MetaChat - Forgive Us Our Press Passes

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01 July 2012

Forgive Us Our Press Passes This story from this week's "This American Life" gave me heartburn. The state of journalism is so completely fucked in this country, it isn't even funny.→[More:]

This story is about a company which provides outsourced "local" news for newspapers. (Pieces are assigned to writers in other cities, or even other countries, and run under pseudonyms.)

But you can see it even in broadcast journalism- a certain Atlanta-based news network just recently fired 46 of its 53 documentary-producing staff, and in the same week, committed 10 million dollars to buying a canned travel/food show from a TV celebrity chef, produced out-of-house. Atlanta's only remaining newspaper looks like a coupon sheet from a supermarket- a few wire stories, LOTS of fluffy feature stories and "Best Gas Prices in Town" type stories, and even the weekend editions are thin enough you could slip them under a door.

Anyway, check out the TAL story, because it's excellent. My favorite part- when the founder of the outsourcing company tries to parse out what "written by" actually means.

post by: BoringPostcards at: 20:34 | 7 comments

Let me guess -- Patch? Examiner?

posted by Madamina 01 July | 21:37

Yep, it's been a bog problem. One of the main things that makes my heart sink is how eagerly internet culture early on embraced and co-created this demise by pushing for free content and sneering at "old media." And it has produced no truly viable alternatives.

posted by Miko 01 July | 21:46

Stijn Debrouwere wrote a great commentary on the state of news. He really verbalized what I'd felt in my gut for a while.

There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.

posted by halonine 03 July | 13:30

I really don't see any good coming out of this, really no light at the end of the tunnel. Newspapers were a great "push" mechanism that trained you to see and appreciate news by putting news in front of you, packaged quite efficiently with other vital information. All the sites that piece halonine links are opt-in. People don't go looking for content they don't know about and can't imagine; I've had people tell me straight up there's no conceivable reason they need to know what's going on in their neighborhood or city politics, let alone some scandal in the capitol far away.

posted by Miko 03 July | 17:15

These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.

Experience says that once that 95% is gone, so is the budget for investigative reporting.

posted by BoringPostcards 03 July | 21:29

Yep. It's not profitable. Everything is free - except real information, which counter to the utopian dreams of internet cheerleaders, turns out to be the rarest and most expensive luxury of all.

posted by Miko 03 July | 22:19

Speaking from the only situation I saw in person: in the old days, Ted Turner used to pay for CNN with all the money he made from World Championship Wrestling. WCW cost basically nothing to produce, so money went in at that end of the funnel, and came out at the news end of the funnel. He knew journalism doesn't pay for itself. No wonder he's said in interviews that he considers selling CNN to be the biggest mistake of his life. (For the record- so do I.)

posted by BoringPostcards 04 July | 00:49

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