Good stories take months (sometimes years), so you need hundreds of good journalists to make good stories in a high enough frequency that people would even consider paying for a subscription.
You're either chasing public grants (and people always question your impartiality), or you die. You can count on one hand the ones that have been in this game for longer than a decade and even then you'll have fingers to spare.
Today we lost a great one.
Disclaimer: I work for OCCRP.org which I would (subjectively) put in the same basket. No Pulitzer yet, but we got a Nobel Peace Prize nomination this year!
Let's not kid ourselves, for every decent journalist in these organizations there's five useless ones who are primarily employed to remind us non-physicists of Murray Gell-Man
To the extent that publications like The Atlantic have declined, I think it's because clickbait works, or at least it seems to if you're dependent on the online ads business model, so legacy publications have chosen to become more like Buzzfeed.
Good stories take months (sometimes years), so you need hundreds of good journalists to make good stories in a high enough frequency that people would even consider paying for a subscription.
You're either chasing public grants (and people always question your impartiality), or you die. You can count on one hand the ones that have been in this game for longer than a decade and even then you'll have fingers to spare.
Today we lost a great one.
Disclaimer: I work for OCCRP.org which I would (subjectively) put in the same basket. No Pulitzer yet, but we got a Nobel Peace Prize nomination this year!