A TV journalist I know helped shed some light on this.

He used to write about one article a week. Usually a review, sometimes an article article.

Nowadays, they have him write about seven "articles" a week, but six of them are SEO-optimized factoids. You know, those articles where you're looking for the premiere date of a show, but they're six sections long, the premiere date is the last section, and the first five sections look kind of like they were written by a human who hates his job? Yeah. They make actual journalists write those, and they want them written well, because Google's idea of fixing the SEO race was to prioritize long articles and articles that look like they were written by humans.

So these articles are created by humans, they're churned out fast, and they have a few sections represented by headers that directly answer common search terms / questions. The more common the question, the further the answer is buried down in the article.

These articles aren't serious, so they expect you to get six of them done per week on top of your actual job, but they still want you to put effort in and write them well so they don't look like chatgpt garbage, and so that, when people click on them, a fraction of a percent of those people actually stick around on the website and look at more ads.

They're competing to see who's gonna land first on Google News, RSS readers and link aggregators as that's how they can get the most organic views, which they can then convert to ad revenue. So I guess for them speed of writing comes before quality.

Most journalism is pretty bad now - if you know about tech, you're just going to notice it more.

Everyone hopped onto ad blockers, and ads were how most online publications made money. Many have tried to switch to subscription, but few successfully, and most people side step that. Journalists are going to work for free, so now publications trip to get the most articles out of the fewest writers, and it's all going to shit.

three forces at work here (two of them on display with recent LMG)

• pressure to constantly produce content leading to unrealistic time scales, crunch time
• cult of personality, celebrity worship, narcissism – ignoring any concerns that don’t affect them directly
• advertising, corporate sponsorship – not wanting to bite the hand that feeds you (IGN’s infamous rating system from 9.0 to 10.0)

Here are 10 reasons why people with journalism degrees have no journalistic integrity.

Hot take. Consumer reporting is different from actual journalism. See also games journalism.

It's like they're just grabbing from other articles and cramming together or adding content to old news

That's exactly what they're doing. And it gets worse, it's often automated. And they don't disclose that so nobody knows they shouldn't trust the information.

There is not enough money in it. High quality authors are expensive.

Kinda off topic, but I'll leave it up.

Just don't get too angry in the comments please.

SEO generated garbage is nothing new, it is just becoming more prevalent.

Actually I think journalistic quality has degraded overall. Not just in technical sites.

The BBC here in the UK I generally counted on well written (if not always technically accurate) articles.

Over the last 10 years or so (maybe longer) this has degraded to articles which have clearly not been proof read.

I put it down to the fact that they need to put out so much content now that proper proof reading isn't possible. I also think in general there's a reliance on spell and grammar checking in software.

Journalists are generally clueless about tech.

Tech people are generally clueless about journalism.

Bro the worst are when YouTubers like MKBHD and Mrwhosetheboss never talk about the privacy concerns of the gadgets they review. I usually ignore their videos these days as I find Louis Rossman videos more interesting.

A lot of tech reporting is funded directly or indirectly by the people they are reporting on.

most tech sites just became an easy cash grab, it's page displays that counts for publisher, it means money, the content doesn't matter, you entered the site, they got the money, it 'helps' that people nowadays don't browse organically but click headers in aggregating apps like google news/now feed or web aggregators like lemmy or reddit, like android police for example, most of the news are rubbish like guides on how to change your phone's volume etc or find best charging cable for your , they also keep refreshing old (often out of date) articles, they show as new with today timestamp and no apparent changes, people point it out in the comments but they don't care, but i see most news outlets nowadays don't have comment sections, so maybe AP will delete their discuss in the near future, because users don't count, content doesn't count, it's the revenue that counts, that too is why youtube isn't showing downvotes count anymore, it clashed with their business model

Another topic I see a bunch is whenever there's an article about Samsung folding phones, it inevitably mentions Samsung killing off the Note line. The Note line isn't dead. S Ultra is the Note. They just renamed it. It's the same damn phone. Compare a Note 10 to an S 20 Ultra and tell me that's not the same series. I've been using the Note/Ultra since the Note 2. This really highlights that they don't care to look beyond the surface level and instead they just regurgitate press releases.

Tech reporting these days is essentially people who have been wined-and-dined by corporate marketing departments and then just regurgitating what press releases tell them what to say. And if these "reporters" don't play ball, they get quietly blacklisted by these companies.

'Content' has replaced information

Journalism is so paid off at this point that it's became normal to see. We need to support independent journalists or do our own research.

Because of the Diggification of the tech community 20 years ago

I like arstechnica and the register for tech news.