Journalism in the Digital Age(cs.stanford.edu)
cs.stanford.edu
Journalism in the Digital Age
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/Journalism/index.html
7 comments
Former journalist chiming in. Should probably be noted that this is material is about 13 years old. It got a lot of things right, before a lot of things changed.
If you read their Time-Displacement and Efficiency page, many of their basic assertions about news consumption were valid before the rise of social media. However, many of their more optimistic views on the future of journalism in the 21st century were formulated immediately before the onset of major changes in how people consume news. If this were a project for the 2010–11 school year, then they would have missed the launch of Snapchat by a year, as well as Snapchat's story/news platforming. Instagram would have been around, but only as the "cool filter photo app." TikTok/musical.ly would not have emerged for almost five more years. This was also the "last hurrah" for many magazines.
Journalism in 2024 and beyond faces a lot of problems, but mostly the inability to actually chart a path to expansion is why it's a dying industry.
If you read their Time-Displacement and Efficiency page, many of their basic assertions about news consumption were valid before the rise of social media. However, many of their more optimistic views on the future of journalism in the 21st century were formulated immediately before the onset of major changes in how people consume news. If this were a project for the 2010–11 school year, then they would have missed the launch of Snapchat by a year, as well as Snapchat's story/news platforming. Instagram would have been around, but only as the "cool filter photo app." TikTok/musical.ly would not have emerged for almost five more years. This was also the "last hurrah" for many magazines.
Journalism in 2024 and beyond faces a lot of problems, but mostly the inability to actually chart a path to expansion is why it's a dying industry.
[deleted]
This is an important topic, but I think this website is doing a bit of a bad job communicating it. It also at no point (as far as I can tell) provides a timeframe for when these essays were written? So statements like "in the last twenty years" or "now" have no meaning. Judging by the content my guess would be this website is maybe a decade old? This lack of verifiability is ironically one of the other problems journalism faces today.
I think a lot of the problems with news/journalism today are worsened by how ads work online. My hypothesis is that ads, as many news sites use them, degrade trust. And some of the most reputable news sources are paywalled anyways: "The lies are free and the truth is paywalled." This undermines journalism since people now get their news from other, less journalistically rigorous places like Facebook or Twitter, which link to these free "lies".
Furthermore, the attention-based economics of ads create a huge conflict of interest with what news sites are trying to achieve. I'm so tired of meaningless headlines meant just to draw me in, in an endless stream of news articles all doing the same thing.
I would love to see essays on these problems, but I think this site was created before the problems had seriously gained root like they have today.
I think a lot of the problems with news/journalism today are worsened by how ads work online. My hypothesis is that ads, as many news sites use them, degrade trust. And some of the most reputable news sources are paywalled anyways: "The lies are free and the truth is paywalled." This undermines journalism since people now get their news from other, less journalistically rigorous places like Facebook or Twitter, which link to these free "lies".
Furthermore, the attention-based economics of ads create a huge conflict of interest with what news sites are trying to achieve. I'm so tired of meaningless headlines meant just to draw me in, in an endless stream of news articles all doing the same thing.
I would love to see essays on these problems, but I think this site was created before the problems had seriously gained root like they have today.
fyi the site was written in or before 2011
reasons for the theory:
- A comment within the HTML says "Mirrored from www.2020symposium.com/ by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [XR&CO'2010], Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:50:49 GMT"
- the website URL contains the numbers "2010-11"
- all references contain dates less than or equal to 2010
I agree about the article's poor communication and the adverse affect advertising has wrought on news and on the broader internet
reasons for the theory:
- A comment within the HTML says "Mirrored from www.2020symposium.com/ by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [XR&CO'2010], Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:50:49 GMT"
- the website URL contains the numbers "2010-11"
- all references contain dates less than or equal to 2010
I agree about the article's poor communication and the adverse affect advertising has wrought on news and on the broader internet
[deleted]
I am highly confident that powerful entities (people, corporations, and governments) are getting away with much, much more malfeasance these days than they did in the '50s-'90s, when the news industry was well respected and well funded. Investigative reporters, reporters with the bandwidth to doggedly pursue a story for months or years, even boring old statehouse reporters ... they've nearly all been defanged through countless budget cuts. It's a vicious cycle. Jobs get cut, the quality of the content suffers, people lose trust and cancel subscriptions, revenue drops, repeat.
Ultimately, it's the rich and powerful who benefit from the dearth of quality journalism and the hostility toward the media stirred up by several prominent political figures. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and there is far less sunlight now than a couple of generations ago.