Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?
Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience.
Y'all, the article is talking about a media extinction event, referring to the increasing difficulty of obtaining enough funding to remain solvent as a news source and "race to the bottom" as far as advertisement revenue, page views, and subscriptions.
It is not talking about an actual human extinction event, although of course that is a huge blaring concern at the moment.
Why is it being down voted?
I honestly have not the slightest idea. I read it on the train, and I thought holy shit, that's a really good deep dive into a significant problem that seems like it's only going to get worse. I liked reading it and I felt like it was worthwhile and so I wanted to share it.
And... I honestly can't even make any sense of the reception. I can't tell if people are just reacting to the title alone, or (ironically) don't like that there's a paywall, or think it's not news, or actually read the article but disagreed, or what it is.
Honestly, if I had to guess, I think the lemmy.world section of Lemmy has mostly completed its arc of evolution into full blown "Hold my referential in-joke, I'm going in!" Reddit 2.0, and there's just not that much going on there to even read into. But like I say I genuinely just have no idea. If someone tries to explain it to you, let me know.
To me the title is deceptive as there is no extinction level event and so I read the above comment (by @stoneparchment ) as sarcasm :
Why is it being down voted? /sarcasm
No
What am I missing?
Look at covid as an example there was different narratives coming from all over the place . People can't agree on anything. We have people who beileve in Scientology and flat earth ffs.
There is also the fact that media organizations are owned by someone or some group so they have their own take on things.
Then we have deepfakes and LLMs getting better by the day.
The media all the while has devolved into clickbait titles and tiktoks.
To top it off we are in an extinction event , the planet is fucked and the media sure isn't going to save us.
titanicquartet.jpg
Almost like the industry was better before it became 24-hour infotainment. The media doesn't need as many people as it has. It needs to cut back its hours and stop serving us all a constant stream of crap.
Ads are...scarce, wtf!?
In the context of the article, they're talking about the fact that news outlets aren't getting enough ad revenue to sustain themselves, and people don't really buy classifieds in papers anymore.
I feel like ads got worse over time to the point that one can barely fathom visiting a news media site without an adblocker.
This could be a good thing in that it could potentially help democratize journalism, taking it out of the hands of billionaires. Conversely, it could make harmful conspiracy theories more widespread.
Most likely, it would be a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
Also, why the hell is this downvoted? Am I missing something?
No.
no
