Anyone can produce "analysis". Watch the cable news sometime--it's 100% "analysis" because only three facts have come out in the last hour, and they have a dozen people on call to give "analysis" of this "breaking news". Analysis is cheap. With more and more people offering this analysis for free, you'd think it'd be easier in the long run to just filter all of this freely available analysis and you'd end up with something just as good as if you paid the Financial Times.
Facts, however, are in short supply. Discovering a surprising fact or two is good journalism. "The CIA has secret prisons in Eastern Europe to imprison suspected terrorists". "The Watergate Hotel break-in was orchestrated by members of Nixon's re-election campaign". But facts like that are hard to get. The only people who'd pay for those facts are the political opponents of whoever they embarrass, which means if both parties are implicated you can cover things up. Also, political opponents will pay just as much for a convincing lie as they will for the truth.
"More data beats a better algorithm" is just as true for journalism. Yes, I'm sure the Financial Times does a good job analyzing the same shallow set of data we can all get for free. I'm sure they do a better job than most other places do. But analysis is what most of the media does. They scrape press releases and the like as hard as they can, never looking for more facts.
At some point, journalism is a public good. But, uniquely among public goods, it cannot be provided by the government because journalism often operates in opposition to the government.
I'm sure dagw would not agree with your description of cable news as analysis. I think he/she is trying to say that newspaper analysis by respectable papers is worth a lot, and it won't lose it's value overnight. People still value NYT because it is respectable and offers great analysis.
Facts, however, are in short supply. Discovering a surprising fact or two is good journalism. "The CIA has secret prisons in Eastern Europe to imprison suspected terrorists". "The Watergate Hotel break-in was orchestrated by members of Nixon's re-election campaign". But facts like that are hard to get. The only people who'd pay for those facts are the political opponents of whoever they embarrass, which means if both parties are implicated you can cover things up. Also, political opponents will pay just as much for a convincing lie as they will for the truth.
"More data beats a better algorithm" is just as true for journalism. Yes, I'm sure the Financial Times does a good job analyzing the same shallow set of data we can all get for free. I'm sure they do a better job than most other places do. But analysis is what most of the media does. They scrape press releases and the like as hard as they can, never looking for more facts.
At some point, journalism is a public good. But, uniquely among public goods, it cannot be provided by the government because journalism often operates in opposition to the government.