Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, has been promising to restore trust in media over the last few months. Instead, he has launched an escalating campaign of editorial interference that acc…
Second, are you seriously defending the steaming pile of garbage legacy media is. Furthermore, are you also suggesting that without them we would have no way to learn about what is happening in the world.
Out of the more prominent things on Youtube and so on - who has the means to be doing any boots on the ground journalism? I see Young Turks trying to fund a few things here and there, and they are probably one of the longest-running and most popular independent things; they even pre-date Youtube, IIRC. But that doesn’t even approach the level of what we are talking about.
Believe me, I’m no fan of the corporate media, but I’d be curious as to what will the fill the gap.
Right now, the situation is that we have a whole lot of parasites that basically feed off of mainstream news, going for the ragebait to get clicks, likes and subs. But that requires almost no budget whatsoever and it’s only tacking on opinion and analysis (mostly just ragebait and ill-informed hot takes, but not always. The usual 80/20 rule applies to this, but the numbers here are probably more like 99% of it is truly just complete shit that makes those that consume such dreck even stupider, with algorithms set up to push the more inflammatory rhetoric even harder even if you don’t seek it out.) onto actual content.
But suppose the “legacy media” completely withers away and dies. Who or what is going to fill that gap? I don’t see anything poised to do so.
We no longer need monolithic entities to help create news. The cost to record and produce this stuff is a fraction of what it used to be and distribution is handled by the Internet.
I find your parasite comment a little appalling considering even mainstream news borrows most of their stories from entities like Reuters. It seems to ignore the basic foundation of communication and reduces it to a simplistic model of who stole whose story when it was never really their story to begin with.
I am not worried that this gap would be filled but perhaps curious as to what it would look like if mainstream news went south because everyone stopped paying attention to it. I think small independents would quickly pick up the slack, but I don’t think the above scenario is really all that realistic.
Even if it was realistic how long before these independents grew and began resembling the legacy media they replaced.
I find your parasite comment a little appalling considering even mainstream news borrows most of their stories from entities like Reuters.
I’m considering Reuters (and AP) as part of that general apparatus.
Shrug, I dunno. I don’t see any independent sources of information arising that comes anywhere close to the level of the current system. Do you have any examples? Honest question. I see shoestring operations out there like Amy Goodman or The Young Turks or The Hartmann Show, but most of that seems to be just a meta-layer put down over top of the bedrock of mainstream news.
Granted, what they do is more thoughtful (generally) than a lot of other stuff, but they are not really providing another source of news, they are just commenting on it. And I say this kind of thing is parasitic, because, without a source of information what are they going to be commenting and analyzing? I realize that a whole lot of cable, op-ed pages, radio, etc…is all in the same boat. Maybe 1% is actual news, the rest is weather, sports coverage, a whole lot of shout shows set up to be even sub-par compared to the likes of Jerry Springer as far as format and actual debate…
Not saying “legacy media” is perfect, I’m just saying what we are told is going to be a replacement doesn’t seem to be happening, and the “social media” landscape is quite possibly far, far worse, due to how it is even further atomizing the populace and creating further alienation.
You mentioned YouTube and although it is a commercial platforms there is a lot of independent news media on it. I think you already mentioned the Young Turks, but here are some others.
Democracy now
Some more news
The Majority Report
The Evening Brief
Breakthrough News
TLDR news
Secular Talk
PragerU
Some of these lean more towards opinion and commentary but that is just the world we live in.
Outside of YouTube I like Ground News. Although not a publisher themselves they can really help to figure out what is going on all sides.
Yeah, I think I’ve seen nearly all of these (I’m watching Adam Mockler right now. I just watched Secular Talk and The Majority Report in just the past hour. :) I’m well aware of a lot of commentary on Youtube, and honestly, I love it. I’m a cord-cutter going back 20+ years). Although some are offered via podcasts, too, I think if YT decides to cut them off - and a few podcast hosting platforms decide to do the same - they are truly boned.
I honestly wish it was otherwise. People have long grown used to - probably for well over a hundred years - for ads to fund their news. The expectation on the 'net about how information wants to be free has further driven revenues down along with general quality…and people are less and less willing to pay for newspapers.
I wish some other model would emerge. Some gigantic collective maybe operating as a B-corp that did actual hard news, in multiple formats, collecting some nominal fee from watchers, and was NOT beholden to even one corporation and no billionaires. I think it would do a lot to reset this country. I just don’t know that anything like that exists.
Out of the more prominent things on Youtube and so on - who has the means to be doing any boots on the ground journalism? I see Young Turks trying to fund a few things here and there, and they are probably one of the longest-running and most popular independent things; they even pre-date Youtube, IIRC. But that doesn’t even approach the level of what we are talking about.
Believe me, I’m no fan of the corporate media, but I’d be curious as to what will the fill the gap.
Right now, the situation is that we have a whole lot of parasites that basically feed off of mainstream news, going for the ragebait to get clicks, likes and subs. But that requires almost no budget whatsoever and it’s only tacking on opinion and analysis (mostly just ragebait and ill-informed hot takes, but not always. The usual 80/20 rule applies to this, but the numbers here are probably more like 99% of it is truly just complete shit that makes those that consume such dreck even stupider, with algorithms set up to push the more inflammatory rhetoric even harder even if you don’t seek it out.) onto actual content.
But suppose the “legacy media” completely withers away and dies. Who or what is going to fill that gap? I don’t see anything poised to do so.
We no longer need monolithic entities to help create news. The cost to record and produce this stuff is a fraction of what it used to be and distribution is handled by the Internet.
I find your parasite comment a little appalling considering even mainstream news borrows most of their stories from entities like Reuters. It seems to ignore the basic foundation of communication and reduces it to a simplistic model of who stole whose story when it was never really their story to begin with.
I am not worried that this gap would be filled but perhaps curious as to what it would look like if mainstream news went south because everyone stopped paying attention to it. I think small independents would quickly pick up the slack, but I don’t think the above scenario is really all that realistic.
Even if it was realistic how long before these independents grew and began resembling the legacy media they replaced.
I’m considering Reuters (and AP) as part of that general apparatus.
Shrug, I dunno. I don’t see any independent sources of information arising that comes anywhere close to the level of the current system. Do you have any examples? Honest question. I see shoestring operations out there like Amy Goodman or The Young Turks or The Hartmann Show, but most of that seems to be just a meta-layer put down over top of the bedrock of mainstream news.
Granted, what they do is more thoughtful (generally) than a lot of other stuff, but they are not really providing another source of news, they are just commenting on it. And I say this kind of thing is parasitic, because, without a source of information what are they going to be commenting and analyzing? I realize that a whole lot of cable, op-ed pages, radio, etc…is all in the same boat. Maybe 1% is actual news, the rest is weather, sports coverage, a whole lot of shout shows set up to be even sub-par compared to the likes of Jerry Springer as far as format and actual debate…
Not saying “legacy media” is perfect, I’m just saying what we are told is going to be a replacement doesn’t seem to be happening, and the “social media” landscape is quite possibly far, far worse, due to how it is even further atomizing the populace and creating further alienation.
You mentioned YouTube and although it is a commercial platforms there is a lot of independent news media on it. I think you already mentioned the Young Turks, but here are some others.
Democracy now
Some more news
The Majority Report
The Evening Brief
Breakthrough News
TLDR news
Secular Talk
PragerU
Some of these lean more towards opinion and commentary but that is just the world we live in.
Outside of YouTube I like Ground News. Although not a publisher themselves they can really help to figure out what is going on all sides.
Oh, and PragerU?
Yeah, I think I’ve seen nearly all of these (I’m watching Adam Mockler right now. I just watched Secular Talk and The Majority Report in just the past hour. :) I’m well aware of a lot of commentary on Youtube, and honestly, I love it. I’m a cord-cutter going back 20+ years). Although some are offered via podcasts, too, I think if YT decides to cut them off - and a few podcast hosting platforms decide to do the same - they are truly boned.
I honestly wish it was otherwise. People have long grown used to - probably for well over a hundred years - for ads to fund their news. The expectation on the 'net about how information wants to be free has further driven revenues down along with general quality…and people are less and less willing to pay for newspapers.
I wish some other model would emerge. Some gigantic collective maybe operating as a B-corp that did actual hard news, in multiple formats, collecting some nominal fee from watchers, and was NOT beholden to even one corporation and no billionaires. I think it would do a lot to reset this country. I just don’t know that anything like that exists.