This used to be the job of the third estate, but traditional media has all been captured and the algorithms have done the rest, drowning us in a sea of content.
> but traditional media has all been captured and the algorithms have done the rest
We should be explicit about what happened:
Google and Facebook skimmed off most of advertising revenue that previously supported journalism.
Then neither originated new news in quantity or quality to replace what they ate. Revenues (from ads) without costs (of paying journalists) = their profits.
Now, we have orders of magnitude less professional journalism.
When you boil it down, their business models are less about being clever and more about redirecting a huge, previously-social-good flow of money through their toll gates and taxing it.
Sorry, have to call b.s. on lack of funds. Our media are owned by a very few, a handful, of corporations. And this happened before Google even existed. It happened in the 90s.
> business model
I don't know, is this willful ignorance? Press is political ...
That Sinclair, Nexstar, CC/iHeartMedia were allowed to consolidate in the 90s is bad.
That Google et al. decimated newspaper revenue from the mid-00s onwards without replacing their newsrooms is worse.*
I wouldn't have as big a gripe if Google or Facebook had started their own news bureaus and funded them with their profits. It still would have been a rounding error on their balance sheet.
But instead they destroyed a social good, took their bonuses, and called it a day.
The media is the fourth estate. In the modern US the first three are often interpreted as the branches of government. Historically estates were often some combination of the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners.
