MOTHERFUCKER - JOURNALISM IS THE FOURTH PILLAR OF DEMOCRACY. ITS YOUR LITERAL ONE JOB - TO DEFEND IT.
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.
Ah, that’s your problem right there. And this is going to be the major issue for generations to come. The algorithms are determining what’s popular and will generate content to maintain engagement. What used to happen is news rooms would find important stories and report on them then the people would read those stories to determine what actually matters in their lives.
I subscribe to my local paper. The mobile app is essentially ‘what the people want’. Meanwhile, the newspaper itself (print or digital) has almost entirely different content and it’s certainly organized differently. When I want to learn about things in my community and the world - the reason I subscribe to a newspaper in the first place - I read the paper, not the app. The app is just like a blog.
It’s incredibly frustrating how far our fourth pillar of democracy has fallen.