Comment by dunkelheit
6 years ago
Yeah, the current situation is that because mainstream journalism are supposed to have 'standards', you get the product with predictable quality, but this quality is slowly but surely getting shittier. Blogs and twitter by contrast have no constraints, which means that variance in quality is much higher and while there are great blogs (such as, well, Slate Star Codex), trusting a random blog is an even worse idea that trusting a random journalist.
Looks like an opening for a new model of journalism begins to appear - something that captures the grassroots spirit of blogs, but filters out biased, disingenious and clickbait stuff, traces provenance of information and allows for fact-checking from multiple angles. Of course, the problem is genuinely hard because any startup that attempts this without new ideas about how the thing will be financed will fall prey to the same incentives as the conventional media and fail to make a difference.
It also helps that Slate Star Cortex isn't expected to be unbiased, so instead of pretending to be the diffuse gaze from nowhere, he can simply be up-front about what you should expect.