[HN Gopher] Publishing Is Back to the Future
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Publishing Is Back to the Future
Author : ZaidMalhis
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-01-27 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stratechery.com)
| lbarrow wrote:
| I'm struck by how much Ben's description of what the NYT is
| becoming - an opinionated, subscriber-focused institution -
| matches up with how I think about Substack and Patreon. I
| wouldn't be surprised if in the long run we basically end up with
| two types of news and media institutions: the advertising-focused
| ones who go for incredibly broad and often low-quality work, and
| the subscribed-focused ones who are more narrow.
| tabtab wrote:
| NYT should more clearly split news from op-eds. Op-eds are
| supposed to be opinionated by definition.
| amoorthy wrote:
| This is the best part of Ben's article:
|
| > I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it
| comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and
| that is thanks to the Internet...the New York Times doesn't have
| the truth, but then again, neither do I, and neither does Amazon.
|
| This is the key insight in news today. You cannot rely on any one
| source for the full story. You must read multiple perspectives,
| ideally from different points in the political spectrum.
|
| My father, and likely others who grew up pre-internet, knew this
| intuitively and always read multiple papers. We should do the
| same and stop expecting our favourite source to be the final word
| on a story.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| I remember my father used to listen to Dr. Laura every day on
| his commute. My father is every bit a Massachusetts
| progressive. He used to arrange his schedule to make sure he
| could hear things like Dr. Farrakhan's speech at the Million
| Man March. He'd read the Wall Street Journal and get
| frustrated.
|
| I once asked why, and he said "It's important to know what
| other people think, even if they're wrong. Because every once
| in a while, you're the one who's wrong."
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| > He'd read the Wall Street Journal and get frustrated.
|
| I'm frustrated with the WSJ too. What used to be a
| conservative but respected publication has over the years
| turned to little more than pop news and sensationalism.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| And at least you can be right about what other people think,
| you can be right about how other people are wrong
| ivanhoe wrote:
| At some point it becomes a burden to do it yourself, so you'll
| be forced to outsource it to a person or company of trust, to
| follow all the news for you and filter out the important ones,
| ask around with their contacts, do the fact checking, and give
| you a digestible overview of what's going on - and then you're
| basically back at the square one, as you've just re-invented
| the journalism.
| toyg wrote:
| I was taught this by my dad and my schoolteachers too. Up until
| the '90s, in Italy you knew in advance whose editorial
| perspective you were getting from any given newspaper or tv
| bulletin; so it was deemed necessary to survey a plurality of
| them to figure out the most likely scenario for any given piece
| of news. In the end, though, only the most politically engaged
| would actually do that, and typically in order to know "what
| the enemy thinks" for tactical reasons.
|
| Nowadays it's all a bit murky - traditional big-money owners
| are not interested in paying for a dying media, and political
| parties are chronically broke and often short-lived, so even
| the biggest properties can quickly change hands from chancer to
| chancer.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This is the key insight in news today. You cannot rely on
| any one source for the full story. You must read multiple
| perspectives, ideally from different points in the political
| spectrum._
|
| The problem is that counter-intuitively, in the past with
| limited news sources, you're more or less forced to hear more
| sides of the story. A newspaper would carry both e.g.
| conservatives and liberals (at least a few of the side it
| didn't favor) to attract people. If you bought it, you had the
| chance to see the other side expressed.
|
| Now with the internet, we can loose ourselves in an echo bubble
| of our own creation (only reading stuff on "our" side, since
| we're no longer forced to get our news wholesale like in print
| newspaper format). Or the news website or social media site can
| elect to show us just (or much more of) the stuff we like by
| itself.
| Booktrope wrote:
| A shallow, one-sided take on what happened to the news business.
| I mean, here's a guy who quotes himself (!) saying,
|
| "I'd go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger
| place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been
| previously, and that is thanks to the Internet"
|
| As his example of this, he appears to the New York Times as his
| exemplar of a company that's been relatively successful online.
| Relative to newspapers that have basically failed that is.
| Comparted to Breitbart, Fox News, and other non-fact based
| journalism, relatively, well, less successful.
|
| Google is in a sense an aggregator but according to algorithms
| that it's careful to keep secret. Its main financial goal in
| doing this is to maximize ad revenue it can extract from the
| feed, and Google is more successful in that regard than any of
| the sources of the news it aggregates. Leaving other concerns
| aside, this does drain ever more revenue out of the business of
| creating news, since advertisers now choose between buying ads
| from the aggegator or ads from the source, and no, Google's work
| hasn't doubled marketing budgets of advertisers.
|
| Facebook controls what people see -- it doesn't aggregate, it
| segregates. You see what Facebook has determined you want to see,
| and usually they're right (It would be much better for us as a
| community if they were wrong much more often and showed everyone
| things they don't want to see.) Facebook financial goal in
| choosing what to put in user feeds is maximizing ad revenue for
| Facebook. This has further drained ad revenue away from sources
| of content.
|
| The piece claims, hey, the internet was making it harder on news
| sources before the ascendency of Facebook and Google, though as
| late as the 1990's newspapers were still a very profitable
| business. Yeah, Craig's List grabbed a huge share of the
| classified ad business which traditionally was a major part of
| newspaper revenue, and newspapers stupidly failed to mount any
| significant effort to get that revenue back. But Google and
| Facebook have vastly more effective methods of siphoning off
| revenue as they've dominated market share and therefore become
| indispensable for all news outlets.
|
| It not only starves news sources of revenue but favors sources
| that tell people what they want to hear in a way that excites the
| audience. In other words, the current sorry state of our
| political world.
| derefr wrote:
| > It would be much better for us as a community if they were
| wrong much more often and showed everyone things they don't
| want to see.
|
| Tangent to this, "Tumblr is the best social media site of
| 2021":
|
| https://phantomrose96.tumblr.com/post/639134013230088192/i-l...
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Comparted to Breitbart, Fox News, and other non-fact based
| journalism_
|
| You're assuming that the NYT is "fact based journalism". I
| don't think it is. They are pushing a point of view, just as
| every other media source is.
|
| _> indispensable for all news outlets_
|
| I know the news outlets claim this, but I find the claim to be
| either very stupid (highly unlikely) or very disingenuous (much
| more likely). If I want to know what the NYT published today, I
| can go to their website. If I want to know what CNN is saying
| today, I can just watch them (or go to their website). Everyone
| knows these news sources exist and where to find them; it's not
| like they're new startups trying to acquire users. So the idea
| that the news outlets need to be visible in Google searches or
| Facebook feeds for people to know what they are saying is
| ludicrous.
| Booktrope wrote:
| Google and FB have a huge share of the internet reading
| market; polls repeatedly show that over 30% of the population
| gets its news from Facebook posts, and another large share
| get info from Google searches. Twitter also plays a huge
| role, and soon to be added, stuff like Gab where no you will
| not be served up any liberal stuff. With the market dominated
| by a few "aggregators" it's not quite accurate to say, oh,
| news sources can just get their own following. Of course they
| can get some market share; the NYT has done better than most
| newspapers at that, and Breitbart even better, due I think to
| its much better alignment with social media (sensationalism,
| tribalism, etc.)
|
| Just because you can find CNN(or even MSNBC) on your TV or go
| to their website, doesn't address the role of FB and Google
| in dissemination of news. Let me repeat, over 30 percent of
| Americans get news from their Facebook feeds. Facebook uses
| these feeds to attract advertising on a scale no media
| producer can even dream of, and it comes from the same
| advertising budgets.
|
| I have to say, when you name call people who disagree with
| you (very stupid or disingenuous), it's a good indicator,
| your argument doesn't have a very solid foundation. You say,
| it's "ludicrous" to say news outlets need visibility in
| Google or FB for people to know what they're saying, you
| totally miss the point. Yeah, I can set up a web site with my
| opinions, and anyone can come and find out what I'm saying
| too. We're talking about how to make economically viable
| newspapers that provide fact-based reporting (no, not
| perfectly factual or "true" but a serious effort), and that
| does require having a presence where a huge share of the
| potential audience finds their news sources.
|
| If someone could actually build a successful media business
| on the scale of a serious newspaper without relying on social
| media to send readers in today's market, why, they'd be the
| most successful newspaper exec since, oh, I dunno, Joe
| Pulitzer, who incidentally was famous for something called
| "yellow journalism," meaning sensationalized, not very
| factual stuff.
|
| No, NYT isn't some paragon of "truth", but it does make a
| much more serious effort to report facts than the non-fact
| based media. Yes there's some slant to its reporting, but its
| not always the same (news tends to be less liberal than
| editorial, for example, and they publish quite a few right
| wing op ed pieces for variety. If you think the quality of
| journalism on Brietbart and NYT are equivalent, well, you
| must not think of "facts" in quite the way I do, you know,
| stuff that actually happened and can be verified.
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| they got a sugar high with clubhouse and now they think they can
| scale their medium investor scam media up.
|
| probably also motivated by /r/wsb latest forays.
| yuy910616 wrote:
| are you referring to a16z?
| app4soft wrote:
| > _This Bill establishes a mandatory code of conduct to help..._
|
| The Future would be restricted just by more CoCs.
| te_chris wrote:
| There's some good here but to talk only of business models misses
| the point. News provides public goods too and in examples like
| nyt, politico etc. they're evaporating in favour of elite news
| for the elites. Now, the Australian bill is almost certainly at
| the behest of the Murdoch press, and so is likely shit...but if
| society, expressed through govt., decides that it values the
| public good of news, then society is entitled to find ways to
| fund that public good.
| interestica wrote:
| I didn't think of publishing focusing on business models as
| something in opposition to the public good. I think, if
| anything, it demonstrates just how valuable and powerful and
| necessary these elements are for a well-functioning society.
| And as integral parts, it would likely need a stronger
| relationship with government to better ensure it serves the
| public good. And when, for many, sites like Facebook at the
| primary source of news, it means that govt has to address it as
| more than just a "private business".
| 0xy wrote:
| Corporate media provides the opposite of public good. In the
| case of NYT, they lied about WMDs in Iraq which helped sell the
| war that killed thousands of people.
|
| It's not obvious to me why they should be let off the hook for
| beating the blood-soaked war drums.
| Proziam wrote:
| I see that you're being downvoted, presumably by people who
| aren't aware of the history of that subject.
| closeparen wrote:
| Ignorance of the business side is not childish or haphazard.
| Editorial independence - that the news should not be influenced
| by business concerns - is as important to journalists as "do no
| harm" is to doctors.
|
| Separation between newsroom and ad business staff is maintained
| intentionally as a matter of ethics. It is the same sort of
| animal as the separation between proprietary trading and advisory
| services at a bank. The "Chinese wall."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
| 13415 wrote:
| Today, Youtube suggested to me to watch a 15 s Hitler speech.
| Why? I have not the slightest idea. But I clicked out of
| curiosity, just to see once more how "good" ol' Hitler spoke. It
| was one of his better speeches. Comments disabled.
|
| I'd say that's the problem of modern journalism. They have to
| compete with algorithms that maximize clicks and engagement, no
| matter what content. I hope I'm wrong but I see no way how this
| battle can be won in the long run. Maybe a bill to make big tech
| pay for the content they "appropriate" (or synthesize from
| sources with AI) would at least be a try.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > I hope I'm wrong but I see no way how this battle can be won
| in the long run.
|
| I mean, this problem _is_ actually very simple to fix: make
| advertising a felony. There 's no way that's ever going to
| _happen_ , but it is simple, easy to see, and effective.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I can see that NYT could have an online front-page that shows
| me kinds of stories I am interested in. Still they need not be
| fake news, like lot of Facebook posts are about(?). Just makes
| sense. If they're not working towards that I don't know why.
| Adapt NYT to the possibilities of per customer customization
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