This is a helluva article on the Current State of American Journalism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... sm/534195/

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"Now each assignment is subjected to a cost-benefit analysis—will the article earn enough traffic to justify the investment?"

Finally. Journalism is getting back to its roots.

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I think journalistic ethics coalesced just after that . . .

The term "fake news" has obviously come to be associated with Donald Trump, but the first person I ever heard use the phrase was Hillary Clinton as she whined about how unfairly she was being treated during the campaign. Trump took her usage, flipped it and ran with it to the point where "fake news" is now a meme/joke.

This stood out in that article: "Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events—and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users’ feeds."

I'm fairly certain the "ideologically pleasing propaganda", i.e. "fake news", being pushed by these tech firms isn't pro-Trump, pro-Republican, or pro-Conservatism.

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Freedom is our Strength.

Also, maybe Boilermaker Rick will begin to understand what a disaster the death of the newspaper actually is.

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Freedom is our Strength.

This isn't about the "right" or the "left". It's not an article about which side is favored the most. That wasn't what the crux of the article was about.

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This was happening for a long time.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

It will not be pro American either. The ideological propaganda will be anti American, like CNN and all the rest and of course, BHO. Gawd, we may never fully recover from the damage done by Obama.


"is it safe"--BHO
"no"--Jimmy Reardon

#SCOAMF

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Obama's Legacy is Trump.
And dead cops.

"One guy lays the pipe, the other guy smokes it"--Clint Eastwood

ugh, that news article was wayyy too long, is there a 30 second video recap you can share

-millennials

Still reading and will have more thoughts, but this excerpt really struck me.

So this is basically a long winded way to say that people need to write about things people want to read?

I'm sure people in the old days who wrote for newspapers never cared that the readers would actually be interested in the story.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Yeah they didn't have PAPErmetrics for idiots to regurgitate numbers back then .

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Leave it to Rick to defend yellow journalism.

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Freedom is our Strength.

I'm pretty sure that term existed before my generation stopped reading newspapers.

I'm not defending it. It's just dumb to think that some time around 2005 that suddenly it became a thing.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

He is romanticizing old time journalism a bit but he isn't overhyping the way News is being provided today. More than anything this article is providing information on how News business is a for profit industry. Whether it has always been that or not is beside the point. It's that way now and the internet is shaping the way that News is being facilitated.

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That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

When I wrote for SB Nation -- part of Vox Media -- we were coached on sensationalizing headlines for more clicks. Like the Atlantic article explains, "Tiger Woods Switches to Nike Golf" got far fewer clicks than "Tiger Woods Makes Shocking Choice." You can imagine some of the headlines during his sex scandal, for example.

The primary focus of the news isn't to inform the public any more. It's to get more clicks faster than the guy down the street.

News has been big business my whole life. "RAZORBLADES IN CANDY, tune in at 10 to hear more!"-style news was around all the time when I was a kid.

This is just more whining about the good old days. We have access to more news than any time in history and we don't have to wait until the next day to see if that news was deemed worthy.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

JORR blaming the little people for corporate decisions to change what is considered news.

Now I've seen everything.

JOBS!

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What about the proliferation of celebrity then and now articles that permeate the internet these days? "What this celebrity looks like today will shock you". Takes you 50-100 clicks to get to the Celebrity in the headline.

Instead of doing a simple then and now it's important for you to be shocked by their appearance.

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Which is exactly the problem.

Sure, but does this really confuse you as to whether it is news or fodder?

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Elections have consequences.

That's a good thing. Nothing is stopping you from being more informed than a newspaper reader from previous decades.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Access to News doesn't mean that what you're being provided with is News. A lot of News today is nothing more than filler.

A President's Twitter account is the most talked about aspect of his Presidency.

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Like music, news always gets better!

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

To a point, yes. But as the article states (and to which I agree) nearly every major online news source is publishing with a hive-mind. Google's search results algorithm is a major root cause to this. Type in "Donald Trump tweets..." and see how many articles come up with those words in the title.

A lot of newspapers were ads and filler. I'm not sure that comics, advice columns, and classified sections were "news" either.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

It's not the problem. The problem is corporations have decided news is a for-profit business and only cared about making money.

Reagan Capitalism killed the news.

INFRASTRUCTURE!

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Sure but you knew what those were.

Now "news" is usually nothing but opinion pieces.

There is still excellent journalism being done. It's on us as consumers to seek it out and not wait to be spoon-fed.

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So? His use of twitter is one of the biggest things of his Presidency. It's actually quite remarkable how he uses it and how dumb he is on it.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!