[kkaske]

I feel like journalism used to be considered a higher calling. Getting things right was very important. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe the internet has just drowned real journalism in a sea of clickbait headlines.

[pyinstallwoes]

It certainly feels like there is no journalism in our zeitgeist. It’s been replaced by propaganda, and sensationalism.

[guerrilla]

I think it was always like that but there were people in journalism fighting hard against it. They lost, apparently somewhat permanently it seems.

[fallous]

There is a reason that newspapers had old saws about their business such as "if it bleeds, it leads" and "dog bites man isn't newsworthy, man bites dog is."

And there is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect that was coined by Michael Crichton back in the early 2000s.

[libraryatnight]

I think about this a lot, because I feel it too. Some of it seems to be a result of these "higher callings" becoming just jobs. The closest example is how I'm often perplexed that so many people with "computer science" and specializations in software "engineering" seem so... clueless. Not all, but a lot. At a certain point I met a few people who were old electrical engineers that worked in computers. They knew more about software and seemed more like "engineers" and it was because there was no "computer science" when they came up. They were electrical engineers that ended up in computers because it was interesting to them. To them it was a higher calling. To the new school, it is a job. There's still genuinely curious people and those that have the "call" but they're mixed in with people who just heard this shit pays well. And since these things are now integrated into society, the pool is extra diluted.

And that doesn't even start in on the parts perverted by our present stage of capitalism and the monsters at the top of it. So uh, it's nuanced, but yeah it feels like it sucks - there are people trying though.

[alephnerd]

I mean, true independent journalism started off as a blue collar job.

The journalists who drove the Muckraker movement [0] were a mix of self taught and state school grads who worked for newspapers like McClure and the World which were founded by hardscrabble immigrants [1][2] who were educated in a nontraditional background.

Fundamentally, journalism back in the day was a calling that could only be learned by doing, and the modern "BA-to-MA-to-Local-to-National" pipeline is an aberration.

Ironically, the more charged, polarized, and independent news blogs are closer to "original" Muckraker journalism than centralized institutions like a NYT or a CNN.

Imo, an apprentice driven model coupled with part-time college would probably help solve the journalism pipeline issue.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._S._McClure

[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer