This is the future if everything has to be free. Since you can't make money by creating content for readers, you have to instead create content for advertisers and propagandists.
The problem is that newspapers evolved in lock-step with the advertising industry and that they had carved out an - in retrospect - extremely fragile position based on a balance that they thought was stable. Unfortunately for many quality news publications it turned out that wasn't the only stable state, the other one is the state in which they are simply gone, maybe a few with hopefully benevolent wealthy sponsors would endure. This was an unforeseen consequence of reducing the value of printing presses to near zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital
Pretty much predicted this, the only thing it got wrong was the timetable, it took a little bit longer.
So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak.
High quality content often depends on access (which can be hard or impossible to get even if you're a real journalist), a lot of time, and quite a lot of input from support staff (editors, subeditors, researchers, picture editors etc).
> So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak.
Agreed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/
High quality content comes from two sources, similar to high quality software. It either comes from an organization which makes and sells high quality content to make money (the new York times::Microsoft) or it comes from individual contributors who create it out of passion for the subject (wikipedia::FSF)
You're moving from a situation where stuff is mostly trustworthy to mostly untrustworthy.
Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. I don't think it would have as many users if this were not the case ;-)
This is completely false: every act of writing or releasing Free software is a political act. That's the point of doing it, of giving your labour away. Free software only exists because of the social and political opinions of its authors.
Software is a tool. The idea that hammer is imbued with the political views of the person who crafted it is a bit of romantic mysticism. The political actor is the person using the software.
To put it another way, if my software cared what my political opinions were, it wouldn't be used. One of the greatest freedoms afforded me by Free Software is freedom from others' political opinions on how to use said software.
Heck, in the technology and gaming worlds, arguably ALL the decent quality content is like this. I mean, if you want tech information, do you go to sites run by large media companies like Wired or the likes, or read content on a site like Hacker News or Stack Exchange or someone's personal blog (or a topical site like CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine)?
And it's even more clear in the gaming world, where stuff like Kotaku or IGN is basically just clickbait whereas all the interesting stuff is on Youtube or Reddit or internet forums or fan sites or specific blogs and wikis. Heck, in the latter, the commercial media going away would probably make for better journalism in general, since the smaller sites aren't scared of negative attention.
Hacker News or Stack Exchange are better quality but the useful information content is still quite low, and it's the sort of stuff that appeals mainly to a small and rather expert audience. Indeed, that applies to Wired as well.
Do you really think combing Reddit for info is a substitute for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal etc?
But if you're a web developer or programmer looking for information about the latest Javascript frameworks or what not, then yes. You're going to find better information in blogs and on social sites that on a mainstream news site or publication, because the former cares about the specific subject and the latter has to try and cover a wide range of things to less of a degree.
And in gaming... well, the 'professional' journalism is terrible quality to begin with. The only sites that cover anything remotely interesting are fan or volunteer run, and the most interesting sources for gaming related media are indeed social media sites. You're not gonna find anything as in depth at this on most sites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A
Even for more normal 'news' stuff, there are usually tons of free and fan run alternatives. For example, no one tries to get news about Pokemon from a mainstream source, because they've got other things to focus on and don't know a lot about gaming in general. Instead, they go to one of the many fan run sites, like Bulbanews or Serebii.net. This holds true for most gaming related niches, where there'll be a few sites that provide it directly (hours ahead of the mainstream media) then a flood of copycats a bit later.
But it all depends. It's not a substitute for 'professional' media for certain, rather more serious subjects no. But for tech, gaming, entertainment or other such subjects, the free news sites are perfect for anyone's needs.
Of course. However, the simple-minded truism that you can find obscure technical information in obscure places doesn't make YouTube or Stack Exchange a replacement for the New York Times, which is actually kind of the like the main point, you know? ;-)
> And in gaming... well, the 'professional' journalism is terrible quality to begin with. The only sites that cover anything remotely interesting are fan or volunteer run, and the most interesting sources for gaming related media are indeed social media sites
So Edge was never interesting and Stuart Dredge is wasting his time on the Guardian....
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