Vice and BuzzFeed News were basically the only major “small stories” outlets but now they’re bankrupt and defunct.
Vice alternated between doing the Babies Ripped From Incubators story that got us into Iraq in '91 and doing the Satanic Panic shit from the 80s, but saying "This is cool, aktuly". It was late stage Gen X counter-culture that never challenged more than vibes.
BuzzFeed was alternately better and worse, with some legitimate investigative journalism that kept getting people pissed at them alongside a bunch of tabloid and listical crap that couldn't keep up with The Algorithm's evolution.
Nobody in the US or Canada pursues high risk, high reward investigative journalism but YouTubers and podcasters these days.
There's no such thing as "High Reward" anymore, because media is so damned entrenched and calcified. The closest thing we had to serious investigative journalism in the last decade was Wikileaks, and look at the "Reward" Julian Assange got for his trouble.
By contrast, consider the modern New Media success stories - Joe Rogan, Barstool Sports, Substack - its all incredibly sterile and safe by comparison.
Going to YouTube or a Podcast isn't rewarding. Its just the only fucking way to get any kind of audience.
There was also just a generalized shift in "investigative media", where nowadays investigative journalism, what shell of it is left, is only valid if it's targeting Bad People or Bad Countries.
If it directly targets the Good Countries, like Seymour Hersh or Julian Assange, it's now propaganda for the Bad Countries.
There was also just a generalized shift in “investigative media”
I don't know if I'd call it a shift. We've always had spooks and propagandists working the "Foreign Man Bad" racket. Periodically, we'll have methods of discourse that aren't heavily policed. Whether we're talking about the pamphleteer era of the 17th-20th centuries, the early regional radio/TV era, or the early-modern internet era, there are channels of communication that have gone largely under-surveilled and controlled for centuries.
Its in these moments when investigative journalism can build up an audience based on reports of scandal. Whether you're Martin Luther issuing scathing critiques of the Catholic Church or Eugene Debbs and Vladimir Lenin stirring up popular opposition to capital or Edward Snowden tipping folks off to the dark underbelly of the US security system, cracks in the wall of entrenched opposition appear and messages slip through them.
But as soon as they appear, the entrenched dominant social forces seek to patch them back up again. Maybe they do that by burning books or maybe they do it by assassinating popular leadership.
If it directly targets the Good Countries, like Seymour Hersh or Julian Assange, it’s now propaganda for the Bad Countries.
Sure. And if you protest WW1, we throw you in prison even if you're running for President, for the same reasons.
Hard to say when the next cracks will emerge in the social ecosystem, but I have no doubt that they'll appear again and we'll have another spat of investigative journalism leak through. But getting news out there and building an audience are two different goals. And then monetizing the audience is another problem further removed. So how do you expand your messaging in a capitalist model, knowing that capitalists do at least have a very effective model for rapid growth and improved distribution models? Idk.
Vice alternated between doing the Babies Ripped From Incubators story that got us into Iraq in '91 and doing the Satanic Panic shit from the 80s, but saying "This is cool, aktuly". It was late stage Gen X counter-culture that never challenged more than vibes.
BuzzFeed was alternately better and worse, with some legitimate investigative journalism that kept getting people pissed at them alongside a bunch of tabloid and listical crap that couldn't keep up with The Algorithm's evolution.
There's no such thing as "High Reward" anymore, because media is so damned entrenched and calcified. The closest thing we had to serious investigative journalism in the last decade was Wikileaks, and look at the "Reward" Julian Assange got for his trouble.
By contrast, consider the modern New Media success stories - Joe Rogan, Barstool Sports, Substack - its all incredibly sterile and safe by comparison.
Going to YouTube or a Podcast isn't rewarding. Its just the only fucking way to get any kind of audience.
There was also just a generalized shift in "investigative media", where nowadays investigative journalism, what shell of it is left, is only valid if it's targeting Bad People or Bad Countries.
If it directly targets the Good Countries, like Seymour Hersh or Julian Assange, it's now propaganda for the Bad Countries.
I don't know if I'd call it a shift. We've always had spooks and propagandists working the "Foreign Man Bad" racket. Periodically, we'll have methods of discourse that aren't heavily policed. Whether we're talking about the pamphleteer era of the 17th-20th centuries, the early regional radio/TV era, or the early-modern internet era, there are channels of communication that have gone largely under-surveilled and controlled for centuries.
Its in these moments when investigative journalism can build up an audience based on reports of scandal. Whether you're Martin Luther issuing scathing critiques of the Catholic Church or Eugene Debbs and Vladimir Lenin stirring up popular opposition to capital or Edward Snowden tipping folks off to the dark underbelly of the US security system, cracks in the wall of entrenched opposition appear and messages slip through them.
But as soon as they appear, the entrenched dominant social forces seek to patch them back up again. Maybe they do that by burning books or maybe they do it by assassinating popular leadership.
Sure. And if you protest WW1, we throw you in prison even if you're running for President, for the same reasons.
Hard to say when the next cracks will emerge in the social ecosystem, but I have no doubt that they'll appear again and we'll have another spat of investigative journalism leak through. But getting news out there and building an audience are two different goals. And then monetizing the audience is another problem further removed. So how do you expand your messaging in a capitalist model, knowing that capitalists do at least have a very effective model for rapid growth and improved distribution models? Idk.
Journalism Award be like :stalin-gun-1::cia:
Yep. There truly is nothing left of western journalism. It's just propaganda and advertising. :same-picture:
And most of that ad money goes to Google and Facebook.