Uptown, tronc you up

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12 Responses

  1. LeeEsq says:

    Most people don’t want journalism, they want entertainment. It’s like politics. If your on blogs on the Internet, people seem more political aware than most people actually are. The ones that want serious journalism, want it separate from entertainment but that is not possible.Report

    • Kim in reply to LeeEsq says:

      Serious journalism is totally possible. It just is expensive, and not for you.

      Dr. Doom does serious journalism, but his stuff’s behind a paywall. Of Course you’ll find serious journalism that people are seriously willing to pay for. High Finance is like that.Report

  2. Damon says:

    I could be projecting, but maybe folks got tired of the “unbiased professional” reporting which was clearly not.Report

  3. Richard Hershberger says:

    …rebrand itself as tronc. The lack of capitalization is accurate and was done for internety reasons.

    We could even say that the lack of capitalization of the name is due to the lack of capitalization of the corporation…

    But seriously, yes, how to pay for serious journalism is a serious problem. This, however, clearly is not the answer. There is no talk of using the ad revenue from those autoplay videos to subsidize the serious work. This is a replacement for journalism, not a strategy to support it: an announcement that the Tribune Company is going out of the journalism business and going into the cheesy clickbait business.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

      You can’t make people pay for what they don’t want. I don’t think tax supported political journalism is a solution.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

      @richard-hershberger

      Well played.

      I think these are the options for serious print journalism:

      1. It will stay with the remaining players: The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the non-profit mags like the Nation and National Review and the for-profit ones like The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

      2. More non-profits like ProPublica and the Vermont Diggers.Report

  4. Marchmaine says:

    replace long-form print journalism with autoplay videos

    If this were Saul DeGraw reading this to me, I’d already have clicked off the tab.Report

  5. dhex says:

    once you move past the incredibly dumb language in the release, the actual (presumed, of course) strategy is fairly straightforward and hard to argue with. more video, resource sharing across platforms, and making choices based upon user data. fairly ho-hum.

    the logo is terrible and reminds me of an awful trance party flyer circa 1992. needs a woman in a bikini and some palm tree shaped vector knockouts tho.Report

  6. Aaron David says:

    I want to agree with you, @saul-degraw as my tastes run to the written way, WAY more than the filmed (in internet/news context at least) but I don’t think you and I are the baseline to look at. Rather, from what I can tell, other media is the direction of content right now. Podcasts, video channels, etc. are on the upswing, as loathsome as that is. I just don’t see long form journalism as being a large part of the future any more.

    It’s too bad it wont live, but then again, what does?Report

    • j r in reply to Aaron David says:

      I am not sure about that. I read plenty of long form journalism. I just tend to read it on blogs these days. And I am not convinced that the quality of what I am getting from people who write in their spare time is, on the whole, any worse than what I get when I read the professionals.

      As an example, I found Scott Alexander’s two long pieces on the neo-reactionary movement to be better than anything I have read on the topic from people who get paid to write about these things, including the much shared Vox piece=. Invariably, what I get from the professionals is not researched facts and informed analysis, but a very deliberate exercise in constructing some narrative (and yes, this is my hobby horse) that is meant to appeal to a particular readership.Report

  7. Hardly anyone reads to the end of a piece of long-form journalism anymore, so you might as well troncate it.Report

  8. j r says:

    Good journalism is an expensive and valuable product but it does not seem to be a product that a good chunk of the population wants which is a shame…

    I am going to ask this as a question borne of legitimate curiosity and not an invitation to sound off on political ideology: how do you square the idea that something is a “valuable product,” with the idea that no one, or almost no one wants to pay for it?

    If you abolished taxes and asked people to pay for fire protection either through donations or as an optional service, you would likely have an underfunded fire department. This is a classic case of a public good. We can define it as such, because we can quantify the estimated losses to any given community in the absence of a fire department and compare it to what it would cost to run a fire department. If the former exceeds the latter, we call it a market failure.

    I’m not sure that I can see the case for claiming that there is some definite loss from not having enough long form journalism. If there is some way that this is not a matter of subjective taste, I am not seeing it. Political and investigative reporting is another matter. We may very well be able to speculate at the losses that we collectively reap from crooked politicians and fraudulent companies going unexposed. And if that is the case, then I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify it.Report