Towards the end the author talks about how Google News doesn't do a good job of actively promoting good, well researched content. I wonder why YouTube doesn't face this same problem. I know it's very subjective, but I've managed to find a plethora of incredibly well made videos on YouTube. It used to have a much worse clickbait problem in the past but at least in the last few years I've usually been able to .<p>I suppose it comes down to 2 main differences.<p>1. It's much easier to post a good looking but badly researched piece of writing than it is to make a good video. So it's hard to tell before clicking or investing time in reading something that it's good.<p>2. Google knows everything about a YouTube video's metrics so can base recommendations off of much more information than it can over just the click through rate that it knows about articles on Google News. So articles with high click through rate will be recommended regardless of whether they're actually high quality which incentivizes clickbait. Meanwhile a YouTube video with high click through rate but terrible audience retention won't be recommended.
I sympathize but it's hard for me to avoid the conclusion that this has already been decided.<p>Real journalism will be paid for and appreciated by the elite, and the public, the masses, will have to live with bad clickbait.
This article tries to describe the past, present & potential future of the relationships between the Media, Tech, and their Audiences. However, I felt the stream-of-conscious style was disorganized, and its ideas were undeveloped.<p>If the writer had instead developed a logical mental model of those relationships and presented them in stages, I could follow along easier and appreciate their points better. Even better, a few diagrams to demonstrate how they see the territory shifting over time. Wrap it up with citations on prior art, and then it may yet be a proper tech spec :^)
My take is that journalism provides the pre-vetted training data for the slow AI that is society. (And consequently the fast AI that is LLM which read <i>all</i> the journalism ever recorded)<p>It’s why it’s important that journalists focus on “this is true”. It’s why science papers are journalism. It’s why it’s important that science papers are published solely on the basis of “is it true” not “does it follow a narrative (#).<p>This is the huge test for AI/LLM; If you state a thing, can you provide a link for why you know that. At the moment we just have “based on things I have read the thing is statistically most likely to be said (hence true).”<p>We really need “the truth”<p>(#) I am thinking here of things like archeology in Nazi Germany which switched heavily to publishing nonsense about Aryan people in different parts of world earlier than anyone else. Not some comment on diversity and inclusion.