alt Hacker News> at least a few of them live in war zones
Which is a valuable perspective. But it's not a subsitute for a seasoned war journalist who can draw on global experience. (And relating that perspective to a particular home market.)
> I'm sure some of them would fly in to collect data if you paid them for it
Sure. That isn't "a news editorial that focuses on free content but in a newspaper-style, e. g. with professional (or good) writers."
One part of the population imagines journalists as writers. They're fine on free, ad-supported content. The other part understands that investigation is not only resource intensive, but also requires rare talent and courage. That part generally pays for its news.
Between the two, a Wikipedia-style journalistic resource is not entertaining enough for the former and not informative enough for the latter. (Importantly, compiling an encyclopedia is principally the work of research and writing. You can be a fine Wikipedia–or scientific journal or newspaper–editor without leaving your room.)
Those roles seem to be diverging:
- crowdsourced data, eg, photos of airplane crashes
- people who live in an area start vlogs
- independent correspondents travel there to interview, eg Ukraine or Israel
We see that our best war reporting comes from analyst groups who ingest that data from the “firehose” of social media. Sometimes at a few levels, eg, in Ukraine the best coverage is people who compare the work of multiple groups mapping social media reports of combat. You have on top of that punditry about what various movements mean for the war.
So we don’t have “journalist”:
- we have raw data (eg, photos)
- we have first hand accounts, self-reported
- we have interviewers (of a few kinds)
- we have analysts who compile the above into meaningful intelligence
- we have anchors and pundits who report on the above to tell us narratives
The fundamental change is that what used to be several roles within a new agency are now independent contractors online. But that was always the case in secret — eg, many interviewers were contracted talent. We’re just seeing the pieces explicitly and without centralized editorial control.
So I tend not to catastrophize as much, because this to me is what the internet always does:
- route information flows around censorship
- disintermediate consumers from producers when the middle layer provides a net negative
As always in business, evolve or die. And traditional media has the same problem you outline:
- not entertaining enough for the celebrity gossip crowd
- too slow and compromised by institutional biases for the analyst crowd, eg, compare WillyOAM coverage of Ukraine to NYT coverage
https://www.youtube.com/@willyOAM