[save_ferris]

Nonprofit news organizations are a thing and I've been incredibly positive about their future (full disclosure: I used to work for a nonprofit publication).

The nonprofit model encourages much more direct community engagement through conferences, festivals, and long-form interviews with local, state and national leaders.

A major hurdle that nonprofit and higher-quality news outlets face is that the major media players have dopamine-driven news down to a science, and it's a lot easier to consume a small and practically meaningless soundbyte than it is to sit and listen to a politician have a challenging discussion with an interviewer for an hour. The attention span of the average American isn't equipped for higher-level discourse as it's not nearly as exciting and rage-inducing as watching CNN/FOX/ABC/??? network.

[Meekro]

The most popular podcaster right now is Joe Rogan, who does 2-3 hour interviews. Doesn't the popularity of his content suggest that Americans are very interested in higher level discourse, but have long been denied it?

[l9k]

As popular as Joe Rogan is, he seems to be a drop in the bucket of the news (infotainment) business.

Also, it's debatable that his podcast promotes higher-level discourse even if it's long in duration.

[save_ferris]

> Doesn't the popularity of his content suggest that Americans are very interested in higher level discourse, but have long been denied it?

This is probably true to degree, although Rogan specifically is a pretty polarizing example due to his proclivity for hosting guests that aren't always welcome elsewhere. It's hard to say how much of his popularity is due to his interview style versus his politics. I also expect that the demographic breakdown of podcast listeners aren't reflective of the country as a whole, it probably skews a bit younger.

Long-form interviews with political leaders aren't a new genre, I suspect they just don't get as much attention as the more soundbite-y forms of news, but I could be wrong.

[msla]

An ideal would be someone like Rogan but with a spine and some teeth, someone willing to stand up to his interviewees and bite them a bit when they say something outright wrong or fuzzy-headed. It would require the interviewer to, first, get acquainted with the idea that facts are more important than feelings, especially the feelings of the people being interviewed, second, learn the facts relevant to a given interview and have them on hand, and, third, develop a position on the topics relevant to the interview based on those facts and have the basic fortitude and honesty to defend that position. It's difficult, but it would draw in people put off by Rogan's style or lack thereof.

[52-6F-62]

America needs another Dick Cavett for a younger generation in that regard (or multiple!). Less pandering, emotionally and intellectually intelligent, honest, but still relatable and still cognizant of his audience.

It definitely kicks the cynical view that people are only interested in bites that satiate a short attention span.

[jeffbee]

My town is blessed with an excellent nonprofit news organization: Berkeleyside and its spin-off, Oaklandside. Together they publish 1-2 articles each day, because that's how much news there is. There's really no reason to have the local dailies like the SF Chronicle, the only major-city newspaper to my knowledge to have been openly mocked in a famous movie, or the SJ Mercury News and the other papers of the Bay Area News Group, a Denver company that hasn't printed anything worth reading in the past decade.

[lacker]

Personally I find that Berkeleyside and Oaklandside are full of “personal interest” type stories that are interesting but usually aren’t too important. Some new restaurant opened, a new indie movie is showing. Whereas the SF Chronicle has recently become an excellent source for local coronavirus and wildfire news.