quote:

Factors converging on the news industry to hollow it out, weaken the product, scare investors, and threaten jobs:

• With a few exceptions, the search for a stable business model has been unsuccessful, in part because the problem changes faster than R & D in the news business.
  
• The rich guy rescue plan rarely works. The rescuer typically underestimates how hard it is to find money in news and keep quality reasonably high. When that is made clear, rich guy's commitment starts faltering. And the hedge funds lie in wait. See San-Diego Union Tribune.
  
• The ad industry doesn't need the news industry when there are so many other ways to purchase attention, and so many better ways to target users.
  
• The internet is rewiring not only the media sector (as with streaming) but the public itself, which is breaking up, or being broken, into multiple — some say parallel — realities.As you can tell from my halting attempt to describe it, we do not have a good language for this shift.
  
• The news industry is still struggling to re-establish a direct connection with readers (through newsletters and podcasts, for example...) after social media captured a lot of that territory for itself.
  
• After a period in the 2010s when it appeared that they did, the big tech platforms today clearly don't care much about news delivery or quality, and yet they have greatly disrupted these things.
  
• Local news is the hardest hit, and local is where people form an initial relationship with journalists and journalism— or don't. TV viewers still develop bonds with local anchors. But TV newsrooms lean heavily on the local newspaper's reporting, and that is where the crisis is.
  
• Journalists have to take it upon themselves to treat sustainability as their problem, but this is not what they signed up for. They signed up to do great stories.
  
• Philanthropy has taken its time to grasp what is happening, and government funding is (in my (his) view) as much a threat as it is a solution.
  
• To say that trust in the news media has declined is correct, but too vague. The reality is that destroying confidence in the practice and products of journalism is a potent and successful political strategy, as with Steve Bannon's "flood the zone."
  
• Decades ago, the leadership class in American journalism accepted the argument that real pluralism had to come to their newsrooms, or the journalism would suffer. Or at least, this is what they said to themselves.But the bosses also said this: We can have a diverse and multi-colored newsroom, and maintain the view from nowhere.See the contradiction? Under-represented journalists are to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress it— in order to prove their objectivity.