Advertisement has ruined journalism. Click-bait and light weight articles that lure people in to see as many ads as they can possibly cram between the lines and around the article, before they sell your reading patterns and digital fingerprint to the highest bidder.

Put words like Elon or Tesla in a headline and you get more clicks than if you didn’t. Bait the headline so people get curious and click in.

Make sure that you fill the top half of the page with generic text and copy-pasta so that you can show a few more ads before you actually come to the point of the article.

Use some AI to generate extra fluffiness or automate writing of sports and finance articles.

Social media certainly didn’t help, but when almost every news outlet wants to participate in the race to the bottom - a race to the bottom it is.

IMO the only way to fix it is a Time Machine. Every news paper linked here, or elsewhere, think they can sell me a subscription just because I followed a link or two. I live in Norway, I’m not going to subscribe to the New York Times just because they had an article I actually wanted to read.

It might not be perfect, but we need a system where journalists and media can be paid for creating quality content that people consume.

Not influencers who knows how to optimize the length of their YouTube videos to maximize income and minimize content.

Real deep journalism is dying. It’s a shame.