Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy [View all]
“The work of obtaining facts has a major economic disadvantage against the production of bullshit, and it’s only getting worse. I’m a pro-labor person, so I often think about the problems of our journalism through a lens of how we do our work, why it’s done, and who’s paying for it. After many years of watching my fellow journalists suffer at legacy newspapers, digital startups, big commercial newsrooms, small nonprofit outlets and public media all alike, here’s what I learned the hard way: America’s marketplace of ideas has a competition problem. The biggest story about media and the internet is that new technology — AI, social media, smartphones, etc. — keeps driving down the cost of producing bullshit while the cost of obtaining quality information only goes up. It’s getting more and more expensive to produce the good stuff, and the good stuff has to compete against more and more trash once it’s out on the market.”
https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/journalisms-fight-for-survival-in
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