It seems like only yesterday that journalism faced existential challenges from technology platforms that helped anyone publish whatever they wanted, took over the distribution of news, and usurped the advertising market with promises of precise targeting. It turns out that the news profession can be quite successful at repelling those challenges. The enemy is in retreat; the news business just needs to be bolder about claiming the spoils.
In the past week, the Huffington Post scaled back its platform for unpaid bloggers and Facebook decided to ask users to rank news sources by trustworthiness. Both represent a clear preference for traditional journalism — in which people get paid for producing stories for good reason.