Not that it excuses anything but I imagine the first thing to be cut as things feel the squeeze (not like newspaper has been the most lucrative of industries these last few decades) is the department that routinely says "all good" and starts to look more and more like an expense, especially if those they look at are considered upstanding members of society doing their bit. Actually you say IT is your game so you probably have sat there with people seeing the money fly out into your department and not generate any income per se aka you are an expense, however in the middle of their clueless rant you start to ponder how long it would take for things to fall over if you all vanished tomorrow.
I don't know what the journalistic equivalent is but spies call them paper mills. When your checking department goes skeleton crew you probably get them as the first thing to slip through the net.
I will admit that I've only worked as an outside contractor, people come to me because they have a need or a problem. This is pretty uncommon to me. OTOH I work fully transparent and have automation in place to create statistics, which is what I would expect from a department that fact checks.
While fact checking a piece, make notes of what can't be corroborated, keep statistics of what is a usual number of unverifiable facts for different departments (harder to verify facts from a reporter on the ground in a war than someone researching a border militia in the US), create reports that show some reporters tend to have significantly higher numbers in these areas, create reports that show trends some reporters became less verifiable over time. You know, the bare minimum.
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People are less interested in the news outlet itself (the "source"). Two examples: 1. People stopped "clicking through" to the original webpage on facebook anymore, to them they get their news "from facebook" (Their videos are autoplaying, why leave the stream.. Thats design.) 2. The google news story about "we dont permit you to use our stories, ups - our reader numbers fell by 50+%".
You're saying people went from reading articles to reading headlines, it's exactly what I meant. Your example regarding google as a news aggregator is literally saying people DO "click through" and it has a massive impact on the site if they don't advertise properly (i.e. be present at aggregators and in social media).
People are still interested in stories - but they can get them "where they already are" (talking to their friends on facebook), and therefor are less interested in news outlets.
The only thing I get from your argument is that people may not be as interested in a specific outlet because they are provided tools to get a better overview over many outlets. This does not constitute less interest in news but may indicate less interest in news of a certain political bias.
I dont see how adhering to facebook logic ("become a personal brand") fixes that. It just strokes peoples egos and plays into the "only whats popular is important" narrative (you dont have a medium any more that can "subsidise" the important story with some popular ones - everything is now optimized for popularity (algorithm)).
Again, I think you're barking up the wrong tree and have a false assessment of the issue at hand. It's true that it won't fix things, it will make it worse. You said yourself Restle is advocating for this, if you look for the immediate feedback that he got for this (twitter responses), it's overwhelmingly negative, are we just ignoring this?
From my perspective, this harms journalism more, than it benefits it. You end up with those guys:
Exactly, from what I hear Relotius was a proponent of value driven journalism as proposed by Restle (I may be wrong of this). This is exactly what it breeds, because the whole premise of it is BS.
I will say again that "amateurs" have been given tools to self publish easily (social media, blogs, etc.) and are in the proccess of overtaking traditional news outlets because outlets will ignore how to play the new game properly, make wrong assumptions and ultimately fall flat on their face while trying to turn things around, it's literally how a lot of big players in various industries have fallen in the past.
But then my main issue here is "facebook", or "google news", or (the aggregators)...
Why? They're a tool for consumers to get a better overview over different outlets. People have done this manually for ages with RSS feeds, remember the outcry when google cancelled their RSS reader application?
Taking a 30% (usually) cut of the income, while having ruined the addvertising market for conventional media (they know much more about their "customer").
I think that's way too simplistic, while what you describe is a problem for big outlets, it's a godsend for smaller outlets and independents. Funny enough, when adpocalypse struck and things became harder for smaller outlets and independants they found a way to generate income through other means like subscriptions, while bigger outlets basically did nothing but take ad block creators to court and trying to make their content inaccessible with an activated ad blocker, recently they started to put certain content behind paywalls which does seem to work better given that it's become more commonplace.
Replacing agenda setting with popularity algorithms (I like).
I don't know if I understand correctly but if you're saying that journalists following an agenda is replaced, than that's a good thing in my book because journalists have no business doing that.
But then thats not a very profound relization as well. I simple want the old system back. Which is never going to happen either.
You want an old system, where it was significantly more time consuming to take in multiple sources to aid in forming an opinion, back?
Thats also why I dont see this as the great new future of media. If it happens, the "educated" people will still rather flock to outlets that follow a different standard - which currently some believe will then be mostly those run by people who are willing to loose money and still dont downsize the editorial staff (Bezos, ...).
The new media landscape and quality journalism are not mutually exclusive. Assumptions made by traditional media of what it would take to transition are misguided.
Funny you mention Bezos. Here's an article of an outlet with "different standards" https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...creator/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0e4eefe92207