I feel like the problem is we've blended reporting and op-eds into the same thing, just like we've blended journalists and influencers into the same thing. Influencers are not journalists. They're performance artists that talk about the news. Journalism needs a licensing program, like lawyers.

I think too the competition from clickbait publications has really hastened this. People mostly read opinion pieces and get angry now if a news article is written neutrally, even if it still implies the same thing that the whiner wants to see in print. Everything is either a shit tabloid now or…

We demanded news for free. The result is that instead of us paying authors, authors are paid by how much traffic they generate. Now we have sensationalism in the headline only for it to be contradicted 5 paragraphs down. We did this to ourselves.