When a 9 year old consistently does your job better and more thoroughly than you do purely out of enjoyment maybe it's a sign that you should try harder.
Granted, she's subsidized by her parents. Real reporters have to serve a business, even if they're not directly involved in discussions of revenue and strategy. Often journalists aren't given the time or resources to dig up stories and vet them thoroughly.
And thus, the sad decline of our media. Beholden to CPMs, CTRs, UPVs, CPAs, CPLs, CRs, and a dozen other acronyms that mean one thing - more eyeballs == more money. So they write in the fastest, most outrageous, most viral manner possible.
They're incentivized to do things like clickbait, and outrage/yellow journalism to keep people spreading it, whether they agree with the viewpoint, or dispute the facts, because it's better to get the eyeballs than have any kind of integrity or skill at the profession.
Isn't Hilde's example exactly the opposite? That motivated individuals can do the basics as a hobby?
Two observations:
1. The barriers to entry have been dramatically lowered. i.e. Cost of distribution is slightly about $0.
2. For basic stories most people only care about the tldr: some drunk driver killed a man on ...; Or about aggregations of tldrs: i.e. 5 people we killed last week due to gun violence in ...
Regardless of the talents of Hilde or her more experienced competitors. When I'm only reading tldr, I really doubt I can tell a 9 year old, from a 90 year old, from some software.
Given the above: With enough motivated hobbyists, all we need is better software news summarizers/aggregators and you can have great aggregations at the local, regional, and global levels.
If your concern is the lack of substance, I would ask, what percentage of the time do you actually care? I'm willing to bet, its a small percentage of the time. I'd also be willing to bet that you only really care about substance for stories that hit the top of news aggregators (i.e. "viral" stories)!
Given that: It should be relatively easy for "real journalists" to pick and bring substance to this small number of stories deserving substance.
Actually, there could even be a BugBounty type exchange. How much do you care about this story? $10, $20? If we collectively reach $1000 a Bloomberg journalist will spend a day on it and so forth.
> "For basic stories most people only care about the tldr: some drunk driver killed a man on ..."
Without wishing to be offensive... perhaps that's a sign that stories like that aren't really newsworthy. Lots of things happen on any given day, including thousands of deaths, isn't the purpose of news outlets to select stories that have significance to their audience rather than going for stories where the main substance can be found in the title?
The funding model for journalism is advertisement. Advertisement generally follows the line of more views = more money. We call "clickbait" and "viral" stories that get viewed by the most people, regardless of their content. This means that journalists will focus on "clickbait" rather than a niche story that only a tiny fraction of their viewership will read.
Also, sourcing and vetting clearly take time, which could instead be spent producing more "clickbait" stories. Unless you're oversaturating the market, producing more "clickbait" is the rational action over producing quality journalism.
Furthermore, quality journalism requires expertise, which costs more. Compared to that, "clickbait" stories require adopting a certain writing skill which is in much larger supply. Thus follows that you would hire "clickbait" writers instead of journalists, because you'd be paying them less for more profit.
Really, pretty much every incentive in journalism fights the naivety of "professionalism" and "integrity", so it's little wonder that the state of journalism is as it is.
I am reminded of a short anecdote I read on HN the other day. People say they want sugarless yogurt, but every market research shows that they actually prefer the sugared variant. "We" say we want "good journalism", but clearly more people are reading tabloids and "clickbait". Whether that is because "we" are the minority, or because "we" are hypocrites is unclear, but that's reality.
$10/year would require an enormous number of subscribers before her time was competitively compensated -- 3,000 at least, and that's assuming no overhead. Her town isn't big enough to support that.
The true subsidy vis-a-vis real journalists is the lack of consequence she faces for being wrong. It's unlikely she'd face a lawsuit regardless of what she said. If she were badly misinformed or made up elements of her story no one would care (nor should they -- she's nine) But 'real' journalists can have careers and livelihoods ruined by such events.
Sure, some journalists' careers and livelihoods are occasionally ruined for reasons. However, the vast majority of journalists are so routinely wrong about everything that such ruination seems unlikely to be at all related to that.
See, Gawker. Sure, they published thousands of articles that were wrong about their respective subjects. But it was only after someone actually had the money and time to sue them into oblivion that it came back to bite them.
The average journalist nowadays seems to have far less fear of being wrong due to not fact checking or poor sources, because it seems consequences for them are nearly non existent.
What is she getting from her parents that helps with digging up stories and vetting them? She's subsidized in the sense of receiving food, clothing, and shelter, but all businesses also provide those things to their employees.
This:
> Often journalists aren't given the time or resources to dig up stories and vet them thoroughly.
(my emphasis)
is not a response to the fact that she's publishing stories faster than they are.
Businesses pay employees with the goal of ROI. Parents typically expect a 0x return on their money (at least in the near term, by which I mean decades). Therefore businesses' employees need to do work that contributes to revenue (listicles) whereas children can do whatever their parents allow them to (in this case, local news).
You make a good point about the time competition, but I was responding re: "better" not "faster".
That's not really fair (maybe you're joking and I'm just really obtuse)—she lives in a town of 5,000 people. Much larger markets than that have proven unable to support a local news industry in the past several years. It's not a better of journalists being lazy, it's a matter of there not being enough demand to support journalists in the first place. (As others have pointed out, this 9-year-old rightly lives with her parents and does not have to support herself.)
This sounds like an idea. Get your local school kids to cover local news. A subscription would be fairly cheap since you don't have to really pay the kids a salary. And some of the kids would enjoy it and learn something.
Yeah, like how to write well. Most adults these days can't seem to do that any more, so it'd be great to have kids learning this by being local journalists. Plus they'd probably do a far better job than adults since they'd be more idealistic and not lazy and not handcuffed by corporate interests.
> When a 9 year old consistently does your job better and more thoroughly than you do purely out of enjoyment maybe it's a sign that you should try harder.
