A Crisis of Online Journalism
HERE in Techrights and over at Tux Machines we use several toolsets and programs ('Swiss army knives' and wrappers) to find, digest, curate, and organise news - an activity I've been doing every day for over 20 years. R.R.R.R.R.R. is the primary one, but there are more. This morning I was surprised if not shocked to see the amount of news that made the cut, or basically got filtered out of 1,000+ RSS feeds. The 'yield' is rapidly diminishing to about half what it was 12 months ago. To be clear, the processes typically involve scanning lots of feeds, then applying a date-based cutoff, e.g. past two days, then scanning for particular topics and weeding out the spammy domains or fake 'articles' (like a "DEAL" in news clothing). Then we the curators get to work and analyse what's happening, organising the news by topic and assessing the quality/accuracy or reports. Over time what makes the cut is not just decreasing in volume but plunging in volume. Today was a good example of that. It wasn't even a holiday, just a normal Sunday.
While that certainly leaves us more time to write and publish (we'll have probably published - by Sunday's end - about 190 new pages, i.e. about 30 per day this past week) this is not a desirable state of affairs. Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism (or probably die for not doing so or politely declining to do this with perceived sincerity at Saipan) and we're hardly finding any investigative reporting/news anymore. In the area of GNU/Linux or the domain of "tech" (at large) a lot of news is just "rehash" of X version Y.Z released (no originality, mostly reciting the originals from the official sites).
While I generally disagree with Bryan Lunduke on a lot of things, yesterday he wrote: "The Lunduke Journal covers the stories that no other Tech News outlet is willing to touch. From major leaks from IBM, Red Hat, & Microsoft -- to in-depth investigations into Mozilla, Wikipedia, and The Linux Foundation -- many stories only get covered by The Lunduke Journal." (Keep Big-Tech-Free Tech Journalism Alive).
A lot of the stuff he has been covering we more or less covered years ago. He's often "late" (to the party), but that's still better than nothing. The oligarchs are "stealing" the narrative and then gaslighting the public - to the point where simple facts and reality may seem "outlandish" and "hard to believe".
Techrights is far from perfect, but at least we've established our independence and resistance to censorship; so we can cover issues as we please, fearlessly and relentlessly.
It's hard to believe that online journalism will "bounce back" (mass plagiarism with LLMs makes that even less likely), but one can hope.
Reading is a valuable activity; but we're running low on high-quality stuff to read. █
