Some More News - SMN: How The Internet Is Killing Journalism

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

Hi. There sure are a lot of media layoffs happening! Let's look at how and why that happened and what we can do to make sure quality journalism doesn't get phased out like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W3jlA9Oz0gFXSSY7eT3G6x921b3B_uBx6KPLrCsSZQU/edit?usp=sharing If you want to take ownership of your health, start with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase exclusively at https://drinkAG1.com/morenews. Check it out.  Check out our MERCH STORE: https://shop.somemorenews.com   SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA   Follow us on social media:

Begin. At Some More News, hi, I'm Cody, this is that. We aim to bring you the news you need where and how you want it. And that means keeping up with all the awesome new social media apps that control our very destinies as content creators. Woo hoo.

So here's some news you can now look for and follow us over at News Scream, the new news app where a decibel meter ensures all news is exclusively screamed at you for maximum believability. Dog treats are woke now. Every single one. They make your dog go blind too.

Find out why by clicking on my scream fire pet. Men and women should live in adjoining single-gender cities. They could have hotels on the border where people meet up exclusively for procreation. No exceptions! This screen brought to you by Argyle. The greater the spy, the bigger the lie! Newsmash! I have a slideshow of destroyed Gazan hospitals, and I will now intercut the zit-popping videos and capybaras designed to ping the addiction center of your brain! This scream is brought to you by Argyle! Argyle! Argyle! SCREAM IT!

I can't keep this up, man! Are you sure we have to do this? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Not sure why I'm trusting Wormbo, but first, I'm just gonna speak extemporaneously for about an hour on the underpinning issues driving this format change. Is that okay? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I don't know if that was a fresh response, the same response ongoing, or the same clip twice, but anyhow, here is how the Internet has made the news much, much better. And of course when I say better, I mean... I'm so tired.

I'm so tired. How the internet murdered or changed the news. Okay, news. At SMN, we care about N. We're literally here to provide you with SM of it. So no one is more concerned than we that the news itself seems to be having a bit of a crisis. Or to put it in the passive voice that makes it officially the news,

news adjacent crisis leaves experts concerned. Journalism is a costly time consuming business that's almost entirely funded via advertising. Or when that fails, contributions from viewers like you and the blood of unthanked newsies. So our right to information feels particularly vulnerable during an economic crisis or any kind of downturn in the ad market, which is exactly what's been happening

over the past few years as companies everywhere try to desperately slash costs in the hopes of pleasing their Wall Street overlords here at the end of Capitalism Street. And of course, no overlord is more feared than Shofringop, the great old news god, slumbering at the bottom of the ocean since ancient times, glutting its news ticker on humanity's collective ignorance.

Praise it, fear be. In part, the lack of viable ad revenue means local and regional newspapers, beloved well-read websites, and other important news sources keep going out of business. A 2020 study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that more than 25%

of US newspapers disappeared in the previous 15 years, leaving a number of communities in what they termed news deserts. of US newspapers disappeared in the previous 15 years, leaving a number of communities in what they termed news deserts. It's like a food desert for your brain, and you can watch it happening in real time. As in, while we were writing this, 2024 began with a series of massive layoffs. By the end of last year,

21,417 media and journalism jobs had already been lost. These cuts are coming from all over the industry, but they've been particularly devastating in the world of legacy and print media. In October of last year, the Washington Post announced plans to slash 240 jobs, or around 9.6% of their total staff after failing to hit subscription, traffic and advertising projections. One month earlier, New York Public Radio cut 12% of its workforce due to quote, "'Battling economic headwinds on multiple fronts.'"

That number would be lowered to only 6% of their workforce thanks to union negotiations. Interesting, seems like there's something to these unions. Anyway, looking ahead to what it called a tough budget year in 2024, the Texas Tribune laid off 11 employees and put two podcasts on hiatus last August. Hearst Magazines let go of 41 employees in July,

including staffers from Cosmo, Harper's Bazaar, and Elle. And in June, National Geographic laid off the very last of its staff writers, plus its entire podcast staff and a group of editors, including one who had been with the publication for nearly 40 years. That magazine is owned by Disney, by the way. They know how to launch a robotic Spider-Man

between two buildings with pinpoint accuracy, but it was too hard making money with a magazine whose beat was anything interesting happening anywhere in the entire world. Karen, airbags please! Okay, semi-pinpoint accuracy. I mean, how many Bear Grylls wannabes could that robot money have sent to Tanzania, Mickey?

Where's Nat Geo, Mickey? Didn't Uncle Ben say something about great power coming with something, a side of fries, something like that? Ah, I forget. Hopefully they'll make a movie soon to remind me for the 93rd time. This economic downturn comes amidst bitter political divides over the pandemic, climate change,

divisive military conflicts, whether or not we ought to punish Donald Trump for his various extremely overt crimes that he wants to do again, and other issues that have led to widespread distrust in mass media. A Gallup poll last year showed that only 34% of Americans trust the media to quote,

"'Fully, accurately, and fairly report the news,' while nearly three quarters of US adults told the Associated Press in May that the news media is causing political polarization." Yeah, it's a pretty bad time out here in New York City, AKA the big crapple. Why do you think I've been wearing this tie so loose? This isn't how they're supposed to look.

I can't afford a tight tie. Dress for the job that's causing you to become untethered. We could make a dozen videos spreading around the blame for what's become of the free press in America and the reasons behind this sudden spike in distrust and cynicism toward our storied American institutions. And we probably will. We need to sell ads after all.

But for our purposes today, we're zeroing in on one particular villain in this saga, the internet. That's right, I'm biting the digital hand that feeds me pixels and finally asking, are you really gonna get your news from some guy on the web who can't even afford to have his ties professionally jacked up to the right height? What have we become?

And for the record, we're not gonna sit here on our fantastic asses and pretend like pre-internet journalism was perfect. We've long been aware of the way the 24-7 TV news cycle perverts our perception of ongoing events, turning every election into a five-year-long white knuckle horse race, blowing up small or even non-existent trends into major crises, and breathlessly repeating the same five facts

on an endless loop to make it seem like important, breaking stories are actually evolving. Not to mention that misleading news and bad reporting are not in and of themselves new problems. The term fake news is fairly novel, but that's only because in the 1800s, they called it yellow journalism instead. One famous example you might have learned about

in high school involved infamous publisher, William Randolph Hearst, using the newspapers he owned to help drive support for the Spanish-American War. He famously told one of his correspondents in Cuba, you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war. Also, don't bother stopping by my castle when you visit California.

It's boring. No one should make a movie about it that depicts me as an acrid and distant tyrant. In fact, verifiably honest and trustworthy journalism itself is a relatively recent phenomenon. The New Yorker only started rigorously proofing each article they ran in 1927. Newsweek followed suit in 1933.

Time Magazine also hired researchers around this point. Now that's not to say modern newspapers are perfect or free from ideological bias, but it's only been 90 years since we even started trying. And thanks to the internet, it looks like we're poised to stop again. But like, way worse. Recent videos circulating online have been manipulated to make the congresswoman's words sound sluggish and slurred. This after a bombshell report suggesting that not only were articles on the SI website generated by AI, but that the supposed authors were themselves fake.

It's part of a series of fake ads involving Canadian news anchors and politicians designed to trick you into handing money over to a company for some sort of investment scheme or scam? We're not entirely sure. Kind of wild that we now live in this Alice in Wonderland world, which I guess would just be Wonderland, where everything is trying to grift or exploit us and it's just totally normal. Some people freaking prefer it because they've been convinced that the mainstream media is worse. But despite the many ways they can be corrupted, traditional news organizations do have systems in place designed to keep a lid on blatantly false information.

And they also have established mechanisms for making corrections and updates should something fake slip by or the circumstances on the ground change. Some fact checking and a real editorial structure like passing news items through multiple people's hands before they make it to the public absolutely work at producing journalism that's on the whole more reliable and trustworthy. But it's slower and more expensive than just spitting out whatever you feel like on X or

Twitter or whatever you feel like calling it today. I call it Katie to sow confusion. Did it work? Is anyone calling it that? I am. The confusion will be sown eventually. Social media platforms have changed the core job of being a journalist in ways

that aren't always entirely positive or apparent. The vast majority of newspaper and magazine writers were once mere bylines as far as the general public was concerned, conducting their research and data gathering behind the scenes and remaining in the background while their work enjoyed the spotlight. But the internet has turned everybody

into a public personality and personal brand, whether or not they embrace the role. In the information age, you can't even be good at news without becoming newsworthy in your own right, and that often undermines your purpose. In October, that one site that we used to call Twitter's owner, Elon Musk, suggested that his platform, the one we don't call Twitter anymore,

provides what he calls open source news. This is the social media version of citizen journalism, which isn't exactly the same as yellow journalism, but tends to be at least sepia-toned, kind of like the Wild West. Breaking news, yee-haw. The idea is that we let everyone post anything they want, and then you, the reader, determine what's trustworthy

and what's nonsensical garbage. It's a plan that flatters our own sense of having great taste and judgment, but thoroughly erodes the core concept of journalism itself. After all, the whole idea is that regular working folks don't have the time to investigate everything happening in the world for themselves. That's why reporters were invented to begin with. We're not experts. So some of us volunteered to specialize

in providing important information in as neutral and impartial a way as possible. Unfortunately, others of us volunteered to be lobbyists and ad executives, and it's been a pitched battle ever since. So naturally, Musk thinks just having everyone post conflicting information, including self-interested parties acting in bad faith, and then forcing individual users to do their own research

is the future of news. Instead of what it would be like to live in medieval times, the epic, not the restaurant. I say naturally because Elon is deeply stupid in case that was unclear. Now everybody got it, okay. Speaking of unclear, strong impartial journalism is how we sort facts from agendas,

information from a sales pitch, the news from the ads. And if we can't sort news from ads or have no barrier between the two, well, that is to invite some disturbing consequences. For example, here's some more news. How you doing, sport? Life got you down? Perhaps you live in a bad country where elections are silly

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Throat the pain! That's my motto. To quote their mandatory ad copy, quote, "'If there's one product I had to recommend "'to elevate your health, it's AG1, "'and that's why I've partnered with them for so long.'" End quote. So if you wanna take ownership of your health, start with AG1. Try AG1. And get a free one-year supply of Vitamin D3 plus K2 and five free AG1 travel packs

with your first purchase exclusively at drinkag1.com slash more news. That's drinkag1.com slash more news. That's DrinkAG1.com slash more news. Check it out. It's a drink. You drink it. You don't have to drink it like I did. See what I mean? That wasn't news at all.

Of course you knew that. No harm in pretending an ad is news. It's not like ExxonMobil ran a series of fake articles in the op-ed section of the New York Times encouraging us to embrace death for their profits. Hey, wow, they should go to mega jail. And in the spirit of learning terrible things, let's reorient ourselves

with a complete and exhaustive history of online advertising and its relationship to modern journalism, okay? And by doing so, we're going to point out some major culprits when it comes to the digital murder of the truth. Fun and fucky. To begin, the digital ad market started sometime around 1994 when HotWired.com, an offshoot of Wired Magazine,

posted the world's very first banner ad, brought to you by AT&T. Notably, that very first banner ad was already you by AT&T. Notably, that very first banner ad was already kind of playfully deceptive. It read, have you ever clicked your mouse right here in rainbow font in a not particularly clever attempt to trick you into clicking right there? The spot cost AT&T $30,000

and had a frankly astounding click-through rate of 44% because no one knew how the internet worked in 1994, especially the people using the internet. To put this in a modern context, the average display ad like this has a click-through rate of around 0.05% today. The problem is obvious. No matter how clever you make the text inside that ad,

eventually everyone tries these out a few times, figures out that they're always ads, and starts ignoring them. The fact that anyone still clicks on banner and display ads in 2024 doesn't actually speak that well about us as a species. It also perfectly represents the main issue with surviving on the internet today.

So how does this all relate to online publishing and therefore the news we so crave? Let's find out. Is it good? I bet the relationship is good. In many ways, the story of internet publishing is the chronicle of a constant struggle between convincing a savvy public

to keep looking at ads against their will and better judgment, and making each one of those increasingly rare engagements more and more valuable to sponsors. As ever, it's important to point out that capitalism legally demands this. So people develop pop-up ads

that users didn't have the option of ignoring. And then users started downloading ad blocking software. It was an arms race. Publications started using cookies and tracking tools to learn more about their readers so they can turn around and sell their attention in a way that's more targeted and precise, which we call data mining.

And just like real mining, the long-term health consequences are severe. Nowadays, search engines and social media apps sell their top results slots to advertisers with no signage or a distinction whatsoever, guaranteeing paid advertisers get primary placement ahead of whatever the user was actually searching for.

Sponsored content seeped into all the little nooks, all the little crannies. In 2021, Netflix launched Tutum, an in-house magazine covering Netflix original shows and films, but presented it in the style of a news site. When you search for news about Netflix shows, these links come up right next to actual third-party publications.

Meanwhile, YouTube is currently locked in a war against ad blocking software in the hopes of driving more people to pay for their premium subscription service. Oh, and we're all supposed to mail Elon a dollar? Business genius. The original promise here was a new model of advertising that would discreetly tastefully fund all manner

of news gathering and reporting the same way TV ads support that industry. But journalism isn't entertainment, or at least it isn't meant to be only entertainment. Blurring the line between ad space and news space because news readers keep getting better and avoiding ads is always going to compromise the news and therefore the social fabric.

This ad creep is not a new problem, just one that's getting worse faster. In the analog era, big newspapers and magazines had sales departments soliciting companies to help them fund the news, not to mention paid classified ads, which have since been completely replaced with Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.

At some point, even television started adding little ads overlaid on the bottom of the screen. But when Google introduced AdWords in 2000, it was like creating a virtual sales team with no moral compass and to which any independent publication now had access. If I start a blog and it gets some readers, I can place ads on it that were pre-sold by Google.

No Don Draper taking anyone for martinis and oysters Rockefeller required, or even Clams Casino, a delicious entree that also sounds like the name of an adorable cartoon gambling addict. 500 on red, yeah! That's the guy. In practice, AdWords did fund a galaxy of new publications,

blogs, and news sources no one visits anymore except through an app or aggregator site. But the program also radically reinvented what incentivizes media and news gathering organizations. In short, our first culprit is simple and obvious. Oversaturation of ads. Ads have always been a major revenue generator for newspapers, but it used to be that subscriptions

were just as important. Then TV and radio changed that dynamic, and finally the internet ramped it up to infinity. And in the early and mid 2000s, revenue from circulation and subscriptions stopped mattering completely. Gone were the days when a small publication had to focus on the trustworthiness

and reliability of its own brand. If you're the Boston Globe, an attention grabbing but misleading headline might help you sell papers on Monday. But if readers feel misinformed or duped by the article, they probably won't buy another copy on Tuesday. But if you're Frank's awesome DC Comics news that he heard from a real source honest.com

and all of your traffic comes in from links on social media or search results pages, your brand's reputation might not really matter to you as much. And having a wild, hateful, stupid opinion everyone gets to dunk on might even become your only selling point. Because hell, there are only five websites now.

So you're not going to get a lot of attention to your homepage regardless. The money that comes in from questionable clicks makes it worthwhile to publish more questionable or inflammatory content. And when one story is disproven, you simply move on to the next confirmed rumor. The fragmented nature of the internet washes you clean

and you start again, maybe even with a new blog with a new name. Yes, harm all foul. In other words, it's always been strategic to build up drama around a news story, but there used to be consequences if you were caught lying. And now those consequences are money and success. There's so much money to be made just from ranking well

in Google results for popular, highly searched topics, an entire industry has grown up around search engine optimization, or SEO. This refers to the myriad ways you can design a webpage, both in terms of written content and the code on the backend, to make it more appealing to search engines

so that it shows up on the first page. Guess what doesn't boost your rank higher? Being accurate. That shit isn't incentivized in the least. Every media company and publisher now has at least a few people on staff who have to learn how to work within these rules and chase the algo just to stay competitive

with their peers who do the same. To be fair, some of it isn't outright pernicious. So-called white hat SEO techniques include adding metadata to photos or switching around the wording and URLs so that the topics are more easily readable for Google's bots and more likely to reach people searching for them.

But it's beyond concerning how much these considerations drive entire giant news organizations in 2023 and 2024 as they struggle to stay afloat and try to pivot to a version of themselves that will still exist in 50 years. That plan must include the internet. So now even reputable editors and publishers are heavily incentivized to focus exclusively

on search-friendly topics likely to bring in fresh eyeballs. Categories that don't get searched as often or already have a lot of very authoritative resources already available will tend to get overlooked, even if there's a lot more to say or it's a crucial topic. So reporters for just about every publication, but especially Buzzfeed, are tasked with spending part of their day

writing identical, vapid, largely pointless, Google-friendly content, seemingly designed with computers in mind more than human beings. Thoughtful Jurassic Park analysis might not keep the lights on, but in what order should I watch the Jurassic Park movies is a guaranteed moneymaker.

Now apply that logic to information vital to our survival as a species. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, don't do that. That's the whole point of the video. Anywho, that's gonna be our second culprit. Put it on the board! Search engine optimization. If you haven't realized it yet,

the focus on SEO and the introduction of AdWords is how we got clickbait. The rise of backend data and targeted advertising as moneymakers led to a technical arms race designed to measure exactly where your attention goes and for how long. The quest for clickability has made the news much more useless as many modern publications

produce more content designed to please robots that crawl their pages on behalf of search engines than they do to inform or even attract actual human readers. In the conventional print journalism days, the New York Times had no clue if you started out reading world news, the sports page, or the funnies. But Google, Apple, Facebook,

that one app that used to be called Twitter but now has a different very cool name everyone uses, they all monitor user activity extremely closely with an eye on optimizing the amount of time people spend looking at headlines, getting riled up, sending them around to friends and yelling at other commenters on their programs and devices.

If the 24-hour news cycle created a marketplace of outrage and fear, the internet has turned that marketplace into a grand bazaar that extends into multiple dimensions and lives inside the phone you must keep within reach at all times. As I already mentioned, newspapers and magazines were once financially incentivized

to build up a large base of regular readers. That mattered even when print ads made more money than subscriptions, because more people reading means they can charge higher advertising rates. This meant running the kinds of stories that publishers knew or guessed or thought their readership wanted to see.

But it also meant a diverse collection of items designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. You wanted something in every edition for everyone in town to read, which meant a good spread of national and international news, financial news and entertainment, sports and the arts, whatever. But with their new found access to a massive compilation

of hyper-specific data pinpointing exactly what stories everyone reads and where they spend their time, present day publishers have not just the incentive, but the ability to exclusively focus on the most profitable and widely read sub-niches, ignoring everything else and crushing any chance for nuance or thoughtful debate. Everything is boiled down like so much Hearst. Publishers and corporations optimize their own websites and schedules to push readers to the stories that are already the most popular or widely shared.

And then social media platforms run the news through the same process all over again, distilling discourse into only the most eye-catching rage bait. This winnowing down not only makes it harder for an individual to find coverage of events that are less mainstream or flying under the radar, like several whole genocides, for example, it also has the psychological effect

of reinforcing existing worldviews and biases. This is also the third culprit, the peak of the turd and puke pyramid, the algorithm. We've tried to recognize that a lot of these problems existed before the internet. Ads were always a problem. Getting on the front page of Google could be compared to how papers and magazines once fought

for newsstand visibility. But what's especially unique about the internet is that it's the first time that media pipe goes both ways. You're not just learning from the news, but the news is learning about you. And once an algorithm learns that an individual prefers a certain kind of information from certain kinds of sources, it's easy for them to end up in an information bubble

to which only those kinds of information and sources get. And they never have a chance to evolve their own ideas or even interact with the wider world. They're deprived of the ability to stumble upon something they wouldn't otherwise be looking for, of discovering something novel or interesting because the algorithm is only feeding them the slop it knows they love devouring.

It might not even be slop they love, maybe it's slop they hate, but ragefully interact with. And so the algorithm gives them more of it. Without being told, they've been cordoned off into a little area and hooked to an advertising machine designed to hypnotize them, all to sell crap. Let's be honest, advertising was always the lifeblood of modern journalism.

But technology provides advertisers with so much data about readers and their behavior, it functionally turns the datasets into proxy editors in chief. The ads don't just pay for the news anymore. Now, the news is specifically shaped and refined by powerful computers to drive more eyeballs toward the ads. So those are the big three,

at least in a humble shoddy's opinion. Ad oversaturation, search engine optimization, and the algorithm. And where do you suppose all of those concepts merge into a Megazord-like monstrosity? Where, oh where, is flooded with ads and algorithms designed to personalize your experience and pit content against each other for views? Oh, right. It is the blazing, all-knowing orb above the pyramid that is social media.

A place that has blurred the line between truth and advertising to such a grotesque point that we probably will have to do an entirely separate episode about that. We'll speak on that more. But first, I have to tell you about some products and services that I'm really excited about. Totally off the cuff without any script at all. Enjoy. What's up, my turds? Ooh, ooh, ooh, that's the sound a turd makes. Now, you may have noticed, perhaps from watching this current episode,

that the internet is a putrid mammoth waterlogged with corporate advertising. It is unfortunate. And our show is no different. But if you want to support us without supporting ads, go check out our Patreon. That's patreon.com slash some more news. For just $5 a month, you can get access to this show plus even more news totally ad-free and earlier than others. And that makes you special. We also have tiers where you can get your name in the credits and even join an online hangout with me, Funk Daddy C,

and the rest of the Some More News team. We would seriously very much appreciate your support. So go to patreon.com slash somemorenews and remember, we love you very much, especially if you supported us on our Patreon. Hi there, we are back and Warmbo has been temporarily subdued. Someone got a hand cramp.

I'm sorry about the creepy way I tried to weave the ads in, even if it was just an ad for us, it was just for comedic effect. Or was it? Is this a joke or is the joke itself just confusing the issue further? Who knows? All I know is very few people get into journalism to write or publish hollow clickbait.

So without condemning humanity, let's just say it's a big problem that all of the decision-making has been taken out of the hands of reporters, editors, and even publishers, and handed over to a bunch of wealthy, aging professional coders who don't really seem like they read a whole lot. I mean, maybe some sci-fi novels,

but like, they don't understand them. Anywho, we were breaking down the individual problems that began to destroy journalism in the early digital age. And now it's time to talk about the entities that mushed those problems together to deliver the death blow. In 2015, a bunch of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, what was at the time called Twitter and Snapchat

started selling news organizations on the idea that consumers preferred getting their information from videos rather than pros. Based almost entirely on metrics provided by these tech platforms themselves, media companies started radically restructuring their entire editorial teams, laying off literally hundreds of professional writers

in favor of producers, editors, and on-camera talent. By 2016, then popular blog Mashable announced that they were firing most of their editorial staff and doubling down on branded content and video. Then in 2017, Fox Sports laid off its entire writing staff while now defunct MTV News shut down a brand new editorial team that it had started up just two years earlier with a dedication

to long form political and cultural reporting. Mike cut 25 staffers to hire people to produce social media clips instead. But here's the thing, following a Wall Street Journal expose, Facebook conceded that it had significantly inflated its viewership metrics on video, often by as much as 60 to 80%.

Oops, fucking oops. In October of 2018, following a class action lawsuit brought by Facebook advertisers, Facebook records were unsealed showing the company had actually and knowingly inflated view numbers by 150% to 900%. But the damage had already been done. The so-called pivot to video was but the damage had already been done. The so-called pivot to video was basically the meteor

hitting the atmosphere. And ever since we've been watching these dinosaurs slowly starve and succumb to oblivion whilst churning out 30 brief posts about when Oppenheimer's finally coming to streaming. It's February 16th. Anyway, best of luck to Elon for his brand new decision to turn Twitter, that thing famously known

for short form writing, into a long form video platform. Business genius. It can't really be overstated how caustic social media was and is for journalism. After the industry was decimated, a lot of bloggers and journalists were left adrift to simply go it alone and rely on a fan base of supporters. And as more Americans seek out alternate sources

of information on their own, it became a great way for bad actors to sneak in, like the Alex Joneses and the Tims Poole of the world, to whom the algorithm is more than happy to direct people. According to the latest digital news report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, one in four adults under 24 now use TikTok as a news source, up 5% from just 2022's report.

Young adults in the UK now spend more time on TikTok than watching broadcast TV on average. Obviously, there are going to be some awesome, serious journalists using TikTok to try and say true things, but most don't have fact checking departments at their disposal or an editor, or possibly even any second pair of eyeballs looking over their work.

Then there's the people just making things up entirely. Decentralized citizen journalism can be great in a number of contexts, like swiftly organizing resistance against an oppressor that owns most of the mainstream media outlets. But it can't cover everything. Society needs boring, verifiable, fact-checked news that isn't designed to bring in one more click or one more ad dollar at any cost. Obviously, we at Some More News aren't against savvy internet journalism. Well-produced independent news can cut through the noise

and provide a lot of helpful background and context, free from preconceived narratives or a driving need to service corporate sponsors as much. I literally have less at stake than say NBC News, so I can take the time to dive even more deeply into a topic. Time is still money for me, but not really, not that much. An hour is like a buck 57.

While editors in chief have no choice but to run yet more stories about how Americans hate working from home every time their boss requests one, YouTube citizen journalists set their own agenda based on what they think is relevant to their subscribers. While mainstream newspapers deploy the passive voice to protect everyone from violent cops and genocidal regimes, TikTokers will just come out and tell you what happened

in clear and straightforward prose. This is what Israel's Checkpoint 300 looks like at five in the morning. People start gathering in Beit Lahem around 3 a.m. for their long and humiliating daily commute. And the fact that people really think these checkpoints are to stop terrorists blows my mind. Because it's so clearly designed as a form of collective punishment. That's seriously a great new aspect of journalism that the internet gave us. But none of this, none of this was ever meant to replace the whole free press.

Providing context is decidedly less helpful if no one can verify anything is actually happening to the degree that someone else won't just call it out as internet fakery. Expecting unpaid TikTokers to always have the best information on hand, whether their intentions are good or bad, is naive. And a lot of the time, the intentions are very bad. At this point, we've basically erased the line

between being a content creator and a paid shill, to the point that when the Screen Actors Guild recently asked Hopeful Future members to stop doing paid advertising for struck companies, it set off a mini crisis among YouTube and TikTokers who genuinely weren't sure whether or not this even applied to them. Over the summer, the Chinese fast fashion brand Shein flew some influencers on an all-expenses-paid

trip to tour a manufacturing center in Guangzhou, China. In exchange for their free trip and additional compensation, these social media mavens naturally gushed about their experience. One influencer, Destine Seduth, said it couldn't have been a sweatshop because the employees she met weren't even sweating. The Sheen stunt was so over the top, it did generate some actual backlash,

but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Every day on all of these apps, online creators are compensated to digitally launder paid promotion and product placement, treating them as personal testimonials from a trusted friend. It is extremely ugly and duplicitous. I did a whole scream about it.

The level of lies on this site absolutely sickened me. I would die if it weren't for the fact that I just saw a sneak peek of Argyle and it's incredible. it changed my life. Please subscribe. I make 0.00001% of a half penny for every scroll by lasting more than four seconds. See, the beautiful thing about out of work journalists

resorting to social media is that you don't have to pay them a fair wage or give them health insurance. I'm sorry, beautiful for the companies, I mean. Facebook and Twitter and TikTok basically sabotaged actual journalism entities and then snuck in as their weird middleman. We did an entire episode about that. And so the ad dollars that used to fund serious journalism

now go to third party platforms that serve up headlines like Google News or Facebook rather than the publications themselves. These parties don't do anything. It's yet another case where the tech industry has promised innovation, but then just kind of inserted itself into a preexisting business transaction

and hoovered up most of the money. And this is of course, part of a larger issue with capitalism as it exists on the internet and everywhere. And that is the fact that everything is now owned by a handful of ultra wealthy dipshits, even the press. Journalism inevitably had to join the internet, a place that we're still failing to regulate.

It made sense that they were almost immediately swarmed by rich tech freaks. According to one industry watcher, you can now count on one hand the big media brands that aren't owned by an oligarch or other billionaire. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. South African billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the Los Angeles Times.

Minnesota billionaire Glenn Taylor owns the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And Steve Jobs' widow, Laureen Powell Jobs, owns a majority stake in The Atlantic. Not to mention, many of the nation's largest newspaper groups, including Tribune, McClatchy, and Media News Group, are now owned, controlled, or in serious financial debt to hedge funds and private equity groups. According to a recent Financial Times analysis, around half of the daily newspapers in the US are now controlled by hedge funds or financial firms. Much of this feels like the kind of stink

you're bound to get when you rub raw capitalism on stuff like journalism or healthcare or education for too long. But in the case of the news, it's important to note the dizzying speed with which the internet took us all from waiting for the local news at 11 to debating the finer points of Rashida Tlaib's censure with some jerk off four states over in the same thread

as the representative herself, or at least a sleep deprived staffer. Oh, Taco Bell is waiting into the chat? Ooh, oh, news did not used to be this way. Anyway, put it on the fucking board or whatever. Four, five fucking rich people. You can argue that rich people have and will always screw up journalism.

The internet just made it way easier for them to the point that they can operate like a get rich quick grift. In 2021, Alden Capital paid $630 million for Tribune Publishing, which includes the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and other papers. The company already owned the Denver Post,

Boston Herald, Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Daily News, and more, and were already infamous for gutting staff and selling off real estate assets to boost their own profits. In fact, in 2019, the US Labor Department cited Alden for violating federal law by mismanaging the pension savings of Denver Post employees among others.

This isn't about a big company with know-how scooping up publications and making them better and more effective. Funds like Alden aren't in this business for the long term. They're there to squeeze all the short-term value out of these businesses before moving on. That means acquiring new papers, laying off their staff, selling off any major assets like real estate holdings,

and driving up subscription prices. Again, it's just a grift. It's flipping houses. Oh, hey, look at this. The Baltimore Sun was just resold to David D. Smith, the owner of Sinclair Inc. Remember those guys? Great.

They don't see the news as anything but a commodity to be bought and sold. And even if the publications aren't scooped up by scavengers doing an overtly terrible job, there's no way this can't be bad in the long term. We're pushing so much power and influence into the hands of just a few people and then trusting them with the tools we use

to check in on how they're using that power and influence. Breaking, everything is going super. In the wake of brave, bold, cost-cutting measures like firing most of the company, internet-fueled tech moguls have overseen a process of condensing more and more work into the hands of a small group of beleaguered staffers who have to compile an ever-increasing amount

of clickbait content themselves, while fewer and fewer journalists are posted around the world actually doing the time-consuming job of investigating the news. But not having anyone on the ground to do the hard but important work of following up and fact checking is how you get chaotic,

unreliable reporting. Say an explosion at a hospital in Gaza that's first reported as an Israeli airstrike, then a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket launch, then there was no way to know what happened, then Israel had no choice because of human shields, then the hospital didn't even explode, then hey, look over here at this refugee camp.

Now what happened? We'll never know because of the shoplifting epidemic. Have we mentioned the shoplifting epidemic? It is tracking really well right now. And so naturally, the quest for cheap journalism has led these big, rich dipshits to glom onto AI. We've already seen a number of publishers and media companies start experimenting

with farming reportage out to chatbots, even though they don't actually write more good than humans do as, at least not as well as do humans. Doth, doth, doth humans do. The point is they don't write good, period, end paragraph. Germany's Bild tabloid among Europe's best selling newspapers cut around 200 jobs over the summer with plans to replace those staffers utilizing

the opportunities of artificial intelligence. The tabloid's parent company, Axel Springer, also owns American news sources like Insider and Politico, and their CEO, Matthias Daufner, is all in on AI. In March, he told CNN that he thinks these apps have the potential to simply replace independent journalism altogether. So far, the results of these experiments have been

what you could call mixed in the way that a bowl of M&Ms with one piece of duty in it is mixed. We are talking about the drama that unfolded at CNET after it was revealed that the outlet was low-key using AI to write articles. We're now joined by Blake Montgomery, Deputy Editor at Gizmodo. And Blake, what went down this week? Thank you Gizmodo for your video transition into this story that also perfectly demonstrated how weird journalism has gotten. Hope the 500 plus views were worth the cost of production. So the technology news site CNET has published 77 articles written by a chatbot so far, and

more than half had significant errors. Some of the ones that were accurate were heavily plagiarized. Meanwhile, major US publisher, Gannett, started utilizing an AI program to write quick recaps of high school sports games, but had to pause the program following an embarrassing and error riddled launch. The same company also got busted for using AI

to write product reviews for the USA Today owned website, Reviewed, and assigned them bylines with fake human names like Brianna Miller and Avery Williamson to trick readers. I'm sorry to the person watching this named Brianna Miller. You are fake. You do not exist. The Reviewed staff even created phony profiles

for the fake computer writers, which absolutely has to take more human effort than it would to just review a goddamn microwave or whatever. Seriously, this is bleak. As we listed all the culprits around the death of journalism, AI will inevitably be the next one. Unless we perhaps do something, huh? Sadly, we can't really rely on the powers that be here,

at least for now. So in the meantime, the easiest and fastest way forward could be as simple as empowering the best journalists ourselves, either via nonprofit or publicly funded business models, or individually through the platforms of their choosing. The public has repeatedly shown that it values having a source of untainted news.

Even after decades of anti-public broadcasting propaganda from Republicans at all levels of government, Americans remain pretty solidly in favor of using some of their tax dollars to fund journalism that's in the public interest. A 2017 survey found that 73% of American voters oppose eliminating funds for public television. Even Republicans opposed cutting federal funds for PBS by a two to one margin. No one can bring themselves to kill a Muppet. Speak for yourself, monkey.

Any newsroom, corporate or independent, that's still driven by an actual editorial team instead of Google Trends needs to thrive. And there are still a number of current examples of nonprofit or publicly funded newsrooms that are routinely doing important work, including many resources that we cite on some more news like ProPublica, Reveal, The Marshall Project,

The Frontier, The Public Herald, Canada's Discourse Media, The Texas Tribune and others. You might do well to support these or perhaps your local public radio or news sites. As for what we do as like a society, well, that's harder. For starters, we need a way to tell news and ads and bullshit apart. That used to be much easier in the analog world.

Before the internet, there were tiers of news, much like the Spice Girls. Tabloids looked a specific way and were located in a specific place, whereas newspapers looked another way and were hurled at your door early in the morning as you flipped a nickel to a little kid going by on his bike.

Talk shows were on during the day. Local and national news came on at night and was rarely, if ever, hurled. It wasn't perfect, but compare it to the internet now, where tabloids, liars, and bloggers hit your feed identical to government officials and news organizations. Gee, if only we had some kind of verification system for that, Elon, oh no!

But since it's all mixed together now, it's impossible to untangle. Mainstream media will even report on social media posts. And ultimately the bulk of internet news stories are aggregated from other sites or rewritten press releases. And that's depressing. It feels like there needs to be a barrier reconstructed here like build a wall,

but maintaining that wall is going to be very hard. As long as capitalism means you're locked in a battle with every other journalist for clicks just to keep functioning. So perhaps we also need some fucking regulations here. Maybe the federal government should be the one maintaining the news ad barrier. The FCC regulates news on the TV and radio,

but they don't mess with the internet at all yet. There have been numerous proposals from both sides of the TV and radio, but they don't mess with the internet at all yet. There have been numerous proposals from both sides of the aisle about misinformation, but that wouldn't help with ads. And it's hard to say how tight the regulations should be and how to enforce them without infringing on free speech. The government could also tax ad revenue from social media giants or pass more tax incentives

to support local journalism, which consumers tend to trust a little more than big news. One regulation that seems like a no-brainer is forcing large aggregators and online platforms to compensate local media sources when linking their work. Australia passed a law doing just that, and platforms like Facebook and Google paid local media sources and publishers

over $200 million-y dues in just the first year. That money, you guessed it, is being used to pay for more actual journalists. As for learning to spot disingenuous journalism, Finland has a long-running media literacy program that teaches high school students and adults how to identify fake news and think critically about information presented on social media.

Last year, the EU passed sweeping regulations that take aim at online misinformation, harmful content and bad practices. The Digital Services Act forces social media giants and online marketplaces like Amazon to regulate and report on harmful content or risk billions of dollars in fines. It's too early to see how effective

the EU's regulation will be, and it probably depends on how aggressively lawmakers will enforce the new rules. So we're boned here. Is that the helpful takeaway? No, I mean, yes, but not entirely. In the absence of helpful federal regulation, there's still something your average,

well-meaning internet using journo can do to help the state of modern journalism, which is cool because it's something you should have been doing anyway, and that is to unionize. Internet work is real work and is increasingly being respected as such. Also, I'm sorry I said journo.

I won't do that anymore. Unionization is picking up in digital, print, and nonprofit newsrooms, and unions have won protections and guarantees, including canceled layoffs and more pay. Unions representing workers at outlets like ProPublica, Condé Nast, Insider, and the New York Times are winning concessions, better pay, benefits, and more equitable treatment. There's every chance that we'll see unions build the protections we need from the ground up, and the federal government will be left to follow up

with similar laws and regulations. That said, widespread unionization isn't a silver bullet that will make online news less hellish. Digital media needs to find streams of revenue other than endless clickbait designed to hang ads from or hide ads in. So call for sensible regulations, vote union, and brush up on your media literacy in the meantime.

This is a complex problem with multiple factors. It's not looking to solve itself in the immediate future. And you can never tell when someone's trying to slip ads in. So, oh, that reminds me. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit up our new merch store at shop.somemorenews.com for your very own sentient Wormbo puppet.

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Anyway, I have to go drink six delicious Coca-Cola's and see Argyle. Now playing, bye. Whew, did we cut? I don't know, sure. Okay, good, thank God. Well, I said it, did they send the money? I don't know. Sure. Okay. Good. Thank God. Well, I said it. Did they send the money?

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