A tidal wave is coming. The destruction of patience is one of the most dramatic cultural shifts we’ll probably experience of our lifetimes, and it pervades everything — journalism, music, comedy, the works. I was at a dinner party recently with a film studies professor who said some of her own students didn’t really watch movies anymore. I don’t say this to beat up on Zoomers or act like it’s a generationally localized phenomenon: I’ve been watching a lot fewer movies and spending a lot more time on TikTok too. I just think the kids shifted their media habits first and the rest of us are slowly catching up. “Ten years ago, more or less, I realized that I had forgotten how to read,” one of my journalist colleagues, Vincent Bevins, wrote recently about training himself to have the patience for books again. “I never pretend that I am going to get some reading done with a cellular device on my person. Those people that arrive at a coffee shop, and then place a phone and a book together on the table, are trying to beat Satan in a game that he has devised. It might be possible to win, but I have never seen it done.”Consumers hardly ever realize it, but they hold traditional news media to vastly higher standards of accurate and ethical behavior than practically every other information source they encounter, even when they’ve started relying on those other information sources instead of the news media. It’s good consumers hold journalism to high standards. The problem here is that the bar is getting lowered, not raised, for everything else.
— Read on mattdpearce.substack.com/p/journalisms-fight-for-survival-in
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