alt Hacker News"corporatism" - come on now. The reason why news was decent and the job was decent for a good amount of time was that newspapers were a natural monopoly. Fat, juicy profits and "owned" cities meant the owners could just say "I don't really care, just print approximately the truth and don't alienate readers across the broad spectrum that we have".... "oh, and I guess pay the journalists decently too, because I'm swimming in money"
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> natural monopoly
Renting time on a printing press is not exorbitant.
Buying out local printing presses (and/or getting exclusivity in return for your business), is anticompetitive and sometimes illegal, but it's definitely not natural.
Colorado has had over 1,000 papers. The tactics of the largest paper during the mid 20th century included cries for attention that no dignified monopolist would try.
By that logic everything is a monopoly.
Car manufacturers have a monopoly on cars.
Smartphone manufacturers on smartphones.
Mankind has a monopoly on creating humans.
> newspapers were a natural monopoly
I don't know why anyone would believe that.
> newspapers were a natural monopoly
What on earth are you talking about? Most major cities have had multiple papers in cutthroat competition with each other for decades. If the New York Times got a story wrong, the Wall Street Journal would happily take the opportunity to correct them and vice versa. In smaller cities with one big paper (like Baltimore with The Sun), the local tabloids (like The City Paper) would relish any opportunity to embarrass the paper of record if they got something wrong.
The era of monopolistic journalism is the new thing, not the old thing. The corporatism GP is referring to is conglomerates like Sinclair and Tribune Online Content (Tronc) buying up tons of local papers and broadcast stations and “cutting costs” by shutting down things like investigative reporting.