404 Media

I must implore you to pay for quality journalism. Free news comes at the cost of sensationalism meant to induce views.

For the past two decades it's been clickbait to get ad views. Buzzfeed was the king and queen of this with listicles and quizzes. But they actually used that to fund real news. But that didn't work and it's all shut down.

Now, social media sites pay folks how post "news" -- whether YouTube or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. And that's where most everyone spends a significant portion of their time online. Which is a-okay!

But what's not okay is being lulled into the prospect that hard news is delivered on those formats. Easy engagement is rewarded, and reading is hard, so anything requiring 3+ seconds of thought (i.e. beyond a headline or a 10-second clip) generally does not earn enough for the creator. And ragebaiting and sensationalizing works way better than objectively delivering facts.

So please, I beg of you. Spend some money on real journalism. Like school, it's boring. But the fourth pillar of democracy serves a real purpose, even while Murdoch and others have bastardized our sense of objective journalism. There may not be a true type of objective journalism in the purest sense, but I do believe there's good journalists who try to get to the truth of the matter, not picking one side or another.

These folks lean a bit to one side, but that's why I balance it out with The Baltimore Banner and Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and ~5 other news sources -- because paying people to deliver me the best facts available to them with known angles (e.g. tech awareness, business insights, etc) is invaluable and if we go around spewing extreme ragebait it's all just such a stupid world and I cannot keep living here like this.

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