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Notes -
Of course it's not just an "online" problem.
Traditional newsrooms lost 40,000 jobs in 12 years, the majority of their employees, mitigated slightly by 11,000 new online news jobs over the same period. The problem has not abated yet; we are now at around two straight decades of decline.
Online there's a "1% rule" to worry about? Ha! Offline we should be lucky to get such a huge, broad cross-section. 50K newsroom employees is 0.03% of the US workforce.
What kind of person, while watching even the first half of this collapse, was coming to the conclusion that "wow, there's the career for me!" Is this type of person someone to whom you want to outsource your epistemic hygiene? In theory we might find a few genius altruists with multi-million-dollar trust funds who decided to give up on any other financial stability for the cause of restoring honor to the Fourth Estate (but can anybody name one?); in practice we're starting with a crop of people who make bad life choices and then we're winnowing that crop down further based on whether they were pragmatic enough to rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "honor". The only redeeming feature of this mess is that the economics also want to winnow away anyone who doesn't rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "crazy political zealotry", but human psychology is such that zealotry is attention-grabbing so I'm not sure this second form of winnowing is quite as effective.
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