Knulp

At least it's on the way I think ? People are trying to get medias to be more transparent about their prices, especially with freelancers. Nothing much is happening with short term turnover contracts though... The only organised unions are the ones in very little newsroom - usually specialised medias - where people stay for years and are - by opposition - organized.

True. And they for sure took the wrong direction to build a new trust so it will probably take quite a while.

There's been a big the wave of new medias but not many survived more than a few month or a year. Not sure about crowdfunding. I'll look it up actually, that would be interesting to compare.

That's true. Problem I think is that with the way organisations work (high turnover with short term contacts) it's hard to get a feel for this. There's also the problem that, once something is online... It's hard to have it disappear, independently of the media's will.

I can only speak for France but unions have been coming up. But they are reeaally recent. (last year maybe). The unions that were already in place were more adapted to paper journalism and didn't take well into account the online issues. So it's starting but the fact it's arriving so late also explains the current situation that people often feel like they have to do everything to keep their job. Because there's nothing that can protect them.

Does that mean all traditionnel outlets are just bound to... Die? Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so. In the meantime they have to maintain the flow of content, content, content so ads will continue supporting them in the meantime. If you add to that most of them are still paper magazines which are going down in sales and require it's own workforce...

Someone made a point in another discussion that traditional news outlets are no longer trustworthy and would have to rebuild somewhere else to get a new sort of trust. Maybe that's the way...

Thing is objectivity can't be reached and Lehrer's says it : the only thing yyou can do is try and be fair. It's a big misconception that medias were objective before. Newspapers have always had political leanings (clear and revendicated as the identity of the magazine) and that just never stopped. To say a media isn't objective with their political coverage is actually the norm and what should be expected. Now if a media trumps a fact in favor of an argument in a paper that explain science, that's wrong. But actually I don't think any media does that (never on purpose. And mistakes usually are corrected).

I think it's a fair point but I agree the comparaison is wrong originally because here one of the main issue is that people are not willing to pay for information anymore.

Thing is also that houses that have crumbled have crumbled and there's nothing left. You can't quantify what happened so easily. Articles stay online. Actually that's something that might be good to think about : for a magazine or a journal that decided to make things better and do more responsable journalism, should they delete the content that doesnt fit that bill anymore ? Kind of like the YouTube Kurzgesagt channel when they were confronted with a few of their faults and decided to eradicate the content that was problematic ? It's pretty radical but it sends a message. Not sure how that would be doable economically though.

I don't know but I think so. It's not that we don't need journalists but that economically speaking people are apparently not willing to pay for news anymore. It's a simple calculation : if medias are only supported by subscriptions and not ads, there is less budget and thus need for less employees.

The blue ticks are totally over rated. You can have them if you're not a proper journalist and not have it if you are ^^

Yeah Pro Publica does really good stuff. That's the thing actually. A few medias have managed to get a community around them that's willing to pay and then you can do good journalism. That's great.

Problem stands more for old medias that needed to adapt and mostly none took the risk of going for internet subscription. So they still have to pay their hundreds of employees with a news model that won't last.

Management in medias is one of the main problems. Like in many industries, medias had a hard time taking internet seriously, then didn't think their strategy through, then started going on Facebook etc without a sound strategy as well... You see there exactly what happened first in music, then tv, and basically every industry. I dont know if the Spotify / Netflix model would works for medias. Open question there ^^

Yes. I don't defend the lack of ethics, I'm merely providing some context that's often overlooked. Maintaining ethics is hard in that kind of situation. Also it tends to allow people whith no ethics and no passion to get promoted compared to those who do. It's the eternal... Being at disadvantage if you play by the rules :s

Let's take Buzzfeed.

Most of what they post is utter clickbait and not really informative. They also do amazing pieces of investigation because this model brought them money and they wanted to use it to do better work.

See this article from 2018 that was nominated for a Pullitzer Prize. https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...

Does that mean you rate Buzzfeed as cancer - including the great reporting they sometimes do ? Or each article independently ? But then who does it ?

Open questions here as well ^^

Then... I want to adress one final fact which is that it's easier to say it's the "journalists" fault if information has gotten so bad. Journalists for sure hold responsability in this but the public that doesnt value the work, isn't willing to pay for it and will click on whatever is coming up without caring about sourcing... Well, that crowd also has its share in how bad the situation has gotten. I don't think you can blame journalists for all the fake news websites that came up and how they often became the first things you got to access. The tools for visibility that we have to deal with are completely not appropriate for responsible journalism and also require an amount of time that will never be worth the money (Google, Facebook etc). Those fake news website play dirty and of benefit greatly from it.

In one of the medias I worked for, it does say something that one of the most visited article of the year was about a tenia worm that was in someone's intestine and took literally ten minute to write, edit and publish. None of the very interesting piece of good journalism got as much attention. If you want to do good reporting that will shine, you need good keywords, a video, tons of links... And a long text for good SEO. They can't all have that. And because of the lack of money, all those steps are often asked of the journalists themselves. How can you do a good job if you have to get a good idea while browsing the internet because you don't have time to go out, talk to people and take the risk it will be all for nothing ? Then you have to sell your idea to your boss. Then research. Then interview. Then maybe do a video. Then maybe edit it. Then write the story. Then also doing editing and all the linking. Then publishing. Then promoting it with your own media so you get recognised by your coworkers. Then promoting it online. Then get another idea. All that in one morning of course because where's your worth as a stable employee if you can't publish 5 articles a day ?

I'm not saying journalists are not responsible for what is happening, that all the points you made weren't good points or that I have any answers. I'm just getting tired of always reading hate and simplistic arguments like "Anyway, Buzzfeed is shit" and "Journalists are only caring about twitter". Those are the symptoms, not the cause of the illness. And it would do great to move the debate elsewhere if we want to cure this. It won't be done by journalists alone. A journalist doesn't exist without an audience and this will have to be a common effort or journalism is just going to die and well, it's only my opinion, but I don't think the world will be better for it.

Sorry that rant ended up being a whole book. But if you get there, I would love to hear what you think and we can discuss this outside of hate and "they" and "journalists" and "toxicity".

So I'd like to take the debate here where I think it should lie: with the companies' management. The problem isn't the journalists - there's good ones, bad ones like everywhere and they can't shoulder all the trust crisis that's out there. The problem is that no one is really checking who posts what online. Medias have had a history of having an article go through 3 to 4 people before getting okayed and being published. I actually hate that you only have one name on an article because it is really not a solo work (or at least it never should be). Often I have read articles I wrote and was unable to recognize them. Or they were cut of a part I though balanced the whole argument I was making. In those cases I feel like it's unfair only my name get written down because I'll get all the criticism. In other cases, we were really two working on an article and the editing work was formidable. But somehow in the end, I'm the only one getting the credit for it, which also feels unfair to my colleagues.

All those problems are not easy to solve. They beg many questions : is there just too many people in journalism ? Should companies shrink so they finally get profitable again and the remaining staff can do quality work - at the expense of thousands of people that would get without a job ? Should there only be subscription-based info ? But then does that mean no one without money would get the right to good information ? Should every company sort out a way to be both a newsroom (one that doesn't make much money or even none at all) and develop multiple activities on the side like an ad company, so that they can stay afloat (some have succeeded that way but it's not a valid point for everyone) ? I don't have an answer and mostly every media is trying to figure out their way out of all this. The thing is it's easy to criticize from outside that the managment is shit... but the ships are sinking and when you're sinking, you're not thinking ahead as to which direction you're going to take, or what part of the boat you're going to make better. First you try to figure out how to get all the water out and keep all the people inside alive. It's not an excuse, just the context we have to deal with.

Side note : there's also a problem of journalist schools. That's my own opinion, but I actually think they are very bad for the job - because you won't learn more than in a media, and it makes all the journalists come out very similar. Problem is, if you don't do them, you have no network and, at least in France, you actually can't intern in big medias. Twitter is a similar bubble to the bubbles school create. Twitter makes journalists feel like what they see or talk about has a bigger influence than it really has. But that's not a problem that's only with journalists. It's also with the platforms and it's been argued that it's all over the internet.

Another point is that there's this image that being a good journalist means investigating. Movies or tv shows never mention the actual money you're getting for publishing online. I often see discussion here on how much engineers make. Everytime I read those, I can't believe the numbers. So let's talk money. In France the middle ground for an online paper is getting paid between 40 dollars for a short piece and 120 for a long one. That's usually 8000 characters for long ones, so more or less 800 to 1000 words. If you want to do a good job, it requiries usually two days : you have to research, get people's contacts. Agree on a time for three or four interview which are going to last between 30 minutes and an hour each. Then if you have everything (rarely happens) you have to write. If no one answers or you realize the subject was actually much more complicated than you thought, it might take a week or a month. The nature of the job makes it hard to know how long exactly something is going to take if you want to do it right... But at the end of the day, the amount of money you get paid doesn't change and you might just get paid 100 dollars for two days work, and that's before taxes. I'll talk about my own experience as a freelancer for a year here, and I'm actually one of the very lucky ones because I had work. I calculated that this year, I often got paid 1 or 2 euro the hour. I earned 300 or 400 a month - well, usually it's more 1500 a month, then nothing for two month, then 200, then 600, then nothing again... Often I got paid four months after being published - and sometimes on Paypal. I also worked for a big American media and they pay you the same amount as in France - except at the end you get a check and your bank at home will also cut its own share of it and you'll end up with two times less money. I am absolutely not exagerating. Of course, I stopped being a freelancer because I couldn't make it work. Yes, my job was more interesting and I was travelling and getting to cover more exciting stuff. But it couldn't compensate the stress that came with having literaly no money and my savings going down and down and down and down. So now I have a job that is actually one of the rare ones where I can do a good job in France and get paid ok. I'll still never earn more than 20 to 25K a year after taxes. But I'm lucky. Really. So imagine how it is for mostly everyone else.

I feel like the conversation is lacking a journalist point of view so I'm going to pitch in :) I usually don't say anything in this kind of debate (especially on Twitter ;) ) because it's pretty useless, but I love reading the community here and it's the first time that a debate disppoints me. I feel like it's one sided and completly lacking the usual counter-argument and debate. Also, bear with me if I make english mistakes - I'm french and it's not my native langage.

First I'd like to adress there's very different kinds of journalism, different set of skills associated with it and of course, a company they work for. As a job, working for the New York Times, for a local journal, for a tech magazine or for travel channel is completely different. I don't think people realise how different the job actually is from one media to the other. You can't say 'journalists' the same way you can't say 'engineers' because there's people doing software, people doing tests, people building machines, people advising companies and many other people doing many other things and having no idea how to do some other engineer job because it is... entirely different. We're not interchangeable and we don't all do the same job at all.

All medias are also different. Which implies different owners, rules, and bosses. As a journalist, you're like everyone else : you're an employee. You can have ethics, you can have thoughts or a list of rules. At the end of the day, it's a job and if your boss asks you to do something completly stupid, you can either say no, loose that job and possibly die of hunger. Or you roll with it and hope very very hard it will not stay on the internet. (Spoiler alert : it will and you'll be ashamed of it all your life.) You do have rights in some countries; but first, like many rights, not everyone know them; and second, those rights don't necessarily protect you. Maybe the media can't fire you right away or because you refused working, but a few months later, when they're considering reconducting your contract, you'll just get cut. It's just sad math. Not everyone can afford to be a hero.