There is of course journalism as a marketing category. Headlines, the fiction that we're reading articles that were written for some local or regional paper paid for by the classified ads, correspondents covering different beats or locations. News channels or timeslots, "this just in," etc. Elon Musk has called X (né Twitter) a new news source, but its mechanism for reconciling claims often still involves citing articles published under the aegis of "news" institutions that seem like they would have been respectable under the old regime as authorities.
But I'm not asking about the third-degree simulacrum of journalism invoked by vaguely newsy websites or brands that mask the absence of an underlying reality. I'm asking about correspondence with the underlying reality that the idea of journalism was originally supposed to represent: the idea that somewhere, some readily intelligible events are happening to people, which many people have an interest in knowing about, so paid specialists go find out what's happening, write it up (or record a verbal or audiovisual description, sometimes with supporting direct recordings of the event), and publish these descriptions of new events periodically, so that they're available for the general public to read about, listen to on the radio, or watch on television.
I've heard some friends suggest that news reporting is mostly no longer happening, despite the continued creation of ostensible news content - e.g. that while you can still get a stream of characters from the New York Times that satisfies the demand for a master signifier of the form "news," you can't find out what's happening in the way you might have been able to a few decades ago. But is this true? If so, what would it look like?
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