There has never been a better time for journalism
Old ways are giving way to new and more interesting news models
There’s been a lot of hemming and hawing over the state of journalism of late. Earlier today we read this excellent exploration of the state of the industry by Real Clear’s Carl Cannon. He writes;
Cause of journalism’s woes? Tech changes, Yes, But partisanship too
In the article he recalls another era when newspapers “printed money” and when the big three network’s news shows had 3/4 of the American television audience between 6 and 7 pm.
The last three decades of the 20th century the author explains were a golden age for the news industry with fat staffs and fat paychecks. But all that has changed.
I remember my first column that ran weekly in a local small town newspaper sometime in the late 2010s. I had one interview with the editor who gave me a tour of the publication’s offices. There were lots and lots of empty cubicles and a handful of people in the newsroom. He explained that the entire industry had been upended in recent years but that they were looking forward to running my column. They couldn’t pay me anything though.
Fast forward another five years. Some new neighbors move in down the street. They are from Omaha.
“Omaha? Who the hell moves to central Virginia from Omaha?” We are chock-a-block full of northeastern refugees but midwestern transplants are not common.
Turns out the husband worked for a newspaper conglomerate (based in Omaha) that owned the local paper. He had come to turn our paper’s ad revenue around as I remember. Nice family. Within a year however they sold the house and moved back to Nebraska.
Since then things have gotten even tougher for the old school news business. Sports Illustrated is close to death if not dead as of this writing. Vice is kaput. Buzzfeed died last year. Dozens of other publications are also struggling.
As Cannon says, technology has been a huge driver of the broad decline of old news and it is probably the biggest driver. But what Cannon calls “partisanship” I would call blatant bias that at times amounts to flat out propaganda. (I mean how many times are we supposed to watch Morning Joe play kissyface with the old guard at the DNC?) Over the last few years it has gotten pretty horrible. I am not the only one who feels like this. Pretty much all of our “right of center” friends are disgusted by the old media these days, along with a growing number of people on the dissident left. (We all owe a debt to the folks in the dissident left who have continued to do real journalism while many of their former fellow travelers turned their backs on good journalistic work.)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Against Crony Capitalism to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.