> The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. [0]

That was a scary number so I Googled it. You should always check scary numbers. It's misleading.

It's true that newspaper newsroom jobs fell 57% (from roughly 71,000 to 31,000 jobs) over that period. However, newsroom employment across all mediums fell by only 26% (from 114,000 to 85,000).

A lot of hose jobs went digital, they didn't just disappear.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsr...

> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.

1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"?

2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.

For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).

I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.

Another way of looking at it is that we've gained the biggest explosion in expert and first person coverage ever. In the golden era of news, newsrooms essentially had a monopoly on information. If you wanted to get information on e.g. the war in Korea or Vietnam you basically had to turn to the news, at least in the average case. Now if you want to read about e.g. Ukraine/Gaza/Iran/etc, you can read first person accounts from people on the ground, get imagery of things seconds after they happen, and so on.

And then you can also get analysis from people who have dedicated their professional lives to studying the geopolitical, historical, and other issues involved in these conflicts. What does a journalist really bring to the picture here? So really we have more sources of news than ever before, and I think that's largely killed "the news" as an industry, because it's not really clear what their role is supposed to be anymore.

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Robert Kaiser, who worked at the Washington Post through its glory years til its purchase by Bezos, wrote a really excellent article about this some time back, 'The Bad News About the News.' [1] It was written back in 2014, but summed up what had happened and accurately predicted where things would be headed:

"[Companies] have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight."

[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...

> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.

I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world.

This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998!

0 - https://link.amazon/B0bh3AKaw

This matters. Our systems of democracy were formed when journalism could be counted on to hold politicians to account. This is no longer true.

We have to change the system somehow so that independent investigative journalism is either funded without compromising its independence (this is difficult, as the recent bullshit coming out of the BBC is proving), or we replace this method of holding politicians to account with something that works just as well (I have no idea what).

Or we have to change our systems of democracy so that politicians cannot abuse them. Something like "no politician, or any members of their family, or their close friends, can ever be employed by any organisation that contracts with the government, or receives government funds, or benefits from government legislation". This is obviously going to be tricky.

>The vast majority of what was lost were "beat" reporters - foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus from regional publications, statehouse reporters, or regional specialty beats (science, law, etc).

People doing actual useful news work, in other terms.

Salon has always been pure opinion/analysis pieces though, they never had a newsroom. They never had much of a moat beyond getting talented people to write thinkpieces for them, and the internet has just inflated the supply of thinkpieces to the point of 0 cost.

> We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage.

You don't have to rely on your domestic media for international coverage. Especially with machine translation being so good these days, you can get your international coverage directly from the outlets abroad.

I was a daily newspaper reader in a midsized market for many years. The paper shrank in late 90s, early 2000s and stabilized around 2014. COVID killed the paper paper, I don't even know where you get it now.

Deregulation and consolidation started hurting the business in the 90s, the pure margin classified business started taking body blows ~2002 here (Craigslist wasn't everywhere) and salaries started tanking. Then the smart reporters flipped to PR.

The smartphone was the death blow as the sweet business of being an ad-delivery courier started to erode. Many people subscribed to the Thursday/Sunday paper to get the supermarket flyer and retail ads/coupons.

I don't think there were any newsroom jobs at Salon?

Cost-of-living crisis. People used to gladly pay for high-quality journalism, because they could. They paid for CDs and VHS/DVDs and cable and movie tickets and cars and houses and long distance phone calls and cigarettes and book-of-the-month clubs, because they could. Not just high-earning professionals. Cashiers. Gas station attendants. Department store employees. Waiters. We had an economy where most people could afford to participate in the consumerist and cultural milieu.

The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it.

When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry.

A lot of journalism has moved to twitter, substack, youtube etc. If you already have a big brand, the economics of writing for a publication are worse than starting your own blog or channel. You have unlimited income potential and have total creative freedom.

The major publications, e.g. AP, NYTs, WaPo, Economist, FT, Bloomberg all have reporting and seem to be doing well. It's not like beat reporting is going to die. The death of journalism is way premature.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/newspapers-mu...

Edit wonder what the verdict will eventually be, he certainly saw the turbulence back then.

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In roughly the same stretch global mobility exploded; from numbers like 2-3 billion flying around to travel, to 6+ billion...almost the entire population

And each of them can journal on their phones

Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers

And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared

All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism

We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.

Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.

  This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.

"News" is just entertainment and fear mongering for money. Always has been. There is no other point to reading the news. Or as someone else put it: "Newspapers are the original doom scrolling".

It would be nice to have a populus informed about what's going on in local government and actually understand the issues. But nobody really wants to be informed. They want biased ragebait.

Journalism pretends like it's fair and balanced while simultaneously only reporting part of a story that's much longer than presented, in order to provide the reader a specific perception. In other words: manipulation. Ignorance is a better outcome, because then at least people aren't overconfident in their wrongness.

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