This is the sort of story you'd expect a good PR firm to seed in a prominent paper and get free media for their client.

Calling these people journalists is an insult to the few real journalists we have left.

I'd like to just make a counterpoint: It's not that we have fewer "real" journalists, its that we created a massive number of platforms that don't hire journalists but proport to peddle "news".

We still have plenty of great, high quality journalists, but we have even more low-quality clickbait and chaff to sift through. The issue isn't that the good stuff went away, it's that we're flooded with junk because it's easier to produce.

But we really do have less actual journalists. As a profession they've been gutted by internet and social media.

Maybe? Let's get some definitions: Who counts as a journalist/reporter? Who should we be respecting?

Of course "person who writes articles published in print news" is going away. But is the guy writing a well researched piece for Vox not a journalist?

It just seems like we have more everything, both signal and noise, and that's the issue. We wanted to democratize information, and we got it. Surprise, most people don't put out very good information. But at least we have a lot of it...

Local news is dying (and being monopolized by the Sinclair group), and being replaced by online news. By sheer numbers, even a 25% percent reduction in local journalism would vastly outnumber any number of paid online journalism, because there's an order of magnitude difference in the total niche space available.