The case against the internet, when it comes to the quality of society’s news, is well-worn: beginning in the 1990’s advertisers shifted their dollars from traditional media to the internet, and the losers in that transition were the newsrooms of America, who had to make do with less.
The internet: The first blow
The migration began in earnest with the rise of Google. Google’s keyword advertising predominately effected direct advertising spending — that is, spending that can be directly tied to a sale (10% off!). This was not good news for our news media. Direct advertising, prior to the internet, was predominately the purview of our print media– newspapers, magazines, the yellow pages and the like — and, to a lesser extent, radio. With a lessened ability to pay journalists, newsrooms around America now employ 20,000 fewer of them than they did in the 1990’s. Few would disagree that our news has suffered as a result.
The early internet put a dent in the quality of our news in another way: the fixed costs of becoming a publisher were drastically reduced to near zero: all it took was a writer, a laptop, and some free software such as…
