>Much of the problems we see today are because the news media largely became unprofitable.
Close, but not quite there. Much of the problems we see today are because the news media are financed through marketing & PR spend.
This makes the media's Overton Window somewhat limited to what is a good side-dish to marketing & PR. Among other concerns, this causes all content to skew towards middle-class, college-educated middle manager viwepoint. That's not exactly a recipe for a great society. And that leaves many segments of the readership underserved.
> more often than not nowadays the mainstream journalists ARE the rich and powerful.
Really? Very few, if any. People like Tucker Carlson have wealthy contracts but they don’t even consider themselves journalists, but entertainers (in his case he’s not part of the news division, for example).
> “The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families.
It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were, but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians, millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them they would have real problems.
But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken). Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc, are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So they get less respect.
>> Journalism went out of business a long time ago because no one will buy it.
And the unfortunate outcome of that is infotainment and advertorials pretending to be news. Even worse is that more and more people take that stuff at face value.
What a joke! The media OCCASIONALLY reports on their activities. But most of the time they just don't. NYT has become moderately more adversarial in recent years, though not consistently. Most of the press not counting explicitly left-wing outlets operate as uncritical stenographers, the credulous, fawning tech press especially.
Tragic absolutely, shortsighted - no. You can't operate without money and news organizations can't survive in todays environment. The way we consume and gather around information simply isn't the same anymore.
>The problem is that things which are socially valuable - especially journalism, but also a lot of entertainment - are chronically dependent on advertising revenues.
I think calling journalism "socially valuable" is debatable.
> Today's mass media is better, in terms of adherence to the truth, diversity, and creativity than at any point in time.
Perhaps where your from it is, but the corporate news media in the USA just literally burned all of their remaining credibility backing the wrong horse in the presidential election. They cheated for her, outright lied for her, and covered for her failings. The people here saw it, and the ones not watching through rose colored glasses now rightly now distrust the media even more than before.
To say "hating journalists and their work has become the last unifying cause" and attempting to paint journalists as the victim is disingenuous at best. They made their bed, now they're mad that they have to lie in it.
> Someone on Twitter earlier was saying journalism has a history of relying on rich people who don't mind losing money (the modern example being Bezos and the Washington Post), and that we're trending back that way. Anyone who can't find a patron is probably going to go out of business no matter what.
I'm not sure it can (or should) be any other way. If you try to run journalism as a for-profit business, you end up with ads and clickbait. Good journalism is like medicine - very important, and very unable to bring in profit.
I honestly doubt that social media has anything to do with it, but rather the consolidation of ownership of news sources over this same period of time and an ongoing desire to have very high ad sales rates while having rock bottom news room costs.
This is simply the result of that financial calculus playing out over the past two decades.
> Firstly, the media currently are too lucrative for my taste and thats why we have everyone being a journalist and publisher.
As someone who works in media: I'm sorry, what? Publishing is certainly not more lucrative than ever, and publishing online now is a far worse business than publishing a physical newspaper pre-cable TV. The proliferation of outlets is due to lower barriers to entry and less need for capex. Plus a little bit of VC optimism.
> The problem for journalism and why it was replaced with "journalism" has always been that journalism costs money, you need customers to make money
That's part of it certainly, but it's also driven by the need for neverending growth. It's not enough to just be making enough to be solidly in the black, the networks are pressured to always being pulling record profits.
It's completely unrealistic, but that's the expectation regardless.
This is what's wrong with media today...
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