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Comment by freddealmeida | Hacker News Reader

I think we need a new journalism. One that can avoid the last 20 years of structured news. Though I think this is impossible now. Not without an outsized reaction by the population that doesn't even care.

Facebook exists because most people can accept those crimes committed against them. They really don't even understand them all. Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore

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We don't need a new journalism, we need a new economic model to support the old old journalism (pre-1990s).

The three foundational planks that we've since lost are (1) strong newsroom editorial control of content, independent of revenue, (2) long form & investigative journalism as a stable, viable profession, & (3) journalists and journalism outlets with reputation (able to counter-balance the weight of those they report on).

The greatest tragedy of Google and Facebook has been that they appropriated advertising money that used to support actual journalism, and in return offered us free social and utility apps, but definitely not journalism.

IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.

While I agree, this reads as "faster horses."

Though I would be for it, half of the US will vehemently oppose funding "fake news" with tax dollars.

That leaves "ditching the horse altogether" as the only option.

What does that look like?

It's easy for people to look at the highlights of journalism and think we must go back. It's more challenging to remember that yellow journalism and worse came from that old old journalism. Perhaps it's only the best results of the old way we want, rather than all of them?

The greatest tragedy of modern journalism has been its inability to adapt business models to a changing world. The old old assumption was that newspapers and TV had a near monopoly on user attention, with a tragic unwillingness to consider that maybe this wouldn't always be the case. Outlets more focused on subscriptions and less on advertising seem to have come through better.

Perhaps the alignment between advertising and journalism was coincidental, rather than some iron law?

> IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.

Don't we already have outlets like that? How do you feel about Voice of America or People's Daily? IMHO, a lot of people distrust them as rather less than independent.

Substack is that new economic model for a limited number of investigative journalists who have strong name recognition like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. But it probably won't scale to the levels were need.

Substack is currently awesome but it isn't going to be able to pay for journalism on any significant scale, as you mentioned. Journalism needs to be paid for by philanthropy. Absolute independence from market forces and political pressures. There are enough billionaires that could fund endless journalism off a fraction of their interest earnings.

How much do you trust the independence of the Washington Post, now that it's owned and backed by Jeff Bezos? They clearly have freedom from market forces and political pressures now.

It is traditional for-profit journalism.

> IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.

What about the independent journalists and outlets that rely on said advertising revenue? Or the more mainstream ones that do likewise?

Seems like this may make it worse for those, unless you've got a way this can only affect ad network providers rather than those utilising their services.

I think journalistic work in gathering and checking facts and statements is fundamentally the same. Delivery sucks though. There is to much news generated each day, but feeds like in Fb or Twitter are not cut out to track issues. So we just endlessly consume information without achieving understanding.

> Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore

Why would that surprise anyone? He had Moxie implement the Signal protocol in WhatsApp.

Nah we don't. Journalism was never for interest of the people. Those get shutdown as 'foreign actors' and we can't have foreign actors messing with our thoughts unless vetted by our ICs. We need less gullible brains, but that would make us realize how far the corruption goes, so far that no one can currently dare call it corruption.

This goes against anyone who currently runs 'a journalism'. We need to stop giving them our attention. We won't

I', so tired of explaining to people that journalism is about making money, period. The "news" is the click bait and the ads and opinions are the product. Always has been this way, since the dawn of printing for the public.

Why anyone is still on Facebook amazes me. You all know the corporations is one of the more evil presences in our society. Smoke up boys!

> Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal

Was this ever confirmed?

Is it possible Zuckerberg just installed it to check out the competition? Is it possible he has it installed as a WhatsApp backup, if FB/WhatsApp is down (exactly the sort of thing the CEO of FB/WhatsApp needs to be prepared for)?

And we've concluded "Zuckerberg uses Signal"?

If he installed it for 5mins to 'test the competition'.... then.... he did it on his "main" phone? Don't they have throwaway phones for that? Would he allow his full contact list to be uploaded?

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