> they just spend all day dueling on Twitter and writing about whatever unsourced hot take is found there.
This is the hubris. Thinking that everyone else's job is way easier than what an engineer does - and journalists just spend all day on twitter without doing anything else.
> Questioning the status quo is how many revolutionary things got started
You can question the status quo and it's not hubris. You can also have instances where you question the status quo and it is hubris. I would say this is an instance of the latter.
And yes, most people today are in agreement that modern "internet journalist" is not a hard job when you don't actually investigate much, don't source anything, and write whatever narrative you want with no accountability.
Some do. Others maliciously crop social media comments and provoke twitter flamewars to create content.
I think the biggest problem with the tech industry is that it's insufficiently self-critical. But I think journalism has the same problem; I rarely see journalists writing articles about other journalists behaving badly. They have a tendency to protect their own, which mirrors my observations of how people in the tech industry generally respond to criticism of the tech industry.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see this as a crisis of the profession in the same way that the GP does.
No, I definitely don't.
I think techies who think they've got all the answers for how to fix journalism are hubristic, but I also think journalists who think all is well with their industry need to get off their high horse and do some introspection too. I think both industries are in a crisis, and it happens that the two crises have nontrivial overlap; the tools the tech industry has been creating over the past 15 or so years have been exacerbating the problems in journalism. So no, I definitely don't think the tech industry is situated to solve the problems with journalism; judging by past performance the tech industry has a deleterious effect on journalism and I don't foresee this changing soon.
I don't know how to fix journalism, nor do I know how to fix the tech industry.
The most valuable news I currently get is from newsletters by individual writers and their podcasts.
Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara and Cafe Insider, Stratechery, Money Stuff, recently persuasion.
I also like Stripe’s increment magazine, but that’s more similar to the old model.
I’d love to support more individual writers I respect rather than the orgs they write for.
What we are saying is that journalism has major problems with accountability and criticism.
The institutional model clearly has major issues and there are countless examples of journalists afflicted with bad incentives and a clear narrative. Also the rise of social media has eroded the whole point of institutional organization since they just spend all day dueling on Twitter and writing about whatever unsourced hot take is found there.