Comment by owenversteeg

>We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.

The average article posted to HN is actually of far higher quality than the average newspaper article. Sit down and read many of the “big names” cover to cover. You’ll cry. Contrast them with the same newspaper twenty years ago and you’ll lose hope entirely.

I have a hypothesis. In the 2000s it became more common to Google things instead of asking people. For years, this worked out well, but today the quality of Google (and websites!) is terrible. Today we have an entire generation of journalists that know to do their research with the internet, and surprise, when your inputs are garbage, so are the outputs. The inputs are also homogenized content slop, so there aren’t any real different perspectives. Take any topic, say road construction or a controversial bill or new technology, and read articles about it twenty years ago and now. Twenty years ago you might see some really off the wall ideas - but now, all the articles will be the same. Left, right, whatever, nobody really has any new perspectives, they just have their specific bias projected onto the same universal set of 5 thoughts. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

Back to this article, it seems well written and I have no bones to pick - but what the author did (pick up the phone and call people) would have been entirely unremarkable not long ago. The fact that we’re remarking on it now is an indication of how deeply fucked the profession is.