> Almost like journalists collectively forgot how the world was before Covid.

Well that tracks, journalists also seem to have collectively forgotten what the world was like during Covid too.

Most journalism today is way too focused on what's right in front of them that can give the most sensationalist headlines. Context doesn't really matter when its all about clicks and engagement.

It is difficult to get a man to remember something when his salary depends upon his not remembering it.

Well, the fact that this stuff still makes it to the front page of hacker news and generates this very discussion right here proves them right. After all, media is not about providing information. It's a business to generate income by grabbing your attention.

This.

I agree. The HN community largely likes to criticize media but fundamentally they don’t understand it.

“The media is a business to generate income by grabbing attention”

This has always been true. Media has been sensationalist since it first started as word of mouth being spread by sailors and politicized as directed by government and business interests.

Once adopted by business interests, it has been forced to reach as many eyeballs as possible in order to be profitable.

Read the histories of journalism, Pulitzer, Hearst, the Spanish American War and other examples.

Freedom of the press is the most important thing and libel /defamation laws are what’s important.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_journalism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

This situation is media is nothing new, but its drastically amplified by digital media platforms. When journalists could spent weeks or months on a major piece and publish it in a newspaper they didn't have constant, immediate feedback. At best they could look at paper sales and industry recognition.

Today journalists see very quickly what lands and what doesn't. They can even A/B test headlines to game attention. The shorter feedback loop can also easily lead to a focus on what one can publish today to get shares and likes, losing much of the integrity that may likely have been on the table when the work stands on its own and you can't immediately watch analytics as soon as its published.

When you guys are comparing a short data driven blog post by Pitchbook about falling VC funding to William Randolph Hearst tabloids starting the Spanish American War with racist hysteria, it seems like the problem isn’t the journalism but that you just are unhappy with the news being conveyed.

I didn't see anyone making that comparison, I'm honestly not quite sure where you were going with that strawman argument.

that's a strawman, no one is saying media was ever perfect, but the death of things like 60 minutes is evidence enough that media has drastically changed.

Especially when it's a blog post by the marketing team of a private company

> I see this in other reporting as well. "Massive drop in X" or similar, when reality is it's returning to pre-Covid levels.

Should it not be reported on, when the rise was reported on? It is a massive, newsworthy, drop and one of the side-effects of Covid wasn't "may increase dealmaking", so it shouldn't be assumed to recede alonside Covid.

One of the side effects of printing $4T+ in new money is an increase in dealmaking.

Most of the new money was poured into the top of the system and it had to go some where, investors threw much of it towards the tech industry as it seemed they could at least keep working and where potentially building businesses that would boom during such a massive a pandemic response.

The recent drop in dealmaking is important and newsworthy. I think the point being made above was simply that reporting seems to ignore the context of how this year's investing compares to 2019 before the massive influx of inflationary cash rolled in.

Feel it's more about how the stories are angled. So often it seems phrased like things during Covid was the norm, rather than things returning to normal.

Thus the interesting question a journalist should research would be: Why did spike during the Covid years happen?

Federal reserve

I think it's less about journalists being sensational and more the nature of business reporting (in the journalistic and financial sense) that everything must be compared quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year

To be fair to the journalist who wrote the linked article, they showed the spike and years previous to covid.

Outrage sells. While some might include pre-covid statistics, the vast majority won't.

Yet this one does.

The article includes a six year chart of total VC funding from 2018 to present that clearly shows the context of the COVID spike.