Gurri at city-journal on the transformation of nyt:
" newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers ... The aim was to herd the audience into a passive consumerist mass. Opinion, which divided readers, was treated like a volatile substance and fenced off from “factual” reporting." "
"a few prominent brand names moved to a model that sought to squeeze revenue from digital subscribers lured behind a paywall ... As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around ... Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?"
"Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls."
"The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.”"
"Objectivity was discarded in favor of an “oppositional” stance. This was not an anti-Trump opinion piece. It was an obituary for the values of a lost era. Rutenberg, who covered the media beat, had authored a factual report about the death of factual reporting"
" Trump could not safely be covered; he had to be opposed."
"The old media had needed happy customers. The goal of post-journalism, according to Mir, is to “produce angry citizens.” "
" The flagship American newspaper had turned in a direction that came close to propaganda. The oppositional stance, as Mir has noted, cannot coexist with newsroom independence: writers and editors were soon to be punished for straying from the cause. The news agenda became narrower and more repetitive as journalists focused on a handful of partisan controversies"
"Future media historians may hold the Trump-Russia story to be a laboratory-perfect specimen of discourse concentration. For nearly two years, it towered over the information landscape and devoured the attention of the media and the public. The total number of articles on the topic produced by the Times is difficult to measure, but a Google search suggests that it was more than 3,000—the equivalent, if accurate, of multiple articles per day for the period in question. This was journalism as if conducted under the impulse of an obsessive-compulsive personality. Virtually every report either implied or proclaimed culpability. Every day in the news marked the beginning of the Trumpian End Times."
" what looked like journalistic failure was, in fact, an astonishing post-journalistic success. The intent of post-journalism was never to represent reality or inform the public but to arouse enough political fervor in readers that they wished to enter the paywall in support of the cause. This was ideology by the numbers—and the numbers were striking ... By August 2020, the paper had 6 million digital subscribers—six times the number on Election Day 2016 and the most in the world for any newspaper."
" Condemnation of Trump as the avatar of American racism was as close to a canonical doctrine as the new style of reporting possessed. "
" “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ ” Given the business model, a new scheme of polarization was needed. "
"a generation uninterested in history that perceived social life in terms of a cosmic conflict against injustice. Their questions suggested that post-journalism, to them, meant telling the unvarnished truth—which happened to be identical to their political convictions."
"Baquet had disparaged Twitter and insisted that the Times would not be edited by social media. He was mistaken."
"focus on race propelled the Times to the vanguard of establishment opinion during the convulsions that followed the death of George Floyd"
" replaced the Russia collusion story as the prime manufacturer of “angry citizens”"
" the duty of the newspaper was less to inform than to protect such “vulnerable” readers from harmful opinions. "
"The history-reframing mission is now in the hands of a deeply self-righteous group that has trouble discerning the many human stopping places between true and false, good and evil, objective and subjective ... Cotton had lied, and the fact that the public approved of his lies was precisely what made his piece dangerous."
" the generation most likely to share the moralistic attitude of the newsroom rebels is the least likely to read a newspaper. Andrey Mir, who first defined the concept, sees post-journalism as a desperate gamble, doomed in the end by demographics. "
https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reportingsidd