To protect democratic values, journalism must save itself (barf alert)

…Even after the creation of the World Wide Web and web browsers, for many years readers of news largely found it on journalism websites, where information was handpicked by professional editors. Now, half of adult Americans get their news from social media (Pew Research center 2023) often curated—that is, selected, organized, interpreted, and presented—by their family and friends. “The editors are being replaced by just people posting whatever they want, so it’s loss of a professional standard about what counts,” explains Stephen Ansolabehere, a government professor at Harvard University. “What is being lost is the idea that people trust an...