Australia: Platform for misandrist “screeds” ends, with death of feminist Fairfax Media

Used to be journalists had a duty to readers to uncover newsworthy stories, including via investigation, because the main or a major revenue stream for the paper was the reader: daily buyers, subscribers, etc. Advertisers may have contributed heftily but buyers were still not to be trifled with, especially as circulation drove ad space prices.

Now, that stream of income (paying customers) has all but dried up. So people in media (as it is now called) have principally only one source of income: Internet ad revenue. Click-through tracking leading to visitor counts and commissions on purchases via click-throughs. Same way Google makes piles of cash off its Ad service, only they are brokers, not hosters of ads. But as you can see from Google Ad revenues, there's gold in them thar click-throughs.

So do journalists work for the public? No. They work for the media company that signs their paycheck, and their employers' priorities are keeping the advertisers happy. Click-bait is now all it's about. Drive traffic to the site. Put *anything* up on the web that will get people to come to your site. That is the entire name of the game. Fact-checking? Too much time and trouble, and besides, that means you need to employ fact-checkers. Nope, not anymore. And so on. Heck, with AI going as it is, humans will no longer be needed to write copy. Soon, it'll be machines churning out copy and machines reading it. Quite a world we have in development here. (And on the way, increasingly insane, desperate made-up news stories will come racing at the reader at ever-increasing rates. I have all but stopped bothering to look at or read national headline news. I just don't trust it anymore because I know the whole mechanism of accountability and responsibility between the reader and the journalist has gone.)

Anyway, if you can't bring readers to your web site, you can't post traffic numbers that are attractive to your advertisers. It's hard to fake these numbers because advertisers track click-throughs from your site. If the numbers you provide don't jibe with their referrer statistics, they won't buy your story that 100,000 people saw their ads last month when in fact you only got a paltry 100 click-throughs from the site. Hard to lie about these things and make it stick.

Well, one way to keep people from coming to your site is to hire people to generate content of various kinds that insults and denigrates them. Major media concerns seem to be forgetting that half the human population is in fact male. And like females, we don't like it when all you seem to be able to do is $hit on/insult us. And guess what, a fair number of women don't like listening to it or reading it, either. A great way to drive off a good half of all possible readers/listeners is to insult and denigrate half the human race in a more or less on-going basis.

But ideologues never seem to learn. Looks like Fairfax Media has learned this lesson in a corporately fatal fashion. Perhaps someone from there will walk away h@ving learned a lesson or two, but I doubt it.

I was just having the worst day ever. Reading that Fairfax is finally going the way of the dodo--and rightly so--and that Phlegm Ford will soon be out of work has just turned everything around for me. Karma is a you know what! Day made!