The Death of News, Even National Broadcasters
Yleisradio Oy is doomed
Last week we saw this worrying article about what an associate called "sports as 'journalism'..." (basically a sport/s section's editor becoming more "elevated" at Yleisradio Oy (Yle)).
Now, just to be clear, we don't claim to be perfect, but we typically stay in our lane and focus on issues that we understand sufficiently well. That limits our scope of coverage, but it ensures we don't get our facts wrong (or seldom make false claims).
In the case of Yleisradio Oy, which we shall refer to as Yle because it is shorter, last month I dumped the feed. I no longer bother with the RSS feed of Yle because it felt like it had resorted to promoting objectively extremist political ideology instead of relaying actual news to Finns (to which Yle is obliged to give information, not to preach hate).
Yle is deteriorating very fast and putting some sports person in charge of it is a self-nuke or an own goal, even if in the short term it can boost "traffic" a little. Well, maybe it will be yle.football next, and maybe more people will visit the site, but that does not mean Yle does well. In fact, covering football is easy (just like "tweets" as headlines; it's cheap as the "author" just shows match scores and some photos). There may be lots of potential traffic for it, but that does not mean it is important or can benefit society, aside from the hoi polloi, which is already distracted and barely keeps up with politics. From an advertising point of view, this may seem alluring (many eyes, little investigation needed, so high RoI), but for a national broadcaster like Yle it would be a shot in its own foot.
"Yep," an associate said, "for good reason."
The good old times of journalism are gone, even in Finland, which is ranked highly (in relative terms) for journalism.
So we have this theory: Yle saw numbers ("traffic" or perceived reach/clout) going down, it then tried some other approach, numbers were still down (resulting in panic and staff cuts). They noticed that the sport/s guy typically gets traffic, unlike the rest of the site, then decided to elevate him, falsely assuming that maybe he can cover general news too (no, it won't work).
I should know this because I worked for Netscape.com. It's like the time Jason Calacanis was put in charge of Netscape.com and then Propeller. It was falsely assumed that he would beat Digg.com (all the rage at the time, nearly 20 years ago). It failed no matter how much they invested in it. Eventually they gave up and threw the entire thing in the trash.
As an associate explains: "Sports 'journalism' is also the first in line for eventual replacement by whatever replaces LLMs on the way to AI. Strategically, it serves as a distraction from the elimination of actual news. I notice already that most 'news' now is from wirefeed services. Back in the day, I used to consider that filler and skip it in search of real articles on the topic covered. However, now it is all that is left. Yle is still afflicted with Microsoftianism and they will rather go under than let it go."
One thing we've both noticed is that some if not most of the articles in 2024 are the same and they just change the headlines, often subjected to editorial decisions and maybe some editing of the body, too (for length limits). Some sites subscribe - for a payment - to some newswires like AP and then they take the material ("content") downstream, with or without attribution (but with a licence, so it is not LLM as a plagiarism bypass).
It should be noted that stock market financial "journalism" is also template-based. Some sites just fetch numbers (such as share prices), add filler, and maybe write their own headline, maybe even clickbait. As a matter of fact that predates LLMs because it's too easy using simple algorithms. The practice is becoming common in sports coverage as well. █