Good news reporting is an expensive and dying craft.
These days most articles have one of two sources:
* rewritten from a single prime news reporting source that did the hard yards,
* copied near verbatim from an official Press Release and|or Advertorial Press Material.
The second is the real bane of modern "news" sourcing - eg: straight up disguised advertising- a mega shopping chain pays a network to insert "news" pieces about fighting back against inflation savings that "local" stores are offering up to "stick it to the big guys" and other such template garbage. Perhaps worse; the undeclared "vested interest" news that comes from (say) a mining or energy companies Press Release.
More and more it's hard to find any truly independant journalism (because of cost cutting), and near impossible to find multiple sources and viewpoints.
One answer is for more citizens to become "press aware" and start to distribute their own press kit releases on local issues to spread the side of events that they want aired. That still faces the counter pressure of actual advertisers that spend with networks that would rather see their take get the airtime.
I appreciate your optimism but I think you got the order wrong.
I'm fairly sure that the #1 source of news articles, social media posts, etc, probably by far is "native advertising" aka hidden advertising (this is actually illegal in some countries) aka PR articles posted as if from the news source.
Other than the fact that text is sequential I imposed no ranking, these are the two major sources.
> "native advertising" aka hidden advertising
aka submarine news, aka Advertorial Press Material (as I called it above)
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.
This is what I was talking about, perhaps we have differing nomenclature due to differing countries of origin or somesuch but it's the same thing; "news" sourced from preprepared press releases issued by vested interests - either advertisers and|or PR think tanks, etc.
Either way it's "free" professionally prepared copy that costs nothing in paid reporter time and sometimes comes with a carrot (paid advertisement inches), sometimes with a stick (we're thinking of withdrawing | changing contracts, but we have this copy we'd like to see run).
These days most articles have one of two sources:
* rewritten from a single prime news reporting source that did the hard yards,
* copied near verbatim from an official Press Release and|or Advertorial Press Material.
The second is the real bane of modern "news" sourcing - eg: straight up disguised advertising- a mega shopping chain pays a network to insert "news" pieces about fighting back against inflation savings that "local" stores are offering up to "stick it to the big guys" and other such template garbage. Perhaps worse; the undeclared "vested interest" news that comes from (say) a mining or energy companies Press Release.
More and more it's hard to find any truly independant journalism (because of cost cutting), and near impossible to find multiple sources and viewpoints.
One answer is for more citizens to become "press aware" and start to distribute their own press kit releases on local issues to spread the side of events that they want aired. That still faces the counter pressure of actual advertisers that spend with networks that would rather see their take get the airtime.