Hey Russ, why make phone calls and go out to talk to people and be at scenes when you can sit in an office and scroll through Facebook and the rapidly decomposing corpse of Twitter dot com, he asked ironically.
Gee, I wonder why a not-insignificant percentage of the public distrusts journalists and news media gathering-and-disseminating outlets. It's a mystery!
There's a great book called Flat Earth News by Nick Davies and yeah, what you described is pretty much what he described was starting to happen in journalism twenty years ago. Fuck I can't believe that book was written twenty years ago....
You all might believe that I am crazy but I just don't think that metrics and page views should be the defining factor in whether a story is covered or a reporter is assigned to a particular beat, like, say city and state government but here we are in 2024!
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Social media is increasingly influencing real life. If people online are cheering on murder, that seems like news.