A few nights ago I was in the kitchen making dinner. My roommate walked into the house, sat down, turned on the TV and put it on Channel 10 (sigh), The Project was playing.
I said: “Oh, you’re watching The Project?”
She replied: “No, I’m watching the News.”
We are currently experiencing a rapid decline in the quality of modern news broadcasting.
This is no more clear than in the kind of figures who anchor the evening news. 7 O’clock evening news arnchored by figure of integiry like Roger Climpson and James Dibble are being replaced with ‘infotanment’ trash like The Project which is hosted by ineffectual and unqualifed figures like Carrie Bickmore. The old news anchor is being replaced with younger, more appealing figures like Carrie, and the appeal is no longer the story but rather entertainment. Charm is more important than facts.
Why is this happening?
Because platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan are increasingly becoming the first souce of news for people. Why? Because they’re quicker. In the time it takes legacy media broadcaster to put together one information segment twitter users can generate thousands of tweets. This aggregation of small pieces of information is colloquially called a ‘bridge of pebbles’.
If legacy media was given a similar name it would be a ‘bridge of boulders’. Modern media is pebbles because their feedback loop is shorter, their news is quicker, and that’s a bad thing.
News is breaking before people have the time to research it.
Say what you will about boulders, but when they were the only mode of delivering news, at least we knew we were picking the stories that needed to be told. Pebbles let everyone become the journalist, because anyone hear something and write a quick 140 character (or 280 now I guess) piece about it, and that means that anything they want to be news IS news.
I googled ‘Carrie Bickmore’ while writing this blog post, and what showed up on google broke me a little bit. No videos of her interviews showed up, there was nothing on her journalistic achievements or style. What there was were numerous gossip articles about her baby and ‘racy remarks’. These stories of course, were pushed along by Twitter, who’s users avidly made remark after remark, reporting and rereporting the story from their own persepctive, ad hoc, without integrity or intention.
Carrie Bickmore isn’t reporting news.
She is the news.
Synthetic Boy 
Hi Josh,
Interesting article~ I enjoyed reading your personal experience with what the people around you view as ‘news’ and this is very true, especially recently as it’s been influenced by social media – it incorporates a very individual and personalised blog post. I note that it’s quite interesting how you almost seem biased at first but the reader won’t be 100% sure, what’s your true stance on whether the overthrowing of mainstream media is bad or good for journalists or not? You can find many articles about the good or bad things from both perspectives 🙂 E.g: Twitter is good for news stories as it invokes discussions and feedback from viewers.
I loved the way that you introduced metaphors of ‘pebbles’ and ‘boulders’ as they are a very good way to visualise what the difference between the two really look like. I agree that “platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan are increasingly becoming the first source of news for people,” and I’d like to introduce that Facebook has also gradually become a platform where people look for news rather than share or connect with family and friends. Here is a link that you might be interested in that talks about that further: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/biggest-concern-twitter-where-does-platform-go-next
Overall, great job but fyi there are some spelling errors here and there 😉
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This is a very valid point about news anchors becoming the news. It’s almost as if you tune in to the show for the hosts rather than the actual news being presented. Another person who mirrors this is John Oliver. Started as a comedian in the UK and is now a satirical news presenter in the US. His show is entertaining before it is factual, even though his show is still factual.
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