Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people.

Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.

I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.

> News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:

The primary reason is the click metrics, they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.

It doesn't matter how much you pay for it when they will just invest more into those things. You can see this in gaming, the more people paid for Ubisoft games the more toxic transactions Ubisoft put into them.

I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value.

The industry got it wrong when it digitized

I suspect the third reason might be that most media is owned by a handful of people. If there's no money in news, why are these companies owned by billionaires?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

99% of everything is crap, even the ones you pay for. Some are good and worth supporting, like 404 Media.

everything is broadly declining, too, as we grow up taking it for granted while the older generation retires, and we also are too busy working menial jobs to pay the rent.

We have plenty of state funded public news services in Europe but they do the same. Just shallow Reuters copy paste slop.

The real deep dives are hard to find.

And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort.

A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care.

And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.

I life in a country where we have a mandatory monthly fee for the state-run media outlet. Its roughly 2x a youtube premium. And quality of said outlet is still declining with everyone else. Pretty non-critical reporting, basically forwarding of what others have claimed. Typos, questionable headlines which get corrected half an hour later. I refute your claim. Its not about financing. Journalists have just become very lazy. Mainstream media deserves the same "I vote with my wallet" treatment as everyone else. And the state forcing me to pay for a specific outlet is just so broken, I am questioning the sanity of our politicians. But lobbying helps I guess. Instead of doing a good/great job, the new tactics is to insist that "you" are an indispensible part of democracy, even though you aren't doing any critical reporting anymore...

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades, but the relationship of news organizations with the current US goverment has been shaped by the current president.

"Donald Trump frequently attacks the American media as having a left-wing bias and being "corrupt", and also uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that give him unfavorable coverage. Trump has sued various media outlets for perceived inaccuracies or biases, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with...

you dropped 3. its more valuable to pay for propaganda

>How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends.

Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions.

I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.