Unamerican.com

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There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism.

In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

from Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky (via infoneer-pulse)

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My take:  There never was “newspaper journalism”.  Just a demand for advertisers to consistently message a local market.  Newspapers bundled these messages in with whatever they could create on a daily basis with a minimum of effort - horoscopes and comics as well as news, often simply reposted off the AP wire. 

We are going to have to invent journalism, I guess.  At least, I think it sounds like a good idea.  What do you think?

(via emergentfutures)