As a profession, they havenât helped themselves in recent years. So many prominent members going into public relations. If they had what people wanted, they wouldnât go by them.
Mr. Vandermeesh was quite pessimistic about the future of the newspaper industry.
He seemed a practical guy who recognises a dying duck when he sees one. Papers are dead.
Explaining the problems with journalism in recent years would have to be explained by first explaining the problems with the business model and how the internet has decimated it, which would take a very long time to do.
Good journalism costs money. Thatâs the reality.
The shortening of concentration spans has diminished the appetite for good journalism.
The shortening of concertation spans has heightened the appetite for clickbait opinion.
True but in any case, I donât quite think the people trust it or that they feel are really getting that quality. That paper should be like the fucking Titanic. I saw a rake of them on the train this morning funnily enough.
People would spend if they felt there was something in it they couldnât miss.
People think its all bullshit and gone too cosy as well though.
He quoted the daily sales figures and stuff like that mentioning the fact that the Indo was selling around 100k copies per day. I thought he was talking baloney and checked there now. 83,900 is their figure for daily copies being given. You couldnât sustain that - they must be haemorrhaging money big time.
The great Sarah Kendzior has written very well on the problems with political journalism. Itâs in a US context but is applicable to everywhere in the western world anyway.
Itâs almost impossible to get into journalism now unless youâre from a well off background, because youâll have to work for free, and if you get paid, the pay is shit. Rent is through the roof. If you can afford to work for free or for little, you probably come from a particular background that tends more often than not to be pro-establishment. Political journalism has now become an endless soap opera because the people who run newspapers believe thatâs what people want, because concentration spans have collapsed. To keep up the soap opera tidbits you have to basically become a client journalist otherwise the politicians will freeze you out, and thus your employer will freeze you out.
It takes a very determined person with serious staying power to overcome these forces.
Everything youâve said there is bang on. Youâd be reading things there some days and there is no sense of proportionality or levity on any issue. Everything is a crisis so nothing is a crisis and the people have just said fuck it.
But the flipside is that a flood of people of low information people who do not know how to navigate the information landscape have turned to completely untrustworthy sources, and thus have ended up batshit. And they are LOUD, loud as hell. And this influences the opinions mainstream publications put out, influences them much for the worse. You get get less thoughtful analysis and more clickety click. Crude reductionism and demolition of any context is manna from heaven for the far right and the right wing kulturkampf. Thatâs why itâs flourishing.
This âDitchâ yoke, I wouldnât trust those fuckers as far as I could look at them. Theyâve modelled themselves as a Gript for the âleftâ but are in reality a chaos agent out to bring down liberal democracy, and theyâre pro-Russia.
It could need something radical. Mainstream social media needs to be demolished. Maybe they could start going against the grain on that. Writers from quality publications deleting their Twitter, âread me here onlyâ, scorched earth.
That includes free copies too
Price of a Sunday Paper is the reason many wonât or donât pick them up.
A lot of US opinion writers are going to Substack. But thereâs a problem with that. You need a pre-existing profile to go to Substack, because otherwise people arenât going to pay. And people also tend not to want to pay for considered opinion. They tend to want incendiary stuff. And also people are not going to pay for Substacks where the person has to do long investigations for actual journalism pieces, because these investigations take ages, and they usually require money, and require help, and that means there isnât going to be that much output. Then if youâre a new writer, how do you build a profile? Online? For free? You arenât going to build a profile saying sensible stuff. You might build a profile by saying incendiary stuff. But thatâs terrible for public debate.
The logic of the âmarketâ has decimated journalism in the same way it has decimated music. The logic of the âmarketâ says that the worth of information or opinion can only be judged by the amount of engagement it generates. That means the trend is for lowest common denominator trash, or lies. You have a further problem in Ireland, because in Ireland, the market is tiny. At least in the US, people will pay for the New York Times (which itself has been fecked up by the âfalse balanceâ mantra and the consistent platforming of turgid right wing opinion writers churning out cliches like an AI Labane) or the Washington Post or other outlets which have an international reputation. The Guardian has an international reputation and seems to be just about getting by for the moment by being effectively a free paper of record for the world. Few outside Ireland will subscribe to Irish papers because we donât matter as a country.
We could be in the situation of ringfenced state subsidies.
Itâs hard to see anything else in the long run, but that brings its own issues.
In the US, local journalism has collapsed. Thatâs a major reason it has turned into an informational hellscape.
The local papers in Ireland provide a very valuable service. They are trusted local institutions, and serve as a form of societal glue.
If there was no Donegal Democrat or Roscommon Herald or Meath Chronicle etc, these places would be well down the road to an informational hellscape.
Ireland also has one other major thing which the US lacks, the presence of which benefits our society and the absence of which fucks theirs.
That is a culture of recreational or semi-serious team sport for adults at a local level.
The Indo is a tabloid in size and content despite thinking itâs still a broadsheet - prob where itâs falling down
Can you expand on this? Without knowing too much about them, it was actually refreshing to see some investigative journalism. Sounds like youâre saying their intentions are something else entirely?
If it smells, something usually stinks.