alt Hacker NewsOf course they are, because they are not primarily concerned with the reporting of noteworthy events. They are most worried about profit with the secondary goal of reporting but only insofar as it serves the first goal. This is a wider trend across many industries.
Obviously, a business needs to have an income but it's becoming more common for businesses to function first and foremast as revenue generators and the thing that enables that is only seen as a means to an end. When the quality of the product/service and it's function as a revenue generator diverge, the product/service will always take 2nd chair.
Maybe we could argue that the primary product is the revenue, especially when there are investors involved who are looking for big returns.
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When it comes to the companies named here, I would argue that they have shown that reporting isn't even a secondary goal or a goal at all. Journalists don't even make that much money, but they've still gutted newsrooms very thoroughly. I assume that they already have people working on setting up an LLM connected to feeds of press releases, government announcements, public police crime reports, prominent social media accounts, etc. to create a repository of slop they can use (which will bear a vague resesmblance to 'news') without having even one reporter employed. And then they'll try to sell access to that slop feed back to the AI vendor (which hopefully won't buy it).
As good a time as any to remind people that the Southern Strategy was never really all that Southern:
https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/052815watchingtvracia...
https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/video-what-happens-when-...
Historically-speaking, if your local news can twist the context to make you easier to sell to (products, services, ideologies), they will do that.
More than even that, there is more news being generated than there are 3 inch chimp brains available to digest it all (even with AI busy summerizing everything) or act on it.
There is no media theory of information of what happens when info explodes beyond capacity of the system to consume it. (UN report on Attention Economy says less than 1% is actually consumed by humans)
So media orgs, instead of coming up with one, they just keep mindlessly doing what they know how to do - generate more info. Platforms and corps subsidize this activity for their own interests.
So media orgs have no signal/warped signals of how useless what they are doing is.