This is very true. It's also easy to blame this on profit motive and clickbait driven advertising but a lot of these journalists are ideologically motivated in large part due to their ironically upper middle class liberal arts education (read privileged).
I'm not a journalist and I've only ever worked for one news publication in my career, so I obviously can't speak for all journalists. That said, we can't ignore the impact that traffic quotas have had on the industry since the collapse of print media.
I worked for a paper in 2016 on their software team and saw how much of an impact that Trump's name in a headline had on the traffic an article received. Everyone on the outside was screaming about why the media was giving him so much attention while the industry, in the middle of a financial crisis, was less than interested to leave money on the table. In the age of internet journalism, orgs are heavily incentivized to produce what they think the community wants, and that has some really dangerous long-term implications.
People don't realize how bad the financial situation is for newspapers across America, and how desperately print media orgs are trying (and in many cases, failing) to stay afloat.
I think this is where I do my usual comment and observe that print media isn't struggling to stay afloat. There are plenty of publications that are profitable. This is invariably ignored and a 'crisis' generalised to the entire industry because the profitable papers tend to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, and they tend to be profitable because they put up paywalls and charge money for their analysis and opinions rather than give them away for free.
This doesn't jive with the agenda of most journalists, who very much want to "change the world" and "do what is right not what is easy", etc. They see a big part of their job as guiding readers to the correct decisions and protecting them from false ideas, but of course if you throw up a paywall and charge money, you're much less able to do that.
I used to be quite sympathetic to the plight of the news industry - it wasn't their fault that times were changing, that they were now all competing with each other, that Craigslist outdid them on classified ads etc. But then some papers started turning things around financially, I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free, and I became much more aware of the extent to which journalists try to manipulate their reader base. My sympathy is now gone: newspapers are businesses, and they need to turn a profit by charging for their services. If that means giving up influence, well hey, welcome to the world the rest of us live in.
> There are plenty of publications that are profitable.
Many that do achieve profitability do so at tremendous sacrifice to the service they provide to the community. A perfect example of this is Alden Capital Group, which owns over 100 papers. They're infamous in the industry for reducing the newsroom headcount by up to 50% and replacing them with sales. Not only that, they're now trying to offload their entire new portfolio because this model of profitability actually devalues the papers in the marketplace, largely because they can't serve their communities.[0] The papers they print are essentially worthless because they can't put resources into writing important local stories.
> I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free
The model of the internet forced them to do this. Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly. Ad platforms by companies like Google were the best way for them to monetize, but in doing so they gave up all control. It was a die quickly or die slowly scenario. Most chose the latter.
Nobody forced them to create websites at all, certainly not "the model of the internet" which can't make anyone do anything. And of those websites, nobody forced them to not implement paywalls. You seem to be claiming that there is some dichotomy between serving a community and charging money for things, but there isn't. Lots of local businesses successfully serve their local community whilst still being financially sustainable.
All the market is telling the news industry is that it's way overstaffed. Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Your case study of Alden seems to back this up. They're private equity, their purpose in life is to turn around failing businesses and make them sustainable, which they have done. The difficulty selling the resulting business is blamed in the final paragraphs on pension liabilities i.e. the hangover of an era when they were fiscally mismanaged; not on their inability to put resources into writing important local stories. With a 15% profit margin they should be able to easily find a buyer regardless of their perceived journalistic quality, but a huge pensions liability will definitely kill the attractiveness of the businesses.
That's like arguing nobody forced you to create a LinkedIn account in order to get a job. All of the infrastructure to get a job is online and has been for years, as is journalism. Sure, you don't _have_ to create an online professional profile, but you're dramatically limiting your options by doing so. Print media chose move online largely due the explosive growth of the internet. Publications saw the internet as innovative (who didn't?), and chose to jump on. Look at the bubble in the 90's, companies were trying to figure out how to incorporate the web into their business years ago. The armchair argument of "they didn't have to jump on" is weak when you consider they didn't have the benefit of hindsight. Everyone was getting on the web.
> Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Investigative journalism is dying in the United States because it often takes months or years to investigate a story and can come at an astronomically high cost.[0]
We're approaching an era of journalism where major landmark stories may never see the light of day because the market doesn't care to pay enough for them. Should we be concerned that future investigative scandals (think Catholic Church sex abuse) may not be unearthed in the future because we're not willing to pay people to investigate them? How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
Er, well, yes. I've never used a LinkedIn account to get a job. I've found work via knowing people. (I have one, but almost never update it, rarely check messages and have not obtained any work through it).
How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
I suspect there are models that can pay for deep investigations, but it's probably not daily or weekly newspapers. One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated. We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
> One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated.
There are many reasons why legitimate investigations don't yield results (inability to retrieve financial records and other evidence, lack of cooperation by key players, threats from sponsors, etc.)
From the article above:
> The level of sponsor interference that news directors said they experienced this year was pretty much the same as last year – it exists in more than half of all newsrooms. In all, 17 percent of news directors say that sponsors have discouraged them from pursuing stories (compared to 18 percent last year), and 54 percent have been pressured to cover stories about sponsors, up slightly from 47 percent last year.
This survey was conducted when news media was in a much healthier financial situation than it is today, and back then, over half of news stations received pressure from sponsors in one form or another to either cover or suppress stories.
> We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
Can you provide some examples of such "scandals"? Investigative reporting, like most other reporting, typically goes through many layers of approval before being published.
I don't mean investigations that hit dead ends and never get published. I mean investigative journalism that turns out to be wrong or fraudulent.
Claas Relotious is a particularly notorious recent example, but there is plenty of meta-investigative journalism out there, like Glenn Greenwald's writeups of how the media present things that look like investigations of scandals but which are factually wrong. Here's a recent summary he did of 10 such cases:
I myself am a subscriber to a daily newspaper, which I read online, to get access to paywalled content. It's essentially opinion and analysis which I find value, and only rarely investigation of scandals. There are lots of newsrooms and only occasionally do they ever get a genuine Watergate or Snowden style scoop which means I can't really subscribe to get them because I don't know where they'll crop up next. And anyway, any paper I do subscribe to will end up paraphrasing and summarising the original paper's investigations anyway, which for me is fine - there's no particular need to learn about these things quickly or even at all, because I can't do anything with the knowledge usually.
In the end I'm skeptical journalism is the right way to keep powerful institutions in check. There are other ways.
Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly.
I don't think that history bears this out. The Wall Street journal was an early paywall adapter, and they have been successful at it. The San Jose Mercury was one of the first newspapers to go online and originally had a paywall. They subsequently removed their paywall and went into a financial tailspin (I'm not suggesting that that's a cause-and-effect relationship, but removing the paywall certainly did not help them in the long-term.)
Yeah, the pundits always have the same thing to say to the Democrats, which is "move to the right" but they never say the Republicans should "move to the left".
I think it's less "move to the right" and more "admit you've already moved to the right".
Democrat attitudes feel increasingly puritan instead of actually liberal to me (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on everyone aligning to a specific moral framework), while Republican attitudes feel increasingly laissez-faire instead of actually conservative (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on destroying our environment instead of, you know, conserving it).
The reality is that the political spectrum is not one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional.
What one person calls a "lack of spine" might be another person's "being responsible to your constituency".
I was an elected official of a party committee once and I faced issues where I believed one thing that only half of my constituents believed so I slowplayed whenever I could.
To be fair, both Democrats and Republicans claim to have moral high ground over the other. Evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican because that party has successfully sold itself as the party defending traditional Christian morality and American culture.
What is now happening though is that the right is now gaining people who are not religious but are pro-free speech and a host of other related but not religious issues. I used to consider myself pretty far on the left. In the 80s and 90s the Evangelical Christians were the problem. They tried to censor music, video games... Now the censorship and dogma comes from the left. What's very interesting is that those same Christians who I thought were very intolerant of others views (and make no mistake they were and sometimes still are) have accepted people like me. Some of it is that we now have a common enemy but it also feels like they've realized that religion is no longer mainstream and thus have come to accept other less than mainstream opinions even if they don't agree with them.
It's worth keeping in mind that the Republicans and Democrats already once swapped sides on the "left" v. "right" spectrum. It ain't inconceivable to think that it might happen again (and in fact might already be in the early stages of happening again).
