It's not just that. A significant problem is monetization:

- you got amateurs (bloggers, social media) being capable of running very fast and high-quality journalism on very low budgets (as the barrier to entry is extremely low, all you need for a vlog these days is a basic iPhone) that can be covered by donations, sponsorships (patreon) or merch

- you got nation-state actors (aka troll farms and content farms [1]) that churn out tons of content for free

- classic print journalism has seen advertising income drastically collapse as ad budgets shifted towards the Internet

- the tradition of reading a newspaper at breakfast has gone, either because people have no time for that any more or because they're reading on their phones

- people lack the money to spend on newspapers

- people are sick of being advertised to all the time, ad blockers significantly impact anything from web pages to Youtube

All in all, high-quality long form journalism (especially investigative reporting) takes serious amounts of money, time and legal risk, but the finance base for this has gone down the drain.

Some media has escaped the fate of their fellows by being bought up by some rich person, but that carries ethical challenges on its own.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

Your first bullet is totally correct, barrier to entry has collapsed and it's easy to do high-quality journalism without the backing of an institution. The people who are good journalists that people want to read have gone to platforms like Substack where they can directly monetize their work. The mediocre journalist stay with the institutions, so there's a net talent drain from the publishers. Which leads to lower quality work and that causes more subscribers to leave (of course annoying ads and everything contribute), and as you say the finance base has gone down the drain.

I see it as a net positive, you have a decentralized distributed group of investitive journalists who are directly reliant on their subscriber base rather than the political whims of the institution. So they are more incentivized to do good work and are harder to silence when the go against the powers-that-be.

It's a shift to merit (are you a good journalist) from credentialism (the BigPublisherCo gives you a job as a writer).

Who's doing long-form investigative journalism on Substack? That's not snark: if they're on there I want to subscribe. I don't know who they are.

Unfortunately, any one I pick will anger one side or the other of the isle, so I'll refrain from naming names. There area bout a half dozen good long form Substacks that I follow and I know my friends follow a few others that I don't. They sound good too, but I don't want to devote that much time to reading :)

I feel like there are very few "high-quality" journalists that can support themselves on Substack/Patreon alone. A story might take months of research and travel to do properly.

> I see it as a net positive, you have a decentralized distributed group of investitive journalists who are directly reliant on their subscriber base rather than the political whims of the institution. So they are more incentivized to do good work and are harder to silence when the go against the powers-that-be.

The problem: with a massive media powerhouse such as the NYT backing you, you can go against large international conglomerates - their lawyers will have your back, and you won't have to pay out of your personal pocket in case of the other side winning in court.

Once you go freelance, that protection vanishes.

Good point. However, the conglomerates just buy ad space on the the powerhouses such as the NYT and they're not as firewalled as you'd hope. The NYT will never allow a negative article go out against someone who has major ad buys.

- classic print journalism has seen advertising income drastically collapse as ad budgets shifted towards the Internet

Print used to have dedicated sales people who had relationships with agencies and brands and could connect those organizations with a dedicated and defined audience. Both sides were vetted. And if any problems occurred there was a responsible and responsive party to fix things. Marketing people could rest easy at night knowing their ad for khaki pants would not be next to photos of white supremists marching in New York wearing khakis.

They gave that all up for the opportunity to show ads for the CatTurd NTF at $0.50 per thousand impressions. You know what defeats ad blocking? Serving the ads from your own servers.

In the end they gave it all away to Google and Meta because they were shortsighted. Just like Sears ended their catalog operations leaving the field open for an Amazon.

I’m waiting for someone to propose gathering all of the quality posts from Medium and Substack on a specific topic or interest area and publish them together for a dedicated audience. They could do this on a periodic basis.

> you got amateurs (bloggers, social media) being capable of running very fast and high-quality journalism on very low budgets (as the barrier to entry is extremely low, all you need for a vlog these days is a basic iPhone)

What is the definition of "journalism"? Are there particular examples that you are thinking of for these 'amateurs'? How many 'amateurs' have broken stories which involved going into archives, chasing down leads, interviewing the principles involved, etc?

As compared to [vb]logs (re-)reporting a story that was originally broken by a 'non-amateur'?

Read the article (or just search for journalism).

This is what the author is claiming and not defining "Real Journalism". Maybe you have to go to a 4 year school and work for the NYT first to become a Real Journalist?

A good example would be Jomboy breaking the Astro’s pitch stealing system. This rocked baseball to its core.

>What is the definition of "journalism"?

One who journals. A journal is a record of current and past incidents and events.

Unfortunately for "journalism" however, "journalists" by and large just write biased hit pieces intended to draw out fear, anger and sensationalism for money. They do not write and keep records, aka journals.

I'm ecstatic that "journalism" is dying. "Journalists" are not the Fourth Estate, they are just a cancer blighting humanity.

> What is the definition of "journalism"? Are there particular examples that you are thinking of for these 'amateurs'? How many 'amateurs' have broken stories which involved going into archives, chasing down leads, interviewing the principles involved, etc?

That's already something not many newspapers or radio stations do, their content tends to originate from press agencies, verbatim copying police reports, or from syndicate stations as John Oliver pointed out a few years back [1].

Some outlets are even worse, they do just the same but it's not even a human journalist rehashing someone else's content but some kind of AI.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/john-ol...

I generally agree. But I see a lot of that as exacerbating symptoms, not cause. I still believe that demand comes before supply for this kind of thing. There’s a mental market for the pablum.