Most news organizations are for profit businesses and produce content that brings in the most customers. If those customers were demanding more policy focused content that's what these organizations would be producing. But they aren't. Even the Economist, arguably the most policy focused mainstream news source on the planet, is now asking for donations in order to keep operating.

I think the explanation is peak intelligence. As a species we're simply becoming dumber and dumber, mostly because the kind of environmental and social imperatives that drove intelligence in the past no longer exist. The average Greek from 2500 years ago would seem like Albert Einstein compared to the average person in this country today. And all the thoughtful and policy driven journalism in the world isn't going to change that simple Darwinian reality. And that's how we ended up with a Donald Trump as president. In short, we're probably doomed.

The so-called MSM don't know anything else but the horse race coverage.

What these media critics are asking for is to rebuild broadcast and print journalism from the top down. IOW getting rid of people on the executive level, producers and directors and managing editors. That's not going to happen. It won't.

No six figure executive is going to step aside for the sake of better journalism nor will outlets get rid of their money makers. Not when news "journalism" already exists on a razors edge.

The problem is nobody wants to PAY for all this great journalism these critics write about. I mean, fuck, even I use ad blocker on THIS site. It's the problem of media consumption in general. Nobody wants to pay for content. Producers don't want to pay creators. And consumers don't want to pay producers. It's the root function of the internet. To cheat out of paying people for shit.

It's a race to the bottom. And we're going to hit bottom before it get's better. If it ever does.

Professor: Correct. Craig Newmark pretty much single-handedly destroyed modern journalism. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"I think the explanation is peak intelligence..."

In the same way that you can't teach a dog calculus, there has to be an upper limit on human wisdom. And its inevitable that we'll eventually develop a technology that humans are too foolish to use and thus destroy ourselves. Everybody assumed it would be a weapon (e.g. nukes) or maybe something medical - like a super-bug. But turns out it was the internet.

@ 3,

What did/does craigslist have to do with it? (thanks to all three of you here btw, as this is already a pretty interesting and thought provoking thread...)

@4 This is unfortunately convincing.

mike: If you're old enough to remember, 20 years ago classified ads were often the largest section of nearly every newspaper - the Sunday classifieds were often a hundred pages long in major papers. And those ads often accounted for over half their revenue, which paid the salaries for many great journalists. After Craigslist launched, those ad pages shrank by over 90%, seemingly overnight - it's hard to beat free. And thus began the decline of the daily paper, and much of the great journalism that existed before then - there isn't a newspaper in the country that hasn't been effected by Craigslist. Craigslist is great, but the unintended consequences, not so much.

We, the People once paid/subsidized the postage on newspapers because
our Founding Fathers wanted the Fourth Estate to inform the Citizenry.

"... in the early 18th century with the publication of the first colonial newspapers. American newspapers began as modest affairs—a sideline for printers. They became a political force in the campaign for American independence. Following independence the first article of U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press. The U.S. Postal Service Act of 1792 provided substantial subsidies: Newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny and beyond for 1.5 cents, when first class postage ranged from six cents to a quarter." --Wiki

Why couldn't we, the people pay for some Journalism once again?
What / who's stopping us?

@4 you've got a point there.

I agree on the history @6, but I wouldn't blame Craig specifically. First and most basically, somebody else would have done a classified ad service.

But more fundamentally, even if newspapers held onto classifieds, using them to subsidize journalism was unstable and subject to being decoupled by the culture of capitalist optimization. If nobody else, a newspaper would have realized they could drop the journalism and push the classifieds and win.

And finally, even putting classifieds aside, they'd still have gotten to chasing cheap clicks and cheap virality. Algorithmic optimization within social media drives them that way. As long as they're profit-seeking corporations, and sometimes others too.

"Divided government in Washington — plus a field of 2020 candidates who can be examined and found wanting as plausible contenders to Trump — means the production of innocence has come roaring back, along with the horse race. 18/"

I really disagree with the "found wanting" bit (thank God Warren is finally running, and we're not even near campaign season yet so who knows what others might emerge), and besides, isn't that sort of prediction exactly the "horse race" framing that he's railing against in his own diatribe?

And that admonishment from Chris Hayes, about how the most important factor is what and whom the candidate will fight for, and how much we trust them to do so? A majority of Americans DID do that, and some even held their nose and voted for Hillary despite their own reservations BECAUSE they were doing that. It was the hopeless imbeciles in flyover country (and the goddamn electoral college that favors them, again) that elected Trump.

@2: Some of the responsibility of the advertising revenue model also lies on the content creators. I have to use an ad blocker on this site because of the ads they choose to run, because I can't be scrolling through at work and have a 99% naked person advertising HUMP! appear on my screen.

@7: Donate to PBS or NPR, and you will be. There's nothing stopping you from doing that, and they produce the most consistently informative and fair journalism you can find.

Seth Abramson has had some useful thoughts on this topic as well.

Eli, and let me cc: Dan here, can you make this a project for the Stranger to trailblaze on? It matters. Obviously you can't do all the stories that need doing, but you can make it A Thing that Seattle's Only Newspaper is doing, raise the prominence of the idea, drag other journalists into it, even get media coverage about the fact that you're doing it.

I'll explain to you how much this matters to me, I'd sacrifice the Election Guide to it -- take the staff time from that toward this. And I think your Election Guide is a real public service. (Don't /actually/ sacrifice that, there are better sacrifices, but you get my point with it.)

(You gotta turn off comments for the project's stories, unless you can also commit the resources toward comment moderation that can stand up against major forces that benefit from 2016-style political journalism. I'll show myself out.)

@3 mfg5000: The road to hell is paved by RepubliKKKans and their blindsided dupes getting dumb and dumber by mistaking Fox TV & Sinclair Broadcasting as reliable news sources and following Twitter.
@9 Knat (re @7): Thank you for the reminder.

Facts suddenly matter at The Stranger?

Corporate media giving more airtime to Trump's shlock, regurgitating neoliberal talking points, and doing hatchet jobs on progressives like Sanders has little to do with the horse race. Follow the money.

14: What corporate media sources did hatchet jobs on Sanders? Name even one example. They loved the underdog angle and covered his campaign like he actually had a chance of winning the nomination, and treated him with kid gloves because it fattened their coffers. It was the Sanders supporters who did all the hatchet jobbing, through social media, at the direction of Russian trolls. And as a result we now have a dangerous imbecile running the country.