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Comment by BeetleB

4 hours ago

How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:

1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)

2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online

Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.

4 comments

BeetleB

Reply
josephg  3 hours ago

Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people.

Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.

I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.

  • coatmatter  2 hours ago

    Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.