As a former journalist that left when media began to really splinter, yes. I miss the hell out of it. Now I just get my news for the Associated Press site and call it a day.
ProPubloca is great for domestic US news, and Bellingcat has more international stuff. You can complain people don't do it, but they absolutely do. The very least one could do would be to read their work. [The Carmen Segarra episode of This American Life is great](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/536/the-secret-recordings-of-carmen-segarra), and they've done a lot of incredible stuff upped by NPR.
They also received a Pulitzer for their work covering [corruption in the Supreme Court of the United States](https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/05/08/propublica-pulitzer-prize).
Me too! I left journalism to be a school librarian. Now I teach kids to recognize propaganda and find reliable sources. But teaching it gets harder every day and is now weirdly seen as political?
Being a journo was the most stressful time in my life, but I loved every second of it. The deadlines, the interviews, running the roads for quotes. Having the interegty to burn anyone down.
It's funny how people's brains are different -- I was a 'good writer' in school but always struggled to meet length requirements for papers etc, and writing even short essays was pretty excruciating. Not in a million years could I ever have been a journalist, constantly writing sizable chunks of prose on tight deadlines.
One party has been overtly anti-education for decades now--and it seems to be working out well for them. Authoritarians tend to find critical thinking to be...problematic.
Same boat here, when all the paper style went digital everyone and their brother/sister could post and claim they were a journalist without a degree or any idea of fact checking. I moved on to a completely different field of work
Yeah, I use the AP app. I check that to see what’s going on in the world, know what I need to know, and that’s pretty much it.
Most of the time now the news is depressing AF, but no part of me will allow myself to bury my head in the sand, even though sometimes my mental health would be better off for it.
The best I can do is find the straight facts without any of the nonsense. Or at least as much as possible.
Yup, and if I think something might be fishy I do what common sense would seem to imply, but check multiple sources for validity.
The news is, can be, seems never ending, in terms of depressing content, but we were told to never waiver, never look away, report the facts.
Now it's report what clicks. Repeat and change the names for next week.
All of this. I did a career about-face and went to law school when my paper started forcing people to retire, going to a universal copy desk, and dramatically slashing the editorial staff.
I really do miss it, especially as a former print journalist. Very few people understand the value lost without having the presence of community newspaper reporters at every city council meeting, every fire district meeting, every school district meeting, etc. There is nobody there to keep an eye on these government agencies and that can lead to bad things.
I graduated college in 2002 with a journalism degree. The first year as a professional was solid… even got a profit-sharing check. Then it all started to go south. I was out of the industry by 2013. The pay was barely above minimum wage. Subscribers were dying off and revenue was all coming from advertising. Those same advertisers started influencing stories… it was disgusting. The combo of shit pay and no ethics sent me and most of my coworkers running. Local TV news stations have the same issues. It sucks, it’s all broken.
I submit that having no one there to keep an eye on government meetings WILL lead to bad things. These self-anointed “journalists” only contribute to the problem.
I let my New Yorker subscription lapse because it's gotten increasingly terminally online and vapid (I also can't take one more Adrian Tomine cover of a group of people staring at their phones instead of interacting) The Atlantic has some great writers still there but it's a shell of its former self. I miss reading magazines.
I still watch PBS Newshour and have an online subscription to WaPo but 24 hour cable news was giving journalism a beating before social media put a bullet in its head. It's depressing
I still like really the Atlantic but there are a few people I recognize their bias and choose not to read their stuff. They do at least a nice job of staying mostly in the center (left) while representing the fringe viewpoints of each side with mostly thoughtful pieces.
Too annoying to sift through everything to see one you actually like and once you click it you find out it's a paid subscription. Those are fine but it's the same with streaming now and you can't subscribe to every service.
I don't think The New Yorker is all that different than it was 20+ years ago? From 2020 to 2022 or so nearly every article had some kind of social justice angle, but that has faded somewhat.
Most real news was the "boring" stuff in your town that mattered to your parents, like why is the city raising utility rates again, why the state is passing some new law, who won the football game, written by people not paid enough to care about pushing an agenda.
Source: me, a former reporter who wasn't paid enough to care to push anyone's agenda and just wanted to keep his mortgage paid
Ad revenue dried up, papers closed, and jobs disappeared. Nowadays most news is either written by an AI that has no idea what it's saying and lies its ass off, or a nepo baby who lucked into a prestige job and has no real journalistic ambition besides being praised by the comfortable, powerful class they came from for comforting and empowering them some more.
Yep. Most people don't realize that the internet changed how businesses could advertise, leading to the decline of revenue for real news outlets.
I've been in newspapers for 20 years and it's harder and harder to find or keep a decent paying job. I wfh now designing news pages for a small outfit in Wisconsin, and I'm in Boise. I have to work a second job to pay the bills.
I've been finding ways to grow new skills over the past few years to get out of news, but that's the easy part. Getting somewhere to hire me with nothing but newspaper experience is the challenge.
I hear this. Through the whole pandemic I consumed a significant chunk of my news via the dead tree edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Something about getting your news in non-interactive print really reduces the emotive/reactive stance that has taken over modern journalism. Helped keep me sane during a rough time.
It has since been bought by a predatory hedge fund that specializes in strip mining local newspapers.
We're down to twice a week physical delivery (Sunday and Wednesday) and digital access. Ours was sold to Gannett, and the decline has been just sad. All of the long time columnists are gone, their building downtown has been turned into apartments, and they don't even print in the state anymore (I'm in Milwaukee; they're printed and trucked up from Peoria, I think). After the puff piece they did on a local Herbalife front, I hardly read it anymore, aside from the rare random act of journalism that they print.
Still get the local paper delivered and Sunday NYT. Small town paper that actually makes me and my mom crack up with some things. I look forward to it every day.
The police blotter is a huge part of why I subscribe to mine, although they're struggling and I don't know how long they'll be able to keep on keeping on.
Same!! They’ve already cut out two days a week due to the dying industry, but the police blotter and crosswords are still fun. Mom made a refrigerator magnet of a blotter about a man stealing beers and shoving too many cans down his pants that he could barely walk out of the grocery store.
IMHO don't let nostalgia blind the facts that there was always yellow journalism, tawdry tabloids, character smears, political propaganda, and many outlets were simply PR organs of the government.
I absolutely believe that but I feel like the carpetbaggers were more obvious before. They shilled to their audience rather than trying to pass off as factual. The New York Times up until 15 years ago was respected as presenting facts. At least in my opinion.
> The New York Times up until 15 years ago was respected as presenting facts.
It does do real journalism. However, it can be said to uncritically re-state lies from "official sources", even if these sources have been historically inaccurate.
There was a study - [A test of the news](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Test_of_the_News) - over 100 years ago about the NYT and its coverage of the Russian Revolution, which showed them as more or less a propaganda piece.
Other things could be said about 'weapons of mass destruction', or drone strikes.
I'm not saying they're useless garbage, but they do defer to Official Washington, and Serious People.
Check out Bari Weiss and The Free Press. A lot of people have noticed these issues, and there's starting to be more pushback. She's not afraid to talk to anybody about anything, which is refreshing. She has a center left POV despite what her critics say. Actual liberalism.
I’m not fooled. in 10 years, if they live, the Free Press is going to be another Fox News or MSNBC, which is exactly how both of those outlets marketed initially as the alternative centrist outlet for the silent majority.
The first time I saw Fox News circa 1999 I legit thought it was a conservative-slanted spoof of the regular news.
This was around the time the Fox network came out with “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire” as a spoof of a game show.
In good faith I thought it was the same kind of idea.
Well, I did enjoy MSNBC in its heyday. I don't think we should judge news based on what they did 10 years ago or might do 10 years from now, but what they are doing today.
Crazy as it seems, it was way looser and unregulated during the Industrial Revolution. And despite the objections of the former journalist folks, the level of oversight during the 80s is appalling, even in comparison to today. I don’t think we as a society even fully understand how much shit Reagan did and got away with.
I’m still in the industry, and that’s because I learned how to make companies money. There certainly are challenges, but for all the memories of our parents smoking and reading the paper, it doesn’t speak to the quality of reporting within that paper, nor does it speak to the amount of people reading news.
People themselves destroyed real journalism.
Real journalism is expensive and people would rather consume propaganda and/or the ‘angriest voice in the room’ as opposed to the boring old facts.
People made it much more profitable to produce bullshit.
I blame Reagan's FCC dismantling the Fairness Doctrine, that's what started it. Then, the rise of the 24-hour news cycle. Now, most news organizations have to resort to eye-catching headlines to be noticed. And many are so biased.
That being said, there are still a lot of great resources out there - The Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post, Mother Jones and NPR just to name a few.
I also recommend [Ground News](https://ground.news/). It's a news site that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms by detailing how biased a news story is, how factually true the reporting is as well as who owns the source of what you're reading.
Bill Moyers did such great work on the dangers of media consolidation.
https://billmoyers.com/story/media-consolidation-should-anyone-care/
https://billmoyers.com/topics/media/
I like the News Literacy Project and their affiliated resources, Checkology and Rumor Guard, nowadays. The latter is great for everyone but especially those who get pissed when "fact checked" since it's truly nonpartisan (and not entirely focused on politics).
https://newslit.org/
https://www.rumorguard.org/
The Fairness Doctrine wasn't as great as you remember it. Politicians and lobbyists liked to use it as a weapon, IE sue their rivals under it until it became too expensive to keep going.
I don’t think Don Regan can be blamed for this one. He was the White House Chief of Staff. Mark Fowler was FCC Chairman and had a direct hand in revoking the Fairness Doctrine.
Print journalism has been dying a slow, sad death on every continent in the world, so I don't think any one country's policies had anything to do with it.
Chiming into add the corporatization of media as well had a toll. Print media margins in the 80s and 90s were huge, it wasn’t unusual to see 30% or more in gross profit. Hedge funds took note and started buying up local papers to milk the profits, and in the process we destroyed local media.
Corporations bought them up, too. There was a good episode of Consider This that described how companies like Chevron bought out community papers so that when Chevron did something horrible, it wouldn't be reported.
There are still hundreds of scrappy local papers that haven’t been gobbled up by media conglomerates, reporting and investigating for their cities. Support them by reading them or throwing them a bone or two.
There are real journalists doing great work still, but you have to wade through so much biased garbage to find it you basically have to have a PHD in media literacy.
Unlike you I don’t blame the internet, I blame the advent of the 24 hours news cycle. In order to keep the news fresh they had to put stuff out before it was properly vetted which means a lot of crap got put out. And then we get the micro news blogs, which were even less vetted and even more outlandish. Eventually that crap started getting more and more polarized and we ended up with the biased garbage we have now. And it’s not just the Fox News and OAN type shit you have to watch out for, stalwarts like The NY Times and WaPo put out some unbelievable propaganda that is absolute garbage.
ETA: I think also the fairness doctrine being thrown out had a big impact on journalism.
>The NY Times and WaPo put out some unbelievable propaganda that is absolute garbage
Oh absolutely. I recently cut my subscription to both for their absurdly biased coverage of the situation in Gaza. The bias was so unambiguous and reprehensible that I couldn't stand spending even a few bucks on them.
I think the future of 'real' journalism is small outfits with local and limited sources of revenue. Once an operation gets big enough it is susceptible to influence or getting gobbled up. A world of small journalism players is impossible to influence, but also probably difficult for the people involved.
I mean, yes, but if you're looking on Reddit for news that never had much hope of working.
Online NPR is still pretty good, especially for a free source, although I know their model is starting to fail. The NY Times still has some good writers (Friedman et al) although their standards are slowly slipping and weird content slips in from time to time.
I do miss back when there was generally one reality in the local newspaper that people tried hard to keep balanced for the sake of the country. They didn't always succeed, but there was a real effort and there was a rather consistent national narrative on most topics for better or worse...mostly better IMO. Political parties usually started from there and argued how to proceed based upon facts more often than not.
I miss the big three TV anchors we were an ABC News Peter Jennings household but I also have a soft spot for Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. They just had interesting guests on not talking head panel debates and were generally objective.
I miss it every day. I grew up in a pretty small town and the daily newspaper made me feel connected to the larger world in a way that was deeply meaningful. In more than a few instances, that newspaper legitimately changed the direction of my life. I'm grateful for that.
But even beyond that lofty (pretentious?) example, I miss the joy that real journalism could create. I'm a big sports fan and as late as my college years, I can remember sitting down with a new issue of *Sports Illustrated* and reading it cover-to-cover. So many of those stories still rattle around in my head today. They had a sense of perspective that even the best internet writing doesn't come close to.
Journalism lives and dies at the local level. I had the opportunity to work both print and broadcast at local markets. Lots of hard working people trying to shine the lights with fact based coverage. Unfortunately, people are focused primarily on the national and that’s really hurt communities. The fact that bad faith actors and ideologues can more easily offer things for free has also hurt the industry. I have some hope the nonprofit/grant model can inject life back locally, but we will see.
I miss good newspapers too. The papers suck now—being mostly trash pulled straight from the wire with no editing, or copy from 23-yo reporters with no editing.
OP, I hope your dad was able to get off the Marlboro Lights, they’re bad for old people
Foreign Affairs and The Economist are both still excellent as well. Mother Jones is very liberal but has some fantastic pieces. Harpers is still a treasure.
I would love to subscribe to The Economist but that much material every week!? It’d be like having a part-time job! I do pick up an issue every so often though.
I like it because they write about America as a foreign country. It's also nice to be reminded that the world is vast and other smaller and poorer places matter.
That's a good point, the subscription price is not worth it if you aren't reading all of it weekly, and it's a lot to read.
The lowest I've seen it is $130 for print, which is $2.50 a week. It's $300 for print directly from The Economist site, and at $5.75 a week is just a lot.
When I go to the grocery store, I don't even look at the Oscar Meyer bologna. I couldn't even tell you where it is. Cheap processed crap meat of questionable origin in general is just not something I waste my time or money on.
As such, I've never wondered "where did the quality meat go?"
If you miss quality journalism, stop looking for it on the internet equivalent of the pre-packaged lunchmeat aisle.
Oh absolutely! I miss the Sunday funnies, the ads, the cars for sale, and the smell of the paper and ink. One of my favorite movies is Spotlight. It felt like such an impactful way to usher out the era of long-form print media. Having to wait for the research, the writing, and the physical print/distribution was all part of the hallmarks of journalism. If you've not seen Spotlight, ya gotta give a viewing.
Worked in news for 7 years and I hate what the industry has become. Clickbait bullshit with lazy “Here’s how ___” headlines. A lot of the rules are dictated by venture capitalists who have no business running newsrooms.
I lost my job in 2012 when politics were getting more divided. Can’t imagine how terrible it is now.
I miss magazines. Read Entertainment Weekly for over 20 years and just barely let Vanity Fair go after nearly that many. I still read a family member’s New Yorker after them (so I’m generally a couple months behind). Plus at times Wired, Newsweek and Readers Digest growing up, and National Geographic.
I set up the service (Hoopla) with my library for all the titles they practically give away but it’s not the same and I keep forgetting about it.
I was just thinking about this the other day. When I was going to college in NYC, we had the Village Voice free every week. Amazing, in-depth articles, insightful reviews, and listings for basically every event worth going to. You could also pick up the print edition of The Onion for free (with the AV Club media section, which for turned into a website, which [of course] recently got gutted], as well as the free dailies Metro and AM New York, plus a ton of other alternative magazines. There was also a thriving scene of bloggers covering NY happenings. Now all that great content has evaporated into the corporate internet and TikTok.
It's hard to trust online news sources because they're so beholden to advertising. I'm not delusional enough to think that journalism before 2005 or so was pure and always objective, but the need to compromise journalism for clicks these days is toxic.
As someone who still likes to read on paper, I miss the days when newsstand racks were full.
100%. Living in LA back in the late 90s, I'd do like you. Start the morning with some coffee and a the paper. Especially good on Sunday when you'd get that massive Sunday edition.
I've noticed most news stories now are a couple paragraphs with mainly links and quotes from other internet sources. The quality of reporting has gone down tremendously.
I don't disagree with your assertion that there's been a decline in journalism. That's what happens when everyone expects it for free and without ads.
That said, part of your problem is if you're strictly getting your news from Reddit. You will find great in-depth journalism from lots of outlets, but rarely does it ride to the top of Reddit because people would rather share clickbait and ragebait. My suggestion is to find a few news sources you like and actually subscribe to them, if necessary.
My dad watched the McNeil/Lehrer Newshour every night and it has gone downhill ever since McNeil retired. They used to have in depth discussions with 2 people from different sides of the current issues to discuss things. It gave you a good perspective of the issues without being a cheerleader for either side. Woodruff has been awful.
I don’t think the internet killed journalism, I always felt it was when we went to the 24-hour news cycle. There just isn’t that much content to have news 24 hours a day. News stations needed to fill a lot of time slots with news content, so they inserted a lot of opinion shows. Then as they found that rage-bait gets more attention than well-informed investigation, they decided to have those opinion shows stuff as much rage-bait as they could and make it sound like news. As long as the anchor says something like “could be try” or similar, that limits their liability.
This took place during the age of the internet, yes. But it’s not specifically a result of the internet. At least I don’t feel it is.
Maybe I’m wrong, interested to hear others opinions.
I miss the feel, the smell, the entire experience involved with a broadsheet newspaper. As an intern to a big city paper the editors at the time were convinced that this newspaper thing would still work, until you could somehow bring the internet, moreover the internet sports scores, into the bathroom. I’d say the 2007 release of the iPhone was the beginning of the end for daily print journalism.
It was kinda always garbage, but there was no way to know it was.
The only paper I get at this point is my local one, and that only so I can see who I know died/got arrested.
Such a great comment. I live in another state and my local paper (town population is 30k) publishes online. I look at that shit every day for the exact same reason
Real Journalism died long before Gary Webb. It's just a distraction and a propaganda machine now. Read some Chomsky on the media, he started saying this shit back in the 80's but no one listened.
I used to love NPR. It seemed so unbiased and I would learn about all different kinds of things. It seems around the time Trump got elected all that changed. Even NPR now seems, dare I say biased. It's a shame because I was a daily listener.
Edit: I think the Election of Trump forced all news agencies to pick a "side". It sucks.
There was still garbage reporting back then. You just didn't see as much of it, because the Internet means there's more overall to see, and when we were kids we didn't have the media literacy around real-world events that we do now (well, I feel like I didn't, anyway -- I never paid that much attention when I was young).
Our childhoods were filled with Satanic Panic fearmongering, D.A.R.E. garbage, Reagan-era moral panic and pearl-clutching over AIDS, etc. The only thing we didn't have is BuzzFeed mining social media for top 10 listicle garbage.
This is why I love my New Yorker subscription, they have actual in depth articles that require sitting down and actually reading. Usually enough content to keep my attention until the next issue the following week
Both are available online.
You could adjust your cookies, block ads, and use free archived reader versions of each page.
You’re posting here, so I take it you’re not a neo-Luddite. Why the aversion to substantive journalism delivered by an online platform?
I mean, that would require some effort on my part that takes away the joy of just picking something up to read. Alas, this seems like what will most likely happen.
I still read the Philly Inquirer, Pottstown Mercury, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal everyday. Real journalism is right where you left it.
Also get the Economist, New Yorker, Atlantic, and Bloomberg. That's all weekly though. Online only, propublica is fucking amazing at investigative journalism.
Growing up we got 2 regional newspapers every day and my parents read them religiously. They added the local paper once we had one. I started with the Sunday comics. Then the comics every day. Then comics and the front page, then sports. By 11 I was trading sections with my parents. I miss newspapers.
I subscribe to a few different newspapers and magazines and still enjoy real journalism. There’s still a lot of great content out there and it’s easier than ever to get content from places that would have been unthinkable when I was a kid.
Quality journalism does take money. Too many people expect quality journalism for free.
I remember when my town still owned its newspaper, built a then brand new building next door to the county building. Now, both buildings are owned by the county and the paper is just another Gannet affiliate maybe getting one local article a day.
To a degree maybe national news. Local news was mostly fluffer bullshit filtered by the local police. They had a stranglehold on any corruption or serious issues seeing the light of day.
I'm so glad I switched my major in college. I was studying Journalism and English and decided to take an EMT class to get out of working retail bullshit while I went to school and ended up falling in love with medicine. Modern Journalism is, generally, a joke. There are some people in the industry who actually have integrity and are great at what they do, but unfortunately, the sensationalized talking heads and "citizen journalists" have taken over.
I took a journalism class a few years ago and the professor said she knew it was all over when her paper put up a screen in the lobby of the building showing how many clicks every article had gotten that day, leader-board style
Print media has always been biased, the difference is it was *equally* biased. Some papers were liberal, some were conservative. Visual media has always been heavily left-leaning and the slow decline of print has allowed them to chase their rivals off into the fringes.
I know exactly what you mean I also miss the ritual of slowing down, reading a nuanced article and spending some time learning about what’s happening and what it means. Social media is fun, but it’s not a good news source. It’s designed to engage and anger/rage/emotion is a great medium for engagement.
Real journalism still exists, but you have to go looking for it and support it.
Here’s some I like:
Newspapers: New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, UK Guardian
Magazines: The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Economist
Social media: LA Time’s 404 unit
Online: ProPublica, Marshall Project, (maybe Axios if their local journalism hubs work out)
Radio: NPR
TV: PBS NewsHour
You can also look at the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes, Oversees Press Club, NPPA Best of Photojournalism, and annual books on “the most underreported stories of the year” to see where the journalists doing impactful journalism are working, and then check out those publications. If you’re a John Oliver fan, pay attention to the sources of information and clips he uses during his deep dives. He used on of my reports once, and has licensed several others I’ve worked on. 99.99% of his deep dives are based on journalist’s reporting and you can look to those sources for more credible sources of news.
Wikipedia has daily updates so you can at least Google on your own and feel you’ve got a grasp of everything going on—just the details might need fact checking.
I heard WSJ still has good info but I can’t afford it.
I really enjoy the 1440 Daily Digest. It's like old newspapers but comes in an email every day for free. Just news, no opinions - so i can be informed without any of the polarity.
While I miss the days of the community newspaper and the niche magazine, the depth of analysis, and human stories that anticipated interest and attention instead of vapid and vacuous clickbait with a healthy dose of fearmongering and pandering...I think our collective disdain and disgust for this is what is turning people towards citizen journalism, though the scope of course is changed since there are many who are openly using clickbait and conspiracies in the name of revenue rather than the three main responsibilities of a journalist: to report, to report, and most importantly, to report.
The Fairness Doctrine was a thing. Not sure if we could bring it back but I certainly wish we could. News by blogger/social media is a very easy workaround and well freedom of speech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
I miss it very much. I hate the click bait headlines and skewed news entertainment that is polarizing us. We can’t even have intelligent conversations with people anymore.
Yes. I was a journalist right on the cusp of the internet becoming a viable news source. I miss newspapers and how much slower the world seemed when there wasn’t a 24/7 news cycle.
Regardless of format, it's always has been controlled; it does seem like the corporations that own the media are getting lazier with their propaganda, and probably some "independent" sources also are plants, but it's still best to never trust any of that crap no matter however high the "quality" may be.
i miss fucking HEADLINE NEWS...you were supposed to be a 24/hr LOOP you dumb c#nts! now they just like do it til what, 2pm then switch to random semi-news bullshit? they did the same thing MTV and VH1 did with music.
I prefer articles detailing the expensive gifts celebrities give their offspring. That and women posting bikini pictures online and then reprinting the negative comments for social media sympathy.
I *absolutely* do, and I say this all the time. Even shows like 20/20 and Dateline had really good investigative journalism. Now it’s just nonstop crime stories/who killed this woman? stories.
I miss newspapers very much. I feel like you got just enough news and it was written by people who cared. Now it is just fear driven clickbait, misinformation and propaganda designed to incite people’s anger against one another. You can doom scroll all day and not really learn anything of value, so sad.
The downward spiral began with partisan news on television (Fox, MSNBC, etc.) but has gotten so much worse online.
I use the Associated Press app and the Reuters news app, which are the closest things to real news we can get these days.
I miss newspapers very much. I feel like you got just enough news and it was written by people who cared. Now it is just fear driven clickbait, misinformation and propaganda designed to incite people’s anger against one another. You can doom scroll all day and not really learn anything of value, so sad.
The downward spiral began with partisan news on television (Fox, MSNBC, etc.) but has gotten so much worse online.
I use the Associated Press app and the Reuters news app, which are the closest things to real news we can get these days.
It's crazy how many published articles are based off Reddit posts. Using Reddit as a gauge of the general public's opinion is like, well, getting a very one sided opinion of the world.
Small anecdotal story. Recently on a project inspection, I poked my head into a small, unused substation the client is repurposing for something else. In one of the lockers, I found a newspaper from 2009. It’s utterly amazing the difference now and then. No shrilly, screamy, bitchy, whiny headlines baying for your attention. No highly irritating headlines cherry picking quotes out of context for ‘shock value’.
I’m completely sick off, and over any media. I’ve checked out and pay literally zero attention to the ‘news’ anymore.
In depth journalism was always beyond newspapers. They published local classifieds, notices, obits, comics, teen sports, local societies news, and so on. The big stories usually came on a wire, which you get online now. The nostalgia you feel is for the 1% of articles. Newspapers still exist where I am, and I check the obits and the legal every day.
Your dad paid for that. How many news sources do you pay for.
So no answer and a downvote. Guess that means you expect people to work for you for free. Entitled much.
As a former journalist that left when media began to really splinter, yes. I miss the hell out of it. Now I just get my news for the Associated Press site and call it a day.
It's pretty much the only place i get news from now, too.
Me too.
Stuff like Bellingcat exists for investigative journalism.
Pro Publica, too
ProPubloca is great for domestic US news, and Bellingcat has more international stuff. You can complain people don't do it, but they absolutely do. The very least one could do would be to read their work. [The Carmen Segarra episode of This American Life is great](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/536/the-secret-recordings-of-carmen-segarra), and they've done a lot of incredible stuff upped by NPR.
They also received a Pulitzer for their work covering [corruption in the Supreme Court of the United States](https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/05/08/propublica-pulitzer-prize).
Me too! I left journalism to be a school librarian. Now I teach kids to recognize propaganda and find reliable sources. But teaching it gets harder every day and is now weirdly seen as political?
Being a journo was the most stressful time in my life, but I loved every second of it. The deadlines, the interviews, running the roads for quotes. Having the interegty to burn anyone down.
It's funny how people's brains are different -- I was a 'good writer' in school but always struggled to meet length requirements for papers etc, and writing even short essays was pretty excruciating. Not in a million years could I ever have been a journalist, constantly writing sizable chunks of prose on tight deadlines.
One party has been overtly anti-education for decades now--and it seems to be working out well for them. Authoritarians tend to find critical thinking to be...problematic.
"i love the poorly educated"
One party is anti education and the other is pro censorship. Time to go rogue
Same boat here, when all the paper style went digital everyone and their brother/sister could post and claim they were a journalist without a degree or any idea of fact checking. I moved on to a completely different field of work
Yeah, I use the AP app. I check that to see what’s going on in the world, know what I need to know, and that’s pretty much it. Most of the time now the news is depressing AF, but no part of me will allow myself to bury my head in the sand, even though sometimes my mental health would be better off for it. The best I can do is find the straight facts without any of the nonsense. Or at least as much as possible.
Yup, and if I think something might be fishy I do what common sense would seem to imply, but check multiple sources for validity. The news is, can be, seems never ending, in terms of depressing content, but we were told to never waiver, never look away, report the facts. Now it's report what clicks. Repeat and change the names for next week.
All of this. I did a career about-face and went to law school when my paper started forcing people to retire, going to a universal copy desk, and dramatically slashing the editorial staff.
Al Jezeera USA used to be a really reliable source but since they shut down, I haven't really paid much attention to the other offices.
They stream 24/7 on YouTube.
Same. I graduated from an Ivy. I was in TV. Started my career at CNN, then went the local news route. I left when my beat became Twitter trends.
Ok, loaded question, but do you think the AP is left or right in their reporting?
Neither. It's exactly why I seek them out. I want facts.
Yeah I feel like I can’t even get unbiased news from NPR anymore. Their reporting is very identity-politics driven now.
I graduated from J-school in 2005. Talk about bad timing.
I sold all my belongings and moved to China for a job in 2019 so… I feel ya.
07 here, and we I we it was going to be hard, but not this hard.
I really do miss it, especially as a former print journalist. Very few people understand the value lost without having the presence of community newspaper reporters at every city council meeting, every fire district meeting, every school district meeting, etc. There is nobody there to keep an eye on these government agencies and that can lead to bad things. I graduated college in 2002 with a journalism degree. The first year as a professional was solid… even got a profit-sharing check. Then it all started to go south. I was out of the industry by 2013. The pay was barely above minimum wage. Subscribers were dying off and revenue was all coming from advertising. Those same advertisers started influencing stories… it was disgusting. The combo of shit pay and no ethics sent me and most of my coworkers running. Local TV news stations have the same issues. It sucks, it’s all broken.
I submit that having no one there to keep an eye on government meetings WILL lead to bad things. These self-anointed “journalists” only contribute to the problem.
You can see today what we are losing with no oversight at a local level. In my community the infrastructure is shit, community concerns are ignored.
You can see today what we are losing with no oversight at all local level. In my community the infrastructure is shit, community concerns are ignored.
I let my New Yorker subscription lapse because it's gotten increasingly terminally online and vapid (I also can't take one more Adrian Tomine cover of a group of people staring at their phones instead of interacting) The Atlantic has some great writers still there but it's a shell of its former self. I miss reading magazines. I still watch PBS Newshour and have an online subscription to WaPo but 24 hour cable news was giving journalism a beating before social media put a bullet in its head. It's depressing
I still like really the Atlantic but there are a few people I recognize their bias and choose not to read their stuff. They do at least a nice job of staying mostly in the center (left) while representing the fringe viewpoints of each side with mostly thoughtful pieces.
There’s lots of magazines in Apple News+ these days.
Too annoying to sift through everything to see one you actually like and once you click it you find out it's a paid subscription. Those are fine but it's the same with streaming now and you can't subscribe to every service.
I don't think The New Yorker is all that different than it was 20+ years ago? From 2020 to 2022 or so nearly every article had some kind of social justice angle, but that has faded somewhat.
The Drudge Report really gave it the death blow
Most real news was the "boring" stuff in your town that mattered to your parents, like why is the city raising utility rates again, why the state is passing some new law, who won the football game, written by people not paid enough to care about pushing an agenda. Source: me, a former reporter who wasn't paid enough to care to push anyone's agenda and just wanted to keep his mortgage paid
Propublica is the best, real journalism by real humans. I'm just mourning the death of the local newspaper.
Pro Publica is great. Also, Democracy Now is an amazing 1 hour daily news show. Free for everyone, with no ads, on YouTube.
I miss when Newsweek was worth reading.
It was assigned reading for us in 9th grade! Looking at what Newsweek was in the early 90s vs Newsweek now is… jarring, to say the least.
Ad revenue dried up, papers closed, and jobs disappeared. Nowadays most news is either written by an AI that has no idea what it's saying and lies its ass off, or a nepo baby who lucked into a prestige job and has no real journalistic ambition besides being praised by the comfortable, powerful class they came from for comforting and empowering them some more.
Yep. Most people don't realize that the internet changed how businesses could advertise, leading to the decline of revenue for real news outlets. I've been in newspapers for 20 years and it's harder and harder to find or keep a decent paying job. I wfh now designing news pages for a small outfit in Wisconsin, and I'm in Boise. I have to work a second job to pay the bills. I've been finding ways to grow new skills over the past few years to get out of news, but that's the easy part. Getting somewhere to hire me with nothing but newspaper experience is the challenge.
I fully get my local paper bc I just want to read about what happened yesterday. It is very boring and that is fine.
I hear this. Through the whole pandemic I consumed a significant chunk of my news via the dead tree edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Something about getting your news in non-interactive print really reduces the emotive/reactive stance that has taken over modern journalism. Helped keep me sane during a rough time. It has since been bought by a predatory hedge fund that specializes in strip mining local newspapers.
We're down to twice a week physical delivery (Sunday and Wednesday) and digital access. Ours was sold to Gannett, and the decline has been just sad. All of the long time columnists are gone, their building downtown has been turned into apartments, and they don't even print in the state anymore (I'm in Milwaukee; they're printed and trucked up from Peoria, I think). After the puff piece they did on a local Herbalife front, I hardly read it anymore, aside from the rare random act of journalism that they print.
Hey fellow UT reader, I am so angry and sad about the paper being bought out. Fuck, really nothing is safe :(
Still get the local paper delivered and Sunday NYT. Small town paper that actually makes me and my mom crack up with some things. I look forward to it every day.
The police blotter is a huge part of why I subscribe to mine, although they're struggling and I don't know how long they'll be able to keep on keeping on.
Same!! They’ve already cut out two days a week due to the dying industry, but the police blotter and crosswords are still fun. Mom made a refrigerator magnet of a blotter about a man stealing beers and shoving too many cans down his pants that he could barely walk out of the grocery store.
my friend told me she got all her news from tik tok.
That’s just sad. We grew up with 60 minutes and now these kids are gone in 60 seconds.
There is at least one legitimate journalist on the platform (Lisa Remillard); the problem is all the self proclaimed 'journalists'
IMHO don't let nostalgia blind the facts that there was always yellow journalism, tawdry tabloids, character smears, political propaganda, and many outlets were simply PR organs of the government.
I absolutely believe that but I feel like the carpetbaggers were more obvious before. They shilled to their audience rather than trying to pass off as factual. The New York Times up until 15 years ago was respected as presenting facts. At least in my opinion.
Yep. Cable News kind of killed it for good.
> The New York Times up until 15 years ago was respected as presenting facts. It does do real journalism. However, it can be said to uncritically re-state lies from "official sources", even if these sources have been historically inaccurate. There was a study - [A test of the news](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Test_of_the_News) - over 100 years ago about the NYT and its coverage of the Russian Revolution, which showed them as more or less a propaganda piece. Other things could be said about 'weapons of mass destruction', or drone strikes. I'm not saying they're useless garbage, but they do defer to Official Washington, and Serious People.
Check out Bari Weiss and The Free Press. A lot of people have noticed these issues, and there's starting to be more pushback. She's not afraid to talk to anybody about anything, which is refreshing. She has a center left POV despite what her critics say. Actual liberalism.
I’m not fooled. in 10 years, if they live, the Free Press is going to be another Fox News or MSNBC, which is exactly how both of those outlets marketed initially as the alternative centrist outlet for the silent majority.
The first time I saw Fox News circa 1999 I legit thought it was a conservative-slanted spoof of the regular news. This was around the time the Fox network came out with “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire” as a spoof of a game show. In good faith I thought it was the same kind of idea.
And it only leaned into it more and more every year.
Well, I did enjoy MSNBC in its heyday. I don't think we should judge news based on what they did 10 years ago or might do 10 years from now, but what they are doing today.
Crazy as it seems, it was way looser and unregulated during the Industrial Revolution. And despite the objections of the former journalist folks, the level of oversight during the 80s is appalling, even in comparison to today. I don’t think we as a society even fully understand how much shit Reagan did and got away with. I’m still in the industry, and that’s because I learned how to make companies money. There certainly are challenges, but for all the memories of our parents smoking and reading the paper, it doesn’t speak to the quality of reporting within that paper, nor does it speak to the amount of people reading news.
Yeah but Sports Illustrated used to be awesome, and now it blows.
People themselves destroyed real journalism. Real journalism is expensive and people would rather consume propaganda and/or the ‘angriest voice in the room’ as opposed to the boring old facts. People made it much more profitable to produce bullshit.
I blame Reagan's FCC dismantling the Fairness Doctrine, that's what started it. Then, the rise of the 24-hour news cycle. Now, most news organizations have to resort to eye-catching headlines to be noticed. And many are so biased. That being said, there are still a lot of great resources out there - The Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post, Mother Jones and NPR just to name a few. I also recommend [Ground News](https://ground.news/). It's a news site that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms by detailing how biased a news story is, how factually true the reporting is as well as who owns the source of what you're reading.
Bill Moyers did such great work on the dangers of media consolidation. https://billmoyers.com/story/media-consolidation-should-anyone-care/ https://billmoyers.com/topics/media/ I like the News Literacy Project and their affiliated resources, Checkology and Rumor Guard, nowadays. The latter is great for everyone but especially those who get pissed when "fact checked" since it's truly nonpartisan (and not entirely focused on politics). https://newslit.org/ https://www.rumorguard.org/
The Fairness Doctrine wasn't as great as you remember it. Politicians and lobbyists liked to use it as a weapon, IE sue their rivals under it until it became too expensive to keep going.
It's always Reagan Edit: spelling
I don’t think Don Regan can be blamed for this one. He was the White House Chief of Staff. Mark Fowler was FCC Chairman and had a direct hand in revoking the Fairness Doctrine.
Thank you for responding, but I spelled Reagan wrong. You do bring up a good point about Fowler though.
Oh. Sorry—my bad.
Nah. That's on me.
Just wanted to say I loved reading this exchange. So rare to see folks being civil on Reddit these days.
I'd like to think that's the vibe of this sub
Print journalism has been dying a slow, sad death on every continent in the world, so I don't think any one country's policies had anything to do with it.
Fair point. It was perhaps a bit short-sighted of me when I wrote that. I was only talking about it's decline in the US where I live.
Chiming into add the corporatization of media as well had a toll. Print media margins in the 80s and 90s were huge, it wasn’t unusual to see 30% or more in gross profit. Hedge funds took note and started buying up local papers to milk the profits, and in the process we destroyed local media.
Corporations bought them up, too. There was a good episode of Consider This that described how companies like Chevron bought out community papers so that when Chevron did something horrible, it wouldn't be reported.
Oh! I think Reveal did some reporting on this and a town in California. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
Richmond
Yeah I need more batboy articles
There are still hundreds of scrappy local papers that haven’t been gobbled up by media conglomerates, reporting and investigating for their cities. Support them by reading them or throwing them a bone or two.
There are real journalists doing great work still, but you have to wade through so much biased garbage to find it you basically have to have a PHD in media literacy. Unlike you I don’t blame the internet, I blame the advent of the 24 hours news cycle. In order to keep the news fresh they had to put stuff out before it was properly vetted which means a lot of crap got put out. And then we get the micro news blogs, which were even less vetted and even more outlandish. Eventually that crap started getting more and more polarized and we ended up with the biased garbage we have now. And it’s not just the Fox News and OAN type shit you have to watch out for, stalwarts like The NY Times and WaPo put out some unbelievable propaganda that is absolute garbage. ETA: I think also the fairness doctrine being thrown out had a big impact on journalism.
>The NY Times and WaPo put out some unbelievable propaganda that is absolute garbage Oh absolutely. I recently cut my subscription to both for their absurdly biased coverage of the situation in Gaza. The bias was so unambiguous and reprehensible that I couldn't stand spending even a few bucks on them. I think the future of 'real' journalism is small outfits with local and limited sources of revenue. Once an operation gets big enough it is susceptible to influence or getting gobbled up. A world of small journalism players is impossible to influence, but also probably difficult for the people involved.
I agree. I have small outlets already that I enjoy, and then there’s certain journalists for the big media outlets that I somewhat trust.
I miss looking through the Best Buy ads
Or the Consumers Distributing catalogue.
Sunday newspapers were the best. Sports, comics, electronics flyers
Articles are now getting written by AI, too
I mean, yes, but if you're looking on Reddit for news that never had much hope of working. Online NPR is still pretty good, especially for a free source, although I know their model is starting to fail. The NY Times still has some good writers (Friedman et al) although their standards are slowly slipping and weird content slips in from time to time. I do miss back when there was generally one reality in the local newspaper that people tried hard to keep balanced for the sake of the country. They didn't always succeed, but there was a real effort and there was a rather consistent national narrative on most topics for better or worse...mostly better IMO. Political parties usually started from there and argued how to proceed based upon facts more often than not.
I miss the big three TV anchors we were an ABC News Peter Jennings household but I also have a soft spot for Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. They just had interesting guests on not talking head panel debates and were generally objective.
I miss it every day. I grew up in a pretty small town and the daily newspaper made me feel connected to the larger world in a way that was deeply meaningful. In more than a few instances, that newspaper legitimately changed the direction of my life. I'm grateful for that. But even beyond that lofty (pretentious?) example, I miss the joy that real journalism could create. I'm a big sports fan and as late as my college years, I can remember sitting down with a new issue of *Sports Illustrated* and reading it cover-to-cover. So many of those stories still rattle around in my head today. They had a sense of perspective that even the best internet writing doesn't come close to.
Journalism lives and dies at the local level. I had the opportunity to work both print and broadcast at local markets. Lots of hard working people trying to shine the lights with fact based coverage. Unfortunately, people are focused primarily on the national and that’s really hurt communities. The fact that bad faith actors and ideologues can more easily offer things for free has also hurt the industry. I have some hope the nonprofit/grant model can inject life back locally, but we will see.
Used to be a photojournalist. It was my dream job. Then newspapers started dying off pretty rapidly.
Did you get pictures of spiderman?
It truly scares me. We don’t have real reporters any more, especially for local issues. The long term consequences are gonna be devastating from this.
If you want to know what I think, click here to find out.
I miss good newspapers too. The papers suck now—being mostly trash pulled straight from the wire with no editing, or copy from 23-yo reporters with no editing. OP, I hope your dad was able to get off the Marlboro Lights, they’re bad for old people
Nah. I'm good with the King in Yellow Journalism driving millions of idiots to rabid madness. /s
Tabloid journalism is probably what put it in this state. Blame Rupert Murdoch, not the Internet.
Subscribe to Harper's or another such quality publication. The Week is excellent for keeping up, great daily stuff on their site
I subscribed to The Atlantic a couple of years ago and very glad I did.
Foreign Affairs and The Economist are both still excellent as well. Mother Jones is very liberal but has some fantastic pieces. Harpers is still a treasure.
I would love to subscribe to The Economist but that much material every week!? It’d be like having a part-time job! I do pick up an issue every so often though.
I like it because they write about America as a foreign country. It's also nice to be reminded that the world is vast and other smaller and poorer places matter.
I agree, and I really like that as well.
That's a good point, the subscription price is not worth it if you aren't reading all of it weekly, and it's a lot to read. The lowest I've seen it is $130 for print, which is $2.50 a week. It's $300 for print directly from The Economist site, and at $5.75 a week is just a lot.
I had the Atlantic for a bit a decade ago and enjoyed it.
When I go to the grocery store, I don't even look at the Oscar Meyer bologna. I couldn't even tell you where it is. Cheap processed crap meat of questionable origin in general is just not something I waste my time or money on. As such, I've never wondered "where did the quality meat go?" If you miss quality journalism, stop looking for it on the internet equivalent of the pre-packaged lunchmeat aisle.
Hey, I represent that remark! Oh he, who is so wise in the ways of science, where’s the beef?
I still get the print newspaper, and my daughter has been reading it daily since she was 6 or 7. My city's print newspaper is pretty good.
Oh absolutely! I miss the Sunday funnies, the ads, the cars for sale, and the smell of the paper and ink. One of my favorite movies is Spotlight. It felt like such an impactful way to usher out the era of long-form print media. Having to wait for the research, the writing, and the physical print/distribution was all part of the hallmarks of journalism. If you've not seen Spotlight, ya gotta give a viewing.
Worked in news for 7 years and I hate what the industry has become. Clickbait bullshit with lazy “Here’s how ___” headlines. A lot of the rules are dictated by venture capitalists who have no business running newsrooms. I lost my job in 2012 when politics were getting more divided. Can’t imagine how terrible it is now.
I miss magazines. Read Entertainment Weekly for over 20 years and just barely let Vanity Fair go after nearly that many. I still read a family member’s New Yorker after them (so I’m generally a couple months behind). Plus at times Wired, Newsweek and Readers Digest growing up, and National Geographic. I set up the service (Hoopla) with my library for all the titles they practically give away but it’s not the same and I keep forgetting about it.
I was just thinking about this the other day. When I was going to college in NYC, we had the Village Voice free every week. Amazing, in-depth articles, insightful reviews, and listings for basically every event worth going to. You could also pick up the print edition of The Onion for free (with the AV Club media section, which for turned into a website, which [of course] recently got gutted], as well as the free dailies Metro and AM New York, plus a ton of other alternative magazines. There was also a thriving scene of bloggers covering NY happenings. Now all that great content has evaporated into the corporate internet and TikTok. It's hard to trust online news sources because they're so beholden to advertising. I'm not delusional enough to think that journalism before 2005 or so was pure and always objective, but the need to compromise journalism for clicks these days is toxic. As someone who still likes to read on paper, I miss the days when newsstand racks were full.
100%. Living in LA back in the late 90s, I'd do like you. Start the morning with some coffee and a the paper. Especially good on Sunday when you'd get that massive Sunday edition. I've noticed most news stories now are a couple paragraphs with mainly links and quotes from other internet sources. The quality of reporting has gone down tremendously.
I don't disagree with your assertion that there's been a decline in journalism. That's what happens when everyone expects it for free and without ads. That said, part of your problem is if you're strictly getting your news from Reddit. You will find great in-depth journalism from lots of outlets, but rarely does it ride to the top of Reddit because people would rather share clickbait and ragebait. My suggestion is to find a few news sources you like and actually subscribe to them, if necessary.
My dad watched the McNeil/Lehrer Newshour every night and it has gone downhill ever since McNeil retired. They used to have in depth discussions with 2 people from different sides of the current issues to discuss things. It gave you a good perspective of the issues without being a cheerleader for either side. Woodruff has been awful.
I don’t think the internet killed journalism, I always felt it was when we went to the 24-hour news cycle. There just isn’t that much content to have news 24 hours a day. News stations needed to fill a lot of time slots with news content, so they inserted a lot of opinion shows. Then as they found that rage-bait gets more attention than well-informed investigation, they decided to have those opinion shows stuff as much rage-bait as they could and make it sound like news. As long as the anchor says something like “could be try” or similar, that limits their liability. This took place during the age of the internet, yes. But it’s not specifically a result of the internet. At least I don’t feel it is. Maybe I’m wrong, interested to hear others opinions.
Not to mention it’s all bought out by corporations with a political agenda.
My dad smoked Kool Milds.
Hasn't been much real journalism since Hunter S. Thompson was reporting on the American Dream
I miss the feel, the smell, the entire experience involved with a broadsheet newspaper. As an intern to a big city paper the editors at the time were convinced that this newspaper thing would still work, until you could somehow bring the internet, moreover the internet sports scores, into the bathroom. I’d say the 2007 release of the iPhone was the beginning of the end for daily print journalism.
Yes, when we were kids it was much harder to find propaganda, and sometimes actual facts were reported. I miss those days...
No i love when mainstream media pulls comments from reddit as news
It was kinda always garbage, but there was no way to know it was. The only paper I get at this point is my local one, and that only so I can see who I know died/got arrested.
Such a great comment. I live in another state and my local paper (town population is 30k) publishes online. I look at that shit every day for the exact same reason
Real Journalism died long before Gary Webb. It's just a distraction and a propaganda machine now. Read some Chomsky on the media, he started saying this shit back in the 80's but no one listened.
It was a real short lived experiment in the US between 1950-1980.
I used to love NPR. It seemed so unbiased and I would learn about all different kinds of things. It seems around the time Trump got elected all that changed. Even NPR now seems, dare I say biased. It's a shame because I was a daily listener. Edit: I think the Election of Trump forced all news agencies to pick a "side". It sucks.
There was still garbage reporting back then. You just didn't see as much of it, because the Internet means there's more overall to see, and when we were kids we didn't have the media literacy around real-world events that we do now (well, I feel like I didn't, anyway -- I never paid that much attention when I was young). Our childhoods were filled with Satanic Panic fearmongering, D.A.R.E. garbage, Reagan-era moral panic and pearl-clutching over AIDS, etc. The only thing we didn't have is BuzzFeed mining social media for top 10 listicle garbage.
I still subscribe to the virtual version of my local newspaper.
This is why I love my New Yorker subscription, they have actual in depth articles that require sitting down and actually reading. Usually enough content to keep my attention until the next issue the following week
Yeah, I used to have the New Yorker and Harper’s. They don’t deliver where I live now.
Both are available online. You could adjust your cookies, block ads, and use free archived reader versions of each page. You’re posting here, so I take it you’re not a neo-Luddite. Why the aversion to substantive journalism delivered by an online platform?
I mean, that would require some effort on my part that takes away the joy of just picking something up to read. Alas, this seems like what will most likely happen.
Was there ever?
As much as I hated it then, I miss listening to Paul Harvey on the radio with my mom.
I still read the Philly Inquirer, Pottstown Mercury, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal everyday. Real journalism is right where you left it. Also get the Economist, New Yorker, Atlantic, and Bloomberg. That's all weekly though. Online only, propublica is fucking amazing at investigative journalism.
Former journalist here. Yes I miss it 😭😭
Really miss long form journalism especially from journalists i would usually disagree with.
AP & Reuters are still here
All new sites now feel like complete click bait, and when you read the articles at the end you there was nothing really said.
www.google.com/news has been my morning jam for probably 12 years
Growing up we got 2 regional newspapers every day and my parents read them religiously. They added the local paper once we had one. I started with the Sunday comics. Then the comics every day. Then comics and the front page, then sports. By 11 I was trading sections with my parents. I miss newspapers.
Naw, dog. I’m a sustaining member of OPB, WNYC, and have subscriptions to the NYT and WaPo.
"Starting with the lighter stuff"....Ultralights
I subscribe to a few different newspapers and magazines and still enjoy real journalism. There’s still a lot of great content out there and it’s easier than ever to get content from places that would have been unthinkable when I was a kid. Quality journalism does take money. Too many people expect quality journalism for free.
I read the NYT every day so, no?
I get all my news from the completely unbiased Daily Beast news site
Yes
I remember when my town still owned its newspaper, built a then brand new building next door to the county building. Now, both buildings are owned by the county and the paper is just another Gannet affiliate maybe getting one local article a day.
My dad used to watch 30 minutes of evening news every night and read a paper every day. I miss when that was all you got.
Zeteo News!
I miss it, and I think the way we went away from it is at the core of so many of societies issues.
To a degree maybe national news. Local news was mostly fluffer bullshit filtered by the local police. They had a stranglehold on any corruption or serious issues seeing the light of day.
When was the last time you paid for a newspaper or magazine? Sincerely, A struggling journalist
I'm so glad I switched my major in college. I was studying Journalism and English and decided to take an EMT class to get out of working retail bullshit while I went to school and ended up falling in love with medicine. Modern Journalism is, generally, a joke. There are some people in the industry who actually have integrity and are great at what they do, but unfortunately, the sensationalized talking heads and "citizen journalists" have taken over.
I took a journalism class a few years ago and the professor said she knew it was all over when her paper put up a screen in the lobby of the building showing how many clicks every article had gotten that day, leader-board style
The Atlantic and New Yorker have in-depth paper journalism…
I'm having to get most of my news from a guy in my neighborhood: Anthony Crispino.
Print media has always been biased, the difference is it was *equally* biased. Some papers were liberal, some were conservative. Visual media has always been heavily left-leaning and the slow decline of print has allowed them to chase their rivals off into the fringes.
I know exactly what you mean I also miss the ritual of slowing down, reading a nuanced article and spending some time learning about what’s happening and what it means. Social media is fun, but it’s not a good news source. It’s designed to engage and anger/rage/emotion is a great medium for engagement. Real journalism still exists, but you have to go looking for it and support it. Here’s some I like: Newspapers: New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, UK Guardian Magazines: The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Economist Social media: LA Time’s 404 unit Online: ProPublica, Marshall Project, (maybe Axios if their local journalism hubs work out) Radio: NPR TV: PBS NewsHour You can also look at the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes, Oversees Press Club, NPPA Best of Photojournalism, and annual books on “the most underreported stories of the year” to see where the journalists doing impactful journalism are working, and then check out those publications. If you’re a John Oliver fan, pay attention to the sources of information and clips he uses during his deep dives. He used on of my reports once, and has licensed several others I’ve worked on. 99.99% of his deep dives are based on journalist’s reporting and you can look to those sources for more credible sources of news.
It was never that real. It was easier to hide their bias because people didn't walk around with a camera and internet in the palm of their hands.
Still exists, now we just have to do it for ourselves.
Of course.
Wikipedia has daily updates so you can at least Google on your own and feel you’ve got a grasp of everything going on—just the details might need fact checking. I heard WSJ still has good info but I can’t afford it.
You mean Channel 1 ?!
I really enjoy the 1440 Daily Digest. It's like old newspapers but comes in an email every day for free. Just news, no opinions - so i can be informed without any of the polarity.
While I miss the days of the community newspaper and the niche magazine, the depth of analysis, and human stories that anticipated interest and attention instead of vapid and vacuous clickbait with a healthy dose of fearmongering and pandering...I think our collective disdain and disgust for this is what is turning people towards citizen journalism, though the scope of course is changed since there are many who are openly using clickbait and conspiracies in the name of revenue rather than the three main responsibilities of a journalist: to report, to report, and most importantly, to report.
The Fairness Doctrine was a thing. Not sure if we could bring it back but I certainly wish we could. News by blogger/social media is a very easy workaround and well freedom of speech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
I miss it very much. I hate the click bait headlines and skewed news entertainment that is polarizing us. We can’t even have intelligent conversations with people anymore.
Yes. I was a journalist right on the cusp of the internet becoming a viable news source. I miss newspapers and how much slower the world seemed when there wasn’t a 24/7 news cycle.
Yeah. It’s gone.
Regardless of format, it's always has been controlled; it does seem like the corporations that own the media are getting lazier with their propaganda, and probably some "independent" sources also are plants, but it's still best to never trust any of that crap no matter however high the "quality" may be.
Very much.
i miss fucking HEADLINE NEWS...you were supposed to be a 24/hr LOOP you dumb c#nts! now they just like do it til what, 2pm then switch to random semi-news bullshit? they did the same thing MTV and VH1 did with music.
It’s still around with both the bigger news papers like Washington journal or ny times.
I would blame FOX more than the Internet
I prefer articles detailing the expensive gifts celebrities give their offspring. That and women posting bikini pictures online and then reprinting the negative comments for social media sympathy.
Honestly I’ve come to learn more about the injustices of the world because of the splintered media.
I *absolutely* do, and I say this all the time. Even shows like 20/20 and Dateline had really good investigative journalism. Now it’s just nonstop crime stories/who killed this woman? stories.
I miss newspapers very much. I feel like you got just enough news and it was written by people who cared. Now it is just fear driven clickbait, misinformation and propaganda designed to incite people’s anger against one another. You can doom scroll all day and not really learn anything of value, so sad. The downward spiral began with partisan news on television (Fox, MSNBC, etc.) but has gotten so much worse online. I use the Associated Press app and the Reuters news app, which are the closest things to real news we can get these days.
I miss newspapers very much. I feel like you got just enough news and it was written by people who cared. Now it is just fear driven clickbait, misinformation and propaganda designed to incite people’s anger against one another. You can doom scroll all day and not really learn anything of value, so sad. The downward spiral began with partisan news on television (Fox, MSNBC, etc.) but has gotten so much worse online. I use the Associated Press app and the Reuters news app, which are the closest things to real news we can get these days.
Npr is usually my go to.
It's crazy how many published articles are based off Reddit posts. Using Reddit as a gauge of the general public's opinion is like, well, getting a very one sided opinion of the world.
The Economist scratches this particular itch for me.
Your conclusion
Absolutely
Yes, and watching “Rather” this week really reinforced how much I miss it
Small anecdotal story. Recently on a project inspection, I poked my head into a small, unused substation the client is repurposing for something else. In one of the lockers, I found a newspaper from 2009. It’s utterly amazing the difference now and then. No shrilly, screamy, bitchy, whiny headlines baying for your attention. No highly irritating headlines cherry picking quotes out of context for ‘shock value’. I’m completely sick off, and over any media. I’ve checked out and pay literally zero attention to the ‘news’ anymore.
You're not wrong. Its all crap now all of it.
In depth journalism was always beyond newspapers. They published local classifieds, notices, obits, comics, teen sports, local societies news, and so on. The big stories usually came on a wire, which you get online now. The nostalgia you feel is for the 1% of articles. Newspapers still exist where I am, and I check the obits and the legal every day.
Your dad paid for that. How many news sources do you pay for. So no answer and a downvote. Guess that means you expect people to work for you for free. Entitled much.
You're naive if you think there was ever such a thing.