 Pains me to say this, but I don't think institutional journalists will be flocking to the Fediverse any time soon. And as much as individual journalists might be all right, their work is largely compromised by the Rupert Murdochs of the world. If we want great journalism on the Fediverse, we’re going to have to build this ourselves. A near-term solution is with Friendica Groups, which can be moderated. But long-term, we’ll need co-ops and non-profits to make this happen. 64 comments
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 @atomicpoet Look, it doesn't matter if the Fediverse has 1 million users or 1 billion users. Institutional journalism is threatened by the Fediverse. There’s many reasons for this. But the biggest is that there’s no easy avenue to monetize an audience here, nor is there analytics to “prove” the value of work. And journalists aren’t exactly the most entrepreneurial bunch either. To me, this isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s not my job to keep Hachette’s stock price afloat.    @atomicpoet The truth is that a lot of modern journalism is just reporters re-hashing what's been said on social media, and providing context. Sometimes fact-checking is involved. But the truth is that common folk usually provide firsthand accounts of events as they happen. For example, reports of natural disasters or protests. Well, I think the Fediverse is as good an avenue for journalism as anything else, and you don’t need the New York Times to legitimize it. @atomicpoet Twitter is at it most useful state when something happens. How can you do that “here”. Also, Twitter can go “back” being text only - as I understand - and operate on very low data. Mastodon for me is much more “socal” and less reactive. But when something “happens” I go for Twitter and also, for example ppl in Hungary, go for Facebook to see what’s up and organize there. Hardly anyone is making a good living off journalism nowadays. Almost every trained journalist that I know now works either in marketing or PR. This isn’t by choice. Most of them would prefer to be journalists. But if you want in on institutional journalism, be prepared to make peanuts. It’s not the Internet’s fault this is happening, nor is social media the problem. It’s billionaires and hedge funds that has hollowed out modern journalism, and made it into glorified propaganda. The only benefit that institutional journalism has nowadays is cultural gatekeeping. Quite frankly, that “feature” is useless. It only matters to people who think The Atlantic has a sacred cultural pedigree that elevates it over Buzzfeed. And typing the previous sentence made me laugh so hard, everyone in my hotel lobby is staring at me like a freak. I’ve spoken a lot about what’s wrong with institutional journalism and social media. But let me talk a little more about feasible alternatives. Back in the 60s-00s, there was a “zine” movement. It was just typewritten or handwritten newsletters that were photocopied over and over again, passed from person to person. Zines were at the vanguard of culture, and often wrote about things before institutional journalists became aware of them. There is virtual space for that now.  @atomicpoet Interesting, but the issue now is separating opinion from fact. People hear things, sometimes even skewed data; and don't understand how to comprehend what they are reading. Zines were what popularized so much subculture. So much about fashion, music, and sexuality was written about in zines before they were ever a consideration at popular newsstands. Some people believe the Internet killed the notion of a subculture. This is not the case. Instead, the Internet built space for ever more cultural niches, and subcultures splintered into microcultures. Which were documented first in blogs, then on spaces like Tumblr. @atomicpoet god I miss early Tumblr, it was like digital collage-building. Totally agree that zines are awesome and should be brought back into the forefront of culture digitally! Now I believe that the institutional takeover of social media is an attempt to not just wipe out what’s left of subculture but also microculture—what the kids nowadays call “aesthetic”. What this is actually doing is forcing it all underground. And the Fediverse can become a social record for this underground. There’s already much subculture/microculture on the Fediverse. Stuff that is unlikely to find its way into the Atlantic or New York Times. While institutional journalism is going down with the Twitter ship, they’re missing out on a whole lot because they’re not here. Their loss is our gain. One final thought. During the 2010s, I became active in a variety of microcultures. The tragedy of most of them is that they were hosted on a variety of proprietary social platforms, and died when these platforms didn’t attain an increase in shareholder value. But this isn’t a problem with the Fediverse. The Fediverse is an excellent destination for creativity because no one can own it.  @atomicpoet I don't know if you need any confirmation that your words are very actual, but here it is. I've been a journalist since I was 17. I graduated in Journalism in Political Sciences here in Sarajevo. Quit journalism after a stress-induced heart attack when I was only 34. Since then, I have worked in marketing/PR and am now a community manager in an IT company. Journalism has been leashed for far too long. @atomicpoet that's true, but..that assumes that the servers stay up. Behind the Fediverse is a whole bunch of Harry Tuttles keeping the whole thing going. I guess that makes the Fediverse sort of....Punk? @justinmwhitaker The Fediverse subsists on duplicates and duplicates of duplicates. @atomicpoet i‘m still in a mailing list, which started in mid 90s as a Yahoo! Group and had to move to Google Groups (because Yahoo! ended the service) but the number and activity shrinked to a minimum (nearly died)  @atomicpoet 90s Internet initially helped subcultures of the era, particularly the rave scene - but folk got complacent thinking it was a magic safe space where opponents didn't have any clout, and many encouraged by corporate social media that tolerated "edgy" content for traffic/ad revenue ended up oversharing incidents of drug use/dealing and even addiction, anti social behaviour and money laundering, and handed evidence on a plate to cops and prohibitionists... @atomicpoet never thought of this, i heard about the fanzines from the eighties in the gothic wave music szene. Maybe the Mastodon topic Server‘s can achieve something similar  @atomicpoet News flash: they're called "blogs". (Google took an axe to them by building the best RSS reader experience on the planet—Google Reader—then killing it after everyone stopped linking to blogs directly and began reading them via RSS/aggregator.)  What an interesting lateral perpective on zines and the Fediverse. I loved zines when they were the real thing; I do believe that zines (as a cheap hardcopy medium) have a complementary role to play in today's digital world; and I am intrigued by thinking of fediverse versions of digital zines too. @atomicpoet We're here! But we're definitely *not* institutional journalism, in fact trying to build the opposite and stay 100% independent. But it's incredibly difficult. We think the opportunity here (Fediverse) is enormous.  @atomicpoet [[The only benefit that institutional journalism has nowadays is cultural gatekeeping.]] It's also doing most of the investigative reporting that's going on in this country. Investigative reporting, and accountability journalism more broadly, are difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Institutional news outlets (be they the NYT or the county's local weekly) are about the only places where journalists can get it done. A few journalists do it independently, but not many. @atomicpoet Journalism has ALWAYS been a low-paying job. But, yes, private equity has made the situation much worse. @atomicpoet and it‘s the people who don’t want to pay for journalism, because you were trained 20 years that on the internet everything is available for free (which isn’t because you pay with data, ads and cookies) - but the capitalism is a problem for journalism, when you „have to make“ money out of everything  @atomicpoet “common folk usually provide firsthand accounts of events as they happen” = citizen journalism @atomicpoet I don't understand the part with monetizing an audience, at least in comparison with #Twitter: Twitter doesn't bring in many visits, it's importance lies in the connections, in the fact that everyone is there and its speed. #Mastodon can replicate all that, but the heavy-users need to migrate. @atomicpoet I think journalists that come here have to keep in mind the audience is different. You can't just post a Twitter link without context, expect people will read it and then complain. At least make a thread (even if it has a Twitter link at the end) and interact a little bit 🤷🏻♀️  https://www.staygrounded.online/p/in-ones-own-time "So many news people use it daily and most of them also get their news via Twitter which means that their perception of the world is shaped by whatever Twitter’s toxicity-favoring algorithms present to their eyeballs. Those journalists write new stories that get posted to Twitter, which are in turn read by the other journalists on Twitter, etc. etc. etc."  @atomicpoet The BBC R&D blog issues their thoughts on this. "unless a large player" gets involved, it's not going to happen. This annoys me, because their job is literally to R&D new ways of helping journalism and broadcasting. If they see problems in fediverse tech, they could be using their expertise to investigate and fix it to suit BBC journalists needs, but they wont.  @atomicpoet Institutional journalists need to be paid. Fediverse doesn’t lend itself to that, so we need independent journalists. Well, independent journalists need to be paid as well. Co-ops and non-profits cannot compete with the likes of News Corp. or CNN. POST is experimenting with a micropayment scheme, where you can “tip” a content producer. As little as $0.01. You get to read an article instead of the whole newspaper. It might work, but in the few months I have tried it, 😒 @atomicpoet  @atomicpoet As someone trying to build a journalism experiment from scratch on the fediverse, I fully agree with Chris on this. Longterm it really seems like co-ops and non-profits are the best solution to build a sustainable journalism platform. @atomicpoet I think public journalism will overtake MSM because MSM is agenda driven; profit before truth.  @atomicpoet Why do people need to rely on social media platforms to get the news in the first place?  @atomicpoet @samlitzinger US news is shit. Otherwise we would hear about climate change effects, gun deaths and stories of a lack of health care 24/7. Nothing else. When journalists go to work for The Daily Mail, eg, they know exactly what kind of journalism is required, same for the others who write for the advantage of autocrats. You can try the citizen journalism @BylinesNetwork - who do have a Mastodon presence  @atomicpoet @mastodonmigration I am still encouraged by institutional journals coming aboard. They are, or claim to be, cultural institutions, our ancient partners in history, and perhaps, through exposure to our different way of doing things here, they will recognize their true destiny, and dump the Murdochs and click-bait as last-year's trash!  @atomicpoet  >"Pains me to say this, but I don't think institutional journalists will be flocking to the Fediverse any time soon. " Good news then (no pun intended) . >"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson One just has to look at the exestenial risk that is climate change, and their job their has been to ensure the biospheres destruction with their servile obsequious. @atomicpoet I've been explaining this as almost all journalists coming from an ad-supported background, where you say outrageous things to boost revenue. That fits perfectly with ad-supported social media, where the algorithm seeks to promote outrageous things to boost its revenue. Nothing in the Fediverse works like that, so it looks like nobody cares about their work...which is admittedly true, since their work obsesses over false conflict and whatever capital says. |
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