As you know, the media is currently in decline. With newspapers losing much of their readership, broadcast news appealing mostly to older generations and online news sources struggling to make ends meet, it’s a terrible time to be a journalist or in the news business as a whole.
And there are many reasons that’s the case. There’s the obvious one regarding online competition, since everyone and their dog can become a journalist thanks to the internet. There’s the rise in tech like adblockers, which came about in response to widespread surveillance from the marketing machine. Hell, there’s even a good case to be made that political disconnects between the media and its audience are the cause, given how many newspaper stories show a complete disregard for the opinions of those outside of echo chambers like Twitter and Reddit.
But there’s one reason many people talk about. One which may have had a surprisingly large effect in killing off the traditional newspaper or TV broadcast.
Namely, specialisation. Thanks to the internet, we don’t need a ‘Jack of all Trades’ publication anymore.
Which is exactly what the media were. They were an ‘aggregator’ before the times of Slashdot or Hacker News, a centralised source that would provide a bunch of interesting stories in a dumbed down, easily understandable form.
And in the pre internet days, that worked. When your alternatives were scientific journals and books from the local library, a simple source that explained…
