The Decline of the Media

[Section_31]

Genuinely concerning. 

 

The Independent was one of two 'centre' newspapers along with the Guardian. It ceased its print publication a few weeks back and went online, it keeps showing up in my Facebook news feed and it's become the worst kind of Daily Mail SEO clickbait garbage around. Saw a piece the other day along the lines of 'watch Piers Morgan squirm at this question - yes, she actually went there!' 

 

Couldn't believe it. 

 

Up and down the country for the last 15+ years local papers have been declining. All sorts of reasons have been put forward for it. Rise of the internet, loss of ad revenue, some of this is true, but it doesn't explain a lot of it. They're run by three big corporations now and chase advertising bucks almost exclusively at the cost of editorial content. 

 

Way back when, if an editor had to choose between running a story and p*ssing off an advertiser, he'd have run the story without question - now that'd be unthinkable in most places. Many of them have 'commercially focussed' teams of content writers and there's been a shuffling of personnel at the top level. The 'naysayers' - i.e anyone with some editorial scruples and backbone - have been pensioned off and replaced with the meandering produce of the Tony & Guy and tan brogues hatchery.  

 

I loved newspapers but now I wouldn't bother wiping my backside with most of them. 

 

The TV news is absolute garbage too. Journalism is supposed to be about scoops, about getting a juicy bit of the truth before your rivals do - now the running order on ITV and BBC is virtually identical, a mix of press releases and garbage spoonfed to their increasingly useless and eccentric political reporters at the tea and biscuits fest in David Cameron's shed. 

 

Worrying times indeed. 

[Oh Buoy]

I know a few people who have departed from journalism because the demands are just too unbelievable. It'd become more about speed of an article than it was about the actual content. 

 

Until Google/Facebook/Snapchat start penalising clickbait, they won't care because it's more about PPC than it is about content. 

[Paul]

If you give something away why would anyone pay for it later? And if it costs a fortune to produce but brings in a smaller income, that's fundamentally unsustainable. Newspapers have committed suicide.

 

It's completely depressing but entirety predictable.

[njackets]

I can't remember the last time I bought a Newspaper, they give away three Daily Newspapers for free in London and I can't be arsed reading any of them.

[razor]

For me there are 10 reasons why the news media have declined in quality over recent years.

 

The 10th reason is insane!

[King Emlyn]

You're a journalist yourself aren't you Sec? Are you thinking of a change? If so what would you be looking towards?

[Section_31]

You're a journalist yourself aren't you Sec? Are you thinking of a change? If so what would you be looking towards?

 

Nah mate the only journalism I do is freelance now, I write online for a retail company for the day job, it's not journalism but needs must.

 

Would have loved to have stayed in it full time but it's utterly fucked. Best job I ever had was a local weekly paper, tremendous fun, but they fucked off lots of my mates and closed the office.

 

What was once a paper with two offices, seven reporters, one editor, news editor, photographer and sports editor is now two reporters based 20 miles off patch, and a news editor based 30 miles in the other direction. All pictures are submitted by the public and almost always shite.

 

Couldn't bear to watch it any more so jacked.

 

[Strontium]

People expect everything for nothing these days. They want high quality news, but they don't want to pay for it. Obviously that's not a sustainable situation. The quality of print journalism has hit a nadir, but that's a response to falling circulation, not the cause of it.

[jimmycase]

Using one or two newsprint sources isnt enough in my opinion. Read a number of print media sources, web sources, tv and radio news outlets. Once you got that cross section, you should be able to reach your own conclusions on most subjects.

[Josef Svejk]

The Independent is still hanging on to its star journalists. But I can't imagine that will remain the case for long. It's awful these days...

[Son of L8]

I get the Guardian Weekly delivered over here, mostly because I get some comfort out of a bit of news from back home and I still like handling a real newspaper. Plus, it passes the time on the shitter. Anyway, I was flipping through last week's edition when it came in, and on one page there was an off-set quote in the middle of this article in bright blue, bold ink:

 

"Hundreds of men rushed to hospital clutching their penises, convinced they were retracting into their bodies and that if they let go of them, they'd die."

 

The finest high-quality British journalism.

 

... Mind you, I still stopped and read the article.

[ZonkoVille77]

Dumbing the population down.

[Dr Nowt]

Anyway, I was flipping through last week's edition when it came in, and on one page there was an off-set quote in the middle of this article in bright blue, bold ink:

 

"Hundreds of men rushed to hospital clutching their penises, convinced they were retracting into their bodies and that if they let go of them, they'd die."

I didn't know pornographic pictures of Thatcher had been published?

[magicrat]

I don't think its papers dumbing down more like playing to their demographic which I suspect is increasingly aging middle class and white, ready to lap endless column inches on the royals and the weather,  

[Hades]

Didn't you get the news? The free market makes everything better.

[Anubis]

Yeah, I went there.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/13/penis-really-shrinking

 

In Singapore, in autumn 1967, hundreds of men and boys hurried to hospital emergency rooms, clutching their penises, convinced they were rapidly retracting into their bodies and that if they let go of them, they’d die. Such panics aren’t as rare as you might imagine. In the early 2000s, in Nigeria and Benin, several people were killed in retaliation for using magic to shrink their enemies’ genitals. The vanishing-penis phenomenon – known by its south-east Asian name, koro – is listed in the psychiatry bible, the DSM, and has cropped up worldwide for centuries.

 

A common response is to scoff at the ignorance of the uneducated. But in The Geography Of Madness, journalist Frank Bures shows that what such “culture-bound syndromes” demonstrate is the astonishing power of culture and belief – on all of us. Whether you’re Beninese, Bolivian or British, the ways your life goes wrong will be heavily influenced by how you believe it could go wrong.

 

Self-styled rationalists often seek to debunk the influence of mind over body: it seems too damned weird that, for example, women who believe they’re at risk from heart disease are 3.6 times more likely to die from heart attacks than those with identical risk factors, but who lack the belief. (That’s a 1992 finding from the respected, long-term Framingham Heart Study.) But on second thoughts, wouldn’t it be weirder if the staggeringly complex organ between our ears didn’t exert strong effects on all the other, less complex organs it coordinates and controls? One effect that’s especially relevant here, Bures explains, is “bio-attentional looping”: you fear something, which causes you to monitor your body for symptoms, which – lo and behold! – you find. That heightens your fear, which increases your self-monitoring, and so on. It’s no coincidence that in almost every recorded case of koro, the victim already knew of the condition, so was primed to detect it.

 

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether merely monitoring your body for signs of genital retraction (or nipple retraction, the female version) can induce the feeling it’s happening, but can anyone doubt that bio-attentional looping affects us in countless other ways? We keep reading about how we’re all underslept and distracted these days, so we can’t help scanning the body for the signs, which obligingly present themselves. (Are you stressed? Feel carefully for traces of tension in the body. Keep going. OK – now are you stressed?)

 

It hardly matters that the belief starts off being false, since believing it makes it true. Those koro victims didn’t have vanishing penises, obviously. But once they believed it could happen, the sensations of shrinkage were real. And what’s the difference between believing you’re stressed and being stressed? There isn’t one. We relate to the world, even our own bodies, through a thick web of beliefs, of which we’re largely unaware. You might be tempted to respond that your beliefs are the reasonable ones to hold. Perhaps. But then of course that’s what you’d believe.

[Furmedge]

I haven't bought a paper since 2008. You're reading yesterdays news. The inception of the internet has made news current and free, however live news can sometimes (most of the time) be poorly written and clogged with clouded judgement due to the site wanting to be the first to report it. As someone says above its not the quality of the work, it's the speed it can be sent out at. Unfortunately though, if I want to read a newspaper I have to flick through adverts, promotions, celebrity news, and non stories to get any sense out of the thing and its not worth it.

 

I suppose if there's a great newspaper willing to be out there with well written news and interesting journalism I'm willing to pay for it, but unfortunately there's none of them about because they won't sell enough copies due to the reasons above and our celebrity obsessed, shit story interested readership in this country.

 

I feel sorry for the genuine journalist who wants to do this type of stuff but is left to report on how Kanye West dressed for a gig in Sydney.

[Moctezuma]

I think one of the concerns here is that a couple of the sites (Vice and Huffington post) that are viewed as the replacement to traditional journalism have cut their backroom teams, so it's not like they are scooping up all of those who have left print media.

 

Another issue is the general bluring in life between work and leisure time, i think journalism is/was particularly susceptible to this and the generation of content is seen as something that is a hobby thus requiring no wages or recompense.

[Section_31]

People expect everything for nothing these days. They want high quality news, but they don't want to pay for it. Obviously that's not a sustainable situation. The quality of print journalism has hit a nadir, but that's a response to falling circulation, not the cause of it.

 

While that's definitely true, I think managed decline has never been so badly managed. 

 

I've never known an industry that can't get it's head around the fact that if it puts up the price of a product and diminishes the quality, people might stop buying it. 

 

I know people who regularly spend 20 quid a month on magazines. Magazines tend to (still) be well designed, have good pictures and big features in. 

 

If they were run to the same standards as local newspapers, what you'd have is copies of 442 with stories lifted from the Metro and pictures of the back of Jamie Vardy's head going into a night club submitted by someone with their Samsung Galaxy.

 

The strategy seems to be to just expand social media and web footprint no matter what, by fair means or foul, and try and figure out how to make money from it somewhere down the road. The likes of the ECHO don't even submit print circulation figures any more, they judge themselves by the number of Facebook likes etc they have - which don't make you no money. 

[cloggypop]

The Echo seems to be mainly advertising features for burger restaurants and secret bars these days.

[Moctezuma]

The Echo seems to be mainly advertising features for burger restaurants and secret bars these days.

 

The way advertising works is strange.

[Anubis]

You're left with a few serious individual journalists, scrabbling around for funding, and web blogging or writing books. Sometimes they may get onto television. But you have to go looking.

 

EDIT: What's needed is one of these fictional Aaron Sorkin/George Clooney written owners who put journalistic integrity before maximisation of profit. Unfortunately, there's a reason they're fictional.

[thegreatelephant]

Nah mate the only journalism I do is freelance now, I write online for a retail company for the day job, it's not journalism but needs must. Would have loved to have stayed in it full time but it's utterly fucked. Best job I ever had was a local weekly paper, tremendous fun, but they fucked off lots of my mates and closed the office. What was once a paper with two offices, seven reporters, one editor, news editor, photographer and sports editor is now two reporters based 20 miles off patch, and a news editor based 30 miles in the other direction. All pictures are submitted by the public and almost always shite. Couldn't bear to watch it any more so jacked.

local papers are largely conveyor belt writing you're talents are obviously greater than, Mr Section.

 

was offered an apprenticeship at my local one 20 odd years ago after some work experience, doing their talking newspaper for the blind etc.- decided to do A-levels instead. as you say, that game is virtually dead.

[razor]

I think there are three reasons for / issues around the decline of the news media, and they are obviously inter-related.

 

Firstly, the tension between information and the free market - information as a commodity is a scary concept.

 

Secondly, the legacy of the red tops - the trivialisation of information being popular.

 

And thirdly, the general population of most western countries having right-leaning tendencies.

 

All of this was epitomised when in 2005 John Pilger was writing huge, revealing investigations into the mechanisms and effects of the Iraq War that The Independent (now gone) put on their front page, and the S*n was waging a 10p cover-charge battle with the Mirror whilst leading with a story about Peggy from EastEnders.

 

Which newspaper sold more?  Which story was discussed more?  Which newspaper is still going strong and which has disappeared?

 

Put information into the free-market and this is what you get.

 

Populist publications will always win - not because of where we are, but because of how we got here.

[Strontium]

Yes, we'd all be much better off if information was wholly controlled by the state.