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Probably Magic posted:For the record, my original argument wasn't that negative coverage of North Korea wasn't warranted, it's that America covers itself far softer than it does North Korea. I can find any article discussing American plans of military action in, say, the Middle East, that do not find America's larger role in the area worthy of note. Here's an example: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/26/politics/us-troops-deploying-middle-east/index.html Nothing is brought up about America's historical antagonist of Iran, their assassination of their generals, their support of Iraq in attacking Iran, breaking of nuclear treaties with Iran, etc., because that's not viewed as "relevant information," even though anything North Korea is viewed as relevant information. This is the essence of my argument, and if I've resorted to categorical imperative when it comes to mandates of addressal, I apologize, but as I've already stated, that is not a concern or a generalized dissatisfaction that is isolated to me. I think the rub is that this isn't really quantifiable in any manner. How harshly should America cover itself? How much is North Korea deserving of its coverage? If America isn't self flagellating itself enough for you, that's fine, but you have to admit that the exact level of coverage isn't something we can measure beyond vibes. When it comes to foreign coverage of America, even if those views are harsher than how America covers itself, the question of is it as harsh as it "should" be is not an answerable question. There's no point in discussing levels that we can't quantify in any reasonable way so unless you have some other point you want to make beyond America media is bad (because it is overly nice to America?), there's nothing more to discuss. We can cover specific instances where a piece doesn't give America enough flak, but that's like counting grains of sand on the beach, what purpose is it serving?
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Jan 4, 2024 08:12
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Yeah it's not some huge revelation that companies that require people to read/watch it to make sustain themselves find that being overly harsh to the population they need for survival doesn't improve their bottom line.
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Jan 4, 2024 08:26
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Probably best just to leave it there simply because this whole conversation has strayed very far from the OP's thesis, and I'll take responsibility for that, I just bristle at double standards I see in evaluations of foreign media versus domestic one.
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Jan 4, 2024 08:35
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Probably Magic posted:Nothing is brought up about America's historical antagonist of Iran, their assassination of their generals, their support of Iraq in attacking Iran, breaking of nuclear treaties with Iran, etc., because that's not viewed as "relevant information," even though anything North Korea is viewed as relevant information. I'm also not really seeing this, but I can't say for sure given the extent of a potentially argumentatively undefinable nature of "anything north korea is viewed as relevant information" – it creates untestability. But more importantly, one of the inescapable issues with attempting to use this sort of thing as a demonstration – when comparing coverage of north korea to most other countries – is that north korea is going to categorically act as one of the worst possible comparators because of materially vital, essentially non-ignorable conditions regarding it and its current government that are not meaningfully equivalent to conditions in many other countries. A nation that has a 0.02 on the vdem human rights index with an essentially imprisoned population and a far narrower profile of internationally noteworthy engagements on the world stage means that the matter of human rights concerns is extremely likely to come up as a considerably prominent, reasonably significant-enough-to-highlight feature of the country and whatever internationally newsworthy events come about to us halfway across the world. You could expect the same from articles about sudan or myanmar – unsurprisingly, human rights concerns are deeply entangled with most of the stories coming out about them, and become relevant to many news stories for them as well.
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Jan 4, 2024 09:42
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To turn back toward the business for a moment, it looks like things are still pretty grim for the industry in the US. In just the past month, Washington Post had 250 buyouts, The Messenger laid off nearly 10 percent of its staff and contemplated shutting down altogether, Conde Nast and Vox media also had layoffs. It's a bit surprising given that the overall economy is otherwise doing well. The ad industry hasn't fully rebounded (and maybe never will) so everything downstream will suffer. We might just be in a permanent realignment, especially for digital media. It might be premature, but I don't think we're ever going to see the online news industry as robust and diverse as it was in the 2010s again. I think some of the more interesting developments are with Axel Springer. They recently struck a deal with OpenAI to get paid for them to use their content (Welt, Bild, Politico, Business Insider) to train AI models. quote:Axel Springer said the deal was important “strategically for us as this creates a revenue stream from an AI provider to us as a publisher — taking a more considered approach than back in the day when Google, Facebook and the likes came into the fold and publishers were deers in the headlights”. Somewhat related, Axel Springer seems to be bowing under pressure from Bill Ackman because of their investigation into his wife's plagiarism. A pretty troubling development, IMO. Even Rupert Murdoch didn't interfere with reporting at his outlets directly. I've also heard rumors that there are going to be more layoffs in big tech companies in the coming weeks, so I expect that will ripple into news media again as well.
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Jan 8, 2024 03:46
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T Zero posted:In just the past month, Washington Post had 250 buyouts, The Messenger laid off nearly 10 percent of its staff and contemplated shutting down altogether, Conde Nast and Vox media also had layoffs. I wonder if they went through the same thing as tech, which bloated their headcount during COVID and did layoffs post-COVID to it back down to earth
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Jan 8, 2024 08:57
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Typo posted:I wonder if they went through the same thing as tech, which bloated their headcount during COVID and did layoffs post-COVID to it back down to earth I looked around for a few minutes and I don't think so. Here is one of few pieces of Content I found News outlets slash nearly 2,700 jobs this year — the highest number since 2020 — contributing to alarming news deserts www.cnn.com - Thu, 14 Dec 2023 posted:It’s a painful holiday season for news organizations.
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Jan 8, 2024 09:05
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Why do we need journalists when we can just have AI write all the Content?
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Jan 8, 2024 19:55
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Typo posted:I wonder if they went through the same thing as tech, which bloated their headcount during COVID and did layoffs post-COVID to it back down to earth I think most news outlets were cutting staff the whole time. First it was sports and dining coverage, followed by broader newsroom cuts. But media outlets definitely go through hiring and firing binges, I've noticed. Thought this was a useful window into the Washington Post, legacy media, and TV (sub or trial required): https://puck.news/post-modernism-theories/ Seems pretty grim. Interestingly it draws a distinction between "linear" and streaming content: quote:In addition to churning subscribers and losing $100 million a year, the Post is also failing to engage audiences. Four years ago, the Post boasted 139 million monthly visitors. By the end of last year, it had less than 60 million, according to sources familiar with its internal numbers. Of that audience, less than one in five read more than a single article per month, while less than one in 500 actually convert to a paying subscription. And quote:That said, CNN remains a highly lucrative business at $700 million-$750 million in annual profits, and its digital product continues to reach more than 160 million monthly users around the world. And Thompson has made it very clear that he intends to pursue an ambitious digital-first strategy without wasting time on assuaging the anxieties of linear natives. CNN needs to think of itself as an “entirely digital organization,” he said on a staff call earlier this week. My guess is TV networks are going to fill some of the online void left by the retreat of digital and print media.
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Jan 9, 2024 03:37
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T Zero posted:I think most news outlets were cutting staff the whole time. First it was sports and dining coverage, followed by broader newsroom cuts. But media outlets definitely go through hiring and firing binges, I've noticed. TV networks probably just has an older viewer base who will always turn in no matter what once the boomers are gone tho I don't see how cable news is sustainable
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Jan 9, 2024 20:03
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https://www.threads.net/@jayrosen_nyc/post/C2pnxs6u2Rq/ A pretty good summary of the problems with journalism as a business right now, although he doesn't have any solutions. Probably because he doesn't accept that government news is a solution. quote:Factors converging on the news industry to hollow it out, weaken the product, scare investors, and threaten jobs: But you can see how the biggest problem from a capitalist perspective is that social media + internet adtech soaked up all the revenue streams, and gave nothing in return but fully automated plagiarism systems like this: https://byword.ai/#!. Seriously, there are plugins to automatically rephrase and republish other people's articles using the power of LLMs to avoid doing any actual work or investigation at all.
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Jan 29, 2024 19:57
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golden bubble posted:https://www.threads.net/@jayrosen_nyc/post/C2pnxs6u2Rq/ We already have NPR, etc., so I'm not sure what solution you think he should be embracing.
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Jan 29, 2024 20:15
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npr is mainly philanthropically funded. the corporation for public broadcasting is closer to most government networks, but the relationship it has with the production of news for PBS is circuitous. (it provides about half the funding for stations that syndicate news programs from the largest PBS stations, which inherently have a lesser degree of government funding even when you take into account the fact that syndication by a half-funded station is indirect government funding. many of these stations do not produce any local news at all.) anyway yeah, good overview. FAANG owns both the monetization and the distribution so news, like pretty much any writing of any kind, gets the scraps. any philanthropic or prestige-driven motivation to fund news (over any other form of Content) has withered.
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Jan 30, 2024 03:32
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