Serious journalism is in steep decline (and it’s not just in the political sphere.) Magazines have been going under at an alarming rate over the last 5 to 10 years. Armies of journalists have been dumped into a market with few openings.
When a genuine job opens up in the world of journalism, hundreds of people apply for that job and at prestige organizations perhaps thousands.
The websites that have replaced magazines are looking for “content providers” - not journalists. The job is to make crap sound interesting rather than doing the hard work of uncovering an interesting story. They want young people who are not conflicted about the fact that what they are doing is just another form of marketing. And young people are cheap these days.
Website want people with SEO skills. SEO stands for search engine optimization. That means the website writers use keyword manipulation to draw people to the website. When the vistors land on the website because of some SEO manipulation, they are disappointed because the story they thought was there is just a lot of puffery. But as long as the website gets hits the owners don’t care. The advertisers are happy and that’s all that matters these days.
Older journalists are like the buggy and whip manufacturers after the automtobile was introduced. They have become increasingly irrelevant and unemployable. For those who were genuine journalists, it is a rough world.
Quality in writing is a thing of the past for the most part. Even when writing about non-political matters. Quality does not pay like it used to with magazines. Whole libraries of trade magazines have bitten the dust as a result.
Wow, very little in the way of paying ads. Some targeting tourists but ... yuck, not much else. These guys will be out of business in a few years at this rate.
I suspect that this holds true for most small to medium newspapers, radio stations and TV stations.
How can they survive if the big 10 Internet sites suck up all of the revenue?
You said a lot of truth in those 6 compact paragraphs.
Young people these days don’t read; Magazines or otherwise.
If it cannot be spoon fed via video, they are not interested.
Their attention span is about 2 minutes. After that, it’s on to the next website.
I see them in restaurants, groups of them, ALL STARING INTO THEIR PHONES LIKE GOOD LITTLE ZOMBIES. Not talking to each other or having any meaningful repartee, except via TEXT MESSAGE, which is chock full of misspelled words, acronyms and internet shorthand that is as meaningless as an intercepted Enigma message before the code was cracked....................