U.S. journalism is steadily being replaced by automated gibberish, engagement bait, brand influencers, and extremely well funded right wing propaganda, but surely that won't wind up being a problem
In 2016, bad actors were literally making fake articles on lookalike news sites to trick people into read misinformation disguised as the real thing. In 2024 there's no need, real news sites have been destroyed and replaced by nonsense.
this is _a_ result of publishers conflating 'traffic' for 'audience.' audiences stay with you. and that's valuable. traffic is fly-by. and that is not valuable. all those publications in that first graf were, for the most part, general publications racing for scale. not very sustainable.
Going to evangelize here. Defector. Discourse. 404 Media. Aftermath. All phoenixes rising from the ashes of G/O Media. I suggest them all to the reader’s consideration.
yep, I love the push toward editor and writer owned outlets. Still most of these are new, there's no guarantee they will survive, and they're not operating at much of a scale
We need much bigger, bolder ways to fund independent journalism at scale
right on, I completely agree with you
smaller, writer owned outlets can actually make money if you're not paying the CEO 5-50 times of all his employees
All the financial incentives point in the completely wrong direction and away from a functionally informed public
Folks like to dress this up as "cold market realities" but none of this is an accident
I don't think most people even notice, they are too busy trying to survive the work week. Without a functional news media I'm afraid they are going to wake up in a dark place one day and wonder how they didn't see it coming.
