Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.

I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?

Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.

If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?

>But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?

NYTimes Revenue - $2.9B Daily Mail Group - £1.1Bn

Getting them/advertisers to pay isn't a problem!

Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.

That deserves some pushback. It's commonly, and more frequently, the case that information is available online; people streaming on the ground right where you want video. It's possible to cultivate online relationships with people nearly everywhere on the planet with people that can serve as a source, or interface with the local people for you.

Good journalism required effort. It used to be really expensive to get news and reporting from around the world, and now it's ubiquitous and nearly free to get news from everywhere.

The hard part about good journalism is critical thinking, and identifying fact, and untangling the thread of truth from the overwhelming flood of information available on nearly every topic. Throw in the motivated bias of modern "style" guides, the politically and ideologically biased influences that govern framing, pacing, which stories get covered and how, thematic and editorial impositions, and it's going to be more or less impossible to do anything resembling "good" journalism in any modern incarnation of the former journalistic institutions.

You can get live streams from nearly anywhere on the planet even during murderously hot conflict. During the middle of Iran's crackdown we were still getting videos from citizens daily, as well as seeing Iranian soldiers videos and the like.

Journalism is a product. It's not a business of itself. The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity. The writing will never be as tangibly valuable on a consistent basis to any of the advertisers.

The value of superb writing and journalism with integrity and a significant story is the perception of institutional integrity, and thereby becoming a better outlet for advertising (and/or manipulation.)

Throw in the fact that every strictly written word platform is in direct competition for time and eyeballs with the likes of TikTok and Twitter, Netflix, Prime, and all the other algorithm optimized timesinks, and the effective marginal value of even the absolute best of the best writing falls to nearly zero.

If all I'm going to get is biased, skewed, ideologically motivated, politically or commercially manipulative narratives, then I'm not only not going to pay, I won't even pirate. I'll find some talking head that does the tedious job of figuring out how things work, de-censors, untangles the manipulative elements, and presents a reasonable facsimile of facts on the ground.

All those talking heads do it for free, and with ad blockers, I'm consuming the video stream resources without contributing to any of the overt commercial mechanisms in play.

The advent of AI also means that I can synthesize, filter, model, and report on any given topic with validated sources and pull in all of the best the internet has to offer.

The era of high paid Pulitzer prize writers and journalists is effectively over, and the only way legacy institutions are going to get people to pay is by tricking them into thinking that value exists where there is, in fact, none.

There's news for entertainment, and news for making informed decisions. I suppose in a healthy democracy, it would be in the people's best interest to have unbiased and thoroughly investigated the news available so voters can make the best decision for themselves and the country. It wouldn't be profitable so it would have to be publicly funded like PBS News, BBC, CBC. And, well, it was good while it lasted but politicians seem hell bent on demonizing anything for the public good.