Journalists (formerly called reporters) are story tellers. 80% of them have degrees in the humanities. Yet many of them have titles like Senior Climate Reporter, Senior Health Reporter, Senior Space Reporter, Senior Science Reporter, Senior Legal Analyst – but have no formal training in the subjects they cover. As a consequence, they lack the knowledge to critically and skeptically question bona fide experts, or to provide detailed explanations of their covered subjects.

This problem is here:

• Media: Who Reports the News? – Social Panic
• Prominent journalists come from prestigious backgrounds – Social Panic
• Why do people invest in expensive degrees to pursue “journalism”? – Social Panic
• Media: The high prevalence of bias in media reporting – Social Panic

Last week, I watched some mainstream media reports on semiconductor manufacturing – done by reporters who are story tellers. Their stories mostly focused on interviewing executives, while purporting tell us about “2nm” semiconductor manufacturing (but without even noting that “2nm” is a 100% marketing term that is not a measurement of anything). These end up being “personality” stories under the cover of being connected to tech’ish.

Then I watched two YouTube videos about the same topic – and the independent YouTube videos were orders of magnitude better and more detailed – I learned a lot from these videos.

Here is one of them from Veritasium. Producer and host Derek has a PhD in physics education and Casper, the “reporter” in the Netherlands at ASML, has an undergraduate degree in physics, a Masters in engineering physics, and a BA in international business, and has run a business in Taiwan, worked in Canada, and is now back in the Netherlands.

Citizen journalists are now reporting on potential mass fraud in Minnesota and other states, on the X platform – and possibly running circles around “professional journalists”.

BigMedia news is dying. Local newspapers today have terminated over half of their employees in the past 2 decades – because Craigslist ended their local classified ad monopolies, and the Internet ended their local news monopoly.

Now, BigMedia is dying because the practitioners have the wrong skillsets and the wrong model. (Some reporters do have the right knowledge and skills, and some really have continued to learn “on the job” – but most do not have the right backgrounds for what is needed today. There are some science and tech reporters who have real science backgrounds, and most business/finance reporters have backgrounds in business/economics/finance, or meteorology reporters have degrees in meteorology. But everyone else covering all other topics tends to be the degree in English Lit, Creative Writing, History or journalism.)

BigMedia’s response is to double down on things like paid subscriptions (our state’s main newspaper, our local paper, CNN) – while NewMedia has gone to X and YouTube.

Watch this long video and actually learn something! This is the future of journalism and documentaries.

FYI – the text description for this lists about 23 individuals involved in the production. This is not a lightweight production.