I would guess based on the post you made the other day about all the quality made good that you like to buy that you would agree with me that we have dismantled a lot of industries in favor of sweatshop labor. Unfortunately, journalism is the one industry that's supposed to protect us from all the other ones when it's working properly (via keeping us informed with free information). The way journalism has been undermined in the last decade or so is a crying shame. Free press means more than just being able to say whatever you like without going to jail. The real question is how to fix it? As long as the click for pay model is in effect, I don't think that anything is going to improve. Imagine in the 80's thinking that you could go to the newsstand and grab a copy of the Times and be pissed off that the attendant at the kiosk wanted you to pay him for it. Or better yet, be pissed off that you have to pay for home delivery each and every day. We don't even have to go to the goddam curb any more to grab our paper off the lawn, and we want the shit free? Doesn't make sense.We really have dismantled our journalism in favor of sweatshop labor...
This is one of the reasons I recommend Ryan Holiday's book - he makes the observation that we are not experiencing "the end of journalism" we are paralleling the time of yellow journalism. The New York Times created modern journalism back then by going to a subscription - based model, which allowed them to bypass the sensationalism that sells broadsheets on street corners in favor of a predictable, reliable income stream that permitted them to focus on reality and its reporting. The Republican noise machine, built up by Lee Atwater in the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's defeat, was ground to a nub against the Iraq War. At the time I figured they'd really regret that but they made a shit ton of money and the whole apparatus had an expiration date anyway. I think the Iraq War and its runup was a touchstone in the history of distrust and the press; I think the ascendancy of The Huffington Post is pretty much the nadir of journalism. I expect we'll start seeing an uptick soon. The NYT went back behind a paywall and survived. So did the WSJ. I pay for The Week, I pay for NSFWCorp. All this blog shit? It's gonna be a footnote, like Hearst and Pulitzer and the Spanish American War.