@aschmitz i have a small amount of respect for 404, but their primary job is still to sell copy

the only journalism i would wholly trust would be journalism that operated as an arm of a different, mission-driven, organization that i also trusted, with the understanding that the journalism was an expense in pursuit of that mission, not a revenue source

or volunteer, citizen journalism. i still think citizen journalism is important

@Lady Hmm. (Setting aside that I'm not inclined to *wholly* trust any given journalist,) good journalism costs a lot of money, so I'm not sure how practical it would be to rely on an organization that was at least an order of magnitude bigger so as to not notice the expense. (In the meantime, there are organizations like PBS/NPR that at least don't have hard requirements on subscriptions or ads, though they do both. But my NPR membership isn't reliant on them chasing clicks, either.)

@Lady There's also, like, the BBC, or other state-sponsored media organizations (though the BBC would bristle at the comparison). Heck, even VOA. Technically part of mission-driven organizations! Maybe not ones you trust though.

(I think the BBC does some good work, and some iffy work. But they do seem to have a bit less of a profit motive than at least *some* other organizations.)

@aschmitz yes, i mean, this is in part an argument along the lines of advocating for state-run media, although i don’t think anyone has figured out how to do stare-run media well yet

NPR in principle i love but in practice has to try way too hard to appear “impartial”, and their coverage has really suffered as a result. i’d rather have partisan media from an organization whose values were clearly stated, so that i could make my own evaluation on whether they were a reliable source for any given topic.

@aschmitz the big question for me tho is the existential question: can this organization make ethical decisions without it threatening their ability to continue to exist? and most organizations today, the answer is no, because they have to at some level serve the needs of profitability. i want journalistic organizations which can make compromises on their missions and purposes when ethics demands, without that threatening their ability to show up for work the next day

@aschmitz i feel like we don’t have that right now, so basically every journalist in the industry right now (who is able to survive in that industry) is someone who is okay playing loose with ethics to some extent when the scoop demands

@Lady I mean I guess at some level I'm not sure that's true of any organization? Like, even with the most benevolent of benefactors, there's only so many times you can poke them in the eye before they get annoyed. Perhaps, arguably, a very large endowment would let you do that? Turn Harvard into a news outlet, say. But I'm not sure how we'd get from here to there.

@aschmitz yeah i toyed briefly with the idea of library-run journalism but we already make our libraries do too much haha

@Lady It would be interesting! And I'm a fan of giving increased responsibility to places that are competent (if they want it). But still likely a problem when journalists inevitably find an issue with their funding source, be it a university or local government. (Which is not to say that those organizations are abnormally problematic, but that as with all organizations, they have problems from time to time.)

@aschmitz oh definitely, but i think that problem is manageable so long as you have a plurality of sources

i’m less worried about the “we can’t run this article or someone will get mad” and more worried about the “we HAVE to run this article, and spin it this way, because it’s a cash cow for us”. if we can solve the second problem, i’m hopeful the first can be addressed thru diversity