New media 3

Follow-up to these posts here and here

 "2024 was arguably the year of the meteoric rise of the independent creator and the calamitous fall of the so-called legacy media." Jeff Bezos was just one of the many who noticed.

Independent writers can publish their own content on the Substack platform and earn their own following, even earning income if readers subscribe to it. Essentially, it's self-publishing so that they can move past the gatekeepers of old legacy media.

Bari Weiss was working for the New York Times but quit her job in 2020. She believed the NYT had abandoned important journalistic values by censoring ideas they didn't like. She and her wife, Nellie Bowles, started a newsletter on Substack that turned into a "new media company" which they call The Free Press.

In contrast to NPR (National Public Radio), they still try to search for the truth. They say "Free people deserve a Free Press."

Bari is the one who interviewed Tom Holland in yesterday's post.

 from Mind Matters

News 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Reporter Nellie Bowles, in her dream job at the New York Times, was surprised when her editors rejected a story that she wrote in 2019 about Prager U. They said the story should have stressed that Prager U's videos are "disinformation."

It confused her because she knew that the videos were not lies, but just represented a point of view which the editors at NYT didn't like. She argued that Prager U's point of view was not inherently a lie. 

"Disinformation" became a movement in newsrooms around the country, she says, at about that time. The movement "pretends to be editorial, but it's extremely political. It's their tangible goal. . . They pretended that Antifa was fake news!" She calls Antifa "an armed group of left-wing protesters." Editors labeled her a fascist for wanting to report on Antifa taking over a neighborhood in Seattle.

Nellie sees journalism as a vehicle for true information, not political activism. So, she's no longer employed by "prestige media."

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