State of the News (and Depletion of Journalism Online, Not Just Offline)
Newspapers are not coming back and the Web is not coming back either
Journalism's demise is a factual, measurable thing. Had the act of reporting been taken off the Web and offered in paper/magazine form instead (the old-fashioned way), that would be OK. Journalism, however, is perishing everywhere, universally.
Online, or on the Web in particular, there are more fake articles showing up that are just plagiarism or rehash of what other people wrote. We'll give examples of this in the future; Bruce Perens has just presented one such example. They call this "hey hi" (AI), but it's just a mindless chatbot that lacks any comprehension.
In the absence of information there is absence of knowledge, and when the general public loses sight of what's truly going on, we all stand to lose as a society.
We continue to refine software tools that help us curate and find noteworthy press reports (what's left of these anyway). In the meantime we can take advantage of the media "calm", which unfortunately seems permanent, to publish more original material of our own.
One might argue that the trajectory of the Web is a reflection of the state of the world in general (conflicts) and is connected to the financial demise which, again due to absence of journalism, is undeniable but at the same time is being glossed over. A lot of the media, nowadays scooped up by oligarchs like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, persists in victim-blaming and hailing of the plunder by robber barons. Social control media isn't an alternative to that when it is controlled by Zuckerberg, Musk, and the Communist Party of China (TikTok), which plunders the world's second-largest economy. █