Consent machine broke

Wonder if it’s possible to merge the left-journo “online journalism is in dire straits because it’s all ultimately run for the personal gain of oligarchs” with the right-journocritic “online journalism is in dire straits because no one wants all this leftist pap”

Into like, “a central purpose of journalism is manufacturing consent to the regimes its owners are aligned with and online journalism is failing at that role because it lost the social technology of balancing ‘afflict the comfortable’ idealism with grizzled veteran editors who internalize the money’s interests and keep the kids in line accordingly”

(Remember the dawn of online-first journalism was like, Bill Gates pouring money into Slate in the ‘90s so it could hire experienced editors from like the explicitly-for-its-owners-whimsy TNR to make a publication that assured us that dispassionate, clever white Gen X men had everything under control)

And maybe under current conditions they can’t rediscover it; with institutions shrinking there’s no room to rise the ranks and promotion is by lateral transfer, add in Twitter’s “national newsroom” and attention economy and workers at other pubs have a greater influence over your career course than managers at your own