alt Hacker NewsReporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
We need that again. As I point out occasionally, read news, and ask yourself which stories started out as a press release. For the City News Bureau, nothing started as a press release. They had people pounding the streets of Chicago for a century. Today, the pundit to reporter ratio is far too high.
There's a great book about the Bureau, called "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite". (by Dornfield, not the one by Sears, which is something else entirely.)[1]
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/06/20/if-city-news-burea...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sweetheart-Get-Me-Rewrite/dp/08...
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The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars.
Would people pay for real journalism?
Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit..
I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961
>This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
Yes the deeply depressing thing is that these sort of city news articles are now very much taken verbatim from press releases, and those press releases are from professional police communications departments, and so this gives enormous new powers to the police in able to shape the broader narrative as their politics and agenda see fit.
For example we can see here that this news article is lifting directly from the police press release. https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3lu...
Maybe it wasn't even an overworked city reporter that did this but simply an automated AI creating news articles straight from the police press releases.
Legacy journalism has changed from a low-barrier-to-entry working man's occupation, with entry level reporting leading to high-paying punditry, into a high-barrier-to-entry ivy league occupation with new entrants to the field expecting prestigious positions from the start.