I drive home from Virginia to Florida in a single day, typically with one stop at the Florence, SC Buc-ee's. That's nearly 600 miles (in a gas RAV4). I do this a couple times a year and it takes about 9 hours, less if there's no cops.
"It’s well known that people are getting news from sources like short-form video, topical newsletters, social media, and curated podcasts, and many are avoiding the news entirely. In line with those trends, just 2% of queries on Google Search are news-related. Nevertheless, we want to continue making targeted contributions to the news ecosystem to help news publishers navigate this inflection point."
Google acknowledges they had a part to play in causing the collapse of journalism but has no solutions to offer.
People aren't consuming news, and when they do they choose the least accurate, most entertaining sources for it. Newspapers and local broadcasters are suffering because the public has lost the will or the capacity to focus. When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health issues? [1] Where's the DARE school-visit campaigns to remind kids that broadcast news is free over the air and their parents are chumps for paying streaming services' subscription fees?
> When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health issues?
We won't (or if we do they won't accomplish anything), because once you've moved to a low-trust society, which we are rapidly doing, any official statements telling you which information to consume/avoid are seen as Enemy Action and make you trust your outside sources even harder. You can find tons of Zoomers saying they get news from Tiktok specifically because it's not under the control of The Man (even though it's controlled by the Chinese government, the ultimate The Man). There are no easy fixes here.
The MBAs trying to keep old media afloat are held hostage by shareholders who don't even watch the product. The general public has become increasingly less willing to spend any amount of time (eyes on ads) or money (subscriptions) on broadcast and print journalism. A whole generation of consumers has grown up on ad-free content and cannot fathom how the business model worked so well, pre-AdSense. Even if they can comprehend broadcast and print business models, they refuse to participate and then complain about the rising cost of subscription services; services that are now experimenting with reintroducing advertisements.
Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.
Have they ever considered ... idk, making a compelling product? They sat around watching the whole Metallica vs Napster saga unfold while calling the internet a fad and writing articles about how "blogs aren't trustworthy".
If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.
