Journalism is just about dead. It is interesting that there was an essay in the NY Times about the fact that its success is making other newspaper in the US make it. Photographically you can only believe photographs if you know the photographer or about them. We get the NY Times hard copy every day (and the last 20 years) and the photographs and the writers are first class. I do remember that Chris Hedges in a distant past fell for the weapons of mass destruction that took the US to war with Iraq. The magazines of the Times have first class photographs and the typography is cutting edge (sometimes it is hard to read). It is amazing that three newspapers, NY Times, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have such good investigating reporting while the LA Times does not seem to. And the magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker are still first class magazines.
On line I enjoy reading the Buenos Aires Times which does not have a pay wall. They were really the first to reveal those 18 degrees Celsius in Antarctica a few weeks back. The Guardian is good, too because they have money and don’t necessarily have to depend so much on ads.
To me the problem with journalism is the existence of such a terrible polarity. In the 80s and 90s I worked for a Vancouver business magazine that had two pages in which one was called From the Left and the other From the Right. Two columnists would write about the same subject from the same point of view.
In my long relationship with the Globe and Mail they had advance knowledge on arts articles so I was given sometimes a full week to work on the photographs. I worked with very good writers. One of them Christopher Dafoe so what was happening and he became a very good lawyer. The lead time meant that photographs could be done with lots of thought. Here is an example: http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/10/the-metamorphosis-of-death-kissed.html
But with the advent of the internet directors like Martin Scorsese stopped traveling to cities to promote their films. Interviews were phoners or with email and more recently with Whatsapp or Skype.
I believe that Time Magazine had so much influence in the last century that their God is Dead cover shocked the world. They could have possibly come out with another with the title Philosophy is Dead.
But not all is bad in this century. Every writer who writes for the NY Times has a Twitter handle. You can communicate with these writers and they often get back to me.
Communications is changing in ways that some might not understand. When I started my blog in 2006 it was paramount to have an RSS feed. About 8 years later I had 450,000 people who read (or at least looked at it). But now nobody uses RSS and if you don’t insert your blog post link to social media people do not know you have blogged. There are even people who ignore the link to the blog and just notice the photograph. That is what is so interesting about the Medium system of determining how long it takes to read an individual essay. So then they are able to tell you who looks and who reads.
The problem with Medium and some US media is its centralization around the US. When I write a Medium essay in Spanish it disappears. I have read articles in US publications about feminist poets and writers of the 20th century and they never mention one of the best, the Swiss-born Argentine Alfonsina Storni who I believe rivals Emily Dickinson.
On line you can find lectures that Borges gave in English in a few US universities. If you look up Julio Cortázar in YouTube you will have scads of stuff of him reading his stories, poems and some of them have avant-garde video attached.
I have no idea if I have answered any of your questions.
