On the angst of American journalists (2019)

[ZeroGravitas]

> Spend a few hours on twitter and you will think America is a 21st century Weimar Republic. But spend time talking with neighbors and friends in the flesh and you find that this feeling ebbs away. The economy is doing well. People are getting paid bounding sums. Nothing seems so fraught as the online hordes would have you fear.

I don't really recognize either side of this dichotomy?

Twitter is full of people being funny, kind, weird, fascinating as well as angry trolls, of the profesionall and amatuer kind.

Real life has illness, death, war, pollution and assholes as well as art, music, love, weddings, births, friendships etc.

I'm generally optimistic that things are getting better, on average, for the human race but don't see how pretending horrors as well as small unnecessary hardships aren't happening every day helps that progress.

[caslon]

Does this seem suspect to anyone else? It's hard to believe an author trying to instill in you the idea that everything is fine, actually, when stuff is pretty obviously not actually fine.

My neighbors are not well off. I am not well off. The people I know are mostly below or hovering around the federal poverty guideline. Far from making great sums, and it's been this way for a long time.

Are we sure the author isn't just rich, and coming largely from rich parts of society?

[Animats]

> Does this seem suspect to anyone else?

Yes. Things are not fine.

The trouble with journalism is that there's too much punditry and too little reporting. Newspapers used to have large staffs of "beat reporters", who went out, gathered news, and sent it in. Today, most "news" begins as a press release. Check cnn.com. Everything above the fold today started as a press release or statement from someone, or is an opinion piece. Fox News is worse.

Collecting local news is now more the job of local TV stations, because they need video.

[GravitasFailure]

The article is from 2019 and things were in pretty good shape then, though I do think the author's broader point about the concerns of journalists not really aligning with the concerns of everyone else does still hold true.

[ravel-bar-foo]

Back in 2019 when this was written, the US was economically doing well. Unemployment was at a 15-year minimum (1), net compensation was increasing for the middle/lower classes at the fastest rate in 20 years (2), and productivity was up. The economic crash started in Jan/Feb 2020 upon Covid worries, and then just kept on going with supply and demand shocks.

(1) https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

(2) https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html

[barry-cotter]

> My neighbors are not well off. I am not well off. The people I know are mostly below or hovering around the federal poverty guideline. Far from making great sums, and it's been this way for a long time.

Perhaps that is true of you and your neighbors but US unemployment is at a low not seen in over a decade. That’s what the Great Resignation is about. The problem that is likely to wallop the Democrats is inflation, not unemployment. Things are going at least ok for a lot of people. They’re going well for quite a few.

[paulpauper]

How would you know. did you ring the doorbell and as "hey, are you guys well off?" What does it mean to be well off anyway? Sometimes people who save a lot of money appear poorer than they are.

[heisenbit]

The main idea of the article is tone of the national conversation is biased by people who are frustrated:

> These are also the people who drive the national conversation on twitter. Academics, journalists, policy hands, and lawyers.[2] The people who form the narratives that we understand our country have been frustrated by fate. They live uncertain, precarious lives; even the most successful and secure are surrounded by defeated legions. Each old college friend is a reminder of what they could have been or might soon be. They are more likely to be stressed by circumstance. Do you think that stress does not carry over into their perceptions of the country writ large?

At least for me my social media activity ramps up a bit when not so happy.

[refurb]

Outrage sells. The National Enquirer's entire business model has used this for the past 50+ years. The big difference is that the major news centers have copied that model and the author's thesis that it's a response to the move online makes sense.

But there is something about online discourse that attracts extreme opinions like mice to cheese. This really dawned on me when I checked out the subreddit r/decaf for people quitting coffee.

I mean, how extreme could a subreddit like that be?

Well, it turns out, incredible extreme. It's nothing but posts about "caffeine is just heroin" and "we need to ban this dangerous drug" and "I'm pretty sure caffeine caused my skull fracture".

It's this bizarre mix of every extreme view you could imagine, obsessive thoughts, anxiety and hypochondria. And posters just feed off of each other.

And I was just curious to read some dull opinion about "my sleep is better when cut down to 1 cup of coffee a day".

[idlehand]

That's the kind of opinion you get in a break room at work when someone asks why you're not chugging your usual fifth cup by noon. For people to look up an online community specifically about something, they'd have to be a bit more interested in it than the average person.

That's something I miss about the forums of old: the off topic sections were generally just regular users commenting on whatever thread was at the top. It was a bit like a break room and could even form into communities.

[TMWNN]

>The National Enquirer's entire business model has used this for the past 50+ years.

Highly relevant: TIL that the National Enquirer was the most reliable news source during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. According to a Harvard law professor who gave the media an overall failing grade, the Enquirer was the only publication that thoroughly followed every rumor and talked to every witness. (<https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6n1kz5/til_th...>)

[t-3]

For a brief period, journalism was a respected professional-class career. Social media and streaming video killed that, so it's back to muckraking. I have confidence that eventually new economic models will emerge that allow writers to better meet the demand for "real" journalism, but figuring that out will take time and more societal adjustment to technology.

[chongli]

There is still a path to professionalism and respect in journalism. It’s the same tough one that’s always been there. War correspondents, investigative journalists, foreign correspondents in general.

There are still lots of journalists around who are devoting large amounts of their time and often taking substantial or even grave personal risks to their livelihood, their freedom, or even their lives. They’re doing all of this out of a deep conviction and sense of responsibility to uncover the truth about corruption, pollution, war, bribery, murder, and off-shore tax evasion and money laundering by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world.

The problem is you won’t find their writing while scrolling through Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. You might find it sometimes here on HN. But otherwise you have to seek it out. It’s a shame so many people can’t be bothered to do so.

[mantas]

There's already a model for this. Crowd-sourced journalists via Patreon etc.

Even in my small country (~3mio pop), people manage to make a cushy living on this. E.g. covering iffy cases of corruption and neglect that ain't reported much (if at all) on mainstream media. In many cases because media if afraid to loose advertisement money from related business structures.

[krageon]

> For a brief period, journalism was a respected professional-class career.

That must have been an extremely brief period significantly before I was alive, because I have never heard a single human being imply this.

[throwaway0x7E6]

journalists killed journalism

[eyelidlessness]

> It is a common observation that internet life and real life don’t really match. Spend a few hours on twitter and you will think America is a 21st century Weimar Republic. But spend time talking with neighbors and friends in the flesh and you find that this feeling ebbs away.

Oh that’s fantastic for your neighbors.

[diob]

Even the well off folks I know want to get out of dodge at this point. Everyone else I know is just trapped.

[paulpauper]

The economy is doing well.

It was..until around 4 months ago

Here is the lifehack to making a living at writing: be famous, well-known at something else and then pivot to writing. that usually does the trick.

[JackFr]

Also be good at writing.

[woevdbz]

Journalism is this weird profession where its individual members have very little personal power and clout, because doing good research and writing is not a huge barrier to entry. Most are just freelance cogs in a big capitalistic machine that isn't doing very well by capitalist standards. But collectively they wield immense power to set the narrative that essentially drives democracy. I suspect this encourages pack behaviors.

[paulpauper]

because doing good research and writing is not a huge barrier to entry.

it's a big barrier when one considers the vast majority of Americans, even those with degrees, cannot do either well.

[chroem-]

> they wield immense power to set the narrative that essentially drives democracy

What you're describing has a name and it isn't democracy: it's oligarchy.

[paulpauper]

Academia produces thousands and thousands of adjuncts working far below the average American wage. To get to that stage you must spend five to eight years laboring as a graduate student, again working under the average wage. Only a fraction of those who go through this experience end up securing a stable university job because of it.

Maybe 10+ years ago the situation was so bleak, not nowadays you see tons of otherwise no-name academics, of all areas whether it's science , math, sociology, political science, or economics, carving out niches online, such as substacks, twitter, podcasts, YouTube lectures (like 3blue 1 brown), selling books on Amazon, fundraising, etc. It's not like your options are only limited to teaching at a university. One of the hidden benefits of academia , even if the pay sucks, is you get branding power, which you typically do not see with other professions. Noah Smith, for example, was something of a failed academic but now runs a hugely popular econ Substack blog.

[Sniffnoy]

(2019)

[hoseja]

Learn to code :)

Seriously though, traditional intellectual pursuits are too crowded? Find new ones, it seems obvious.

[whatshisface]

That's all right for the people who are trying to make money but what about us the public who is suffering from a lack of journalism?