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Comment by cornyNetHandle | Hacker News Reader

I hardly think that you have identified journalism's biggest achilles heel.

Journalism as a business and the journalists who work within it, by and large, do not insist on the concept of quality journalism, or think that most people care, let alone that they care enough to pay for it.

If they did then they would mainly be producing meticulously researched and in depth content with no advertising and paywalls as default.

While this does exist, it is the periphery of journalism. The mainstream within the industry being the concept of presenting news as team sports to capture market segments for advertisers.

Also, context and perspective do not define truth. Logically, the whole truth regarding an event must contain the perspectives and contexts relating to it, rather than being defined by them.

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"Quality journalism" cost money. If you go into any debate about the future of journalism you will find the same thing as I have found.

I don't know, in the UK the discussions about the future of journalism centre more around press regulation and what are the acceptable limits of tabloid excess.

The discussion about the future of journalism is based on the idea of quality journalism and the fact that in order for journalism and medias to survive quality needs to be improved.

That's the same in the UK, the US or Denmark for that matter as all of them are struggling with the same issues.

Perhaps I hang around with very different journalists than you do.

or maybe you only hang out with tabloid journalists?

Do any search on google about journalism and the future of journalism and the majority discussion isn't about regulation or tabloid (tabloid is way to popular to be under danger)

I have been involved in several newspaper projects both one trying to be extreme high quality and one which was supposed to be free.

Regulation have never been a serious discussion point when it comes to discussing journalism, so yes perhaps we do hang out with different journalists.

Only two of them are tabloid. The rest are broadsheet and telly.

In the UK, regulation is a serious discussion point when discussing journalism, both from the perspective of things like the tabloid phone hacking and also from the perspective of restrictions placed on broadsheet reporting, e.g. the Trafigura super-injunction.

Also, what role were you taking in the newspaper projects you were involved with?

One I was responsible for advertising and digital strategy.

The other I helped create the entire newspaper both when it came to design and the content as one of my partners were lead investor in it.

They both failed for two different reasons, Despite the general love for the first newspaper and it's content (think International Herald Tribune) not enough wanted to pay for it.

The other was an attempt to establish a free danish national omnibus newspaper which failed because of problems with distribution.

I have also been advising a few online journalistic magazines. One of them is doing really well by following a donation model ala the one used on brainpickings.org.

Regulation is always a discussion but it's not the discussion that journalist normally discusses when they discuss journalism as tabloids aren't the only types of newspapers there are so I would still question the idea that regulation is really the core discussion when it comes to journalism.

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