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Demise of the WWW and Newsrooms
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
THE media was persistently shifting to the World Wide Web in the 1990s or later. People kept insisting that the days of printer media were numbered and that it was time to evolve or perish.
"In some cases, for each real article there are about 10 spam pieces, i.e. a ratio of 1:10. This makes news very hard to find or curate."So some time in the early 2000s all the major newspapers had at least some presence "online". It did not work out as well as they had hoped. The general de-funding and consolidation of the media meant journalists kept losing their jobs. Only this past day or two we learned about Gannett's strike. It's not going to improve. Gannett owns and controls a ton of news Web sites in the US; actual journalists are being clobbered. The video above explains the threat of bots, CG druft, PR drones (such as Clickfraud Spamnil), plagiarism sites, corporate propaganda sites in disguise, and sponsored spam like SiliconANGLE, where articles about companies are funded if not composed by those companies themselves.
We're accordingly adapting with Daily Links and pondering what to do when the signal-to-noise (s/n) ratio becomes way too poor on the World Wide Web. Once-reputable sites go offline and some become spamfarms. In some cases, for each real article there are about 10 spam pieces, i.e. a ratio of 1:10. This makes news very hard to find or curate.
Where does the World Wide Web go from here? What does that mean for real journalism -- the sort of work that requires a lot of time-consuming investigations, fact-checking, and hiring of domain experts rather than random graduates with an English or History degree?
The saddest thing is that getting any real news (reports, commentary etc.) about GNU/Linux and Free software has become very hard. There's scarcity. Some days there's almost nothing at all. But the problem isn't limited to this domain; it's a general trend across all spectra. Once the trend or the general inertia drifts in this direction it is irrational to expect a rebound or some miraculous "comeback" for news online. ⬆