They are an alternative, but not a substitute for institutional journalism.
News exists to give you an approximate representation of what is happening without having to invest too much effort in actual investigation. It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
There is no royal road to trust in journalism, to paraphrase a famous mathematician. If venerable institutions such as the New York Times can be corrupted by the transition to new media and the excesses of the zeitgeist, then there is no quick fix in the form of trust in institutions.
The web, more than any other medium before it, has elevated the individual. Therefore, it stands to reason that we ought to place our trust in the individual alone, for whom reputation remains meaningful, and for whom the holding of accountability remains possible.
Agreed. It is the best approach. I think it is laughable that editorial reasons for publishing are brought to front. I actually remember the political articles I read from the last years. I wouldn't have released the Biden story but certainly not because of alleged editorial reasons. Everyone lies, but you should set sensible limits.
One source of news that I find particularly trustworthy and impartial (partially because there is no way to financially profit from twisting it, AFAIK) is Wikipedia's current events page[0].
Someone else shared this on HN in the last few weeks, and I've been looking at it almost daily.
> It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
While this may be true theoretically, it's already been disproven in practice. People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, whether it is a no-name website or a random tweet that goes viral.
It won't work, we will simply just have a collection of disparate, narrowly focused and financially limited sources, from which anyone can draw to reinforce whatever view of the world they already have. You need an instution with the resources to look deep and wide and enough of a reputation that people will listen when it reports something they do not like.
It isn’t reasonable to expect independent journalists to take over the work that news media currently engages in. While there are legitimate criticisms of media companies becoming too large and being driven by outrage based engagements, they also provide the resources for some of the best journalists to spend a large part of their lives dedicated to digging into a story rather than worrying about how to make ends meet.
The press is a pillar of American democracy. Independent journalists are great but they just won’t have the same power or credibility as they do when they’re organized.
And, to the degree that they're actually doing investigative journalism, it's really hard to see how the finances work out. I guess there's patronage of various sorts but that tends not to work very well and certainly isn't very scalable.
My sense is that trust is the invariant in the reader-writer relationship. (Lack of) financing is one method to undermine trust, and a method that news organizations are not immune to. Just look at what the internet has done to them!
I'm curious about independent accreditation that journalists can attain and what kind of signal that could provide to contemporary distribution methods. It's easier for Twitter's algorithm to trust such an agency than it is to somehow infer credibility from the lame like/retweet signals it has direct access to.
