Bonum Certa Men Certa

What News Industry???

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 27, 2023

Marketing, spam, and chatbots

Moraine Lake Panorama: Scenic Moraine Lake in the Canadian Rockies

THE state of the news industry is dreadful. It's very hard to find any real news or original stories. Each time there's a major holiday there's a subsequent, very considerable decline in quality (and sometimes quantity) as if further cuts are made to staff and budget. Some people never come back from the "break".

Today, many in the US return to work, but we don't suppose the media will work. It's not hard to show what happened to news sites (it's all spam and cruft), but taking a screenshot would give visibility to loads of spam. This past week some sites were basically like spamfarms, especially because of "Black Friday". Even supposedly reputable sites did this! It's a sellout. It's appalling

Aside from the spam there was lots of mindless marketing instead of actual journalism, e.g. "Microsoft Bing Chat Rebranded To Copilot, Can It Better Compete With ChatGPT Now?" (That's an actual headline)

Pretending REBRAND is what matters and that Microsoft competes with what it owns and controls?

I swear that this past week 90% or more of "Apple" "news" that I netted was just Black Friday SPAM. As for Microsoft, it's just "HEY HI" (AI) VAPOURWARE instead of actual news. Did they use or get help from chatbots to "write" this nonsense? The company has no actual products to show, just many layoffs, shutdowns, and worse. Shareholders now rely on empty promises.

The media is exploding. Sadly, a lot of this media depends only on the Web now; worse yet, some outsourced to social control media.

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