My primary reaction to Farhad Manjoo’s latest New York Times column:
It’s the cuts at BuzzFeed that sting most. You may regard the site as a purveyor of silly listicles and inane quizzes. I think of it as a relentlessly experimental innovator: It’s the site that gave us The Dress and published The Dossier, a company that pushed the rest of the industry to regard the digital world with seriousness and rigor.
More than anyone else in media, BuzzFeed’s founder, Jonah Peretti, bet on symbioses with the tech platforms. He understood that the tech giants would keep getting bigger, but to him that was a feature, not a bug. By creating content that hooked into their algorithms, he imagined BuzzFeed getting bigger — and making money — along with them.
At the least, the layoffs suggest the tragic folly of Mr. Peretti’s thinking. Google and Facebook have no economic incentive for symbiosis; everything BuzzFeed can do for them can also be done by the online hordes who’ll make content without pay.
So where does that leave media? Bereft.
in which he leaps to the defense of Buzzfeed is that it shakes any confidence I might have had in our present naturalization process.
There is no right to earn a living as an opinion writer. If there is one thing that has been demonstrated over the period of the last 15 years it is that 99.999% of opinion writing isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. I would go farther and suggest that paid opinion writing is an artifact of the giant media conglomerates he criticizes. Ben Franklin wrote a lot of opinion but he wasn’t paid for it. He was a professional printer and an amateur opinion writer. He did his opinion writing while waiting for a paying job to come in.
Vibrant, diverse, interesting, high quality opinion writing predates the major media outlets and will survive after they’re gone. The biggest threats to quality opinion writing aren’t layoffs at Buzzfeed. The larger threats are illiteracy and loss of attention span.
I welcome the day when I don’t hear NPR reporting that CNN is reporting that Buzzfeed is reporting something everybody agrees “there is serious reason to doubt†is true. If journalism was a profession, I would consider that professional malfeasance.
I’ve touched on that before. For the last 70 years or so reporters have been trying to turn journalism from a craft into a profession. They don’t seem to realize that one of the factors in professionalism is adherence to a code of ethics. They’ve completely abandoned their own code of ethics so the jig is up.
Canada just announced direct subsidies to newspapers.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/600m-in-federal-funding-for-media-a-turning-point-in-the-plight-of-newspapers-in-canada
Put 2 and 2 together.
The plan seems to have two components. The first provision is not applicable to the United States because here not-for-profit news organizations can already accept donations without incurring a tax liability.
The other provision appears to extend the same sort of benefit to news organizations that the National Endowment for the Arts does to artists here. Such a plan fills me with dread. It would inevitably be loaded with party apparatchiks and be a vehicle for grift and cronyism.
I think its commonly been claimed that state laws requiring certain notices to be published in a weekly paper are forms of subsidy.
Back in the antebellum period, state and national newspapers were rewarded for their support by getting contracts to publish the legislative record or similar official documents.
indeed, many a small paper of general circulation in the county survives because of those legal ads. Locally, state legislators have bought newspapers or shares in them since their local bills have to be published for three weeks.
to topic, what we need are reporters who remember they are not the story, confine front page news to the five Ws with the back page (or two) of section one has opinion, analysis, columnists speculation, etc and remember local news matters.
Responding to what walt said above, the death of small local newspapers has been greatly exaggerated. They are still alive and kicking. It’s an open question as to how much demand there is for national daily organs of opinion.
However, you probably won’t get national recognition or big bucks by pounding a keyboard for a small local newspaper. I think that’s what this is really about.
Amidst all the negativity, a lot of which I think is correct, I think it should be acknowledged that the the job completely changed. We went from print to TV and radio and then the internet and social media. The emphasis shifted to speed over accuracy. Since you have 24 hours a day to fill lots of news more important than correct news. While a few people here might prefer slower but higher quality news, my guess is that such a service would go out of business or be a niche service at best.
Steve
It changed but not in the way you’re suggesting. Nearly all reporting is syndicated. I suspect that of the journalists who have been laid off at Buzzfeed and Huffpost not 1% had done any actual beat reporting.
News outlets can pull more reporting than anyone could possibly read from the wire services. What’s cut out of this arrangement are small towns, local reporting, and specialized interests.