What’s happening to online journalism and online news video?

This is a quick episode on how the news landscape is shifting and how it’s now nearly unrecognizable to what it was only a decade ago. Legacy news networks have figured out that investigative journalism is costly and requires lots of legwork, while independent YouTubers are now commanding immense audiences. What’s next?

As the traditional news networks are struggling to monetize their content and maintain their business, they clamor harder and harder for their core following (left or right), whilst also trying to provide a sense of excitement. Everything is breaking news. There’s a need to sensationalize every event, however trivial, and they are constantly suggesting that a major dramatic turn is just around the corner (see impeachment, proof of a Russia-trump collusion, etc.)

If you want to make it as an individual; as an investigative journalist in the digital age, you have to provide value — not just talk — and the legacy networks are now finding themselves competing against exactly such individuals.

Meanwhile, platforms such as YouTube are definitely siding with the losing team. We know through official statements as well as through Project Veritas etc. that YouTube views the legacy networks as ‘authoritative channels’, and therefore these are getting surfaced and recommended far more often. This is, in part, because of the more advertiser friendly nature of buttoned-up old school news channels, but it’s also because of the narrative and political affiliation associated with the legacy broadcast media. 

More and more people are waking up to the tiring nature of today’s corporate news media. Impeachment is supposedly just around the corner, election interference is just about to be declared a fact, Trump’s tax records are nearly about to be released, etc. It’s not news; it’s rumor milling, gossip, hearsay, it’s endless regurgitation of recent events, and it’s historical revisionism in realtime.

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