Why is Sri Lanka lacking good journalism?
It’s more about gossips and clickbait
If you are surfing on Facebook today you might have noticed that most of the articles people are sharing online are either gossips or low quality content about celebrities or entertainment.
Today there is very little good journalism and creative writing in Sri Lanka, if you follow blog aggregators you will realize that the number of active bloggers and blogs are falling. The average length of a post if falling and you can sometimes compress an entire news story to a single tweet.
Some reasons for the lack of good journalism in Sri Lanka
One reason is the fact that people have gotten used to the junk food media culture on the internet, it’s addictive, it doesn’t take long to read a simple story and move on to the next one. They only give you a spike in your dopamine level and the cycle repeats.
It’s also easy to create low quality content, Facebook pages and other social media sites to create these low quality posts, it won’t cost any money or time, there is no need of investigative journalism you only need to have a smartphone and you can create multiple low quality content per day.
It’s also where the money is, more eyeballs mean more advertising money and because more and more people are reading these low quality content advertisers are spending more money on them and it makes difficult for good publishers to find advertising money as almost all of these publications depend on advertising revenue.
There are only handful number of local pushers on the internet that are still posting good quality content, but they hardly get the attention and publicity they deserve.
If you look at USA and other countries although social media is getting popular there are still good journalism with high quality content happening on the internet, such as The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian.
It’s time publishers make content that adds value to their readers. By looking at the number of people attending the Colombo international book fair and the Big Bad Wolf I still think there are people out there who want to read quality content. There is still hope.
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