YES! This! I worked for a higher-up “legacy”(?) news paper for three years and what people don’t understand is that “the news” isn’t just some objective collection of facts. It’s work to collect, analyze, verify, source, and interpret those facts. That’s why it’s always so sigh-worthy when I see some other startup crop up in the HN-esque circle that’s “going to fix news” when these people have essentially 0 actual journalists as their friends or even as consultants on their product. Everyone wants to complain about paywalls and say their undemocratic or even say they violate “free speech” (misunderstanding both words in that right) and then offer no other alternative other than “trust us, we’ll do it better.” The fundamental problem is that a contrarian take on pop culture gets vastly (3-10x) more views than something which took several months and dozens of sources to put together. I could go on and on but point being: Y-E-S, us tech people cannot “fix” other industries. We can help, but cannot lead.
Even worse is the amount of time a publisher maintained their status as the "exclusive" source for a story used to be a least a couple days - meaning a subscription to an outlet that regularly has an edge is valuable (particularly in finance journalism, which has fared better than the industry as a whole). Now, a newsroom spends a year preparing a story and somebody summarizes the key points, devoid of context, in a Twitter thread and nobody sees the actual story. Why pay for getting the story first if you can just wait a couple minutes to get the free summary?
