Comment by phasersout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phasersout | Hacker News Reader

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I fully agree: I am a trained journalist and a programmer.

Ten years ago it was possible to feed a family with an editors salary and have a work environment that made for all around decent articles.

But then the public decided they are not going to pay for journalism anymore and that's exactly the reason we are where we are today. Endless SEO-Content-Attacks, a new breaking news headline every 30 minutes and editors that are not "editors" anymore but "content managers" - people who "write articles" for 20 dollars a pop and content creators who have to finance their notebook reviews with affiliate links of said piece of tech - wonder how independent these review are going to be. All the while publishers trying to get ouf of the reds and into the black and trying to appease the almighty Google ad good as possible.

You people brought that onto yourself. Anybody who wants to write for a career today must be able to afford it...

Disagree with blaming the general public. I'm a librarian-programmer who's dabbled in writing and done some political comms work, though never journalism.

You're right about the lack of financial ability for writing to keep one afloat financially (unless you're willing to do sketchy work, of course), but that's more a tragedy of the attention economy commons than the fault of the average news consumer. The business divisions of publications realized they could make as much money without paying their journalists as much; why wouldn't they do that? The answer, of course, is because if every outlet turns into a tabloid that it turns out that's bad for society, but no outlet is going to give up the attention economy/data $$$ in exchange for a healthier society because their competitors are still playing the game and they're not going to disadvantage themselves.

Journalists and publications are also not helping their case with trying to run so leanly (no editors, QA, fact-checking, etc.) that their work is no longer worth paying for for those of us who ARE be willing to pay for decent journalism.

The incentives of both journalists and their bosses no longer match each other, and in addition both sets of incentives also don't match what society requires.

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