A big problem is that the product of "access journalism" is untrustworthy.

In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.

Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.

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thesumofall 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t know. Is a random YT channel more trustworthy considering their reliance on sponsorships? And once they do interviews, they face the same issue

I also just don’t see interviews being a big audience draw (at least for text-based news). It seems there are so many other, bigger problems than the issue of access: lack of revenues, lack of interest in quality journalism, …

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rectang 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not that the random YT channel is actually more trustworthy, but that it exposes the audience to adversarial perspectives which mainstream access journalists hide — thereby eroding the trust of young audiences for mainstream journalist outlets compared to previous generations for whom such adversarial perspectives were less available.

	▲	justonceokay an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I miss when Christopher Hitchens could get on CNN as a self-identified socialist and have 10 minute discussions /in good faith/ with callers who disagreed with him. Sometimes he would put us silly Americans in our place, sometimes (less often) he would end up looking the fool. And he kept doing it regularly for a decade. Imagine that happening today

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Barrin92 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.

sure because they're just making shit up. If you don't have access to a source you're by definition speculating. The fact that they can do it in an abrasive way or in attack mode is a performance of authenticity, not actual reporting. You believe them because they're "just like you".

It's the biggest curse of our time and emotional manipulation. Journalists sometimes have to navigate how they talk to people but a skilled reader can at least extract real information from it even if it requires reading between the lines. The Youtube 'reporters' add nothing, it's entertainment. They're popular to the extent that they reinterpret publicly available information in a way that confirms the biases of their audiences.

The journalist pays for access but the youtuber pays with audience capture, the difference is consumers of mainstream journalism are aware of it. Someone who reads an interview in the NYT with a mainstream politician know in advance that they'll have to be critical, 18 year old's watching youtube don't. Youtubers are infinitely more deferential to their audience than a journalist is ever going to be to an individual subject because the latter is professionally employed and the former is a cancelled subscription wave away from flipping burgers.

	▲	rectang 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Mainstream journalism can't compete its way out of its malaise by insisting on an "impartiality" that demands journalists lie by omission. Such journalism is utterly incapable of meeting the moment and opposing the innovative incrementalist autocracy of Orban, Ergogan, Putin, and others. Such feckless news organizations are destined to become tools of the state; perhaps that is in fact the smartest play for the profits of their ownership. Certainly Bezos seems to be taking WaPo down the path of collaborator, as are the Ellisons with CBS. The illusion-of-impartiality model has its loyalists, but this article is about the young news audiences who have have been lost. At least some of them have been lost, not to YouTube and influencers, but to other news outlets (left and right) who have embraced their own biases and adversarial perspectives. You call that a "performance of authenticity", but in the marketplace it has beaten a performance of impartiality which is at least as inauthentic.