There's also a professional divide between "journalists" and "bloggers" [0]. If anyone can start their own website and write stuff, without getting any kind of qualification or accreditation, and without following any editorial policy or maintaining any kind of journalistic integrity, and still get credited with a story, then journalism itself has an identity crisis.
Meanwhile, (some) journalists at (some) news organisations are being forced to write stories that have no integrity under an editorial policy that is designed to promote a partisan point of view.
There's no working business model for real investigative journalism, but our democratic systems need real investigative journalism in order to function properly and hold politicians to account. Nothing else does.
Independent journalists can make this happen, but how do we recognise a "real" independent journalist doing real investigative journalism from an activist blogger with an axe to grind?
[0] I'm not saying that the author is not a journalist, or inferring that they're a blogger.
I’m sure that opinions vary widely on this, but I follow people and not companies.
With platforms like substack, X, and LinkedIn it seems easier than ever for an independent journalist to cultivate an audience.
As long as they create quality content, I’m more than happy to subscribe to whatever platform they choose to use.
True quality (especially once you get into the niches) is extremely valuable/interesting and to paraphrase Van Gogh, wheat is wheat, even if townsfolk see it as grass at first.
> With platforms like substack, X, and LinkedIn it seems easier than ever for an independent journalist to cultivate an audience.
Cultivating an audience is one thing but serious investigative journalism often takes considerable amount of time and money. Most journalists I’ve seen on Substack and similar platforms seem to mainly do commentary, summaries of topics, interviews, and the like. There is a place for that of course but it isn’t really filling the need for investigative journalism too well at the moment.
And it is also easy to waste time on multi year projects that does not fit you current audience. If you present the result you need to slant it in the correct way to sell subscription. This is very visible with journalist that live on the whim donations.
You see people become more and more extreme because that is what get them donations. This might just be what works with humans.
> without getting any kind of qualification or accreditation . . . and still get credited with a story, then journalism itself has an identity crisis.
A subplot of @patio11's podcast has been how to bootstrap the social conventions of "qualification or accreditation" in order to bring one's findings to a broader audience through journalistic enterprises.
Example: By the way if you get written about once by any paper ever, every time that you do a reach out to your favorite local assessor's officer, similar in the first paragraph you know, as you might have seen in blah, blah, blah we are the blah, blah, blah. Like, you don't have to be officially constituted or blessed initiative for anything.
> how do we recognise a "real" independent journalist doing real investigative journalism from an activist blogger with an axe to grind?
100% the wrong take.
Why shouldn't reporting be traceable as far as is both practical, and safe for the people involved? "The 'I HATE BIBI' blog reported that the Israeli Prime Minister admitted he like dressing up like a kangaroo and hopping around his office" allows people more (potentially) useful information than merely reporting the PM is a furry.
There doesn't need to be a distinct line between "reporter" and "person reporting news". At least, not in general; some measure of impact (followers, audience size, etc) is practical and necessary for allowing people to attend White House press briefings, but that's another subject altogether.
The difference between the casual blogger and the professional journalist are not of nature, but degrees on different axes.
The main difference from a societal point of view are obviously all the privileges and duties given to a pro in a field, be it writing or anything else actually.
Independence is ever denial or lie when it comes to social interaction. No one is an island, or if you prefer, under the sea even island are connected on solid grounds and all kinds of life forms are able to travel from one island to an other. There is nothing as an absolutely isolated zone.
Also you can be trappist, but simultaneously claiming to be the president of the universe won't hold much attention.
There are obviously some extremely high profile incidents of journalists being forced to promote an ostensibly partisan view in recent times, but that's generally only when the ownership flip flops on their views. And the reason for this is quite insidious. Knowing somebody's partisanship, biases, and other interests in pretty easy in modern times for people who like to be visible which is, more or less by definition, always true for journalists. So if you want bias [x] or partisanship [y], you simply only hire people of such partisanship or bias. So there's only a problem when you change your mind about the 'right' biases.
And I don't think there's any legacy media outlet that's really independent now a days. They've all gone hardcore partisan one way or the other, and all frame things in strong accordance with US geopolitical policy. For instance imagine how absurdly different the coverage would look if what was happening between Israel and Gaza was instead, otherwise identically, happening between China and Xinjiang (Uyghurs).
As Chomsky famously told Andrew Marr, he may have been perfectly sincere in his beliefs, but he wouldn't be sitting where he was if he believed anything else.
A while back, a semi-independent journalist, Nate Silver, said that Disney (who had bought his site) "almost never interfered in our editorial policy".
Apparently oblivious to what that means: that Disney were perfectly willing to interfere with his editorial policy, but rarely had reason to.
> If anyone can start their own website and write stuff, without getting any kind of qualification or accreditation, and without following any editorial policy or maintaining any kind of journalistic integrity, and still get credited with a story, then journalism itself has an identity crisis.
So? Why should this be considered a special case? Its no different than programming, for example.
The idea that only authorities should be able to report as journalists is anathema to a free and open, democratic society.
There is an argument that programming should be more like engineering - and you should not be able to do this professionally unless qualified. All of us know that we have a huge mess of bad code and worse practices in various ecosystems, and that we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Relying on open-source "amateur" [0] developers to create key infrastructure has allowed us to move quickly, but not at a very high level of quality.
Holding programming up as the apex of good practice in this area isn't the argument you think it is ;)
[0] Amateur from an engineering discipline perspective.
> There's also a professional divide between "journalists" and "bloggers" [0].
There doesn't have to be. No reason to gatekeep it. Anyone doing investigative work, and publishing their findings in a structured way qualifies as a journalist. In fact, the more journalists there are speaking truth to power, the more we all benefit.
But if we treat prediction markets as a source of truth, then those with wealth can spend it to distort the prediction market. Lots of arbitrage opportunity, there: you might even be able to turn a profit!
This is the sort of thing that only works if hardly anyone is doing it, and hardly anyone takes it seriously. (It's like most "free market" solutions, in that regard: the conditions for a free market are actually quite hard to obtain, and are almost never stable.)
> This is the sort of thing that only works if hardly anyone is doing it
In fact, it's just the opposite.
If "hardly anyone is doing it", you can, in fact, distort a prediction market pretty easily. If you have the money to throw at it, nobody is going to stop you.
If absolutely everybody is doing it, though, the situation changes. Somebody whose pockets are just as deep as yours will eventually discover what you're doing. It is in their best interest to trade against you and bring the market to where it should be.
This is one of the reasons penny stocks are so much worse than Aapl or SPY. Penny stocks have very low trading volumes and very low interests, so it's pretty easy for a motivated player to distort their price, "pump and dump", or do other shenanigans of the sort. There are so many people trading on aapl that you can be pretty sure the current price represents the market consensus of what aapl is currently worth.
The divide is almost entirely in status - not in actions or morals. It’s important to remember they are competitors and both have an interest in guarding their audience.
More cynically, almost all news these days is PR. There is very little new information entering the system from journalists - just synthesis of information provided to them. So traditional journalists are not unlike bloggers in this way either.
> Meanwhile, (some) journalists at (some) news organisations are being forced to write stories that have no integrity under an editorial policy that is designed to promote a partisan point of view.
Let’s not forget the credentialed journalists, backed by well-funded media orgs, fully equipped with narratives—and not shy about targeting everyday people they simply don’t like.
If qualification, accreditation, integrity is overseen and regulated and handed out by multinational corporations and organizations, owned by and run for billionaires with shady connections and hidden backroom deals among governments, bureaucrats, corporations, the rich, etc., then that really does not "qualify" them to report on very much at all except what maintains the status quo and advances the interests of the ruling class.
A least with independent journalists there is a chance they might not be compromised. Not so, corporate journalists.
> There's no working business model for real investigative journalism, but our democratic systems need real investigative journalism in order to function properly and hold politicians to account.
You just described the perfect business model. A democratic society would be all over that. Who wouldn't pay a small sum to ensure that their employees are kept in line?
The only problem is that most people don't really want democracy. They want replaceable dictators who can do as they please during their stay as long as they step down after the allotted time. That's why said business struggles to find any customers.
Meanwhile, (some) journalists at (some) news organisations are being forced to write stories that have no integrity under an editorial policy that is designed to promote a partisan point of view.
There's no working business model for real investigative journalism, but our democratic systems need real investigative journalism in order to function properly and hold politicians to account. Nothing else does.
Independent journalists can make this happen, but how do we recognise a "real" independent journalist doing real investigative journalism from an activist blogger with an axe to grind?
[0] I'm not saying that the author is not a journalist, or inferring that they're a blogger.