is people who compare the work of multiple groups mapping social media reports of combat. You have on top of that punditry about what various movements mean for the war. So we don’t have “journalist”: - we have raw data (eg, photos) - we have first hand accounts, self-reported - we have interviewers (of a few kinds) - we have analysts who compile the above into meaningful intelligence - we have anchors and pundits who report on the above to tell us narratives The fundamental change is that what used to be several roles within a new agency are now independent contractors online. But that was always the case in secret — eg, many interviewers were contracted talent. We’re just seeing the pieces explicitly and without centralized editorial control. So I tend not to catastrophize as much, because this to me is what the internet always does: - route information flows around censorship - disintermediate consumers from producers when the middle layer provides a net negative As always in business, evolve or die. And traditional media has the same problem you outline: - not entertaining enough for the celebrity gossip crowd - too slow and compromised by institutional biases for the analyst crowd, eg, compare WillyOAM coverage of Ukraine to NYT coverage | ||