Imagine this response to the recent round of layoffs at General Motors.

It is difficult to parse out the role bad journalism plays because pretty much everything parading as 'journalism' these days is pure shit.
Pure.Shit.

Exceptionally cogent commentary of the media landscape, Katie! Too bad most people won't even elect to read it, as you say, on the toilet. Too many words.

I have tons of respect and admiration for journalists that take the time to delve into issues and write about them for my edification. For journalists that simply ejaculate pithy outrage onto my screens, not so much. But they are the ones who are rewarded. It sucks.

Respect and admiration, of course, does not pay the rent. I mourn the attrition of (even relatively) objective reporting in the age of clickbait, but I have no idea how to stop it.

:(

Also: I used to read Katie at Grist, and I didn't like her as much then because she seemed a little too clickbait-y. My opinion has really changed about Herzog since she joined the Stranger!

You seem to be swimming upstream in many ways, Katie. Please don't change because of all the haters. You're getting better at this every day.

@2: Not really. We all can enumerate a list of good-to-great journalists if we think about it.

'It may not be Good for America,
but it's fucking FanTASTic for Corporate America!'

An un- under- ill- and mal-informed Citizenry
hasn't a Clue as to what's goiing on.

They're perfect marks.
They were generous enough to give us Trumpfy...

The Fourth Estate's been sold down the River.
Fucking SAD.

Sounds like Kay Kay is blaming the customer. That's rarely a winning strategy.

And there goes the chance of Ms Herzog running off and joining the IDW. Mr Rubin only tolerates criticism and cake refusals from the right.

@1: The phrase "learn to code" was exactly what these same bloggers were smugly sneering at coal miners and others who lost manufacturing jobs under the Obama administration.

So you already had your question answered years ago.

These opinion/clickbait/outrage bloggers are now feeling the sting of having an unskilled position in a dying industry as well. It's basically just paint-by-buzzword.

@1: "Learn to code" is the modern day version of "Let them eat cake."

You're literally defending fucking Buzzfeed and claiming it's journalism. Your opinion is completely disregarded right there.

Buzzfeed literally launched a hoax the day before the layoffs that completely fucked up the National newscycle. The mainstream media has turned into feminist fan fiction as it bites on literally every fake propaganda piece and joke that comes at them. This industry is populated by entitled middle class alcoholic who are making sub 50k a year if they're lucky yet still pontificate on champagne socialism while everything they advocate turns to shit. The sheer mental illness of these people who defend journalists and the media is hilarious as the monster they created swallows them up and the public stopped giving a fuck in droves long ago. But have fun in the dying days of clickbait blogging masquerading as anything more than the whimsies of people too dumb to see how the world is evolving and they're being betamaxed out of it.

And when The Stranger dies and people like you who weren't good enough to make it in LA and NYC are reduced to the level of the people you've attacked and talked down to your whole career, that will be a blessed day for society. Your industry is dying because it doesn't produce a product anyone wants and it doesn't serve a purpose anymore.

Have fun being an old HUWHITE woman looking for a writing job when this goes tits up.

“The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Clickbait News Outlets to Lay Off a Combined 1,000 Employees, And That’s a Good Thing!

@16 The Venn diagram between you and reality looks like two distant, misshapen nipples.

Agreed. It is bad business to try and sell something (opinions) that can easily be had for free.

lol you are so full of shit. Keep up the bad work, your job is next!

@Dadddy - "Because that's what readers want: simple, stupid, easily digested conclusions they can read on the toilet."

Yeah, Kay Kay's blaming the reader isn't a winning strategy and is partly why readers don't trust the media.

@21 If I didn't know someone else had written this post, I would have thought it was one of mine from 2014 or 2015. Still a great read, still a great point. It is totally true, views are the commodity being sold to advertisers, who are just the lowest scum of the earth.

I suspect you've read it, but if not, read Robert Cialdini's seminal book, Influence. Knowing the ways in which people's decisions are considerably engineered is the best defense against it short of total disengagement.