Saving What's Left of Decent and Independent Journalism on the Web
EARLIER this year a prominent British publisher/founder - sometimes wrongly accused (according to him) of doing "tabloids" - died. Apparently every news site that's not controlled or funded by the corporations it writes about is a "tabloid". His main remaining site had gone offline years earlier (The Inquirer) and then he went too. His name is Mike Magee (1949-2024) and here's a bio/obituary about this site's founder, composed by a friend, who valued if not revered his accomplishments (he understood those, unlike Establishment Media that just ignored the death). We've noticed that he last tweeted a year before his death and did this interview where he talked about health implications of writing many articles all day long (he left The Register, which he had founded, for urgent health reasons). He wasn't happy about efforts to discredit his work by misusing terms like "tabloid". He also did not like what The Register became during his long health break. To some, instead of being a role model (founder of the biggest tech site in the UK, even posthumously) he was some relic of history, unworthy of a mention even upon his death. He founded and helped with so many news sites based in the UK. Where's the respect for this man, let alone public recognition?
There's a lesson to be learned here about how Establishment Media (corporate, mainstream, whatever!) treats "outliers" who "bite the hand that feeds IT" (The Register's original motto). This man was biting their sponsors, their Sugar Daddies whom they sought to protect from scrutiny in pursuit of more advertising "sugar". As Andy put it earlier today: "In the week that Steve Jobs died so did Dennis Ritchie. Apple plastered a black banded mourning image of Jobs on the start page of every Mac computer in the world. Jobs never met the man who made his success possible."
2024 was a bad year for journalism and next year will be worse as leadership will get worse. The leadership is hostile towards free press and has huge disdain for online media, except for social control media controlled by allies and charlatans such as Elon Musk. Even "leaders of the free world" become more like Putin and Xi, i.e. enemies of any independent press. To be independent means to be "foreign agent".
It's also sad to see how about 80% of "Linux" stories come from ~10 domains or about 10 people (Liam Dawe, Marius Nestor, Michael Larabel etc.) rather than about 100 - that's how it was a decade or two ago. Well, many quit journalism altogether (an editor told me about why and I too can tell stories).
"Phoronix is a force of nature," an editor told me, but we stopped linking to it because Michael Larabel had clearly sold out. We used to be his #1 source of traffic, according to Alexa.com (Amazon recently killed Alexa (the original, the site)). I heard some stories about people who quit writing about Linux, but would rather not name them... as they want privacy. Those who still regularly cover the topic are so few that one can be in contact with all of them in a single day. I used to be in regular contact with Phoronix, even made technical suggestions for the site (it is also fast and uses its own system) because I used to be very close to Michael in the early days of his site. I linked to almost every Phoronix article for 18 years, but nowadays he does lots of marketing, so I stopped at the start of 2022. To be clear, we were his #1 source of traffic, Alexa.com said, but things changed when he basically sold out. Independent news sites are slowly vanishing.
2024 marked the apparent permanent death of groklaw.net [1, 2] (even after converting to static in ibiblio.org the site broke). Well, "it's a real shame what happened with groklaw," an editor told me. He said so after I said told him they "can cover groklaw going offline" (no major news site has mentioned this; only one site mentioned SCO's McBride dying). Isn't it interesting? Not a single site taking note of groklaw.net's demise? I said "it had many important legal documents [and] history of UNIX with lawyers and greybeards explaining it [...] now it's too late" (to save them, almost all the comments are gone forever).
2024's biggest blow to the Web was downtime and possibly the end of the Internet Archive (IA), along with the Wayback Machine that Wikipedia increasingly relies on. Imagine all the papers (or references) that will be gone for good if IA dies. We increasingly (over time) try to make local copies (hosted on our server) of important documents; it's hard to rely on third parties. However, our server right now has close to 2 million files. █