The American Press Is Destroying Itself - Reporting by Matt Taibbi

In traditional journalism, there are strong incentives to act maliciously. Journalists are incentivized to optimize for views and clicks. The answer is not to reform the industry. We can change media through radical decentralization. Everyone becomes a journalist. Each person writes about their local issues or areas of expertise

Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories

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Early on in my career, working at very traditional newspapers owned by corporate chains with no unions, I was struck by the sense of powerlessness that was drilled into us as cub reporters. We were supposed to be ruthless and fearless, hold the powerful accountable, while quietly sucking up the daily humiliations of our own workplaces. Don't questi... See more

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (nationa... See more

See, you happened to have picked an issue where the business community is split, and therefore the press will present “both sides.” But try to start doing something that undermines all business interests as such—you will quickly find that you’re not a journalist anymore. I mean, they may be willing to keep you on as a maverick just for the fun of i

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