This is one of the reasons I recommend Ryan Holiday's book - he makes the observation that we are not experiencing "the end of journalism" we are paralleling the time of yellow journalism. The New York Times created modern journalism back then by going to a subscription - based model, which allowed them to bypass the sensationalism that sells broadsheets on street corners in favor of a predictable, reliable income stream that permitted them to focus on reality and its reporting.

The Republican noise machine, built up by Lee Atwater in the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's defeat, was ground to a nub against the Iraq War. At the time I figured they'd really regret that but they made a shit ton of money and the whole apparatus had an expiration date anyway. I think the Iraq War and its runup was a touchstone in the history of distrust and the press; I think the ascendancy of The Huffington Post is pretty much the nadir of journalism.

I expect we'll start seeing an uptick soon. The NYT went back behind a paywall and survived. So did the WSJ. I pay for The Week, I pay for NSFWCorp. All this blog shit? It's gonna be a footnote, like Hearst and Pulitzer and the Spanish American War.