Hacker News Reader

The current quality and quantity of information previously classified as "news" is far beyond what has ever existed previously. Look at any news event and compare the information that's immediately available now compared to similar news events 20 or 30 years ago. People on the ground publish pictures, videos, and reports as the events are happening, and we can read reports from any source in the world translated instantaneously into our native languages. And we have access to all of this using a tiny computer that fits in a pocket.

The idea that quality has decreased is simply an absurd and obvious myth perpetuated by editors and professional writers who are unhappy that their control over the journalism and publishing industries is evaporating. Furthermore, the market has never really paid for journalism, which was always subsidized by ads of questionable efficacy and ownership by wealthy individuals.

Finally, the big secret is the a massive amount of non-fiction by professional writers is embellished, plagiarized, or outright fabricated, and there is almost no real fact-checking in the industry. The regular scandals are just the tip of the iceberg.

Journalism and non-fiction writing as they exist now are in need of a major overhaul. Thankfully, technology is creating a situation where the world is naturally moving forward.

I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. Straightforward reporting is in very good shape right now, particularly due to the effects you mention.

Long form journalism and in-depth reporting is not doing nearly as well, and is not well supported currently.

Well, there are still a couple of good ones. The Economist is exceptional, but it's there. Foreign Policy is also pretty good, though it the opinions are less polished - it seems written by people who haven't had to defend their article in front of colleagues before publishing. Anyway, it's good. On the tech front there's Anandtech and partly Ars Technica. I doubt the world has seen much better journalism than those four.

And the best private blogs are really good. (Even if the average is pretty poor.)

Quality isn't a linear metric.

Immediacy and media quantity have shot up, like you say. It's one of the most amazing things about living in the world today.

Depth and investigation has suffered, and I think accuracy and objectivity have too. Not every story can be revealed with cell cameras in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you have to dig and dig hard.

I rolled my eyes every time someone linked to the “publications” you’ve mentioned: readwrite, thenextweb, techcrunch, mashable… add venturebeat, buzzfeed, cnet, business insider, the street, and many more……

It is all in the name of page hit, no longer about useful information.

The pageview journalism model is fascinating. Initially you just had to produce cheap content in volume. Now you actually have to build the incentive structure so that most of your content is free. The payouts to writers become somewhat of a skill based lottery.

Much like Bitcoin mining, there are only so many pageviews per day. You can optimize certain behaviors to increase your pageviews and ad impressions -- more ad units, auto reloading pages, slideshows, more side links, etc. Publishers doing this increase their slice of the pie. Big brand advertisers appear to not track sales at all so quality publishers basically subsidize the low quality content farms.

Fighting back is possible. If you see a weird article that friends are sharing, look up the writer. Many of these people are amateur writers or college students. Facts are wrong (happens in real journalism too.) Some of the 'controversies' in technology today are almost completely made up but they attract pageviews, so they keep getting written about.

One thing I learned when I was earlier was that a lot of articles in the professional business press where complete trash for an entrepreneur -- Fortune, Forbes, Harvard Business Review. They had some basis in fact but consisted of a lot of noise written by writers who probably didn't know what they were writing about (with exceptions, which is why I kept reading.) What happens when the people who do read get not only noise but noise that no one fact checked? Twitter, Youtube, and fact based organizations (Human Rights Watch, ACLU) publishing material to all instantly balance even this ocean of crap out. I think despite the negatives we remain much better informed than the past.

>readers are not idiots.

The wild success of such social justice warfare proves that you are incorrect. Most people are too stupid to read, comprehend and / or care about legitimate news, and so the industry adapted in order to increase revenue. This adaptation started over 100 years ago, and now the transformation is almost complete.

There are still some excellent journalists out there, but they are outnumbered.

I don't think there is really no one paying for it. At least where I am from you can buy 100+ really obscure magazines at larger railway stations for example. I doubt the magazines will generate large profits, but seem to be self sustaining and at least some of them have content you would not easily find on the web. Even with tablets, it is more pleasant to leaf through a 10 Dollar magazine about design, than the equivalent app. High quality magazines should still have some advantages over online advertising for some brands and they select specific audiences probably as efficient as elaborate online analytics. If you bought a magazine about miniature railroads or gardening, noone needs to store your purchase history to infer what products you might want to buy.

> At least where I am from you can buy 100+ really obscure magazines at larger railway stations

That's because magazine publishers are responding to widespread decline in sales with more and more titles, trying to capture every possible niche under the sun.

> seem to be self sustaining

That's less and less true every year.

Try googling "Linux Voice"; read up on their background, what they are doing and why. You'll see how things are really going. The "magazine" format is dying a slow death, in the same way generalist TV is; their death will be slower than the one of newspapers, but it's written in stone in the same way.

> since nobody's paying for it the content is usually average at best.

I think that's an oversimplification.

I believe the lack of publishing gatekeepers means the bottom end of the bell curve isn't being truncated. The variation in quality has certainly gone up, but I'm not sure if the mean or median have really moved.

Sure, there's a lot of crap to wade through, but there are also a lot of talented people who wouldn't have been able to find an audience going through old publishing systems.