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I can't stop thinking about this story. I went to sleep thinking about it and I woke up thinking about it. It's so infuriating. $3b stolen from the journalism industry last year alone. We need to be repaid. https://branded.substack.com/p/inside-the-chaos-of-brand-safety
I can't stop thinking about the colleagues I've had over the years who have died prematurely of heart disease or cancer that went undetected until it killed them because they didn't have health insurance and couldn't afford health care without it
Or those who were forced by circumstance to live in their cars, or in shelters, simply because there's no money in journalism. Or how in 2014, I started looking for a full-time job because my border work wasn't making enough for me to pay my bills and eat
Or those of us who were instructed to cover wildfires, but had to provide our own protective gear. And do you know how expensive good helmets and bulletproof vests are? We're putting ourselves in great physical danger for pennies on the dollar
We get hounded, harassed, threatened, arrested, teargassed, pepper sprayed, followed home for our pains, and many of us make well below a living wage in our towns because we've been fed the line, "there's no money in journalism," and we have just accepted it.
2016 was the first year EVER that I didn't have some sort of a side hustle, whether it was writing and editing copy or selling photos or working in a restaurant or whatever. Shit, I was going to give tarot card readings to drunks at bars but I could never figure out how lol
Meanwhile, all these little shits are running around Silicon Valley scooping up all the money we're making them so they can ride their little Segways from home to work and have their little buffets and play little fun office games every day
and get glowing profiles written about them by the exact same people whose money they are using for this bullshit -- as they give all their buddies' offensive sites the highest possible ratings so they can make money off advertising. And this is before FB and Google fuckery!
I mean, remember "pivot to video" from those made-up metrics? Ask anyone in journalism how badly that devastated our industry, as eager-beaver know-nothings in charge of newsroom budgets insisted that we could make sO mUcH mOrE mOnEy that way. A lot of good journos got fired.
So these fuckers deliberately destroyed our industry and now dole out "grants" that are just enough to keep us from starving completely and which keep us all on the hook so that we're afraid to properly scrutinize exactly what they are doing, which is leaving the entire world
open to disinformation and propaganda attacks. And then when people like me come out about it, @Facebook and other tech companies level smear campaigns against us and try to run us out of the business.
Well this fucking ends now. I'm going to make sure of it.
Well this fucking ends now. I'm going to make sure of it.
And then there's this! https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/16/google-facebook-suppress-competition-ads-447315
And this!! https://apnews.com/article/us-govt-states-sue-facebook-antitrust-312de23e330a318ff8d339ef38dfbc08
There IS money in journalism. It's just been stolen from us by the very robber barons who we need to be scrutinizing the most as they play at being "disruptors." They're just fucking thieves.
It's been exactly two years since I came forward now, in one of the most terrifying decisions of my life, and I was more right to do so than I ever knew back then. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/13/they-dont-care-facebook-fact-checking-in-disarray-as-journalists-push-to-cut-ties
This is what @Facebook prefers to actual journalism. This is what their algorithms privilege over news -- and it is deliberate. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/1339597185365622786?s=20
