1/ The gutting of journalist careers as seen with all the recent #huffpo layoffs is joyful and necessary, but the media will get woken and worse before it gets better. We are not yet at the bottom of the Woke chain...
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2/ When ad revenues fell off due to the rise of the net, longterm expensive older male journalists were the 1st to be let go from the legacy media. Most of these were GENUINE benefactors of “white privilege” (boys from the working class don’t grow up to become restaurant critics)
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3/ So don’t feel too bad for the guys who sat and wrote food and movie reviews for 30 years. With the fall of the legacy media, online sites like Buzzfeed, HuffPo, Slate, Salon and all those other lügenpresse outlets rose to take their place.
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4/ These sites were mainly staffed by low paid young female staff and an endless rotating army of unpaid interns. They were also good at what they did from a clickbait point of view: nobody knows how to generate hysteria and retweets better than a female mid-20s English lit grad.
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5/ The legacy media adopted the model of their new online rivals, leading to once worthy newspapers of record descending into puerile clickbait, outrage, and projections against men by the new oestrogeneration of young “journalists”.
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6/ It’s true that salaries of these women are low, but don’t feel too bad for them. Low media salaries, high competition and endless internships mean that only the most privileged of grads can afford to be funded by Mom & Dad for 8 years to pay their rents in the big media cities
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7/ As well as a bankroll from Bank of Mom & Dad, the media has high barriers to entry. Only the most well connected get those initial internships which then lead to full time employment in the industry.
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8/ Working class and/or conservatives need not even apply for these entry level media jobs. The only other avenue for those not well connected is to out-woke your competitors leading to an arms race in outrage, hysteria and click generating garbage.
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9/ All of this has led to the sad sorry state of our current media scene. But, as our lovely HuffPo ladies have just learnt, endless diversity means that there are always costs to be cut and savings to be made. Woke Capital is still Capital at the end of the day.
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10/ Right now, Facebook, Twitter & all other social media employ armies of low paid workers in India/Philippines to generate content & moderate comments. Outrage can be outsourced. So can censorship. Why pay even a freelancer when someone in Manila can do it for almost free?
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11/ So the surge in media insanity seen recently is not just a product of Trump Derangement Syndrome - it’s an intra-journalist competition & arms race for the ever decreasing number of opportunities available. Remember: journos are unskilled, they can’t just get jobs elsewhere.
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12/ Every journo has to fight their fellow journo in creating hysteria and outrage. Trump was the best thing that ever happened to them.
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13/ But the reckoning is already here. What isn’t outsourced to Manila can now be replaced by algorithms that generate clicks & reader share. That doesn’t mean better/fairer journalism - in fact it will get worse - but at least we get to see HuffPo catladies crying on Twitter
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14/ Where does it go after that? I’m not sure tbh. I predict lines drawn in the sand dividing algorithm generated content of a conservative bent forever from algorithm generated content of a liberal bent. Unless conservative views are banned outrightly, which is also possible.
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15/ My advice to any journos: Want to be respected again? Act in a manner that earns respect. You are no longer lofty chroniclers of public record, anyone with two thumbs and a phone can write online now. Don’t sneer at those whose common rank and file you may soon be joining.
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16/ I’ll let Neil Munro have the final say which just about says it all.pic.twitter.com/yERRr8HGKm
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End of conversation
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