The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down with It | Hacker News Reader

The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down with It

politico.com

24 pointsmarban8 comments

Seem to be forgetting how often these swaggerin dude's got the story wrong. No need for swagger, just tell the goddamn truth, verifiably.

>Treading softly so as not to rile anybody

Consolidation, Consolidation, Consolidation.

Advertisers have consolidated to a few businesses. Bug business has become bigger and more consolidated. News itself has become consolidated.

Only place people are willing to have swagger is online distribution, but so many of those rag fall under some category worse than yellow journalism

> Nobody wants a return to the locker room ethos of earlier newsrooms where a mist of testosterone hung in the air, where every other desk had an opened bottle of scotch on it...Surely there is a path back from the milquetoastery of contemporary journalism to something approximating swagger.

Maybe "swagger" and the "locker room ethos" are symbiotic, and trying to wipe away the latter killed (or at least weakened) the former? I don't think the world is so neat and tidy that we can have our ideological cake and eat it too, and I'm sure lot of fashionable programs will have severe consequences (due to subtle and not-so-subtle contradictions).

If doesn't help that actual output often seems pretty far down on the list of priorities, and as a society there seems to be little appetite do deal with predictable problems before they become absolute disasters (and sometimes not even then).

Maybe this article thinks the picture they’re painting with this paragraph is supposed to be repulsive but I almost have a yearning for it.

This article is almost irrelevant because here we are in 2024, barreling towards a future where there are approximately zero real journalists, and all news is written by an LLM. No reader wants this, but it’s clear it’s coming and it’s coming soon.

Now consider that journalists are essentially the historians. Arguably, this is even their primary function. Meaning that very soon history books will be citing history as written by LLMs. There's a lot of downstream discussion to be had from this premise.

> and all news is written by an LLM.

And that's arguably not even really news. IMHO, the best that can be is regurgitated press releases or worse (like closing stock prices mashed up with hot takes from social media and some hallucinations for "analysis").

An LLM isn't going to do any investigation, or even really have any judgement about what to write about. Though I'm sure "AI" enthusiastic will happily point to the weakened state of journalism, which does sometimes regurgitate press releases, as justification for weakening it further in order hype "AI" more.

I think journalism took a nosedive when the journalists were allowed to promote their personal beliefs and opinions, instead of reporting facts and providing analysis. Journalists hate this because they feel its their jobs to persuade, not inform. It may sound boring to some but I just want facts and analysis, not personal opinion and persuasion reported as fact.

Yes, media has always done this, but that doesn't make it right and it's gotten worse, and worse.

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