The 'Brand Safety' and 'Suitability' industries have financially crushed the news business by keeping ads away from articles that its 'sentiment analysis' algorithms think will make people sad or upset.
I definitely see some of the concerns that they have with this GARM stuff, but I also don’t particularly feel like I’ve seen much under the umbrella of the Gawker media group in general that I’d classify as “high-quality journalism”. There are decent articles here and there, but the standard for what qualifies to be published has always struck me as not particularly high.
I get that there’s a place for aggressive journalism, sometimes it’s exactly what’s called for. But Gawker always kind of felt like it was just aggressive for its own sake in order to attract eyeballs. Not to say that they never shed light on anything important, but a lot of the time it seemed like they were tilting at windmills just trying to keep that energy up.
Advertising really doesn’t seem like a great long-term solution for journalism’s funding, though. Nobody really wants ads, and people are increasingly able to just not interact with them. At the same time, nobody wants a paywall either.
Government funding, maybe? Some big public foundation? We certainly need something to prop journalism up financially or it’s just going to keep getting worse.
I think the problem is centralised “big house” journalism. I’ve only ever really been happy with special interest, independent, moderately-sized publications. I can drop them and move on when they start to show institutionalised bias that I find distasteful (like the AIM hosting Labor lapdogs, which would be fine, if the party wasn’t ambivalently ableist and infested with documented Christofascists). There’s a certain size of online journal that is actually sustainable given its audience.
I definitely see some of the concerns that they have with this GARM stuff, but I also don’t particularly feel like I’ve seen much under the umbrella of the Gawker media group in general that I’d classify as “high-quality journalism”. There are decent articles here and there, but the standard for what qualifies to be published has always struck me as not particularly high.
I get that there’s a place for aggressive journalism, sometimes it’s exactly what’s called for. But Gawker always kind of felt like it was just aggressive for its own sake in order to attract eyeballs. Not to say that they never shed light on anything important, but a lot of the time it seemed like they were tilting at windmills just trying to keep that energy up.
Advertising really doesn’t seem like a great long-term solution for journalism’s funding, though. Nobody really wants ads, and people are increasingly able to just not interact with them. At the same time, nobody wants a paywall either.
Government funding, maybe? Some big public foundation? We certainly need something to prop journalism up financially or it’s just going to keep getting worse.
I think the problem is centralised “big house” journalism. I’ve only ever really been happy with special interest, independent, moderately-sized publications. I can drop them and move on when they start to show institutionalised bias that I find distasteful (like the AIM hosting Labor lapdogs, which would be fine, if the party wasn’t ambivalently ableist and infested with documented Christofascists). There’s a certain size of online journal that is actually sustainable given its audience.