| ▲ | legitster a day ago |
| The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. The vast majority of what was lost were "beat" reporters - foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus from regional publications, statehouse reporters, or regional specialty beats (science, law, etc). This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves. For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage. |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| > The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. [0] That was a scary number so I Googled it. You should always check scary numbers. It's misleading. It's true that newspaper newsroom jobs fell 57% (from roughly 71,000 to 31,000 jobs) over that period. However, newsroom employment across all mediums fell by only 26% (from 114,000 to 85,000). A lot of hose jobs went digital, they didn't just disappear. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsr... |
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| ▲ | maybewhenthesun 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The advent of internet and the notion that news should / could be 'free' has caused a steep decline in quality journalism worldwide, I think. I have some journalists (for a local newspaper) in my circle of friends and they all complain there's no 'newsroom' anymore for most (dutch) newspapers. All journalists now are supposed to 'self-redact' and their copy is just pasted into the newspaper without anybody else looking at it. Lots of 'journalists' are freelancers who just send in their piece. Even those often get published with minimal oversight. There just isn't enough money to have a redaction. Fact-checking is(or should be) done by the one writing the piece. So personal biases are hardly ever caught. Admitted, all these stories are for a small local newspaper with very tight budgets. But according to my friends it's the same everywhere when they speak to their friends, and even the big national newspapers here have very minimal supporting personnel. It's no wonder the world polarizes. | | |
| ▲ | mcculley 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would love to know what it would cost to subscribe to a newspaper that gets revenue only from subscribers and runs no ads. Is it so high that nobody tries? | | |
| ▲ | Abstract_Typist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | An "ad-free" subscription to The Guardian is $18 per month ($15 starter, students $10 a year). They aren't funded exclusively by subscribers because that would exclude a source of revenue that enables cheaper subscriptions. But you can have no ads for a reasonable premium. https://support.theguardian.com/us/contribute | |
| ▲ | freedomben 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would add another important caveat to this: no dark patterns in subscriptions (like call to cancel), and a reasonable price on the subscription. I would gladly pay for something like this | |
| ▲ | intended 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep. Professional journals can be a few 100s$ per year. So you could get quality journalism, it would just be for very few people compared to the masses. Historically, public/mass news services were dependent on adverts or classifieds to pay for their running. That business has been consumed by ad tech. YouTube has become a source for journalism now, but the viability of newspapers and local beats has reduced. |
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| ▲ | jacobolus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Your page has: > Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020. So, if we group digital publications with newspapers we are going from 78k to about 49k jobs, a drop of almost 40%. It would be interesting to see a finer grained breakdown by type of jobs. I would speculate that there was probably an even bigger decline in the number of journalists per se. The rest of the numbers you are quoting are mostly broadcast TV, with some radio and cable TV folks thrown in. My impression is that quite few of those jobs / stories are serious journalism. | |
| ▲ | hedora 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's down 81% since 2002: https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/new-local-journalist-index-... (Measured as local journalist equivalent per 100,000 people.) | |
| ▲ | lp92 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's still a huge loss. Now imagine if the tech jobs fell by 26%. You won't be saying it "only" fell by 26%. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yes, and I don't mean to downplay the scale of that human loss. Only to point out that the numbers (as stated) were misleading. Accuracy is actually MOST important when strong feelings are involved. If we're talking about what time to eat lunch 'noonish' is good enough. If we're talking about about how many people died in a tragedy exact numbers help prevent misinformation, hyperbole, and panic from driving everyone into a frenzy. |
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| ▲ | AbstractH24 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. [0] My reaction was a little different. I said "that's it? Only 60%?" | |
| ▲ | ulfw 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "digital" sadly nowadays means regurgitation of someone's Twitter "X" post |
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| ▲ | 10111001 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves. 1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"? 2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now. For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone). I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects. |
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| ▲ | legitster a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Let me rephrase it: "long before the decline of the open internet, and the rise of AI". I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source. | |
| ▲ | joe_the_user a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think the open Internet is often said to have begun declining with the rise of walled gardens, notably Facebook, 2010 or so. A further factor was Google's degeneration from relatively fair broker to (biased) "question answerer", with a notable step 2019-2020 but with earlier steps also. Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first. But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight. The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today. |
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| ▲ | somenameforme 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Another way of looking at it is that we've gained the biggest explosion in expert and first person coverage ever. In the golden era of news, newsrooms essentially had a monopoly on information. If you wanted to get information on e.g. the war in Korea or Vietnam you basically had to turn to the news, at least in the average case. Now if you want to read about e.g. Ukraine/Gaza/Iran/etc, you can read first person accounts from people on the ground, get imagery of things seconds after they happen, and so on. And then you can also get analysis from people who have dedicated their professional lives to studying the geopolitical, historical, and other issues involved in these conflicts. What does a journalist really bring to the picture here? So really we have more sources of news than ever before, and I think that's largely killed "the news" as an industry, because it's not really clear what their role is supposed to be anymore. --- Robert Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post through its glory years til its purchase by Bezos, wrote a really excellent article about this some time back, 'The Bad News About the News.' [1] It was written back in 2014, but summed up what had happened and accurately predicted where things would be headed: "[Companies] have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight." [1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-... |
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| ▲ | darkwater 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Now if you want to read about e.g. Ukraine/Gaza/Iran/etc, you can read first person accounts from people on the ground, get imagery of things seconds after they happen, and so on. That's the good side of the Internet (and smartphones) and what all of us early adopters always said the Internet will be great for.
But then there is the other side of the coin: fake news, fake account, coordinated disinformation campaigns from foreign state actors, bad taste pranks etc. Some of those existed before with classic journalism as well but the scale at which things are now done was simply impossible before. So, having journalism and journalists as a trusted source, and filter, that can already digest and filter out the fake from the truth are still needed. Or even more than before, I dare to say. The issue is that there are too many monetary incentives to not act like that. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | How do you expect journalists to be able to figure out the truth? And how do you not see them as a single point of failure? Let's take an example from the past. The Vietnam War was started because of a false flag. [1] This was a time when there was a much more adversarial relationship between the media and the government/intelligence agencies than there is today. But even in that context, they mostly unquestioningly reported the lie. Because how else could they have known? In modern times I'll again take the glass half full side here. The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle. And even in the anonymous internet age, there's still the issue of reputation. It's perhaps more important than ever now a days because you can look at some entity's predictions or statements from one time period, see how it played out over the next e.g. 6 months, and see whether they were onto something, or blowing smoke. I think this is why it's so hard for the government to drum up support for war now a days. They have no ability to control the narrative and so framing invading some country half way around the world as being 'defensive' is a narrative that usually collapses in rapid order. Even during Vietnam it started becoming clear that the narrative around the Gulf of Tonkin was dodgy, but it's a process that took years. By Iraq we were down to lies starting to be exposed within months. Now a days it'd probably take about 24 hours, to the point that with Iran didn't even bother with trying to manufacture consent and we saw the result of that a few days ago. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident | | |
| ▲ | darkwater 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > How do you expect journalists to be able to figure out the truth? And how are YOU expected to figure out the truth?
Journalists should be akin to scientists and researchers: specialized in their field, with better connections and expertise and be able to follow a trail to reach ground truth. Now, can and will be they fooled? Absolutely, and there should be still some peer-review of what they publish. Also this is an ideal scenario, and it's not what happening right now, or at least it happen only for a handful of media outlets all over the world. This model still support (and expect) having biased publications - I mean, it's just how we humans are - and you as a responsible citizen are still required to look at least at a couple of sources and form your own opinion. I do agree with you that the truth tends to come out at some point because it follows the path of least resistance, but sometimes the lie can be so well written that it takes decades for the truth to come out. | | |
| ▲ | silvestrov 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Journalists should be akin to scientists and researcher: specialized in their field That would require them to actually have studied that field in university in a masters degree (or PhD) like researchers have. Very few journalists have. Some journalists are good, many are talking heads. | | |
| ▲ | darkwater 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Have you studied a master degree in every field you read casual information about?
For hard science matters, sure, they should, or at very least be very connected to the field to have a very good understanding of it, critical thinking to smell out the bullshit revolutionary researches and a network of actual PhDs working on the field every day that can help them getting to the core of the topic.
Apply the same concept to all the other fields, even the not hard science ones, and you may end up with a web of news and information outlets that you can believe. Again, this is an ideal scenario, I know, but IMO there is nothing that makes it technically impossible to achieve. | |
| ▲ | freeone3000 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Journalism is, in fact, a university degree program. My journalist friend does indeed have an MFA in Journalism. This is not an unrealistic expectation if regular pay is on the other end. |
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| ▲ | bluebarbet 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's a superficially reasonable objection that elides the crucial detail: Modern journalism is a profession. It has standards of entry, an established mission (fact-finding, truth-seeking), and a code of ethics. We can choose to be cynical about those constraints, but the fact is that none of them apply to a random person on Youtube or Substack. | | |
| ▲ | ethbr1 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | This. Say what you want about the tenets of journalism, but at least it's an ethos. The 'citizen journalist' is at best a part time volunteer and at worst an astroturf'd contractor of a PR department. And as the quip goes about volunteers -- willing to work for free, altruistic, and competent: pick two. Occasionally you get delightful humans that combine all three, but they're needles in haystacks. |
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| ▲ | ethbr1 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle. This is exactly why professional journalists, with employers who can restrict strong pressure, are important. The truth about things which are widely observable tends to come out over time. There are many, many things which are not widely observable. You know the easiest way to do something secretly in government today? Have an in-person meeting, gloss over it in online-posted minutes, then bury the evidence of it being done in the most detailed, voluminous reports. Because finding that requires a butt in a seat through boring meetings and tracing / reconciling line items through reports. And generally speaking, most people who aren't being paid aren't willing to do that for fun. | |
| ▲ | intended 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Like they used to? Journalism had a pretty strong code of conduct and drive to publish the facts. They couldn’t get it right all the time, but they had a stake in doing the best they could and not losing their reputation. The truth of things doesn’t tend to come out in time. We know the truth about many things now, but after the window in which a change could be made was obfuscated and stopped. Facts coming out when it is convenient to the people withholding them is not a success. If they come out at all. The old system of journalism did a surprisingly good job, until people gave up on playing by the rules and decided to play by the trappings of journalism. Reputation matters to the center and the left of the information ecosystem today. The right has connected its media to its politics entirely, to create a propaganda machine. Part of its routine is to state that journalism and the left are biased, and don’t want to deal with the truth, and then shoehorning their narrative into it. |
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| ▲ | alexpotato a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world. This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998! 0 - https://link.amazon/B0bh3AKaw |
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| ▲ | marcus_holmes 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This matters. Our systems of democracy were formed when journalism could be counted on to hold politicians to account. This is no longer true. We have to change the system somehow so that independent investigative journalism is either funded without compromising its independence (this is difficult, as the recent bullshit coming out of the BBC is proving), or we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what). Or we have to change our systems of democracy so that politicians cannot abuse them. Something like "no politician, or any members of their family, or their close friends, can ever be employed by any organisation that contracts with the government, or receives government funds, or benefits from government legislation". This is obviously going to be tricky. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If anything newspapers over much of the past were even more partisan than today. | | |
| ▲ | marcus_holmes 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not the partisanship that's causing the problem, it's the business model. Investigative journalism, done properly, takes time and money. And it produces long articles that can be challenging to read and involve the detail that backs the claim. In a clickbait world, this doesn't produce profit. There's no functioning business model for it now, but we have built our democratic systems on the assumption that there is. Rich folks buying newspapers and then meddling with their editorial policy was always a problem, but with the editorial office completely dependent on the rich folks for their salaries it gets harder to resist. | |
| ▲ | nomel 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The most truth comes from adversarial systems, motivated to find flaws in the other. There's nothing inherently wrong with being partisan. The problem comes when people align themselves to a single news org that only shows one side. Having news orgs in the middle is great too, of course, but the motivation to not rock the boat might be greater. | | |
| ▲ | hunterpayne 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | In theory I agree. In practice, with journalism, different camps tend to create their own information bubbles and then they get filled with propaganda and copium. I'm not sure what the solution is, but there was a high point for journalism and we are well past it now. To call what some organization put out information is doing some heavy lifting these days. | | |
| ▲ | nomel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You need to go in with the perspective that it's all biased propaganda. Neutral news orgs have never been a reality. You look at multiple perspectives, and tease out reality from all the information, understanding that it's all biased. This has always been required. |
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| ▲ | nunez 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what). twitter and facebook were supposed to fill this purpose. oh well |
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| ▲ | coldtea a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >The vast majority of what was lost were "beat" reporters - foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus from regional publications, statehouse reporters, or regional specialty beats (science, law, etc). People doing actual useful news work, in other terms. |
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| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wish would stop using "journalist" and "reporter" interchangeably. Reporters are people who actually get out into the world, collect facts, collect opinions from real people (some of them experts at something, some of them not), try to actually see "newsworthy events" in person. Journalists write essays based on the work reporters do. I'm not saying I want less journalists, but I do want more reporters. | | |
| ▲ | bluebarbet 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The profession is journalism. Reporting is a form of journalism. Non-reporter journalists are not just pundits who pontificate. Analysis (based on someone else's reporting) is a form of journalism. Editing and sub-editing are forms of journalism. | |
| ▲ | epcoa 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Disagree, it’d be more accurate to say reporters are a subset of journalists. Reporters are journalists, journalists is just more general. | |
| ▲ | jameshart 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You might be thinking of ‘columnists’? |
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| ▲ | rdiddly 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "The vast majority of what was lost were journalists." Fixed it for both of you! (I'm joking, but then again, if demagogues can remove specifics to make statements punchier, why can't I?) |
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| ▲ | Analemma_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Salon has always been pure opinion/analysis pieces though, they never had a newsroom. They never had much of a moat beyond getting talented people to write thinkpieces for them, and the internet has just inflated the supply of thinkpieces to the point of 0 cost. |
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| ▲ | twoodfin a day ago | parent [-] | | There’s still a supply of opinion & analysis writing that people will pay for, but Salon and similar online publications got disintermediated for it by Substack. | | |
| ▲ | saimiam a day ago | parent [-] | | And not just Substack. Most people can get their celebrity news straight from that celebrity’s insta feed. Unless you’re TMZ breaking the juiciest news about celebrities, you can’t compete with that. Big newspapers early in the internet age tried explain why journalism was needed - to explain the story behind the story - and that was the correct move, imho. | | |
| ▲ | ricardobeat 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s not journalism anymore, is it? At what point does it become pure PR/propaganda if your news come directly from the subject? | |
| ▲ | skinfaxi 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah my thoughts went to Matt Levine, who is so popular you can subscribe directly to his posts for free without paying for a Bloomberg subscription. |
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| ▲ | eru 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. You don't have to rely on your domestic media for international coverage. Especially with machine translation being so good these days, you can get your international coverage directly from the outlets abroad. |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was a daily newspaper reader in a midsized market for many years. The paper shrank in late 90s, early 2000s and stabilized around 2014. COVID killed the paper paper, I don't even know where you get it now. Deregulation and consolidation started hurting the business in the 90s, the pure margin classified business started taking body blows ~2002 here (Craigslist wasn't everywhere) and salaries started tanking. Then the smart reporters flipped to PR. The smartphone was the death blow as the sweet business of being an ad-delivery courier started to erode. Many people subscribed to the Thursday/Sunday paper to get the supermarket flyer and retail ads/coupons. |
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| ▲ | paulpauper a day ago | parent | next [-] | | But there is tons of newspapers still? And online publications? It's not like there is a shortage of news sites | | |
| ▲ | GolfPopper a day ago | parent | next [-] | | How many of those newspapers are "skins", hollow shells that layer a newspaper shape (printed or virtual) over generic content with minimal human curation or editing? I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be. | | |
| ▲ | xp84 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a very correct question to be asking. The Alden Global Capital guys have been pioneers of this, but are not the only ones of course. Of the papers you've heard of, they own a plurality of them. And what they are most known for is (of course, being PE) optimizing shareholder value. Firing people and replacing local content with wire stories and shared material from other papers in the portfolio. Their current list of formerly great papers includes the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News, East Bay Times, The Orange County Register, and Orlando Sentinel. They also bought my hometown daily paper, just a small, nowheresville town. The paper went from being respectably sized for a small town, and featuring many local news stories, to being slim and having one randomly selected story from one of the 5-8 papers they own in the region, and a bunch of wire stories. Once a week, they copy and paste the local police blotter. The outlook on the news industry is exceedingly bleak. :( | |
| ▲ | nunez 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The show "The Paper" actually satirizes this. One bit involves pulling articles from an AP feed and putting it to print and how cutting that feed cut their largest revenue source, not that this means much as the paper is funded by a toilet paper company. | |
| ▲ | AmVess a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The largest city in the state I used to live in had two daily newspapers. Then it went to one, and some short years later went to none. It was resurrected a few years later, and now runs out of a strip mall. About 10 years ago, I managed to get a copy (I'd moved states), and it was two pages of state/local news, and the rest was filler. They recently cut production down to 3 days a week and laid off half their already tiny staff. |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is but it’s a brutal dying business. Our little paper had like 20 reporters in the mid 90s. Now like 5, who also do editorial, and make peanuts. |
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| ▲ | jstrong a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | the internet made it ~free for anyone to publish to the whole world, which eviscerated the premium of space in the newspaper. it'd have been hard for newspapers to not get destroyed no matter what they did, but losing classifieds to fuckin' craigslist wasn't their finest moment, either. |
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| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think there were any newsroom jobs at Salon? |
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| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent [-] | | They were always just opinion and commentary, but did have staff writers. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent [-] | | Right. But The Atlantic, for instance, is mostly opinion and commentary --- in fact, on any given day, that's all you'll see them running on the front page --- but they've funded some pretty intense investigative reporting (Caitlin Dickerson's pieces, in particular the most recent Darien Gap thing, great illustrations of that). Salon never did, so far as I know. | | |
| ▲ | bluebarbet 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Salon never did, so far as I know. And for a reason. It's expensive. Only the tiny handful of winners of the digital transition (including The Atlantic) can now afford it. The Atlantic and the NYT are now quite flush. IMO people should be subscribing to local newspapers instead, to fund local reporting, which is in a dire state. | |
| ▲ | timr 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, I agree. I don't think they've ever had any actual "news" staff. | | |
| ▲ | rurban 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | They had paid cultural news staff, and actually they were the very best those times. Charles Taylor, Andrew O'Hehir, Stephanie Zacharek for film eg. Similar for music and literature. |
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| ▲ | 59percentmore 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cost-of-living crisis. People used to gladly pay for high-quality journalism, because they could. They paid for CDs and VHS/DVDs and cable and movie tickets and cars and houses and long distance phone calls and cigarettes and book-of-the-month clubs, because they could. Not just high-earning professionals. Cashiers. Gas station attendants. Department store employees. Waiters. We had an economy where most people could afford to participate in the consumerist and cultural milieu. The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it. When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry. |
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| ▲ | MattDamonSpace 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The federal gov is essentially just entitlement programs for the elderly and the military, and all the wealth of the billionaires wouldn’t pay for it for even a year. | | |
| ▲ | KingMob 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the parent comment is making a common mistake when it comes to taxing the ultra-wealthy. We don't need to tax them to make up a shortfall; we need to tax them to remove their power to distort government in their favor. |
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| ▲ | prirun 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I hate that CEOs make 325x more than an average worker whereas is 1965 they made 21x. But whenever I see something about taxing unrealized capital gains, it makes me wonder: are we also going to give tax credits for unrealized capital losses? | | |
| ▲ | tancop 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's really a proxy measure on a couple tax evasion strategies, like the one where you borrow against your shares and default on purpose letting your bank take them. There is no taxable event because legally you're not selling anything. You're just turning shares into money at the market rate. If you tried to ban all of the known strategies they would just come up with new ones. That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax. Of course for the long term it would be better to replace traditional shares with time limited ones that give you a percentage of profits for 5 years but no voting rights. Power stays with workers and no one gets unlimited returns on a one time investment. And enforce pay equality where no one can get more than 20x median total comp. But I think that's too radical to pass anywhere today. | | |
| ▲ | hunterpayne 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | "That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax" The problem with this is that is a good reason we don't tax unrealized gains. Yes, there are people using this as a loophole. But if you tax this, everytime home value goes up, there is a huge wave of bigger tax bills for every home owner and business owner. Which would crash the housing market overnight and probably kill 90% of the job creation in the economy. I'm sure you could make some carve outs for it, but if you do that, you probably won't collect much in tax revenue. The biggest thing you don't seem to understand is that there is an economic concept called the Laffer curve. It relates tax rates to the total amount of tax a government takes in. And we are already at or near that tax rate. Increase taxes and the government won't take in more revenue. Growing the economy, that increases government tax revenue. But increasing tax rates past the optimum rate DECREASES not increases the tax revenue. Even ignoring the increased rates of tax avoidance, it constricts economic growth which reduces the employment tax revenue. Basically, you can't tax your way to pay for your desired programs. Either allocate the budget you have or cancel the programs. PS 1/2 of the federal budget is social spending, 1/6th is military (1/4 of which is the VA), 1/6 is interest on the debt and 1/6 is everything else the government does. | | |
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| ▲ | bananamogul 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Completely wrong because Salon wasn’t “high-quality journalism”. It was opinion pieces. There’s a zillion free substacks where you can get that today. Salon’s business was commoditized and is now grossly oversupplied. Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre. |
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| ▲ | paulpauper a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc. If you already have a big brand, the economics of writing for a publication are worse than starting your own blog or channel. You have unlimited income potential and have total creative freedom. The major publications, e.g. AP, NYTs, WaPo, Economist, FT, Bloomberg all have reporting and seem to be doing well. It's not like beat reporting is going to die. The death of journalism is way premature. |
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| ▲ | afavour a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc And the world suffers as a result, IMO. It’s all very thinly veiled opinion rather than original reporting. How many YouTubers are reporting out in the field rather than just reacting to stories other people reported? More than anything else Substack shows to me how valuable editors are in the journalistic world. So, so many people are in desperate need of an editor to challenge them before they hit publish. | |
| ▲ | jstrong a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020" - those jobs were the pipeline for the jobs at the publications you mention. Journalist is hardly the same career path it was prior to the Internet, which pretty much destroyed the business model of newspapers. Lets concede for discussion that it's going awesome for the New York Times of the world - they don't cover local stories, which, will not being relevant to the whole world, are quite relevant to people living where they are occurring. We have also lost a professional class of people who's job it was to find out what's going on. It's definitely a huge loss in my book. | |
| ▲ | Marsymars 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc. A lot of punditry has moved to those platforms, but roughly nobody on those platforms is actually doing investigative journalism. | |
| ▲ | burningChrome a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >> A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc. You forgot podcasts which are available on numerous platforms. One of which is YT for video podcasts. Most of the sports news now are breaking on podcasts. Same with pop culture. News sites now mostly refer to some podcast and the person on the podcast whatever bit of news they have come from there. As of September: Roughly 478,000 podcasts have released at least one new episode in the last 90 days Podcasts have become the way a majority of people I know are now getting their news, which is pretty crazy. | | |
| ▲ | serf a day ago | parent [-] | | podcasts and web venues has allowed reputation to get all loosey-goosey compared to traditional journalism, there is less at stake, less likelihood of an actual blacklisting, and every derisive opinion has a cheerleading squad online to amplify the (usually terrible) opinions. podcasts and web stuff is where the majority of people go to seek journalism, but I hesitate to say that's what replaced it. I see a void where it once was, and the product offered largely different than what I came to expect from journalism wholly. |
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| ▲ | Fricken a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's a bloodbath for local journalism, and by extension democracy. No viable business model for local independent journalism is known to exist. |
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| ▲ | morkalork 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/newspapers-mu... Edit wonder what the verdict will eventually be, he certainly saw the turbulence back then. |
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| ▲ | aaron695 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | hocusPokeUs a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In roughly the same stretch global mobility exploded; from numbers like 2-3 billion flying around to travel, to 6+ billion...almost the entire population And each of them can journal on their phones Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit. Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices. |
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| ▲ | donohoe a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.
Not sure thats true. |
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| ▲ | trothamel a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I suspect it is. I think the real problem was sites like craigslist (and online advertising in general) removing much of the (classified, job listing, etc) advertising that made publishing a newspaper profitable. | |
| ▲ | shinjitsu a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I remember in a very early 1990s (maybe '91 or '90) the Utne Reader had an article talking about how journalism outlets were merging at a rapid rate, resulting in layoffs and consolidation. The author feared that by 2000 there would only be 4-5 news conglomerates left. The internet was pretty much for engineering Universities and Tech companies (and all command line at that) so certainly before the 'open internet' as most people think of it. | |
| ▲ | xnorswap 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nick Davies wrote "Flat Earth News" about this very problem in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Davies#Bibliography | |
| ▲ | unrented7977 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It was discussed extensively at the time and in the years since | |
| ▲ | tclancy a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am so confused by the implied timeline of the top comment here. And if the open internet happened after 2008 it’s … news to me. | | | |
| ▲ | gwbas1c a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Many people in the news industry were complaining about this situation. It's very well known. | |
| ▲ | manishsharan a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is very true. Back in early 2000s , I was in a startup that built publication management tools for newspapers. I recall making about 700 phone calls and speaking to the editorial staff to get them to sign up. And this is where I learnt that only a handful of obscure companies owned nearly all of local newspapers. Cost effective but soulless. Local news was killed by private equity and consolidation. | |
| ▲ | donohoe a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | For context, I have worked in news/media since 2003. Yes, newspaper circulation had been declining since the late 1980s/early 1990s. The real economic damage came as classifieds, recruitment, real estate and advertising moved online. Craigslist and other online marketplaces ate the business model long before social media and AI entered the picture. So "open internet" doesn't refer to a specific historical moment, but in this context I'd place its emergence in the early to mid-1990s. My shallow, poorly worded, comment was aimed at time of the "open internet". Newspapers took large revenue from advertising that had little to do with journalism. That subsidized foreign bureaus, statehouse reporters, investigative work and specialized beats. When those dollars moved elsewhere, the economics of reporting collapsed. The 2008 recession accelerated that. That 60% figure is specifically newspaper newsroom employment, not journalism employment. |
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| ▲ | 0xbadcafebee a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "News" is just entertainment and fear mongering for money. Always has been. There is no other point to reading the news. Or as someone else put it: "Newspapers are the original doom scrolling". It would be nice to have a populus informed about what's going on in local government and actually understand the issues. But nobody really wants to be informed. They want biased ragebait. Journalism pretends like it's fair and balanced while simultaneously only reporting part of a story that's much longer than presented, in order to provide the reader a specific perception. In other words: manipulation. Ignorance is a better outcome, because then at least people aren't overconfident in their wrongness. |
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| ▲ | caned a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Are you saying that journalism, though inherently biased, serves no useful function in our society and only ever serves to mislead people? | | |
| ▲ | 0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It serves a useful function in the same way that a bar serving alcohol serves a useful function. It's making money by giving people something that's bad for them. They really want it, so it's not going away. But it's a net negative on society and we'd all be better off if they disappeared. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | easterncalculus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Frankly, the pitch of news - the 'moat' - is a lack of bias. You pay to have someone who is not actually an expert in the field being discussed (or even a beginner, in most cases today) give you an unbiased view of the situation. The idea is that the expert is too close to the situation and can be biased, so the journalist is the filter. They supposedly know enough about the subject to ask smart questions about it, and their capability to do that is judged by other journalists with... even less understanding of the subject at hand. If journalists violate this assumption by being so blatantly biased, like they were at outlets like Salon, there is no information being shared anymore AND no benefit to listening to them outside of having your assumptions hopefully reassured by another ignorant person. Journalism moving from a comparably open and meritocratic field to being entirely populated by PMC failsons about as illiterate as their peer majors doesn't help this. The only other real value-add is that the journalist is a better 'communicator', an assumption mostly based on stereotypes about the people being interviewed, especially with tech journalism. This has broken down too - the largest outlets regularly release pieces filled with run-on sentences and typos now, and often obfuscate the point rather than clarify it. See any NYT article about any hot-button issue over the past ten years or so. | |
| ▲ | idlewords a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's spelled "populace". I learned that by reading newspapers! | | |
| ▲ | tclancy a day ago | parent [-] | | And I learned everything about human relations from Ann Landers and Love Is. Lord they keep making dudes that do the “if the average person was as smart as me”. Probably time to move to Mars. If only someone would write a newsletter about how to do it. To be clear, I mean the dude you’re replying to who has seen through the veil the fourth estate cast over our eyes. | | |
| ▲ | stavros 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | What's wrong about what he's saying, though? The media is, largely, a conduit for propaganda. There's very little unbiased journalism, and none of it is free. |
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| ▲ | oddIdentities a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
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