> Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time.
Correct answer.
People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish.
Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles.
The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.
I wonder if there's a viable market for a news outlet which has as its distinguishing core principle the guarantee that it will never use any material from press releases (or equivalently unsolicited, self-interested messaging) as unqualified sources, except for narrow cases when no other source was available. And in such cases it is accompanied by an unambiguous indication (really unambiguous, like a different color font for any portions of the article text directly and solely derived from such sources) that the information presented therein should be trusted on the same level as motivated hearsay from a single source, because that's what it is.
But of course this would be expensive to operate, difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such an outlet's stated core principle.
I don't think that model is compatible with news, where one of the value props is being fast.
As you shade over from news to analysis, there are outlets like that. The Economist comes to mind; I don't think I've ever felt that their content was written from press releases. But it's also at least a day, usually a week, later than the actual news.
There's probably a project management style triangle here: fast, accurate, and, um. Some third thing. Pick two.
This has become noticeably more true as newsrooms are cut to the bone. Content volume over content quality, because volume is what gets the ad dollars.
Correct answer.
People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish.
Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles.
The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.