Is journalism dying?

Anyway nobody seems to believe in the importance of journalists more than journalists. But The News has never stopped being one of the many machines that turns anger and anxiety into money.

Like how much honestly happens on a given day that I have to know about the next day, there’s nothing to be done about any of it.

Not all journalism is daily journalism. Reportage and think-pieces in monthly or quarterly magazines is journalism, too. For democracy to work, people have to have some kind of trusted source for what is happening beyond their front door.

So to follow up on my last thread revive, a friend and I have both quit our jobs to start this thing -- compassknox.com -- to cover gubmint, politics and business in our fine city. We have low overhead and we're doing subscription only, so we figure we only need a couple of thousand subscribers to be sustainable. (In a metro area of well over half a million people.) Reaction from our first week of offering subscriptions has been good -- especially because we aren't even publishing til September, so right now people are just signing up because they know us or like the idea. Here's hoping.

Oh, here's a clickable link: https://compassknox.com/

Best wishes~ hope you can pay the bills ASAP

You’re probably the one who looks like an ilx user right

yeah that other guy looks like one of those guys with money or one of those guys who knows people with money, smart move getting hooked up with him

that's great tipsy, best of luck

I enjoyed the "son of" bio openers

omfg the dichotomy of your accents in the video

I fully support this but I no longer live in Knoxville

Thanks all! Yeah, I love the mix of accents too. We gotta have at least one real East Tennessean.

best of luck tipsy! :)

Great initiative tipsy, hope you rack up the subscribers soon!

go tipsy go!! local news has been absolutely decimated by decades of bad corporate policy (fuck gannett forever) and recent trends toward focusing only on the phony metric known as "trending"

i was fucking astonished at how bad local tv news is now in Knoxville. WBIR literally just runs packages from random Gannett affiliates. if it's vaguely near Knoxville that's a bonus but it totally doesn't have to be. craft beer festival in, i dunno, california? WBIR has you covered! the only actual local news they do on the reg is sports and weather. the last 10 minutes of the show. it's kind of unbelievable!

Yeah, the local media landscape is pretty dismal. It's not like it was ever great, but there are so many fewer actual reporters in town than there were 10 or 20 years ago (even though there are tens of thousands more people living here).

local news has been absolutely decimated by decades of bad corporate policy (fuck gannett forever) and recent trends toward focusing only on the phony metric known as "trending"

I've talked to some people at the local (Gannett) daily, and they don't even pretend otherwise. It is literally all about generating clicks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/business/media/mic-staff-layoff.html

I wrote a piece for them once, and it was a good experience overall. Hopefully Kyle and everyone else lands okay.

36,000sf of 1WTC for this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/at-npr-an-army-of-temps-resents-a-workplace-full-of-anxiety-and-insecurity/2018/12/07/32e49632-f35b-11e8-80d0-f7e1948d55f4_story.html

Botero quickly realized what she was up against. As a “temp,” she floated among unfamiliar co-workers and faced an ever-changing set of responsibilities, some of which she’d never been trained for. Her work contracts were sometimes as brief as two weeks, at the end of which she’d have to persuade a manager to extend her.

Worse was the sense of constant competition among her fellow temps, many of whom were angling to be hired for a limited number of permanent positions. “The only person I felt I could trust,” she said, “was the person I was dating, who was in the same position I was.” After a year of such uncertainty, she left, taking a job as a reporter for a group of public radio stations in New York state.

What’s surprising about Botero’s experience is how unsurprising it is at NPR.

For decades, the public broadcaster has relied on a cadre of temporary journalists to produce its hourly newscasts and popular news programs. Without temporary workers — who are subject to termination without cause — NPR would probably be unable to be NPR. Temps do almost every important job in NPR’s newsroom: they pitch ideas, assign stories, edit them, report and produce them. Temps not only book the guests heard in interviews, they often write the questions the hosts ask the guests.

The only thing worse than Gannett being the largest newspaper company in America would be MNG being the largest newspaper company in America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/business/dealbook/gannett-takeover-offer-mng.html

i know there's a long line of american industries that should have all their executives prosecuted but hedge funds have to be, like, top 5

my tweet portal is whack
i hv been trying to say i am sorry i offended
and i so appreciate my colleague

— Tom Brokaw (@tombrokaw) January 28, 2019

nothing says you mean it like abbrevin’ words like “have”

“abbreviNATION: what social media leaves out” could be a book

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medallions-suicides.html

props to a genuine act of journalism for once

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/whats-at-stake-in-the-takeover-of-cahiers-du-cinema

Haven't looked at it in 40 years, since university, but it's just one of those things you always assume will be there. (And it still is.)

Anybody signed up for this?

https://thecorrespondent.com/

I was a member for some years of the Dutch version, from which the English version originated. I ultimately bowed out because of the pedant tone a lot of the articles had, that rubbed me up the wrong way (the "this is right/wrong, and here's why", which is way more de rigeur in the USA imo). Having said that, I do think they are doing some things right and occasionally publish stories that 'matter'. With Jay Rosen on board I think they have a decent shot at getting a foot in the door in the US, and I'm interested in seeing how they'll fare.

signed up for the us version and it's been pretty eh

Final update on the thread of news dystopia: Microsoft’s artificial intelligence news app is now swamped with stories selected by the news robot about the news robot backfiring. pic.twitter.com/X0LwfVxw8e

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) June 9, 2020

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article243391186.html

hasan generally on point
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA

Once the hedge funds have snarfed up your local paper, it becomes much more difficult to follow his advice to support it, because you're getting fleeced, just like all the other 'assets' the paper owns. Figuring out how to convert them to employee-owned and run co-ops seems like a pipedream, but maybe that's the best avenue for keeping them viable.

something something cryptocurrency something something

Aimless otm. I worked in newspapering from approximately 1985 to 1999. My grandfather was the owner/editor/publisher of a small-town paper. My grandmother, mother, and my two sisters were all print-era creatures. I have ink in my veins. If I'm not a stan for print journalism, no one is. And yet...

The project of shlurping local papers into a homogenous corporate blob was already well underway in 1982 (having essentially started with the establishment of USA Today/Gannet/Tegna).

Nowadays, the remaining "local" papers are as local as those Clear Channel-style radio stations that have identical programming, except for the weather and traffic and one or two "this one goes out to Janie in Incestville" requests that help them "localize" what is otherwise centralized. In most cities it is not doing anything different from the local Fox affiliate.

On a personal note: You can not imagine how hard it was for me to cancel print delivery of the Washington Post, after 42 years of having the day begin with its arrival on the doorstep. I don't know what to do about this, but it is a minor heartbreak.

i just started getting the ny times international edition delivered! it's magic, i love it. i got a very good introductory price and it saves me having to wait in a queue for the print edition on the weekends just so i can do the crossword.

I suspect your subscription also entitles you to access the online crossword?

Mine does.

i'd rather not do it at all if i couldn't use a pen. faintly ghosting in a guess with a ballpoint is one of my key techniques.

it also takes my eyes away from a screen for a few goddamn minutes.

http://i.imgur.com/pqrQItG.png

Might throw some dollars at this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1478924964/the-brick-house-cooperative

More info here: https://www.cjr.org/first_person/introducing-the-brick-house-the-wolf-proof-media-cooperative.php

so it’s civil without the crypto and with a few new faces

Is it? I didn’t pay much attention to civil

other people vouch for maria b and certainly i admire the effort but establishing a post-click *and* post-blockchain economy seems like a lot

ah shit paywalled. it's the story of how Wirecard tried to discredit the FT, going to mad lengths to set up fake news operations with some (shitty) former intelligence people bribing market manipulators and ... hell, it's all insane Bourne-Ultimatum stuff

lol rong thred