I listened recently to the episode “The Future of Reporting with Mandy Matney,” from the The Emily Show. That is a podcast by Emily D. Baker. For this episode, she interviewed Mandy Matney of the True Sunlight podcast, formerly known as the Murdaugh Murders podcast.
After that long prelude, the parts I’m going to write about are fairly short:
- Matney said she used to work as a reporter for a newspaper that was owned by a larger newspaper conglomerate. She said the big newspapers focus more on “trending” topics than complex and important issues which will take a lot of resources to follow and research. Among other things, at one point she was assigned to write three to five articles a day about issues trending on Twitter or Reddit. News stories don’t get national attention unless they start trending, and then almost all of the national papers repeat the same information with different headlines.
- Baker replied that she is seeing something similar while covering stories about the music industry. Instead of investing in a band for a few albums to see if the band can gain a following and take off, the music industry will now invest in a band or performer for one song. And if that one song doesn’t take off on TikTok, then they move on.
In doing this, both industries are killing the things that originally created them. Technology makes this easier. It might provide a more convincing rationale in the short term. But that is still what is happening.