It's a good view but fairly one-sided. I think the digital transformation also showed some pretty severe flaws underlying the model of journalism. I can think of at least these:
1) When the entertainment and information alternatives are much poorer the bar is much lower. Newspapers were used to this and then the internet raised the bar quite high. Whereas a bunch of friends might get their banter on by reading a sports newspaper at their bar they may now get a steady stream on twitter, or read a specialized blog if they're nerdier, or...
2) We romaticize journalism way too much. These days if I want the reality of the government budget I'll more easily head online to a specialized blog or read the well organized state stats page than read the newspaper. The newspaper article on the same thing is often wrong, sometimes comically so (e.g., missing the scale of the national debt by a factor of a 1000). If we get to topics I really know about I'll definitely get much better information, and a nice discussion to boot, in a specialized forum like this one than in a newspaper. And these kinds of places pop up more and more.
3) The kinds of things I'd really like an investigative journalist to do are just not done and probably never were. I don't see anyone going through the published laws explaining things, running through government spending and explaining where the problems are, and a million other things that are now easy to do because the data sources are available. The closest they come is doing "factcheck" articles which are nice to try and keep politicians in check but are an extremely biased source of news. I don't want you to be driven by whatever the current soundbite is, I want you to drive the news cycle by picking the things that actually matter to people, running through them methodically and reporting on that original output.
Pointing towards the current US president as an example of how journalism shows its worth seems shortsighted. The challenge of Trump is what they are actually setup to do. Challenge a few shallow narratives and keep pushing until things unravel. It's the actual challenge of educating the population on important topics that I don't see a way for journalism to get enough resources to turn around and actually do. But maybe I was expecting too much from it.
Reminds me of an old tweet I made several years ago:
"The internet will do to society, what highways did to the landscape"
We see cheap fast food establishments scattered everywhere with bright signs while healthy whole food is being quietly digested by individuals and families amongst themselves after patient cooking (researching).
Those stories are everywhere, but it doesn't make them worthless. I think it's often overlooked that these stories do take a lot of work to discover, and that losing those resources could become dangerous. Case in point: the Trump Jr meeting with a Russian delegation came out because the New York Times invested months tracking it down. Or, more recently, this story about Icahn, that probably lead to his resignation: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/carl-icahns-fai..., and this rather impressive and extremely long expose on a single real estate deal in Georgia: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business...
> The kinds of things I'd really like an investigative journalist to do are just not done and probably never were. I don't see anyone going through the published laws explaining things,
Those things aren't "investigative" journalism, but there are lots of examples. Here's an interactive version of the President's budget proposal: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/23/us/politics/t.... I'm pretty sure that if you spend 30 to 40 minutes daily scanning through the NYT or WSJ, or read the Economist cover-to-cover every week, you'll have a well-rounded knowledge of world affairs.
1) When the entertainment and information alternatives are much poorer the bar is much lower. Newspapers were used to this and then the internet raised the bar quite high. Whereas a bunch of friends might get their banter on by reading a sports newspaper at their bar they may now get a steady stream on twitter, or read a specialized blog if they're nerdier, or...
2) We romaticize journalism way too much. These days if I want the reality of the government budget I'll more easily head online to a specialized blog or read the well organized state stats page than read the newspaper. The newspaper article on the same thing is often wrong, sometimes comically so (e.g., missing the scale of the national debt by a factor of a 1000). If we get to topics I really know about I'll definitely get much better information, and a nice discussion to boot, in a specialized forum like this one than in a newspaper. And these kinds of places pop up more and more.
3) The kinds of things I'd really like an investigative journalist to do are just not done and probably never were. I don't see anyone going through the published laws explaining things, running through government spending and explaining where the problems are, and a million other things that are now easy to do because the data sources are available. The closest they come is doing "factcheck" articles which are nice to try and keep politicians in check but are an extremely biased source of news. I don't want you to be driven by whatever the current soundbite is, I want you to drive the news cycle by picking the things that actually matter to people, running through them methodically and reporting on that original output.
Pointing towards the current US president as an example of how journalism shows its worth seems shortsighted. The challenge of Trump is what they are actually setup to do. Challenge a few shallow narratives and keep pushing until things unravel. It's the actual challenge of educating the population on important topics that I don't see a way for journalism to get enough resources to turn around and actually do. But maybe I was expecting too much from it.