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Actual outcome is going to be more whistleblowers, competitors to Wikileaks, and mob justice together putting most big, secretive institutions requiring expensive journalism out of business. Can’t analyze change in reoporting without analyzing change in things-worth-reporting.
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All right, folks, I have exactly one half hour to Tweetstorm my latest column, and explain just how bad the economics of the media industry are. Subtitle: why you can't have all the awesome free journalism you want and have come to expect. Let's go! washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-par
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I’m reminded of how medieval forts were rendered obsolete by sufficiently powerful artillery, and trench warfare by tanks. Journalism is an arms race between thick institutional secrecy defense walls versus powerful probing resources.
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You wouldn’t need journalism at all in a notional fully decentralized world of sovereign individuals; gossip would do the trick (which is not to say I think such a world is either likely or desirable). The need for journalism is proportionate to the amount of protected secrets
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We are likely headed towards a bimodal world of: a) huge global platform ecosystems with local visibility ranging from complete openness to deep secrecy b) decentralized wildlands where nothing is larger than family scale Journalism can’t report on a), won’t be needed for b)
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I’m very interested in how *ecosystem* equivalent of reporting can happen. I think it is dedicated “forest ranger” type independents who operate more like secret agents picking missions based on values rather than institution-backed journalists
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Two examples. navigates and “reports” on social media ecosystems better than any journalist navigates and “reports” on the factory farming world better than any journalist Scare quotes because what they do isn’t quite reporting. It is ecosystem ranger work
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This has cost and credibility advantages Cost: ecosystem rangers have lower cost structures because they cultivate *narrow* ground intelligence assets over a long time (vertical integration) Credibility: they are basically insiders with outsider values. No Gell-Mann amnesia.
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Downside of course massive fragmentation. You have to assemble a news feed out of the work of hundreds of such individuals to replace a few newspapers. It’s like a la carte wire services.
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The other big downside is that such individuals typically lack the legal cover needed to fight back if targets attempt to retaliate with lawsuits. The solution to this is probably some sort of crowdfunded legal defense insurance via things like Patreon
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Basically, journalism is being unbundled at roughly the same rate as things worth reporting on with the journalism model are being unbundled. It’s a basic complexity-impedance-matching trajectory. Ashly’s law of requisite variety applies.
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I keep going back to basics: “journalism is printing what somebody doesn’t want printed. Everything else is public relations.” It is reasonable to expect the “shape” of journalism to mirror the “shape” of the power of the somebodies, modulo whistleblower/hacktivist subsidy
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