I'd like my journalists to be constrained by the truth, and paid editors in the context of a "traditional" newspaper are one possible way to achieve that. However, if you believe the stats on this, trust for traditional news sources is at record lows.

I personally don't trust traditional news sources very much. Therefore, I'm open to trying something different. I've been a happy subscriber to a handful of Substack journalists for a few months now. It's too soon to say whether this will be a lasting improvement, but it's hard to do worse than the mainstream media.

I'm curious, as I tend to trust many of the large media outlets, especially the NYT and WaPo.

1) Which outlets do you consider to be the "mainstream media" or "traditional media"?

And 2) why don't you trust them?

Rather than annoy the HN mods by derailing this conversation into politics, I can answer in detail to you directly. If you want that, could you update your bio on HN to include your email address?

I appreciate that both for helping me keep it non-politics on HN and also for being willing to reach out.

I've updated my email in my bio, hope to hear from you soon.

> why don't you trust them?

Have we already forgotten the NYT and WaPo pushing to get us into the Iraq War on false pretenses?

Glenn Greenwald gets into this a lot. As one recent example, WaPo misquoted Trump's comments on his infamous phone call with the Georgia secretary of state and this was not corrected until two months later when the Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of the call: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

Indeed. Readers of WaPo should be outraged the paper took one source at their word when it came to statements from the President. Zero confirmation.

And it turns out it was all made up.

Do we know how many writers on Substack/Medium/independent blogs employ an editor or researcher in some capacity? I've only seen occasional mention, e.g., Kevin Kelly has said that he employs a librarian as a full time researcher. But the absence of mention isn't necessarily a strong indicator to the negative.

If substack stars need an editor, I assume they hire one.

Some probably already do.

Very unlikely that they won’t exist anymore.

And whichever low number they are reduced to, they will start to grow again because there will be people willing to pay for their services.

some of the more successful writers on substack are hiring people to do editorial work so even with this model it doesnt go away entirely