[HN Gopher] Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 142 points
Date : 2024-08-14 19:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (diaspora.glasswings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (diaspora.glasswings.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Despite a great deal of jawboning and gnashing of teeth about the
| state of news media and possible remedies there are a number of
| dimensions of the problem and potential opportunities I rarely
| see discussed.
|
| I'd add to my 2022 comments the following:
|
| - When the NY Times hardened its paywall notably in TK-year,
| front-page appearances on Hacker News _fell to a quarter_ of
| their previous trend. There was no policy change at HN, just
| voting behaviour on submissions.
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (Own data based
| on a 2023 scrape of all HN front-page activity.)
|
| - Broadcast / programmed television seems to be undergoing a
| similar transition as occurred to newspapers in the past decade.
| See: "Traditional TV is Dying" <https://www.theguardian.com/film/
| article/2024/aug/08/traditi...>.
|
| - My "short reading list" is available via archive:
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi...>
| (The subreddit it was posted to is now private protesting
| Reddit's enshittification.)
|
| - Most _successful_ media have had either government support
| (e.g., the BBC, Deutschlandfunk) _or_ a strong multi-tier
| financing model.
|
| Of the last, the _Economist_ suggests a commercial basis being
| roughly by thirds subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke
| research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Public
| broadcasting in the US (NPR, PBS) benefit by member support,
| commercial underwriting (now little different from ads), and some
| government support (mostly to local stations). Traditionally
| within the US commercial publication revenue was based on banner
| ads, classifieds, legal notices (effectively an obligate support
| of newspapers by law imposed on private citizens and firms),
| subscriptions, and news-stand sales.
|
| Currently, the ISP as _at least a major payment gateway_ seems a
| highly underutilised opportunity. What translates to an Internet
| age is clearly still being worked out, though at the cost of many
| established institutions, large and small, failing entirely.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And I've remembered one other additional insight I'd meant to
| include above: _I 'd far prefer if more news entities operated
| like Wikipedia_.
|
| I'd first noticed this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
| and tsunami, which was a huge, complex, long-evolving story
| covering a huge area. Trying to get _useful_ information from
| news media was ... maddening. Even _good_ sources were at best
| useful for 1) initial reports and 2) a long dribble of
| additional developments, but after the first day or so
| _reading, listening, or watching_ news items gave very little
| clear overview of the story.
|
| There've been many, many, many such cases since. The Oroville
| Dam crisis (a notable press exception was Brad Plumer, then at
| _Vox_ , whose single-author reportage largely equaled
| Wikipedia). Covid-19. Various major court cases.
|
| Most recently, after hitting several outlets (BBC, CBC, NPR, NY
| Times, Guardian) over the outbreak of riots in the UK, and
| trying to relate the news and answer questions to an older
| relative, I remembered my Wikipedia trick and turned to their
| coverage. _The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gave
| all the relevant context far more clearly than any of five or
| so mainstream media sources I 'd turned to._
|
| Moreover, the Wikipedia article had on the order of 175
| footnotes and references, _linked_ in the article but
| _separated_ from the text, as footnotes are, meaning that one
| could _read the text as a narrative_ and _NOT_ be constantly
| interrupted by attributions as one so often is in current
| reporting. _Yes_ , it's useful to have sources cited, but
| _doing so as part of the narrative_ is itself, in my
| experience, mind-numbing in its own way.
|
| And if you're not happy with the Wikipedia coverage, there's
| the article's "Talk" page, which discusses issues and conflicts
| amongst editors, _at length_. At the time I 'd checked, the
| article ran about 18 screens (on my A4 e-ink tablet), only half
| of which were the actual article, the remainder being
| references and other Wikipedia "furniture". The Talk page ran
| _38 screens_ , which is to say, twice the length of the article
| and four times the length of the actual text, such that
| virtually all major conflicts and concerns were voiced there.
| And of course there's edit history so the reader can see what's
| changed, when, and by whom.
|
| I'd _really_ like to see media organisations adopt a Wikipedia-
| like format for long, complex, and evolving stories such that
| it 's easy to turn to such a page and get _the best, concise,
| current_ state of understanding, again with sources and
| discussion if wanted.
|
| Most media organisations, even those which are now fully
| digital, seem still to embrace the notion of a static printed
| product, and haven't fully embraced the capabilities of digital
| production, dissemination, change-control, and disclosure. It's
| ... disappointing.
|
| But we _do_ have Wikipedia, and I 'd strongly suggest using it.
|
| (A more permissive edit capability on HN, and for that matter,
| Diaspora*, would also be nifty. Perhaps an earned privilege,
| probably with strong penalties for abuse, as in "you lose
| privs". But SRSLY...)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Year of the NYT paywall was 2020, my "TK-year" note above not
| having been caught by me before the edit window closed.
| slavik81 wrote:
| I quite lite The Economist, but the cost has been increasing
| quite significantly. It's now 429 CAD/yr for a print
| subscription. I don't have time to read every issue, so it's
| getting difficult to justify renewing.
| 57FkMytWjyFu wrote:
| When I realized how many news stories were paid placements, I
| refused to be billed to read them.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Why do you think that is, and how might you suggest reducing
| their incidence?
| lunarmony wrote:
| multi-tier payment structures (subscription + ads + paid
| placements) are very common for most news industry players..
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm aware that some people find the news _as it exists_ largely
| useless. I 'm going to suggest that _this is in fact a symptom of
| the larger problem I 'm referencing_.
|
| And that news _can_ be useful, even _vital_ at times. And
| performs a critical role in a democratic polity. One which is
| increasingly not being performed, most especially at the local
| and regional level.
|
| And that the proposals I'm making in TFA might be worth
| discussion in that light.
|
| Thanks.
| sooheon wrote:
| The closest you've come to a solution is to pay for it with
| taxes. Is there an example of this working in the wild? Why do
| you think this is the best solution? Why is the status quo a
| problem that needs your solution in the first place?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Governments exist, amongst other roles, to provide for the
| common weal, that is, sources of general improvement, which
| markets and other mechanisms cannot provide. Generally, this
| is achieved through spending and taxation[1], legislation and
| regulation, and in some cases specific executive roles.
| _Most_ functions of government, passage of laws, operation of
| courts, defence, social welfare, backstop insurance,[2] and
| public goods and services such as schools, roads, police,
| fire, ports, and often services including hospitals,
| sewerage, water, electricity, postal services, and
| occasionally communications and media.
|
| There are of course many instances of media organisations
| directly funded through governments, most especially in
| broadcasting: the BBC, ABC (Australia), CBC, Deutsche Welle,
| Deutschlandfunk, and more, partial list here:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41262025>.
|
| _Print_ media has more often been at least nominally
| privately-held, _but often with major indirect public
| support_. In the US that takes the form of discounted postal
| rates, legal notices, tax breaks, and direct advertising
| expenditures by governments. See:
|
| "A Reminder of Precedents in Subsidizing Newspapers" Jan. 27,
| 2010, <https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/business/media/28su
| bsidy....>.
|
| Many of those subsidies have decreased, been eliminated, or
| no longer apply (e.g., postal discounts given Internet-based
| distribution) in today's world, and _along with other
| business challenges_ have made commercial newspaper (or
| online news-media) operation all the more challenging.
|
| A key challenge is that information is a public good, in the
| economic sense:
|
| - It is (mostly) nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. That is, one
| person's consumption doesn't preclude others doing so
| (unlike, say, food or land), and it's difficult (though not
| impossible) to restrict access.
|
| - Marginal costs of production, that is, the additional cost
| for an additional unit produced or consumed, is near nil.
| This has implications on how market prices fall, which is
| (absent other manipulation) also near nil.
|
| - News and information have _high positive externalities_.
| That is, there are benefits to consumption which the producer
| cannot readily capture through market mechanisms.
|
| I've addressed this in more length here: <https://web.archive
| .org/web/20170611065351/https://www.reddi...>
|
| A lot of this boils down to "there's no easy way to erect
| tollbooths on the consumption or distribution of information,
| and high costs in the form of deadweight losses (people
| excluded from access) from doing so."
|
| But there _are_ at least two remaining tollbooths:
|
| - The ISP, with whom the reader has an existing financial
| relationship.
|
| - Tax authorities: local (city/county), state, and national.
|
| Each of these can charge audiences, and pay publishers, for
| media accessed online. My proposal is that payments be
| relatively nominal (on the order of $100 to $400/year for a
| household), and be made with minimal prejudice to qualifying
| publishers and authors. (Some independent arbitrator of which
| publishers qualify, and a mechanism, perhaps itself market
| based, for payment rates based on media category would
| probably be part of such a scheme.) Indirect supports
| analogous to postal-rate subsidies, legal notices, and direct
| government advertising might also apply.
|
| A tax / universal content fee approach directly addresses the
| many issues of applying markets to information goods
| (addressed in this comment and links).
|
| _All_ successful media models at scale divorce reveneus from
| consumption. Advertising most particularly.
|
| TFA and my many comments (as well as those of numerous others
| in this thread) address what the failures of the status quo
| are. Most saliently: news organisations, print, broadcast,
| and online are simply failing to survive presently, and lack
| of effective news and informational sources is a key driver
| of social and political dysfunction. Weak media institutions
| are highly susceptible to malign influences.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. How and whether these two must correspond is ... a longer
| and tangential discussion. See especially MMT:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory>
|
| 2. Flood, earthquake, major storm, other natural disaster,
| major industrial risks such as nuclear power plants, and the
| like.
| card_zero wrote:
| Interesting use of the word _weal,_ which apparently here
| is used in the sense of "well-being" rather than the other
| meaning of "a nasty purple wound":
|
| > Governments exist, amongst other roles, to provide for
| the common weal,
|
| Yes, but governments _also_ exist - looking at governments
| in general, around the world - to further the interests of
| officials and their families, and provide them with money,
| status, disproportionate rights, and ideologically
| agreeable laws. And then there are organisations, which may
| be related to governments or effectively similar to
| governments or agents of governments, with a mission or
| interest in distorting news so that the money, status,
| etc., gets delivered.
|
| So in theory, under _good governance,_ that wouldn 't
| happen. Additionally, the government would be all-knowing
| with a good grip on salience, so it wouldn't do anything
| biased, even by accident. And then we might as well have
| news distributed by a central ministry of information,
| which would reliably arbitrate the truth in a good way.
|
| Since actual governments are at best kinda corrupt and
| somewhat stupid, it would be better for taxpayers to fund
| _a diversity of editorially independent news media
| sources,_ right?
|
| But that's kind of passing the buck to the grass roots. In
| theory, the natural power of the grass roots can cause
| information to be critiqued and filtered by by many
| independent and informed individuals so that a consensus on
| the facts of what is actually going on bubbles to the top.
| In reality, it's social media, and its accuracy depends on
| the power of _good moderation_ and a _good culture,_ which,
| like good governance, is brought into being and sustained
| by voodoo.
|
| I think the answer is: if you've found a good, trustworthy
| source of information, whether a public broadcaster, a
| commercial media entity, or a non-commercial forum,
| treasure it _while it lasts,_ and by all means bring more
| of these into being. Except I don 't think anybody knows
| what those means _are_ and it seems to happen more or less
| by accident. Something about open society.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| > weal: "well-being," Old English wela "wealth," in late
| Old English also "welfare, well-being," from West
| Germanic *welon-, from PIE root *wel- (2) "to wish, will"
|
| <https://www.etymonline.com/word/weal>
|
| As in common weal, commonweal, commonwealth.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Since actual governments are at best kinda corrupt and
| somewhat stupid, it would be better for taxpayers to fund
| a diversity of editorially independent news media
| sources, right?_
|
| But of course. And there's nothing in _public funding of
| media_ that says that _multiple media sources cannot be
| funded._
|
| As for the rest of your ... comment: _all_ human
| institutions tend toward corruption. Government, Church,
| Business, Family, Academy. We recognise this, are aware
| of it, fight it, accept what we must, and try to pit the
| various factions against one another in a a balance of
| power. Multiple sources, as you say.
|
| The issue with present media isn't the lack of many
| sources, it's the financial investments required for them
| to be both effective and sustaining. Which as my earlier
| comment (and many others on that topic) makes clear
| simply will not and cannot happen in a pure-play market
| approach. And for the most part never has.
| sooheon wrote:
| I think there are three parts to your argument: 1) status
| quo is bad 2) you can design and centrally direct a better
| alternative and 3) it should be funded through taxation.
|
| Whether we need 3 depends on 1 and 2. Hell, if 1 is bad
| enough and 2 is good enough, it could justify anything,
| including conscription to a literal media war. But even
| assuming I grant you 1 is true, nothing in TFA or your
| comments convinces me that 2 is true.
|
| Most examples of state and media unification I can think of
| are not free, not useful except as explicit propaganda
| arms.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Several people have responded in ways that suggest I'm
| talking about publicly funding a _single_ news source.
| That 's not at all what I'm suggesting.
|
| Rather, it's creating a public fund for _numerous_ news
| and informational sources. How many, what qualifications
| they should have, and how they are individually
| compensated is a further element of this discussion, but
| all of that 's secondary to the point that what I'm
| calling for is _not_ a single unitary Ministry of News,
| but for a many entities, preferably with multiple funding
| streams whether governmental (at local / regional /
| state / federal levels), ISP / connectivity provider
| fees, or other indirect funding sources (subscriptions,
| memberships, sponsorships, foundations, philanthropy,
| advertising, legal notices, distribution and/or
| production subsidies).
|
| So, 1: yes. 2: no. 3: in part.
| sooheon wrote:
| > many entities, preferably with multiple funding streams
| whether governmental (at local / regional / state /
| federal levels), ISP / connectivity provider fees, or
| other indirect funding sources (subscriptions,
| memberships, sponsorships, foundations, philanthropy,
| advertising, legal notices, distribution and/or
| production subsidies).
|
| This is broad enough to include every funding source, and
| you're back to describing the status quo. All of these
| funding sources are available currently, and they're
| evidently not enough. The thesis just morphs from "why
| won't people pay for news?" to "why won't people
| politically organize to create quasi-public well funded
| media apparatuses?"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The difference is a funding floor in the form of a
| diversified, universally-applied funding basis, in the
| form of taxes (at multiple governmental levels) and/or an
| ISP-implemented media fee. Media and journalism generally
| presently lack this, and are suffering badly for it.
|
| The reframing question is fair, but asking why people
| won't pay directly for subscriptions _under the present
| model_ remains a useful excercise, and is what I 've
| attempted here.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers),
| but since online, people seem to expect free.
|
| Plus I think over the decades, broadcast news morphed into a form
| of entertainment. And seems well over half the news I have access
| to is about Sports, Hollywood and who is having sex, which I do
| not care about.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Use to be very common for people to pay for news
| (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free.
|
| I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my
| streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325
| a year for whatever it is that they're selling? Even setting
| aside concerns about the quality of the product, news
| subscriptions are priced way too high given the amount of
| competition for those dollars. Then they'll monitor everything
| you do and sell your information to the highest bidder. Then
| when you realize it's not worth it, they'll put you through
| hell and back to cancel.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Local News Papers were a lot cheaper, plus you got news that
| no one else was reporting.
|
| In most cases the news was balanced back then. Go to a
| Library and see for yourself by viewing archives.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Oh, I'm old enough to remember the days when we were all
| subscribing to the local newspaper. I'm still thinking
| about subscribing to our local paper, but last time I
| checked it was just too expensive, taking into account that
| all the news I need will get to me by social media, TV,
| email, or text message.
| brewdad wrote:
| My local paper is about 9% local crime stories, 1% local
| politics stories, and 90% AP story reprints. For that,
| they want $10/mo for the online product or $20/mo for a
| 4x a week delivery of a dead trees product.
|
| AP will give me 90% of that for free and unedited. The
| other 10% I can find through other channels or is of no
| interest to me.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| > I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of
| my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times
| $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling?
|
| uHH...yes?? Hello? We used to pay $1 every day to buy
| newsPAPERs? Remember? Does this stuff being on the internet
| suddenly makes journalism a free labor or something?
| noirbot wrote:
| Did we? I grew up middle-class and no one I knew got actual
| newspapers. That was always a marker for me of someone
| being rich. We maybe got weekly/monthly news magazines, but
| that's an order of magnitude cheaper.
| jmclnx wrote:
| What years ? Even in the 80s and a good deal of the 90s,
| many people got and shared newspapers. They were
| everywhere. I remember them being 15, 25, 50 Cents
| through the years.
| chgs wrote:
| Certainly normal to read both a morning and evening paper
| on the commute in London well into the 00s
| anon-3988 wrote:
| Definitely did. Maybe not in your area, but many people
| here used to spend their idle times reading newspapers.
| Restaurants have them ready on the tables for people to
| consume as they come. Now its been replaced by phones.
|
| Newspapers was the only the way I could get any insights
| on the outer world. This was in 2000s and early 2010s.
| There were TVs but newspapers were the only method where
| I could stare at pictures from all over the world and
| read random people's opinion.
|
| No I didn't have internet back then.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > We used to pay $1 every day to buy newsPAPERs? Remember?
|
| I don't remember it being anywhere near that much.
|
| Even today the local paper is a good chunk under that
| price, and if I forgo the actual printing then it's about a
| hundred dollars per year.
| almatabata wrote:
| I only every bought like 2 newspapers regularly, canard
| enchaine (1.20 euros/per week) and monde diplomatique
| (5.40/per month). That comes around to 52 * 1.8 + 12 * 5.4
| = 158.4 euros per year. So for half the price I get two
| newspapers with potentially different view on events. 325
| euros per year sounds overpriced to me given that I like to
| hear multiple opinions from different publications. 325 to
| get access to 3-4 publications that only publishes weekly
| sounds good.
|
| You can also look at other french journals like mediapart
| who do investigative journalism. Even they only charge 120
| a year (https://abo.mediapart.fr).
| listenallyall wrote:
| Funny to see people publicly out themselves as too cheap to
| become informed.
|
| The currency that is limited is not money, it is time. When
| news is presented digitally, it's just one more thing on your
| always-connected screen competing for your attention with
| every other website, app, video, etc. With a physical
| newspaper, you actually (most days) carve out the time to
| peruse it front page to back. Of course some days its a quick
| glance while other days you read every article. But the
| physical-ness of a newspaper somehow elevates it's priority
| and commands your time, in a way a digital version simply
| cannot.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >Funny to see people publicly out themselves as too cheap
| to become informed.
|
| Not that, the only news I can find on-line is about
| National Items. I cannot find any information about what my
| City Council is doing, what is being built in the City. I
| can find only scrubbed items released by just the Council.
|
| In the old days, the local news paper would investigate the
| local politicians and report if they are doing anything
| illegal. Now, we have no idea, so graft could be rampant in
| local politics and no one would know.
| svachalek wrote:
| You used to be able to have them put real ink on real paper and
| deliver multiple pounds of it to your doorstep for less than
| they want to charge for the bits now. It's like in the 90s
| banks wanted you to pay extra to use the ATM. It saved them
| from having the office open and hiring tellers but they wanted
| to charge you for the "convenience" of using the machine.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| Sure, none of the people involved in that had healthcare.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Those newspapers made most of their money through ads. Most of
| what people paid was their attention, not their money.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Exactly, that's the thing people keep missing in these
| discussions. That $0.25 for your newsstand paper didn't pay
| for the costs of paying reporters and journalists; it really
| only paid for distribution and maybe printing costs (e.g., a
| lot of that quarter went to the local newsstand, not the
| newspaper). These days, distribution costs are pretty close
| to zero since they don't need printing presses, trucks to
| drive papers around, newsstands, and all the people to staff
| this machinery. They do need IT personnel and some servers,
| but the per-viewer cost there is much less. Newspapers got
| the bulk of their funding from advertising back then, so
| readers' expectations haven't really changed that much, the
| newspapers have simply gotten much worse at funding
| themselves with ads.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Plus classifieds, that was a big revenue stream for them
| too.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Right, but that's another form of advertising.
|
| But it's a good point. Classified ads were purchased by
| individuals or small companies usually. Now, the people
| things did with those, they do for free, or use some
| other paid service that's not affiliated with a news
| organization. Instead of paying for an ad in the
| "personals", people use dating apps (either for free, or
| they pay for a premium membership to get extra benefits).
| Instead of paying for a classified ad to sell their old
| car or appliance, they post it for free on Ebay or
| Craigslist or FB Marketplace, and in most cases pay a
| commission when they receive payment through the site. So
| basically, other services took this revenue stream away
| from the newspapers.
| asdff wrote:
| The real death of the news was that with the internet,
| these sleepy old papers suddenly had competition from
| around the world. No longer was it an essential regional
| monopoly or cartel of a couple news orgs being the source
| of truth for a given region. Now that they no longer have
| their moat, what do you know, old establishment folded to
| things people would rather spend their attention on now
| that they actually have the choice to do so.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| True, but there's more: as I pointed out in my sister
| comment here, newspapers used to pull in money from
| classified ads too, but the internet made those
| completely obsolete. Basically, pre-internet, the only
| way to communicate with other people (other than directly
| or with a phone) was through TV, radio, or newspapers.
| Newspapers were by far the cheapest option, and most
| accessible to regular people (i.e., the classifieds). The
| internet replaced that: now people can communicate with
| others through the internet and various websites and
| other digital services.
|
| It wasn't just about "the truth", it was about how people
| could participate in mass communications: the newspapers
| had a lock on one of the main ways to do this. The
| internet gave us a new communications medium.
| outop wrote:
| This is the right answer.
|
| Many newspapers gave away most of the value in their
| advertising power to Google and Facebook, for free, because
| they just didn't understand how internet advertising was
| going to work.
|
| Now they've decided to blame and shame their own readers
| rather than actually try to compete against other media for
| people's dollars.
| input_sh wrote:
| One crucial difference is that you could walk up to a newsstand
| and buy an issue whenever you felt like it.
|
| Online, there's very other options that don't include a
| perpetual agreement.
| xp84 wrote:
| This is so true. I'd anonymously pump 50 cents into those
| paywalls on a daily basis if that were a way to gain access
| to an article, but the only online option any newspaper or
| magazine I know of provides is an auto-renewing subscription
| of $5-10 a month, with the deal being a bit better if you go
| annual. Problem is, there are like 6,000 newspapers and
| magazines in the country whose articles I might stumble upon
| and like to read. No, I'm not subscribing to the Akron Times,
| the San Diego Tribune, and the Boston Herald just because
| someone linked me an article from each today.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Many publications have tried the 50c for an article
| approach, and it just isn't worth it. Those one-off
| purchases at best make for a single digit percentage of
| revenue.
|
| What could possibly work is mega syndication, where you pay
| a monthly subscription and get access to a large amount of
| newspapers, a la Spotify or YouTube. But for that to
| happen, newspapers need to change their attitude and start
| seeing themselves not as arbiters of truth, but producers
| of news as a commodity. Then you could even have "enemy"
| newspapers on the same subscription. Just as you have rock,
| classical and rap on the same subscription.
|
| The question is, does the population actually want news or
| do they want to read something that confirms their world
| view and snugly fits with their chosen political tribe?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I used to pay for news, but then news started looking more like
| opinions and you can pretty much get opinions for free. So I
| stopped paying.
| physicsguy wrote:
| Depends what it is; some of the print newspapers in the UK have
| moved to online subscription. It worked for the 'premium' ones
| with longform articles, it has not worked for the 'red top'
| newspapers, and they've gone back to ad-supported models and
| have enormously declined in quality of journalism.
| KerryJones wrote:
| The most obvious reason seems to be missing?
|
| Because it's split up. You no longer pay "for the news", you pay
| a specific company for their take.
|
| Do you want leftist? Rightist? Something central? You want
| multiple opinions, will you pay multiple subscriptions?
|
| Happily pay $10/mo for a selection of specifics news items.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| See "The closest I've come to a solution" in TFA.
|
| Thoughts?
| svachalek wrote:
| I don't know how you find agreement on what our taxes have to
| pay for, given how polarized it all is now. I'd much rather a
| system where my browser anonymously pays a nickel or
| something to read what I want.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| We've had three decades of micropayments proposals, none
| have worked.[1] _Traditionally_ , publishers have strongly
| trended toward _aggregated_ rather than _disaggregated_
| payment models: you pay for _a full issue_ of a publication
| at the newsstand, you pay for a _year-long subscription_ of
| a print publication. Or these days of online publications
| and streaming services, should you choose to do so.
|
| Superbundling (e.g., a single fee providing universal
| access), a universal content tax, and/or a fee assessed by
| ISPs (if at all possible indexed to typical household
| wealth within an area) strike me as far more tractable
| options.
|
| Among the elements of a tax-based system is that there are
| in fact multiple taxing jurisdictions, and access might be
| spread amongst them, and through multiple mechanisms.
| Public libraries already exhibit some of this, with funding
| being provided at the local (city/county), state, and
| federal levels, as well as other aggregations such as
| regional library coalitions, _academic institutions and
| districts_ (particularly community and state postsecondary
| institutions), and others.[2] There 's also the option of
| _indirect_ support, which is what mechanisms such as
| mandatory legal notices entailed: a jurisdiction could
| require public posting of various sorts (fictitious names,
| legal settlements and actions, etc.) which effectively
| require private parties to pay for the upkeep of a
| newspaper. Similarly, discount "book rate" postage was a
| distribution subsidy offered to publishers of not only
| books but newspapers and magazines within the U.S. That's
| less an issue given the Internet, but the _spirit_ of that
| idea might be adopted.
|
| The idea of local papers which can rely on some level of
| multi-jurisdictional tax funding, perhaps some charitable
| or foundational support, advertising, subscriptions,
| obligatory notices, bespoke research, and other funding
| sources would give _multiple independent funding channels_
| which would be difficult to choke off entirely. That seems
| far healthier than the present system.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. My own argument, and numerous citations to both pro and
| con views, is "Repudiation as the micropayments killer
| feature (Not)" <https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004820/
| https://old.reddi...>, based on a six-year-old proposal
| from David Brin which has gone ... precisely nowhere.
|
| 2. Yes, I'm aware of certain issues concerning library
| texts in recent years within the U.S. I'd suggest that the
| fact that those debates are ongoing rather than settled
| _either_ way means that overt control isn 't completely
| straightforward.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| There should be an intermediate syndicate that charges me
| micropayments for every article I choose to read, then
| charges one lump sum to my credit card at the end of the
| month. And also remits payment to each newspaper or
| Website.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Why not simply an all-you-can-eat time-based payment
| (weekly, monthly, annually), distributed on the basis of
| the sources you've read, preferably with some true-cost-
| of-production adjustment (e.g., algorithmic or AI hash
| doesn't get compensated on the same basis as true shoe-
| leather / long-distance-travel journalism).
|
| You fill a bucket. It's drained, based on what you
| read/view/listen. Or otherwise equitably shared based on
| some global allocation basis if access nothing --- you're
| _still_ benefiting by the positive externality of the
| informed polity which journalism creates --- if you read
| nothing.
|
| This ensures a stable funding basis, you have a
| predictable cost basis, you can direct the allocation
| based on your own access patterns, the common weal
| benefits even if you don't utilise the resource.
|
| Note that much of this is the same as an ad-funded media,
| excepting that you can't direct spending, the allocations
| are far less public-benefit oriented, and the costs per
| household are far higher: roughly $700 _per person_ for
| advanced countries (North America, Europe, Japan,
| Australia /NZ), based on a $700 billion spend and roughly
| 1 billion population. _What we have now costs an immense
| amount and is failing media and journalism badly._
| KerryJones wrote:
| Yeah, I think what I'm describing would fall under a thing
| like MoviePass but for NewsPass.
| johnea wrote:
| I agree. I scan about 30 websites for news each day.
|
| Do I need to subscrible to all of them?
|
| Just not practical...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I'd made this point a bit over a year ago with regards to
| Hacker News, based on my own work scraping a full history of
| Front Page views from the "past" archive.
|
| Note that there are only 30 stories which make the front page
| per day, total submissions run somewhat higher, typically a
| bit over 100, and about 400,000 per year per research by
| Whaly.[1]
|
| As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites
| submitted to the front page.
|
| Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to
| 149.
|
| Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.
|
| Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year
| ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget
| _just to be able to discuss what 's appearing on Hacker News
| from mainstream news sources_.
|
| Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per
| article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-
| page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and _that_ is just
| based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far
| more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page
| each day.
|
| Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe"
| argument untenable. _Some_ sort of bundling payment
| arrangement is required.
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354>
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. "A Year on Hacker News" (2022)
| <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>
| paradox460 wrote:
| Is grounded still around? Because that's what they offered.
|
| For me I find skipping the daily hystronic news cycle is better
| for my health. Anything of significant enough import would get
| to me via social channels, at which point I can go find enough
| sources about a subject to get a proper nuanced view
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Yes, I see them advertised by a few YouTube content creators
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It doesn't even need to be everything. to be honest I'm not
| really interested in paying for current events from any outlet,
| as I am simply not a news junkie, but if I could get some kinda
| combo deal for the publications that are frequent fliers in
| Sunday Longreads I would go for it.
|
| In the olden days papers would target people like me who only
| occasionally read news with good headlines on the front and a
| low price for that day's print run. Now they are asking for a
| subscription (which is too much to pay for a single article)
| and acting like the archival value add is worth it to me (it
| isnt).
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I am astounded that the conclusion the writer comes to is..
| socialize the news.
|
| Clearly people won't pay for news because it's flawed, the
| product stinks, and the information is biased. So here's a great
| idea, let's steal from everyone via taxes and force them to pay
| for it! Then it will be good somehow.
| autoexecbat wrote:
| Some countries provide government funded news that is of
| reasonable quality, for example abc.net.au/news
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Many others, partial listing:
|
| - ABC (Australia)
|
| - BBC (UK)
|
| - CBC (Canada)
|
| - CPB, NPR, and PBS (US, though with _very_ limited public
| funding)
|
| - Canal Once, Canal 22, Canal Catorce (Mexico)
|
| - DR (Denmark)
|
| - Deutshlandfunk, DeutscheWelle and regional broadcasters
| (NDR, RBB, SWR, MDR, WDR, BR, HR, SR, RB), the last for
| somewhat interesting denazification reasons.
|
| - EBC (Brazil)
|
| - ERT (Greece)
|
| - NRK (Norway)
|
| - Polskie Radio (Poland)
|
| - RNZ/TVNZ (New Zealand)
|
| - Sveriges Radio/Television (Sweden)
|
| - TVN (Chile)
|
| - VOA, AFN (US, not broadcast domestically)
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting>
| skirge wrote:
| I don't know other countries but Polskie Radio and TVP was
| turned into propaganda machine of who was ruling at the
| time with News starting with "thanks to the XXX and despite
| YYY saying it was not possible/stealing/selling to the
| Germans". It is a reason I'm not watching TV anymore.
| atrus wrote:
| I'll nibble. A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring
| a profit and where that profit comes from. News is required to
| be dramatic and sensationalist because that's what attracts
| attention and gets you those advertising dollar. Certain topics
| are off limits, because of those advertising dollars.
|
| It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to
| organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it
| might solve some.
| gottorf wrote:
| > A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit
| and where that profit comes from.
|
| The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded
| organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks,
| and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather
| there not be an official merger of the government and media
| that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty
| picture of the government.
|
| The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may
| have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as
| the alternative.
| jl6 wrote:
| The BBC has a sorta-kinda-taxpayer-funded model and manages
| to attract criticism from all sides, which is generally
| taken as a compliment to its neutrality.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Um, no. The criticism from the Left is, "it's not Left
| enough."
|
| Show us some stories, oh, the Rotherham grooming scandal,
| for instance, _before_ it became a national story.
|
| Here's one afterward:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-
| yorkshire-61868863
|
| > Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal
| with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town
| for more than 15 years, according to a new report.
|
| "not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I
| thought that was what police were supposed to do.
| somishere wrote:
| Personal biases abound in publicly funded news orgs, just
| as in private. But there are models where editorial
| independence is maintained .. including in Australia and
| the UK.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| > After all, someone is still writing the checks, and
| coverage will be biased towards that someone.
|
| In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks.
| C-Span is just limited to its cut from cable subscriptions
| but even that has made it far less sensationalist. C-Span
| isn't entertainment, it's pure news.
| gottorf wrote:
| > In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the
| checks.
|
| To further the analogy, everyone's pooling money in the
| same bank account, but there's still someone in charge of
| signing the checks. That someone is as capable of anybody
| else of holding biases, which has the strong potential to
| be reflected in the media program that the money is
| funding.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Not sure I agree. NPR, a nonprofit, has followed Fox News,
| NYT, MSNBC, etc down the biased, slanted drain hole. I
| listened to NPR from my childhood until a few years ago
| before I, sadly, had to call it quits.
| atrus wrote:
| It's a multifacted problem, so you're still going to have
| the attention problem. NPR is primarily user funded, so if
| your news is boring (as non-biased, non-slanted tends to be
| thankfully) you're going to lose out to the
| more..."exciting" sources.
| eltoxo wrote:
| I don't see how it really matters. A bigger issue is that
| some days there is just going to be nothing to report if you
| want "real" news.
|
| "Today nothing happened, the end" would not work. So you
| would have to lower your standards for that day. On that day
| you would conflate what happened with entertainment and low
| and behold that day nothing actually happened is more popular
| than reality.
|
| Loop this process over and over and we get what we have now.
|
| I suspect we end up at the point we are at now no matter what
| the initial starting conditions or how you design the system.
|
| "News" is a form of entertainment and to pretend it is not
| seems completely delusional to me.
|
| I think it is like asking how do you get people to watch a
| movie of a professor giving a statistics lecture. You have to
| publicly fund it because no one is going to really watch or
| pay for that movie.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| Australia's taxpayer-funded news [0], while maybe not as bad
| as some commercial news sites, is still terrible. Clickbait
| headlines, lack of editing, lets-just-repeat-a-bunch-of-
| tweets-and-call-it-an-article etc.
|
| Last year I paid for a subscription to one of the independent
| sources of news here [1], but haven't made use of it because,
| honestly, news is pointless. I find it mostly makes me upset
| about things that are completely out of my control. It
| doesn't change my behaviour in any positive way.
|
| I did consider continuing my subscription, just because
| "independent journalism" is a societal good, even if I don't
| consume it. But then it is in direct competition with other
| charities that I could donate to.
|
| 0: https://www.abc.net.au/news 1: https://crikey.com.au
| johnea wrote:
| BBC is pretty good, as well as NPR.
|
| News companies are mostly collapsing. The only viable way to
| keep in private hands might be the Guardian model, of a trust
| established in it's name.
|
| Bozo could certainly afford to do that for the Wash Post,
| instead they're leading the race to the bottom with firings and
| more for-profit articles.
| gottorf wrote:
| I don't know, Uri Berliner's critique of NPR was pretty spot-
| on, at least from n=1 of this former longtime listener. I
| found it increasingly difficult to stomach the lopsided
| coverage that no longer stuck to just the facts, but rather
| what to think and how to feel about them.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Neither of your comparisons is true, as I've detailed
| elsewhere in this thread.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd be interested in what if any media sources you find to
| be unbiased, and, more importantly, _why they are that way_
| (as in causally, not as in descriptive characteristics).
|
| The following would address specifically how (or if)
| journalistic business / financing models need reform.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| So you're conceding that NPR and BBC are biased? Or you
| just want to argue?
|
| As for journalistic business / financing models: public
| financing will never be anything but a tool of the power
| structure (whether or not they happen to be in formal
| power at the moment).
|
| Private financing sometimes works, but doesn't at the
| moment.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I don't want to argue, I'd like to know what you believe
| and why.
|
| You're welcome to share or not.
|
| What _isn 't_ a tool of the power structure? What of
| advertising (see the I.F. Stone interview I've posted
| elsewhere in this thread), or of philanthropy (take your
| pick of benefactors)?
| glial wrote:
| Ideally, governments solve problems that are important but that
| society can't figure out how to solve in other ways. The
| questions for us are then:
|
| - is it important that voting citizens are informed about
| various issues?
|
| - is the market (or some other mechanism) currently meeting
| this need?
| Schiendelman wrote:
| And: - would implementing "news" change the level of
| informedness?
|
| I don't think we can assume it would.
| glial wrote:
| Good call - 'news' as we know it today is optimized for
| engagement, not creating an informed citizenry.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What's your alternative?
|
| Are there specific parts of my diagnosis or etiology you
| specifically disagree with? Which?
| dinkblam wrote:
| i want to pay for reuters but they won't let me. no option to
| turn off the ads in exchange for payments..
| apercu wrote:
| I mean, the shareholders.... think of them....
| fibonachos wrote:
| I filled out a contact form some months ago asking how I, as an
| individual, can purchase an individual subscription. After some
| back and forth they coul only offer to connect me with their
| sales team. No thanks.
|
| Provide a low friction subscribe and unsubscribe flow, and I
| will gladly pay for your product, Reuters.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Cost of sales is actually a huge issue for all kinds of
| products and services.
|
| It _costs_ a business half or more of all revenue _simply to
| make a sale_ in many cases. High-friction subscription
| services and all the support involved is a large piece of
| this.
|
| Many products and services suffer from the fact that they are
| too cheap to produce to make meaningful _individual_ revenue
| recovery sensible.
|
| Raise the question with your hometown or city. What would it
| take for Reuters to licence gratis access to all residents
| through a city-paid arrangement? That's _one_ sales contact
| for Reuters, and thousands to millions of readers onboarded.
| Vastly more efficient than one-at-a-time relations.
| nimbius wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godi_media
|
| This is nothing new and in fact is a feature of having a for-
| profit 24 hour news media industry that thrives on advertising
| revenue and flourishes under emaciated regulation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
|
| the repeal of the fairness doctrine in the United States means
| your television radio and internet news feeds are free to
| outright fabricate stories with impunity. commercial news means
| the product is tailored to the consumer, not congruent with the
| facts.
|
| Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it
| to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure. You
| can still have private news agencies, they just cannot market or
| sell "snake oil" in the service of the dollar. Another
| alternative is turning all news into something akin to NPR, or
| having news "co-ops" that provide the service to their listeners
| for a fee.
| gottorf wrote:
| > turning all news into something akin to NPR
|
| Why do you see NPR as such a positive example of journalism? It
| seems to me that it's been skating on its previous good
| reputation for quite some time now.
| madrox wrote:
| I don't think the OP was pointing to it as a example of
| positivity but an example of a business model (donation
| supported)
| paradox460 wrote:
| Likely because NPR has yet to tread on one of their beliefs
| with biased reporting. It will happen eventually, the rate at
| which it's happening is accelerating, and when they realize
| it happens they'll feel the same outage we all did our first
| time. The umbrage, the "you were supposed to be unbiased" cry
|
| I grew up on NPR. It was always on in the background. On the
| way to and from daycare, in the car on Sunday mornings on the
| way to the uu church, playing out of a small boom box on the
| back porch, or winding up the miles of a long road trip.
| Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Schickelie mix, etc, all
| were the background music to my childhood. When I entered
| adult life, I tried to continue listening, but leading to,
| during, and after the 2016 election, the biases became too
| base, too visible to ignore
| baseballdork wrote:
| Is there no chance that instead of NPR all of a sudden
| being exposed as biased, it was your own biases that were
| exposed?
| brewdad wrote:
| My problem with NPR is that is the spirit of remaining
| unbiased, they allow both sides of the political spectrum
| to say their piece with little to no push back. Whichever
| side spews the best lines of BS wins regardless of the
| actual facts on the ground.
| mulderc wrote:
| Can't speak for all of NPR but what I listen to regularly
| pushes back on claims from both sides. My local affiliate
| had an especially critical interview with the state
| governor and the interviewer and governor agreed that
| they should do these hour long interviews more often.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NPR _has_ been pushing back harder, and will label
| untruths as "lies" where earlier (circa 2015/16) it was
| very reluctant to do so. _Many_ news organisations in the
| US tried very hard through the 2016 campaign cycle to
| normalise what was a very-far-from-normal. I 've recently
| been going through some Brookings Institution podcasts
| from ~2012--2016, and the degree to which the hard-right
| shift was normalised at the time is telling.
|
| NPR in particular avoided the word "lie" as late as 2017,
| see:
|
| "NPR And The Word 'Liar': Intent Is Key", January 25,
| 20175:00 AM ET <https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2017/01/25/511503605...>
|
| Contrast 2024 where this is no longer a problem:
|
| "162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-
| checks former President Trump", August 11, 20247:00 AM ET
| <https://www.npr.org/2024/08/11/nx-s1-5070566/trump-news-
| conf...>
|
| NPR also pressed the former president on lies in an
| interview in 2022. It didn't go well:
|
| "Pressed on his election lies, former President Trump
| cuts NPR interview short", January 12, 20225:01 AM ET
| <https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072204478/donald-trump-
| npr-i...>
|
| My view is that NPR's stance change is a positive
| development.
| listenallyall wrote:
| At some point, you the audience member has to be able to
| whittle down two sides of an argument and determine who
| "wins", rather than having some broadcaster decide for
| you.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| This is...kind of an insane take on what NPR does and
| does not cover?
|
| First, the insinuation that they make an effort to remain
| unbiased is kinda wild. As an NPR listener and donator,
| that isn't at all the impression I get. They seem to
| overwhelmingly cater their coverage and their slant
| towards people a lot like me. That's why I listen and why
| I pay and what paying customers actually expect (whether
| they are consciously aware of how they are supporting and
| consuming their own preferred bias in media is maybe
| 50/50 but whatever).
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| People conflate bias with increased criticism of one side
| vs. the other. But those would only be equivalent if
| there was some law of the universe dictating that both
| sides of an issue were consistently equally deserving of
| criticism.
| incompatible wrote:
| I think this would be a desire for bothsidesism, the
| principle that (say) flat Earth theory and spherical
| Earth theory are both valid view points and should be
| given equal amounts of coverage.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| Maybe so, but that doesn't matter all that much. All
| journalism has a point of view and its impossible to be
| completely unbiased...the most suspicious kind of media
| consumers are those that cannot recognize the bias within
| the media they consume.
|
| NPR is undoubtedly a "leans left" shop in the same way
| Fox is undoubtedly "leans right".
|
| Of course, even if we were talking about the WSJ or
| Economist or something...that's still biased. Being dead
| center between the current interpretation of left or
| right is still a kind of bias.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > All journalism has a point of view and its impossible
| to be completely unbiased...
|
| So the alternative is to not even try? To double-down or
| triple-down on bias and shamelessly continue to self-
| label as journalism? To whine & cry about "the threat to
| democracy" while neglecting their duties as The Fourth
| Estate?
|
| I think not.
|
| The problem is simple: stop lowering the bar. Stop
| calling things journalism that don't qualify. If your pet
| barks, would you call it a cat?
|
| You've got Jim Leher is turning in his grave.
|
| https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-
| for...
| watwut wrote:
| No, the alternative is to be more honest about it. The
| whole debate about "objectivity" is because the previous
| definition of objectivity produced consistent bias. And
| by that I mean consistent huge bias.
|
| Objectivity meant that journalist had to identify two
| sides and report on both equally - even if the acts in
| question were not equal in any objective way. If I
| obviously lied and you obviously did not, articles did
| not reflected that at all. What was called objectivity
| enabled and facilitated bad actors. Consistently.
|
| Second issue was that just a selection of topics and
| selection of who will be allowed to express things itself
| creates bias. And the rules about that consistently
| disadvantaged certain groups and advantaged other groups.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I understand there's a bias. But review that Leher list
| and you'll realize that 95% of what is passed off as
| journalism violates too many of those rules. That is, it
| doesn't qualify to be called journalism.
|
| As threats to democracy go, there's nothing worse than a
| self-proclaimed journalist (read: a hack) fronting like
| they're fulfilling their duties as a member of The Fourth
| Estate. Frankly, most of them don't know the difference
| between cause and correlation (which is an essential /
| foundational concept in truth and being objective), let
| alone what The Fourth Estate is (and why it matters).
|
| The problem is, the publishing industry doesn't even
| realize it's wrong. It's blind to its own blind spot.
|
| What could go wrong?
| watwut wrote:
| First of all, funnily, Lehrer rules do not define
| journalism. Not even historically, origins of journalism
| is not that.
|
| And some of them in fact do cause own bias - they presume
| how the result should look like. Lehrer rules will
| facilitate both side journalism where you blame both
| sides equally regardless of facts on the ground. As I
| said, it is biased toward bad actors. And against those
| who says the truth.
|
| Note how they contain nothing about real fact checking.
| They are super easy to "be followed" while being
| manipulative. Stuff like "I am just reporting on what X
| said" whereas X said unfounded accusation that is just
| getting traction because you refuse to fact check it.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| So we're going to nitpick Lehrer while giving current
| (mainstream) media a free pass? I'm sorry, I don't wish
| to participate in such a distraction. And the irony only
| highlights how broken the current situation is.
| ruszki wrote:
| Is NPR really that bad as Fox seems from outside of
| America?
| stonogo wrote:
| Not even close. Fox has admitted in court that their
| programming is not journalism. NPR definitely swings
| left, don't get me wrong, but Fox is completely unhinged.
| Their own lawyers argued no reasonable person would
| beleive them. They're just not comparable in any rational
| sense.
| instagraham wrote:
| This is the problem with moral equivalence in judging
| media bias. One side can slide slightly left and still be
| almost completely factual (if slightly illogical), while
| the right can be neither factual nor logical - but we are
| made to pretend that the biases are equal here.
|
| As a general principle, and I know it's not a very wise
| thing to say, left-leaning sources are on a different
| dimension of factuality than right-leaning ones.
| codegrappler wrote:
| I think that also depends on the story. You saw far
| different reporting on Covid from the two sources. Some
| of the stuff coming out of the right was crazy but some
| ended up being the truth and the left leaning sources
| clearly had their marching orders dialed in and even cast
| things that were eventually proven true to be "lies" at
| the time.
| ruszki wrote:
| Crazy that ended up true? And what "lies"? In the country
| where I was back then (Hungary), it was quite different,
| but that's also because abuse there was and there is
| still no opposition. COVID was just simply mishandled,
| and full of corruption, just as usual.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's not about right or left, the biggest populists in
| the 90's were labeling themselves as communists or
| socialists.
| ruszki wrote:
| There were nazis, fascists and nationalists too. They
| were just not in the mainstream.
| decremental wrote:
| Yeah NPR and Fox are the same degree of biased. It's just
| harder for people to tell that NPR is biased because its
| bias is aligned better with the liberal regimes of most
| western countries. If the regime in your country was
| right leaning, you'd see most media display that bias and
| NPR would be your go-to example of something unhinged and
| biased.
|
| Most left leaning people can't even tell when they're
| watching something biased towards their beliefs because
| to them it's just like a fish swimming in water.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _NPR is undoubtedly a "leans left" shop in the same way
| Fox is undoubtedly "leans right"._
|
| Oh c'mon, it's ridiculous that I need to call out a false
| equivalence like that.
|
| Fox News isn't even news; they've admitted in court that
| they're an entertainment program. NPR is... not even
| remotely that. Certainly NPR has a bias, but they at
| least do their best to tell the truth. Fox News makes a
| business out of lying for outrage engagement.
| gottorf wrote:
| > Fox News isn't even news; they've admitted in court
| that they're an entertainment program.
|
| The admission they made was about one show, the one that
| Tucker Carlson ran before his departure from Fox[0].
| Taking that and eliding it to the rest of Fox News sounds
| either lazy or dishonest.
|
| An NPR host said in 1995 that if millions of people who
| believed in the religious concept of "rapture" actually
| did evaporate from this earth, the world would be a
| better place. After public outrage, they issued an
| apology but continued their relationship with the host.
| Does that make them tacitly support such bigotry? Nobody
| sued NPR over this (perhaps if this happened today and
| not 30 years ago, somebody would have), but what would
| their defense have been? That people shouldn't take
| things said by a show host so literally?
|
| I used to listen and donate to NPR, but no longer do,
| because I don't share your confidence that they do in
| fact "do their best to tell the truth". I might actually
| feel better about it if, like Fox, they came out and
| admitted that they are, at least in the year 2024, in
| many ways a nakedly partisan organization, instead of the
| taxpayer-funded neutral bringer of facts that they
| pretend to be.
|
| [0]: The judge ended up dismissing the case in favor of
| Fox: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
| courts/new-yor...
| t-3 wrote:
| I wouldn't say NPR "leans left", rather that they "lean
| establishment". NPR has no sympathy at all for
| socialists, third party candidates, most protest
| movements, etc. Republicans just have too much political
| diversity and churn in their base in the last few decades
| to be anywhere near as uniform and cohesive a bloc and so
| the establishment usually appears at least superficially
| Democrat-biased.
|
| Note: _Local_ NPR programs are a lot better than
| _national_ programs, IMO. There are two available NPR
| stations in my area, and they 're really not similar at
| all except for a small overlap in programming.
| Zak wrote:
| Perhaps not everyone will accept the judgment of Media
| Bias Fact Check, but I find their ratings mostly fair and
| based more on verifiably failed fact checks and the like
| than editorial opinion.
|
| They rate NPR as having a left-center bias and high
| factual reporting. The bias is based on story selection
| rather than the reporting itself containing substantial
| bias.
|
| They rate Fox News as having a right bias and mixed
| factual reporting. The bias based is on editorial
| positions and they note that news reports are generally
| accurate, but commentary often isn't.
|
| If that seems unfair, consider that they rate MSNBC
| comparably to Fox with left bias and mixed factual
| reporting, though they do give it a slightly higher
| overall credibility rating.
|
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/npr
|
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news
|
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/msnbc/
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Is there no chance that instead of NPR all of a sudden
| being exposed as biased, it was your own biases that were
| exposed?
|
| There is a fairly simple heuristic to determine if a
| media outlet has a partisan bias. Does their coverage
| disproportionately portray one party in a positive light
| and the other party in a negative light?
|
| The US has two major political parties that are each
| supported by approximately the same number of people. It
| would be mighty shocking if it turned out that one of
| them was right about _everything_ and the other was wrong
| about _everything_. So if that 's the impression that a
| media outlet leaves you with, that is a biased media
| outlet.
|
| This is different than their coverage of an individual
| story. For any given issue, one of the parties might
| legitimately be right and the other one wrong. But that's
| not going to be true for _every_ issue _in the same
| direction_.
| aredox wrote:
| "The Confederacy is not as bad as portrayed by the media
| in the pocket of the Union would let you believe"
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That statement is unintentionally factually accurate and
| clearly an attempt to make someone try to defend the
| despised enemy, which really proves my point. The
| Confederacy were obviously wrong on slavery but if they
| were right on something else then "Union media" would be
| the last place you'd find an objective account of it.
| gottorf wrote:
| Reasonable people can unironically agree with this
| statement without being a bad person or condoning
| slavery, so I suppose it's an illustrative point.
| aredox wrote:
| Republicans support a known liar, who lied and lies about
| almost everything. How could someone honest _not_ portray
| them in a negative light? There is nothing redeemable
| about the whole Trump cult.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Politicians lying is so common it's a cliche. Trump does
| it in an unusual way, because they typically lie about
| what they're going to do and then you don't find out
| until after they're in office, whereas Trump will say
| inaccurate things you can contemporaneously validate.
|
| He'll do things like call Kamala Harris the "border
| czar", which she never had as an official title, but she
| was actually tasked with handling some aspects of the
| migrant issue. So then it's not exactly accurate, but to
| write a story about it, now you're writing a story about
| immigration (which Trump wants) and explaining the issue
| by telling people that Harris really was tasked with
| doing something about it, with the implication that it's
| not solved. He's clearly doing it on purpose. It's one of
| the reasons the news media hates him so much. He's
| effectively manipulating them and they don't like it.
|
| But then, for example, in the Trump interview with Elon
| Musk, Musk proposed a government efficiency commission
| and Trump was receptive to the idea. Which isn't a bad
| idea at all, but _that_ was not the focus of any of the
| interview coverage I observed.
| gottorf wrote:
| > He'll do things like call Kamala Harris the "border
| czar", which she never had as an official title
|
| Trump's strategy (whether one exists or not) around this
| aside, heaps of people have been called the "X czar" by
| the media for decades. As you point out, it's a shorthand
| for someone in the presiding administration who is tasked
| with some singular objective. Rarely did their official
| title ever contain the word "czar".
|
| The current media "fact check" circus around Harris never
| having been the border czar is yet another clearly
| identifiable example of a class of people who were so
| dismayed by Trump's presidency that they would go to any
| length, however distasteful, to prevent a second term.
| paulmd wrote:
| Not really. I think the change from Diane Rehm to JJ
| Johnson and now the new "1A" host is precisely emblematic
| of the decline of NPR/APM (I do not care about the
| difference) in that era.
| standyro wrote:
| Agreed. I was a longtime listener since I had fond
| memories of my dad listening in the car growing up, but
| it's borderline unlistenable now. Emblematic of the
| drastic change this generation in the aims of journalism,
| where everything in public life has become politicized,
| and the goal is no longer to inform and engage listeners,
| but to persuade and influence.
| paulmd wrote:
| Yup. I used to listen to it while working summer jobs,
| something new every day to pass the time (not just
| politics either, Diane was almost a variety show in a
| sense, sometimes it'd be literature or authors or
| whatever too) and her retiring/her slot switching to 1A
| was really the catalyst for me to stop listening to npr
| altogether. I lasted a few months and realized it wasn't
| going to get better and this was just the angle they
| wanted now.
|
| I adore Terri Gross tho, I should put fresh air on my
| podcast app.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| NPR does an excellent job of manufacturing a facade of
| being fair and disinterested, but in recent years, they've
| become more brazen about being a PR campaign for wealthy
| elites, their enterprises, and their politics, a la the
| Pareto principle. If you're against that, then NPR has been
| pretty intolerable for the past decade.
|
| NPR member stations are on the whole decent, but the way
| NPR came out in force against Sanders showed both how out
| of touch and unabashedly unreasonable they could be when
| called to toe their betters' line. I'd been a regular
| supporter through the early Car Talk and Science Friday
| days, ending with their disgusting behavior during the
| primaries.
|
| Pulling off making everyone look biased but you is quite a
| feat, and I'm impressed how many still consent rather than
| admit their emperor's indecency.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Fwiw, I feel the same.
|
| What annoys me the most about NPR is the relentless
| gaslighting. They act / speak as if they don't have an
| agenda (i.e., bias) and the rest of us are too stupid to
| see it. There's a smug "we didn't say X or Y" attitude
| but the problem is the questions they don't ask, the
| subtle ins and outs they pretend don't exist. Their news
| feels redacted to the point it looks like Swiss cheese.
|
| I enjoy the speciality shows (e.g., Hidden Brain) but the
| sociopolitical current events on the local NYC and PHL
| stations is gringe-tastic too often.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Oops. I should have said, "Their news feels redacted to
| the point it looks like Swiss cheese, and smells like
| Limburger."
| zht wrote:
| are there elites that are not wealthy? or does wealthy
| elite just sound better as a soundbite?
| harimau777 wrote:
| Academics, artists, and public intellectuals reasonably
| qualify as elite while often not being wealthy.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also lot of journalists. Though it is questionable are
| they part of elite. But they act like they are and follow
| same talking points. While not making much money.
| graemep wrote:
| A lot of people in professional jobs who identify with
| the wealthy to distinguish their place in the hierarchy
| from the next layer down.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Elites as defined by having an agenda, and perhaps a
| station to enact it from. Bureaucrats, politicians,
| academics, etc generally have different domains of
| influence and aren't all wealthy.
|
| NPR are proud of their sponsors, and prouder yet of how
| very little all of the public's dollars make up of their
| revenue in comparison.
| outop wrote:
| That's definitely not the definition of an elite.
| gottorf wrote:
| The Rasmussen poll on elites[0] has a nice working
| definition of "those having a postgraduate degree, a
| household income of more than $150,000 annually, and
| living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per
| square mile" as well as a fascinating material difference
| in the beliefs of that 1% of the population as compared
| to the rest.
|
| If I may editorialize, perhaps we can also posit that if
| someone does not meet these criteria but nevertheless
| shares the same opinions as the elite, then they are
| desiring to join the elite.
|
| [0]: https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-
| content/uploads/...
| otikik wrote:
| There's perhaps wealthy people who are not elites.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Unbiased news is literally impossible now that "alternative
| facts" are in the mainstream. Take climate change for
| example:
|
| Party A: "As greenhouse gasses increase, so too does the
| temperature according to historical measurements. We should
| do something about this."
|
| Party B: "There is no way to measure the global
| temperature, and anyone claiming to have done so is working
| for Party A. We shouldn't address this at all."
|
| Whether or not you as a journalist, were to include a
| factoid about it being the hottest summer on record, you're
| now doing biased reporting. Sure, if you include the fact
| you're siding with Party A and saying the fact is wrong is
| siding with Party B. However, not talking about it all is
| _still_ siding with Party B, since that 's their end goal.
| Factually accurate, inaccurate, and ambiguous are therefore
| all a form of bias.
| roenxi wrote:
| The trick it to be biased towards truth and humility. If
| they choose which party to align with based on
| considerations other than considering which party
| believes what that would be an excellent start.
|
| For example, in this case a publication could run an
| article saying that the hottest summer on record just
| happened, and present cases on how big a problem it is
| and how much in the way of resources should be dedicated
| to solving it - including the case for the whole thing
| being a non-issue. That'd be pretty good journalism.
| They'd probably manage to upset both parties or make both
| of them happy if they did that IMO.
| gottorf wrote:
| Neither of those are factually accurate statements; they
| pair a claim to fact in the first half with a policy
| proposal in the second half. "We should/should not do
| something about this" is not a statement of fact, it's a
| value proposition. So if a media outlet is consistently
| pushing the same value proposition (namely, that we
| should expend considerable effort to counteract climate
| change), then it's biased, regardless of the factual
| accuracy of what they report.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Biases in which direction?
| eltoxo wrote:
| I love NPR but to believe NPR is not biased reporting is
| completely delusional.
| ekianjo wrote:
| biased ? sure they are. Groundnews ranks them as clear left
| leaning.
|
| https://ground.news/interest/npr
| harimau777 wrote:
| I think that's an overly simplistic reading. The rate
| them as leaning left with high factualness. While that's
| not perfect, calling that clear left leaning is likely to
| give the wrong impression.
| autoexec wrote:
| > rate them as leaning left with high factualness.
|
| that seems to be the trend with left leaning news
| sources. They don't make up lies, but they hide truths
| leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they
| have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being
| directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling
| deceived.
|
| The right leaning news sources tend to tell a mix of
| truth and complete fabrications, while also refusing talk
| about truths inconvenient to the narrative they're
| telling so sure NPR is the clear winner in that sense,
| but the bar is set so low that it can't really be counted
| as a victory.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving
| people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's
| nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly
| lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.
|
| It's not just the omissions though, it's the
| implications.
|
| For example, they were covering the Republicans saying
| they want to do something about the immigrants and
| Fentanyl illegally coming over the border. NPR's coverage
| made a point of telling you that most of the Fentanyl
| comes over at marked border crossings rather than through
| the desert, strongly implying this was meant to be
| refuting some lie the Republicans were telling. But the
| clip they aired didn't have the Republicans claiming
| otherwise. They were plausibly talking about the desert
| in the context of the people crossing there. And
| installing a border fence there could arguably free up
| some customs resources to use to inspect more trucks. But
| they're so desperate for a "gotcha" that they make one
| up.
| fmbb wrote:
| The republicans are lying about that topic though.
|
| Fentanyl is not being smuggled by immigrants coming over
| the border. Stopping immigration will not stop the
| fentanyl.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| _Most_ (not all) of the _seized_ fentanyl is not being
| smuggled by immigrants coming over the border. The
| arguments Republicans make are that the migrants are
| exacerbating the situation by diverting customs resources
| and that those numbers could be skewed because there is
| equipment to detect drugs at ports of entry but not
| between border crossings, so the seizure rates could be
| higher at ports of entry out of proportion to the
| trafficking rates.
|
| Obviously this is politics and people can disagree with
| their arguments, but this is one of the other favorite
| "don't lie but kind of do" games. The claim that
| detection rates could be higher at ports of entry isn't
| outrageous, there is some logic to it, but since by
| definition we don't know what the rate of undetected
| trafficking is in each location, there is "no evidence"
| for their claim. This is not equivalent to it being
| proven false, but that will often be implied.
| varnaud wrote:
| Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally
| bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their
| backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the
| cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the
| fentanyl problem.
|
| To believe this, you have to assume that the reporting on
| fentanyl smuggling by the DEA and CBP and the fentanyl
| convictions data from the USSC that all point to US
| citizen being responsible for bringing in fentanyl in to
| the US is insufficient because "we don't know the
| undetected trafficking rate is in each location". It's
| possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by
| themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets
| put the blame on immigrants.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally
| bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their
| backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the
| cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the
| fentanyl problem.
|
| Again, they're making two parallel arguments. One is,
| some of the migrants have fentanyl (true; not established
| that the number is very large), but the number _could_ be
| large and isn 't known. The other is, customs is spread
| thin because of migrants and is not catching the
| smugglers as a result. In both cases they propose the
| same solution, i.e. stem the flow of migrants.
|
| > It's possible that we missed this one immigrant
| carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the
| US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.
|
| The claim is presumably that they could be missing a lot
| because there are a lot of migrants and more than one of
| them could have brought fentanyl.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Not to be overly pedantic, but Ground lists them on
| average as "Lean Left", with that rating coming from two
| "Lean Left" and one "Center" rating from three 3rd party
| media bias rating orgs. Their factuality is also High, so
| while there may be editorial subjectivity in what they
| choose to publish, the stuff they do publish is generally
| high quality and truthful.
|
| For some other examples, Pink News is listed as Left with
| Mixed factuality. Fox News holds Right and also Mixed.
|
| --
|
| There are nearly no reputable media outlets with no
| amount of bias at all. I certainly wouldn't stop
| consuming NPR for having a slight lean to the left.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| driving
|
| get bored
|
| remember I have a radio
|
| turn on NPR
|
| _in this episode we 're going to investigate the
| relationship between consensual undocumented migrant men and
| underage boys who want to seem older, on this hour of the
| Latino story hour_
|
| click
|
| repeat every 4-6 months
| foobarian wrote:
| Or, repeat never having done the above with a carful of 8
| year olds
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I'm just wondering, is this a true episode that happened to
| you or are you being hyperbolic and fabricating this so-
| called experience, because frankly I don't think this story
| is based in reality, where I like to operate. Sources, if
| you have them though.
| gottorf wrote:
| I'm sure GP is being facetious, though perhaps with an
| allusion to stories like "How climate change is hitting
| vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers"[0]. It's neither
| from NPR nor about Latinos as in GP's (unlikely to be
| real) example, but nevertheless emblematic of what one
| may come across frequently in left-leaning media sources:
| combine as many subject matters as possible that are
| currently in vogue in the progressive thought landscape,
| without much relevance to the broader public.
|
| [0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-
| change/news/indonesian...
| EasyMark wrote:
| NPR does a fabulous job not sounding like CNN or Fox News
| with their breathlessness. Sure like 1 in 100 stories from
| them would be meh, but I use them and APNews as my primary
| source and it doesn't feel like a panic attack when I go to
| their pages as compared to most mainstream news.
| standyro wrote:
| They lack the alarmism of CNN, but the way that outlets
| like NPR were so comfortable to tow obvious political lines
| during the pandemic (such as even entertaining the
| possibility of a "lab leak" hypothesis, painting it to be
| insanely conspiratorial and/or racist, despite the Wuhan
| lab being supported by NIH grants) -- the most clear and
| dangerous version of manufactured consent I've seen in
| American media this generation.
|
| Most media outlets (including NPR) begrudgingly accepted
| this as a strong likelihood for the initial source of the
| virus only a year or two later, once they had political
| approval.
|
| Journalists and editors in these larger institutions no
| longer have any courage to actually be a "fourth estate" or
| think independently of government.
| aredox wrote:
| The Wuhan lab is still not the likely source for the
| SARS-CoV-2, despite what you want to believe.
| TimedToasts wrote:
| They didn't write that it was likely, just that NPR
| willingly participated in the Establishment campaign to
| suppress and distort the lab leak hypothesis.
| gottorf wrote:
| My understanding is that expert opinion in recent months
| have been converging towards the lab leak theory.
| Consider this opinion piece[0], which points out some
| notable differences between the previous outbreaks of
| coronaviruses that had natural origins to Covid.
|
| I'm not sure whether GP really wants to believe that
| Covid has man-made origins like you claim, but I think by
| now with all the evidence that has been released into the
| behind-the-scenes workings of Dr. Fauci et al[1] we can
| all agree that in the early days, a consensus was
| deliberately manufactured away from the lab leak theory.
| Moreover, there is clear public interest in discovering
| the true origin as well as preventing this type of
| politicization of the scientific process in the future.
|
| What is your theory as to the most likely source?
|
| [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opini
| on/covid...
|
| [1]: https://www.public.news/p/fauci-diverted-us-
| government-away
| nomel wrote:
| > Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing
| it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure.
|
| I think it would be very difficult to set rigor (truth?)
| standards. There's a long history of truths that directly
| conflict with the "facts" provided, especially those from
| governments, which could probably not be reported under such
| scrutiny. I'm also curious how lying by omissions, which is the
| biggest problem I perceive, would be handled.
| deepsun wrote:
| What if we start prosecuting for knowingly spreading
| misinformation? It already works, but only in licensed areas
| like healthcare and legal advice (although I think we could
| do more on health advice side). We could make more areas like
| that.
|
| And fines to be small, similar to copyrighted media content
| sharing -- those who did initial leak would get large fines,
| those who just re-shared -- slap on the hand.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Medical history, even recent, is full of cases where the
| accepted truth turned out to be false and those who spoke
| out against it to have the truth be known would have been
| persecuted by the believers in the incumbent truth.
| lesuorac wrote:
| My favorite example being germ theory [1]. Granted, he
| went over the top (claiming all infant mortality was from
| cadaverous particles) a bit like some who claim Covid was
| a lab-leak from a Chinese bio-weapon; if you just stop at
| the lab-leak part you have a decent claim, the bio-weapon
| is what tanks your argument.
|
| But it's not like doctors started washing their hands
| despite his evidence of mortality dropping from 18% to
| 2%.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
| #Ignaz_S...
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Meh. Based on the way the CIA and the intelligence
| apparatus of the country reacted, they probably though it
| was a bioweapon bubonic plague level event. Of course, it
| wasn't, and it became quite apparent very fast, but it
| was an election year, so a lot of Democrats went on to
| ignore basic facts as misinformation.
| deepsun wrote:
| Sorry but your agument is a perfect example of Asimov's
| "spherical earth fallacy" [1]:
|
| > My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the
| earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the
| earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think
| that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as
| thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger
| than both of them put together."
|
| I.e. there's no medical protocol that tells doctor to
| prescribe unproven "accepted truth", at least not in
| important areas. It's way different to tell someone to
| ingest dangerous chemical compounds that were not even
| designed for medical purposes.
|
| [1] https://mvellend.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/Asimov_angl
| osabote...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Fox News paid $800 million for telling their lies about the
| 2020 election and the Newsmax trial for the same starts
| next month. Alex Jones is going through bankruptcy. When it
| gets egregious enough, there are consequences.
| vharuck wrote:
| Fox News only had to pay Dominion because Dominion lost
| customers. I think the proposed fines are for the
| societal harm of deceptive "news," not just provable
| financial harm.
|
| >Alex Jones is going through bankruptcy. When it gets
| egregious enough, there are consequences.
|
| Yeah, that was really egregious and caused real harm to a
| lot of people. But again, that lawsuit only succeeded
| because a group of victims claimed harm. I imagine the
| previous poster intended for the "deceptive news" laws to
| be like pollution laws, where prosecutors just need to
| prove the act but don't need victims.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| What lies?
| free_bip wrote:
| I believe they're referring to the scandal regarding
| their coverage of Dominion voting machines.
| otikik wrote:
| Yeah with Fox News it's sometimes difficult to know which
| lies people are referring to, specifically.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| Don't I know this. I've been stuck around a TV with fox
| news for 2 weeks now(even had the great displeasure of
| being present the whole time while the former guy gave a
| presser yesterday), and it's like watching bizzaro world
| where they try to blatantly push your emotional buttons,
| it is exhausting, deeply sad, and yet funny at the same
| time because to me, it exposed the utter inanity of
| running a superpower nation like this. There is no way a
| major party should find themselves in thrall to a single
| liar, yet here we are.
| nomel wrote:
| "Knowingly" is the tricky part. I could only see this as
| allowing a government approved set of authorities to push
| mis/dis/mal-information while suppressing any opposition:
| "Government/Coorporation/Industry says this is true, so it
| is all that can be reported, without question.", as has
| happened again and again within the big 6 [1]. How could
| opposition of the accepted be reported?
|
| I think it would advance the death of the freedom of the
| press [2], _disallowing_ truths that go agains the
| governing bodies, more than anything.
|
| [1] https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-
| that-own...
|
| [2] https://www.cima.ned.org/publication/chilling-
| legislation/
| cebert wrote:
| > What if we start prosecuting for knowingly spreading
| misinformation?
|
| What's concerning about this approach is who gets to
| determine what is and is not misinformation. Having that
| power is a great way to silence those who don't agree with
| you.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Good idea, I nominate you to decide what is truth and what
| are lies in this world, and severely punish those who
| spread harmful ideas.
|
| But instead of fining them, I think it would be more
| productive as a punishment to send these people to into
| rehabilitation camps in more remote regions of the country,
| where they could pay their fine by working community
| service for a few years.
| Veserv wrote:
| I always propose the: "Technically, your honor..." standard.
| If you make a commercial statement and in court your defense
| is "Technically, your honor, it means something completely
| different than what anybody hearing it would think and I
| spent a bunch of time in focus groups crafting the message to
| be deceptive", then you lose.
|
| It should be your duty to be intentionally honest and only
| accidentally confusing in proportion to your time and
| experience in crafting messages. A carefully curated message
| should be required to be entirely honest, a quick retort can
| be less rigorous (but still not intentionally deceptive; much
| harder to prove, but also less likely to be perfectly
| deceptive).
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| This would be a start
|
| https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-
| for...
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| The fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast license
| holders, so it would have never affected internet or cable news
| companies.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm quite familiar with the background literature, and include
| a "short reading list" on media for that reason:
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi..
| .>
|
| I'd especially point out Hamilton Holt's excellent, fact-
| filled, and highly readable _Commercialism and Journalism_
| (1909), 124 large-print pages. _Yes_ , it's dated, _but_
| precisely _for that reason_ it both pressages virtually all
| present discussion _and_ gives an excellent and valuable view
| of how things stood and had evolved _just as the phenomenon of
| advertising-supported media was emerging_.
|
| <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n7/m..
| .>
|
| There are far more academic, recent, detailed, and lengthy
| works. But if you want the maximum bang for your reading buck,
| start with this one.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Addressing your other points:
|
| Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were
| _explicitly_ partisan, often organs of various political
| parties, e.g., the Arizona _Republican_ (GOP) or _American
| Federationist_ (labour / AFL/CIO).
|
| Emergence of a (nominally) unbiased, nonpartisan press largely
| followed publication of _Public Opinion_ by Walter Lippmann
| (1922), and probably came to a fore during WWII, which in many
| ways was the high-water mark of American journalism as a near-
| universally-purchased service.
|
| I.F. Stone's 1974? interview on public broadcasting's _Day at
| Night_ is an excellent insight into the state of US media at
| that time. It had reached another high-water mark with the
| Watergate scandal, in which two reporters ultimately brought
| down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many
| faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown
| since then:
|
| <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>
|
| Edward Jay Epstein's _News from Nowhere: Television and the
| News_ (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how
| it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of
| the fundamental issues, particularly around audience
| development and narrative-fitting, remain:
|
| <https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst>
| jimjimjim wrote:
| I really do believe there should be negative repercussions for
| bullshitting. I would pay for a news source that fact checked
| anything said by a politician and stated it in the news
| article. And also, during interviews, called out obvious
| bullshittery to their face.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >And also, during interviews, called out obvious bullshittery
| to their face.
|
| The problem here is that politicians simply won't do
| interviews with these journalists. I think we saw exactly
| this during the Trump administration. This idea would
| probably only work if _all_ the journalists adopted this
| policy (prisoner 's dilemma).
| noirbot wrote:
| And even the times that Trump or his people did do
| interviews with actually combative people, did anyone
| remember or care? Did anything change? Did it cause anyone
| to re-evaluate their views? I remember multiple times
| people interviewing the then-president literally handed him
| transcripts of his own speeches that contradicted his
| denials about saying things and he just refused to
| acknowledge anything was wrong and kept going.
|
| It's not to say there's not ways the media can be better,
| but people have this "why, if I was a journalist, I'd fix
| everything with this one weird trick" and that's just not
| how any of it actually works in reality.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >And even the times that Trump or his people did do
| interviews with actually combative people, did anyone
| remember or care? Did anything change? Did it cause
| anyone to re-evaluate their views?
|
| Well, to be fair, Trump did lose his re-election
| campaign. It's impossible to say how much effect
| combative journalists had on this, but for whatever
| reasons, the American voters did turn out in higher
| numbers in 2020 and voted for Biden.
| noirbot wrote:
| Sure, but in my mind, the onus is on the person claiming
| the single-digit number of interviews where someone was
| bold with Trump mattered, as opposed to 4 years of his
| policies causing people to dislike how he effected their
| life. I highly doubt "wait, but he just lied" is
| something someone realized years into him being a
| candidate with nearly 100% name recognition in the US. As
| you say, it ended up being about turnout, and I find it
| very unlikely that more people decided to vote because of
| a couple interviews with someone they likely already
| disagreed with.
| listenallyall wrote:
| If "news" was highly regulated then likely nobody would produce
| it. Everything would simply become "opinion" or discussion of
| topics. Honestly you already see that at all the host-
| personality shows on CNN/Fox/MSNBC, every hour starts with a
| monologue then 50 minutes of panel discussions.
| autoexec wrote:
| > If "news" was highly regulated then likely nobody would
| produce it. Everything would simply become "opinion" or
| discussion of topics.
|
| That doesn't really seem much different from what we have now
| though. It seems like there's more commentary than content.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Yes, because it's cheaper and easier and has a longer tail
| (the press conference may be 20 minutes, the discussion
| about it can last all day) and is likely more entertaining
| (because the host can inject some personality) - so if you
| added more regulation to the "news" side, it would tip the
| balance to "opinion"/entertainment even further.
| cebert wrote:
| > Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing
| it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure.
|
| Politicians and parties with a majority can change. How can we
| trust that those regulating the news and determining what is
| truth or misinformation?
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Why are you mentioning NPR? NPR isn't a news source, NPR is
| just another political tool.
|
| >Truth is less important
|
| >Truth gets on the way of consensus and getting big things
| done.
|
| NPR CEO
| https://x.com/realCarola2Hope/status/1823746926279582115
| jonquark wrote:
| This seems to be a mischaractisation of what she was saying:
| https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/05/08/n.
| ..
| NullPrefix wrote:
| So the argument is based on the fact, that her talk was
| given before she became CEO, so her truthfulness values as
| a CEO are actually OK?
| timbit42 wrote:
| It's ridiculous how much they want to charge for an article. Some
| won't even sell single articles and want a monthly or annual
| subscription to see everything they produce. I don't want to see
| everything. I'm not your sheeple. I can't afford to buy 5 or 20
| annual subscriptions. I want to read articles from a variety of
| news sources.
|
| I want to pay $20 for 10 articles and be debited for the ones I
| view. If that takes me 3 days or 3 years to view 10 articles,
| that's what I want. They will make more money selling articles at
| a reasonable price than they will selling annual subscriptions
| full of crap people don't want.
| apercu wrote:
| Right? I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75
| and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a
| fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days, though it was
| probably a huge waste of paper and water. Although the industry
| actually provided jobs back then.
|
| If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5
| or 10 times a month. But I guess capitalism says that they
| would rather have 1 person pay $100 a year than 2500 people pay
| fifty cents once a month.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's badly outdated pricing data.
|
| The _daily_ edition of the _New York Times_ now runs $2 at a
| news stand, best I can make out.[1]
|
| Sunday costs $5 in NYC, $6 elsewhere.
|
| Note that the print Sunday edition was (and is) _massively_
| underwritten by advertising, which comprises the bulk of the
| issue, 60--90% by column inch or weight.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. <https://www.travelizta.com/how-much-is-a-copy-of-the-new-
| yor...> isn't a particularly impressive source, but it's the
| best I can find. I cannot find a newsstand price for the
| _Times_ anywhere on the paper 's actual website. Which is
| another gripe I've got generally: for a commercial product,
| pricing data are exceedingly difficult to come by.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Their point remains.
| mhb wrote:
| No it doesn't. He could subscribe to the online NY Times
| and get ALL the articles for every day (including
| Sundays) for less than the cost of printed Sundays alone.
| So what's the missing element? Taking a fun article to
| work on Monday?
| t-writescode wrote:
| Their argument was:
|
| > If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would
| do that 5 or 10 times a month.
|
| The subscription is a major contributor to the problem.
| Also, NYT does the tricky "change the price to $25/mo
| after 6 months" game.
| mhb wrote:
| He says two things. My reply was responsive to:
|
| "I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75
| and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and
| take a fun article to work on Monday. I miss those
| days..."
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I was addressing the price specifically.
|
| I _do_ have fond memories of reading the Sunday _Times_
| all day, and for much of the next week. On that I 'm in
| agreement.
|
| I'll add another useful feature of both newspapers and
| more especially magazines. When you were done with the
| damned thing, _you could pick it up and dispose of it_
| ... trash, recycling, reuse as fishwrap or firestarter,
| take your pick. Rather than leaving a litter of
| individual browser tabs which are painful to collect and
| discard (even using tools such as Tree Style Tabs), the
| format _was an aggregation itself_.
|
| What was _harder_ of course was to maintain an _archive_
| of items of interest. That 's not a primary role of
| publishers however, and many news sites have paywalled
| their archives (this strikes me as ... shortsighted),
| broken links, or both, which should be familiar
| frustrations to many.
|
| I'm not sure how OP is really responding to the questions
| of how to _fund_ and _provide access_ to news and
| journalistic content, however.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I don't buy the NYT, but the Sunday print edition of the
| local paper is not the same product as the Sunday print
| edition of the local paper back when people paid for news.
|
| Back when people paid for news, the Sunday edition was
| three inches thick and weighed around 5 pounds. I know
| because I used to deliver them on my bike.
|
| Sunday mornings sucked as a paperboy, but you really could
| spend all morning reading the thing.
| apercu wrote:
| I liked the news better in America before the Fairness Doctrine
| was revoked by an extreme right wing administration.
|
| I also spent a huge chunk of my adulthood in Canada, and I never
| really minded the CBC, until the last ~10 or so years when (like
| most institutions and companies) they have lacked any sort of
| reasonable, competent or rational leadership and now they're
| combining staff layoffs and massive executive bonuses, which is
| the ridiculous reality of the world we live in.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| For what its worth, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this
| because - and full disclosure -- I've been working on a startup
| for news. (More on that below.)
|
| But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a
| few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably _did_ pay for
| news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc.
|
| The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for
| free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that
| the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally
| was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it
| online and advertise against it?
|
| That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising
| market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators.
|
| These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on
| paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great!
| Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit.
|
| There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news
| homepages -- because the links go to articles.
|
| Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just
| imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you
| subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you
| wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was
| inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or
| whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd
| flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It
| didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw
| the same number of ads, and they had value.
|
| Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites
| need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so
| they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize.
| They cannot monetize if you don't click.
|
| If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes
| the story -- you give the user little reason to click through.
| There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors
| start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble
| their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most
| newsworthy.
|
| Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard.
| They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to
| ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the
| shoeleather reporting, they just type.
|
| --
|
| As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth
| (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all
| of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're
| admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let
| users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of
| topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people
| doing the reporting.
| throwadobe wrote:
| It's an interesting problem, but I would say that a single feed
| of the "latest" news isn't really what I want as a reader. I
| already have twitter for that. None of your writers are known
| to me so I'm not going to implicitly trust them more than John
| Doe on Twitter.
|
| I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or
| nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on
| what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for
| different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all
| of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you
| so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding.
| Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized
| content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with...
| but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if
| they want what everyone else is reading
|
| Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You're actually addressing a few points I'd _not_ covered in my
| piece, key being _how people access news_.
|
| I actually _do_ go to the homepages of several news
| organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on
| social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+
| at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as
| well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story,
| largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I 'll also
| listen to podcasts (largely _not_ news-related, though some are
| included). I 've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back
| markedly on radio as well.[1]
|
| That said, my practice is probably not typical.
|
| I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are
| sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often
| possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though
| that's not especially user-friendly. _Adding in_ sections that
| are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a
| challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit
| (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is
| annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait
| headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples,
| though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at
| _ProPublica_ and the _WSJ_ (speaking to layout rather than
| content /editorial slant) are better than most.
|
| It would be really interesting to find a publication which
| dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or
| weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook
| reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've
| found, but _managing_ content on it is an absolute nightmare,
| and there 's nothing about it which would make a regular
| subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't
| "pick it up and throw it away". I _do_ append items of interest
| to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some
| benefits.
|
| I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's
| part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and
| is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed
| this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times,
| possibly also earlier at Vox.)
|
| I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to
| be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole /
| desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own
| organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course:
| how are you (and they) getting paid?
|
| What's success look like? Failure?
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming
| annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-
| recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and
| other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to
| me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's _The World_ much
| more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s
| or early aughts.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| My co-founder and I are both former journalists; we met years
| ago at ABC News. Getting this right is personal to us --
| there's a definite gap in between how important we think news
| is with how much it seems to be worth in the market -- a big
| problem considering how expensive it is to do correctly.
|
| Our aspirational goal is to be _THE_ place for news updates,
| regardless of what you 're into. Before we started, I asked
| my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay
| up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them
| -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent?
| She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly
| through the headlines." We want to that, better.
|
| It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of
| the things we learned pretty early on is that while people
| say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it
| isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we
| do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and
| around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the
| street _AND_ Gaza /Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between.
| It's a tall order.
|
| We have local in many places, though its uneven across the
| country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get
| an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons,
| we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.)
|
| We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to
| places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists
| and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly
| know their beats like they do -- and they're already out
| there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are,
| and ask them too abide by an editorial policy
| (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as
| easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without
| the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc.
|
| Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our
| biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up
| enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or
| actually crack the subscription business model once and for
| all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la
| Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist
| reading this, we'd love to chat -
| https://journalists.forth.news)
|
| Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| On local: speaking with a friend who finally ditched their
| own long-standing subscription to a clearly-walking-dead
| local paper, the one element most missed was coverage of
| local arts and culture events. Even a national publication
| might be able to address that with a few regional editions
| which focus on events in major cities. For, say, the NYT,
| covering LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington, and
| perhaps Houston or Dallas, might at least give a proxy of
| regional coverage, and I'm aware that at least some papers
| _do_ offer a regionalised edition for at least some places.
|
| Sounds as if you're doing more _news aggregation_ than
| _news production_ , which ... doesn't seem to get at the
| question of how to actually get local news produced in the
| first place. That's a long-standing challenge. From what
| I've read of news history local newspapers pretty much
| always _did_ function as both a local challenge on national
| /international reporting (usually through wire services)
| with a gloss of local coverage and advertising. This also
| meant that by subscribing to the local paper, readers were
| getting national stories and features. Often stories would
| run in multiple papers nationally with small elements
| changed to fit or feature locations or features specific to
| a local paper's readership.
|
| With Internet-based distribution, much of that's
| disintermediated, as you note.
|
| Glancing over your homepage: what I'd like to see is an
| arrangement that groups similar topics together, rather
| than a random sequence of stories. See Postman's
| description of the contextless news wire (I think that's in
| _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ ).
|
| And I've dropped you an email, check your spam folder ;-)
| madrox wrote:
| I think the author is in the right ballpark, but frames it in a
| way that makes me wonder if they're right for the wrong reason.
|
| News has always been partisan and flawed. The internet just makes
| the flaws more obvious, because no single source gets nearly the
| same control over the narrative as pre-internet. As long as
| someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way about
| things, news will have this problem.
|
| Which is also why no one will pay for it. As long as someone
| stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way, they'll
| happily give you that content for free. How can a subscription
| service compete with that?
|
| The article does cite these reasons, but in a way that makes me
| think they see these as bugs in the system and not endemic to the
| newscycle. When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE
| the product.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the
| product.
|
| Sometimes, even when you are paying for the product, you are
| the product. Nothing prevents companies from taking money from
| you _and_ then making more money e.g. by selling your personal
| data.
| impure wrote:
| I have trouble believing any of these reasons. You don't pay for
| news because you can get it for free elsewhere. You don't have to
| be all high and mighty about it.
|
| This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when
| you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining
| about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want.
| fritzo wrote:
| I can vouch for H: The incessant upselling. I'd like to pay for
| the Economist, but last time I unsubscribed, they forced me to
| wait on phone hold for a half hour, then go through another
| half hour of verbal upselling spiel, like "have you considered
| changing to a biannual subscription?". Never again.
| linza wrote:
| I'd pay for news, even bad ones. I see it like a donation to
| the Red Cross or something.
|
| My experience and reasons for not paying anymore are similar.
| Used to pay for The Guardian for some time, but when they
| started pestering me about a subscription renewal the whole
| thing felt a lot less classy. Now it suddenly was about me
| and not news anymore.
|
| Me too: never again. I would pay for anonymous vouchers or
| similar where I'm not identifiable to the newspaper, though.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But
| when you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to
| complaining about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing
| what they want._
|
| Don't write code, don't talk to users?
| re-thc wrote:
| > You don't pay for news because you can get it for free
| elsewhere.
|
| There's also just too much news these days and most of it isn't
| important. It's saturated. Maybe if we cut down on the number
| of media outlets. You used to just buy 1-2 newspapers at most
| but the equivalent now is likely 5-10. And each 1 would be 2x
| as thick.
| deadfece wrote:
| Allow me to offer my opinion without reading the article:
|
| I can and do pay for news, I just dislike the bait and switch
| with modals/popovers that much. Now that I can no longer block
| domains in my Google search results, I can't remove those
| paywalled sites from relevancy and it's hard to keep track of
| everyone who only lets you read the first paragraph and a half
| before sticking their hand out asking for $10.
|
| ETA: I have now read the article and have no revisions to my
| statements.
| 627467 wrote:
| most news is really just entertainment disguised as life-changing
| information. deep down everyone knows it. so, now it competes
| with all other forms of entertainment
| motohagiography wrote:
| BBC and CBC are already public agencies, as the author suggested
| as a solution. arguably, given who pays them, the party of the
| official opposition should appoint the heads of them both.
|
| imo non-partisanship was the artifact of another time. in another
| life i wrote occasionally for establishment media and met many
| players, and i don't bother with any mainstream news anymore.
| these days i prefer to read the writing on the wall.
| stephen_g wrote:
| That doesn't seem like a solid strategy - for example, here in
| Australia the current opposition are the ones who _did_ appoint
| the heads of our national broadcaster (when in Government) and
| were widely condemned for the political nature of the
| appointments (actually bypassing an independent selection board
| to make ideologically motivated appointments) and also for
| their political interference (or attempts at it) both while in
| Government and while in opposition (as they are currently).
|
| Their attempts at political manipulation is arguably even
| stronger while in opposition, so if anything they would be even
| more likely to make politically and ideologically motivated
| appointments!
| taeric wrote:
| This is ignoring the question of "what is the value of news for
| most people?"
|
| It is clearly of high value for people that can to make informed
| decisions. Unfortunately, most decisions people are making are
| not informed by the news. Such that any attempt to get people to
| pay for it will be difficult.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's a good insight, and suggests another: for whom _is_ the
| news of significant value?
|
| What I've noticed both through my own experience and research
| of the history of journalism is that _business news_ has, _in
| general_ tended to be far more reliable then general-
| consumption news, _if also strongly self-serving to the
| interests of business and fiance._
|
| Amongst the best quality news sources that I find presently are
| the _Economist_ and _Financial Times_ , with _Foreign Policy_
| also standing high. The _Wall Street Journal_ had a very strong
| (if of course pro-business) reputation when it was still owned
| by the Dow Jones corporation, somewhat less so of late.
| Newswires such as AP, Reuters, and AFP are also generally quite
| good. You can also find regional business news publications of
| high quality and relevance, _especially_ as compared with their
| non-business local counterparts.
|
| In debunking a century-plus old hoax (the "Banker's Manifesto")
| a few years back, one of the more amusing bits I'd found was
| that of all the claims it made, one which was more easily
| addressed was a mention-in-passing of the failures of several
| banks. It turns out that of all the things that a bank-centric
| publication is interested in, it's the solvency of financial
| institutions, and the bulk of any given issue addressed
| insolvencies and failures, of which those mentioned in the
| (bogus) manifesto made no appearance...
|
| I suspect that a large reason for greater relevance and
| accuracy is that _business news tends to be actionable_ to
| businesses, executives, and managers. I also suspect that
| misquotations and misrepresentations of interviews tend to get
| sharp responses. By contrast, the principle operating principle
| of a mass-market paper is to maximise circulation and eyeballs.
| At the worst of the Penny Papers this lead to outright hoaxes
| (e.g., the Great Moon Hoax:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax>). And of
| course, with large circulations it was also possible to steer
| public opinion (e.g., exploiting the explosion of the USS
| _Maine_ to incite the Spanish-American war by Hearst and
| Pulitzer: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yell
| ow_journa...>).
|
| But I'd suggest that the population for whom quality, relevant
| news is of high interest is relatively small.
| taeric wrote:
| That last line is one I was aiming at, but I do not have any
| way to quantify it.
|
| I used to want to try and make the news valuable to myself. I
| have yet to find a way to do that, though. Such that I am
| unlikely to want to pay for it anytime soon. Would be neat to
| consider ways I could start making the news of more personal
| value.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You could probably get a fair way to quantifying that by
| looking at premium news-publication subscription rates, and
| making allowances for domestic vs. international
| readership.
|
| There's also the 15% subscribership rate amongst NPR
| listeners, which suggests to me a hard-core media consumer
| segment. That percentage has been steady for _decades_ ,
| and if anything has fallen somewhat as NPR's overall
| listenership has expanded.
|
| The hard-core news segment is probably on the order of 1--
| 5% of the population.
|
| Circulation of WSJ and NYT, print and online, is roughly 3m
| and 7m respectively. That's from a total US adult
| population of ~300m, or about 1--2% of population for each.
| I suspect a fair bit of overlap in subscriptions.
|
| How much of this is a matter of interest, willingness to
| pay, _ability_ to pay, or ability to access news through
| other means /channels, I don't know.
| eduction wrote:
| You're wrong to suggest the Journal is no longer owned by Dow
| Jones. Maybe you're referring to the fact that until about 16
| years ago Dow Jones was owned by the Bancroft family, then it
| was acquired by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch).
|
| I think the quality has remained quite high, and the rather
| robust subscription numbers bear that out (millions of people
| paying $40/month is impressive). It helps that the WSJ news
| staff resisted the temptation to abandon objectivity as at
| NYT.
|
| The FT and Economist are nice but FT newsroom is an order of
| magnitude smaller than WSJ and the Economist an order of
| magnitude smaller than that (if you're subscriber who checks
| daily you'll know this).
|
| Of the three I'd keep WSJ if I had to choose. FT is very nice
| for an international perspective though. Economist for high
| level summary.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fair enough. Replace "Dow Jones" with "Bancrofts" in my
| original comment. I was referring to the corresponding
| ownership change.
| asdff wrote:
| If you are making informed decisions about something you should
| not be looking at the news for information. You should be
| looking at data.
| notdang wrote:
| Good luck looking for data and ignoring news when you country
| and worse, the region where you live is being invaded by the
| neighbor and you need to make an informed decision to stay or
| to leave.
| taeric wrote:
| This is all kind of my point? There is some data in most
| newspapers that is of interest to folks and could be used.
| Sports scores, basic weather, fashion trends, etc. However,
| if that is actually something you are using to make a
| decision, you are almost certainly able to get the data in
| a more rapid and actionable way. You won't be waiting for
| it to show up in the general news.
|
| Similarly, at a state level, you know they are the same.
| They have data feeds that are not released to the public.
|
| Which brings us back to my point, what is there of value in
| the news for most people? I can think of very little
| personal value there.
|
| Now, I can see great political and public value in making
| sure you have an informed population. Such that I am not
| claiming there is no value in it. Hard to show a direct
| bottom line value to individuals, though. And we are
| discussing why individuals won't pay.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I think it's because people don't find news through news sites
| anymore. They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and
| then want to read a single article. Then you're prompted with a
| paywall that requires you to _dedicate yourself to a single news
| company (or have multiple companies) and pay them $4 to $40 / mo
| - usually on the cheap-but-then-expensive-in-6-months-when-you-
| forget model)_.
|
| I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate
| subscription that covers all the major players *OR* if I could
| pay per-article from a centralized grab-bag.
|
| I don't want to see an interesting topic and then need to go to
| the NYT to see their take on it. I just want to see an
| interesting topic and read that view of it - maybe read several
| views of it (and happily pay for each one).
| nottorp wrote:
| > They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and then
| want to read a single article.
|
| or HN :)
|
| No, I won't pay a subscription for each random site that gets
| posted on here. I might pay a few cents, if it's a unified
| service as you say, but micropayments are 10 years away every
| year.
| NaOH wrote:
| _> I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate
| subscription that covers all the major players...._
|
| Isn't this what the Apple News+ service offers? I haven't used
| it, but for US $13 per month Apple says it offers content from
| over 400 publications. Of course it necessitates using one of
| the Apple OS platforms, and I've heard both good and bad about
| the overall design and presentation of the content, but it
| seems like this kind of service is akin to what you describe.
|
| I'd think this kind of broad offering would appeal to readers
| more than a single-site subscription. The Apple cost of $13 per
| month sounds much better than, say, the NY Times cost of $25
| every four weeks, but maybe the Apple access to publications is
| limited or has other problematic attributes.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| It should, but like you said, Apple's access is somewhat
| limited.
|
| I don't think that's the main problem though. The main reason
| I unsubscribed is that Apple News+ still has ads and prompts
| to sign up for newsletters! It's a usability issue; the
| newspaper equivalent of torrenting music, archive.is offers a
| far superior reading experience and just so happens to be
| free. The industry needs something like Spotify or Steam to
| fix it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Apple News _somewhat_ approaches the concept of an ISP-based
| gateway, yes.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This gets to the tollbooth problem.
|
| With print subscriptions, the _publisher_ was one clear
| tollbooth, as unless subscribers paid for delivery, the paper
| wasn 't delivered. That was a leaky model --- there were copies
| circulated at offices, people would bring and leave papers at
| cafes, they could be read at libraries or private clubs. But
| generally, _a_ copy of the paper or magazine had to be bought.
|
| The other tollbooth was the newsstand, where individual copies
| could be bought from either a manned or unmanned site.
|
| With the Internet and Web, the notion of such tollbooths is
| largely eliminated. As I've suggested several times in this
| discussion, the two highly obvious tollbooths are either the
| ISP (with whom the reader has an existing relationship, though
| less so in the case of, say, public WiFi), _or_ a taxing
| authority who could assess a payment on _all_ residents of a
| region (on the basis that media and an informed public
| contribute to the common weal). Or perhaps other _indirect_
| assessments, as with old legal notice requirements (see:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>).
| d_k_h wrote:
| Of course there is the small detail of removing agency from
| the internet user at that point. Maybe I don't want to
| support local/regional news or maybe that extra fee is going
| to make the access untenable for me.
|
| Beyond that it would devolve into a scenario where entities
| would begin trying to game whatever system is created to get
| a cut of the pie.
|
| Forced support is not the answer.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| An additional element of my user fee / tax-based support,
| and one that strongly distinguishes it from a flat-fee
| assessment as with the BBC or German public broadcasting is
| that _it should be strongly progressive_.
|
| For a tax assessment this would be based on wealth (e.g.,
| property tax) and/or income. For an ISP-based assessment,
| the allocation might be more challenging, but a
| differentiation between business and residential usage
| (with a higher assessment for businesses, again on a
| progressive scale), _and_ differentiated rates _probably_
| on a neighbourhood / metro region basis (so that a
| household on the Upper West Side and one in Julesburg, CO,
| would pay widely differing rates), is what I have in mind.
|
| Rationale is that the wealthy have already benefitted
| mightily from such access, and the poor should not be
| denied access to media: news, entertainment, books, music,
| video, whatever.
|
| You say "forced". I say enlighted common weal.
| wrp wrote:
| Local newspapers should not be used as a point of comparison.
| When we subscribed to the city newspaper, it easily paid for
| itself in coupons and awareness of sales. There would also be
| notice of civic affairs that directly affected our lives.
| National and world news was essentially added entertainment.
|
| Before complaining that people aren't willing to pay for online
| news, recall that they didn't pay for national broadcast news
| either.
| lvspiff wrote:
| My parents still pay for the local newspaper to be delivered at
| home but it went from every day to I think now twice a week -
| Sunday and Wednesday or something like that. Same price, they
| get a "free" online subscription in addition to paper, but its
| still disappointing to not be able to have a paper with morning
| coffee anymore.
| mrweasel wrote:
| A few months back I was looking through the local paper, when
| I visited my parents. My dad note: "I don't think we'll be
| resubscribing this year. There's almost no articles left at
| the price went up again".
|
| The paper covers an area of around 1 million people. They
| have no correspondents, with the exception of a small team at
| the Danish parliament. All their "journalists" are
| centralised in the regional "capital". I'm sure that their
| reporters are actual journalists, just not very good writers.
| All foreign news are provide by Reuters or some other news
| service, with a little rewrite and no adding of information
| from other sources. There simply isn't enough news in the
| area, to make a daily newspaper necessary and they don't have
| the staff to add much value to the national and international
| coverage. For this newspaper, which is mostly ads and very
| poorly written articles they charge the equivalent of $1250
| per year. That is absolutely insane, you can get a legitimate
| good paper for $890 per year, but that will not have the
| local angle and there are very few other sources for local
| news.
|
| I don't agree that you shouldn't follow the news, but I'd
| argue that you don't need daily coverage, that's pointless as
| well. Daily provides no time for details to emerge, no time
| for investigation or second sources. Weekly is absolutely
| fine, anymore frequent and the news degenerate and the media
| becomes an ad hellscape to cover the cost of publishing.
| flimsypremise wrote:
| Because I don't want to pay monthly for a bunch of content I
| probably won't read. I want to pay a small amount of money, with
| as little friction as possible, for the specific content I want
| to read now.
| hakanito wrote:
| This is what I want too. Been wanting it for years.
|
| Maybe once payments are bundled into the browser coupled with
| some W3 standard...
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| That's been a dream for nearly as long as the web has been
| around. I'm pretty sure there are mailing list threads from
| the '90s about turning micropayments into a standardized web
| API. As far as I can tell, this never caught on because it's
| almost always more profitable to operate your own paywall
| scheme or payment network than to participate in someone
| else's (provided that you're powerful enough to get away with
| it).
| mayneack wrote:
| You're basically describing the BAT from Brave
| Terr_ wrote:
| Cue wave of "micropayments" deja-vu from the 1990s.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Re: micropayments:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Until we have anonymous electronic money, this still does not
| overcome the problem of privacy (it may worsen it).
|
| "Problem of privacy" which incidentally made me very relieved
| to find in your article: it is nice not to be alone
|
| > _I don't want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-
| card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the
| paragraph what I'm reading_
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I sometimes pay for news, and when I do, I do it by buying print
| versions for the reasons (H) and (I) in the article, "The
| incessent upselling" and "Privacy".
|
| He writes "Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter
| at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The
| Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire
| life history wasn't sea-lioning into every possible situation
| trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket".
|
| I can still buy the print version of the Economist at the
| newsstand (OK, Barnes & Noble) and I can still buy a print copy
| of the WSJ at the grocery store or convenience store.
|
| I paid, hmm, looks like $11.49 plus tax for the last print
| version of the Economist I bought. Will I consider paying $6 or
| so an issue for a subscription to the online version? No, I will
| not.
|
| I paid, I think, $5 plus tax for the last print WSJ weekend
| edition I bought. Will I consider paying $40 a month for a
| digital subscription? No, I will not.
|
| Here are my requirements: I can pay in cash per issue with no way
| for the publisher to tell I bought it or to track my reading in
| any way.
|
| Don't meet my requirements? Totally fine. But if you don't, I'm
| not paying for your product. Go complain to someone else.
| specialist wrote:
| Agree with all.
|
| Yes and: Most of what we now label "news" is actually
| infotainment. aka USA Today. Which is distinct from previous
| incarnations of tabloids, yellow journalism, phamphleteering,
| etc.
|
| Ad supported media (structurally) cannot sustainably create real
| news. It just doesn't pencil out.
|
| FWIW I happily pay for quality media creating real news, opinion,
| and analysis. (starting with Propublica, Five to Four, Volts,
| Know Your Enemy.) More so over time, as I discover more good
| stuff.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| (Started writing this as a response to mhb[1], but posting at the
| top-level because I think it's generally relevant.)
|
| Most newspapers have deliberately promoted the online editions in
| preference to their traditional print editions, which is
| compromising the economies of scale in printing. The online
| edition of the New York Times is half the price of the print
| edition because they want it to be, not because that would be its
| natural market price.
|
| A specific newspaper is not a free market resource; the editorial
| stance and quality is exclusive. But assume for sake of argument
| that it is: that there are dozens of different companies that can
| produce the New York Times. As long as the physical quality (of
| the ink, paper etc.) is adequate, consumers will purchase the
| paper which is cheapest. Eventually, a monopoly would emerge due
| the economies of scale - the producer which sells the most papers
| would also be able to provide the lowest prices. Yet, this
| hypothetical printer would still be kept honest because, with no
| exclusivity over printing, they couldn't raise their prices above
| the basic printing cost of a single copy (which does not benefit
| from economies of scale).
|
| Here's the key part of the argument: the difference between the
| online and print edition is $3. For less than $3, I can print the
| entire Sunday edition at home, probably on higher quality paper
| too. That means that the New York Times are deliberately over-
| pricing the print edition relative to their online edition. They
| can do this because they hold copyright over the text. They
| _want_ to do this because they can target advertising to
| individuals, lock customers into subscriptions more easily
| online, show attention-grabbing multimedia and a do whole litany
| of other profitable things.
|
| I should note that abolishing copyright wouldn't fix the problem,
| because that would drive prices down below even the true market
| value of journalism. This is because nobody would want be the
| first to purchase a copy of the article; wait a little longer and
| someone else will sell you theirs at a discount. I personally
| believe it would be closer to the real value than the status quo,
| but it is still below it, and that isn't a sustainable income for
| journalists. It would harm professional journalism eventually.
|
| Ensuring that anyone is allowed to republish an article verbatim
| at a fixed royalty - a royalty no higher than the price of the
| online edition - would, I think, go a long way to making print
| editions reflect their actual relative value compared to
| electronic publishing. Legislation permitting format-shifting,
| and resale of the format-shifted work, would facilitate this.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261282
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The article makes a lot of pretty bold assumptions and
| conclusions (i.e. that the media is to blame for increased
| partisanship, causality isn't clear at all, partisanship might
| drive media behavior etc),
|
| but the entire article is basically I think almost useless
| without a baseline comparison, namely if people are less likely
| to pay for news than they are less likely to pay for anything
| else and I don't think that's true. People pay for virtually
| nothing on the internet if they can get a free (usually ad
| driven) alternative.
|
| Be it search, web browers, apps, youtube, tiktok, with digital
| services the norm is usually that the service is free, a small
| percentage will pay for premium, so in that sense news functions
| literally just like anything else and the reluctance to pay isn't
| enough to make unsubstantiated claims about quality or bias in
| the news.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My claim was "Partisanship has increased to the point that
| trust in any opposing news media is all but nil. In numerous
| cases, the media themselves are entirely to blame."
|
| The first is simply a recognition that _partisanship as a
| whole_ has increased, without ascribing causality.
|
| The second is a fair note that there's been an increase in
| _overtly partisan major news sources_ , which again is pretty
| well founded. Fox News in the US beginning in the 1990s, right-
| wing talk radio (attempts to create a left-wing alternative
| have largely foundered, see Air America), and increasingly
| branding of even major news organisations as leaning strongly
| to one political party or the other: WSJ (Murdoch-owned and
| GOP), NYT (Dem), MSNBC (Dem), Sinclair (GOP), etc.
|
| (I'm focusing on the US, there are of course examples
| elsewhere, notably in the UK, DE, FR, and AU press.)
|
| You make a point that I agree with strongly, and probably gets
| at a key mechanism: "People pay for virtually nothing on the
| internet if they can get a free (usually ad driven)
| alternative."
|
| This is absolutely true, and has exceptionally pernicious
| impacts not only on how content is funded, but what content is
| _sustainable_. Advertising is dependent on many eyeballs,
| common appeal, and reasonably-advertiser-friendly content.
| There are types of content which thrive in such a world, and
| many, many, many types which do not.
|
| A large part of my argument is in finding alternative paths to
| funding which give content which struggles under an ad-centric
| market, _and which has substantial social value_. For reasons
| argued both within my essay and elsewhere (and I can give
| further reading on request) markets and information play
| together poorly.
| RigelKentaurus wrote:
| Because it's a lousy product.
|
| -Because opinion pieces increasing masquerade as news articles.
|
| -Because journalists have no comprehension of basic math and
| statistics, so stats like "a woman earns $0.72 for each $1 earned
| by a man" are taken at face value or parroted endlessly. Most
| news articles show a lack of critical thinking.
|
| -Context is deliberately avoided to paint nuanced topics as black
| and white.
|
| -Graphs are intentionally created in a way to provoke outrage
| instead of understanding.
|
| -Clickbait titles.
|
| Sadly, all of this is true even for paid news such as NYT, WSJ
| etc.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Why do you think that is, and how might you suggest improving
| the situation?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think there are several parts to the cause, there's the
| issue that 'professional' journalists often act like their
| job is sacred and their credentials make them superior to
| 'indie' journalists and other 'commoner' scum despite the
| current standards being even lower than what it'd take for
| someone without a CS degree to write code. We see this alot
| in relation to the discourse around misinformation or
| reporting on violent events on sanitized platforms like
| YouTube. This makes people question why they should bother
| paying for the opinion of someone who looks down on them.
|
| Then there's the other issue that we see even scientists
| frequently make mistakes interpreting data despite having a
| far more rigorous education and far more experience
| interpreting data and risking significant professional
| consequences if caught. But journalists have none of that,
| they don't have to actually understand what they're trying to
| report on, they don't have to interpret the data in good
| faith and they don't really face any consequences for being
| wrong. A scientist might end up having to retract a paper if
| it's wrong, a journalist doesn't even necessarily have to add
| a correction.
|
| This also leads into an additional issue about journalists
| who specialize in certain things. Like, say, games
| journalists, tech journalists, aerospace journalists, medical
| journalists etc. Often they don't have any expertise in the
| field they're reporting on, it's so common for:
|
| - tech journalists to report obviously incorrect
| interpretations of basic technical matters
|
| - game journalists to be completely out of touch with gaming
|
| - aerospace journalists to report information that makes it
| obvious they don't know/care about the accuracy of what
| they're saying (there's an example from just a few days ago,
| of a journalist latching onto one typo of a number reported
| correctly in several other parts of the report for a hit
| piece, refusing to issue a proper correction despite being
| publicly called out by the company they targeted)
|
| - medical journalists to report research results without
| understanding the caveats or confidence levels of the study
| (eg the jumping back and forth on how coffee can provide X
| health benefit)
|
| - tv/movie journalists to have opinions that are more often
| than not completely opposite to those of the public, complete
| with looking down on the public disdainfully for the
| disagreement rather than updating their reporting style to at
| least also fairly cover public sentiment
|
| These are topics people tend to be passionate about and thus
| are more likely to spot issues, which reduces trust in
| journalism as a whole. After all, if the reporting on a topic
| they follow in depth is so bad, how bad might the reporting
| on topics they don't know as much about be?
|
| To me, the solution would be to make professional journalism
| actually require skills and that they also need to have some
| humility. Like, a tech journalist should be someone who has
| had decent experience in the tech field, such that they
| understand the technology they're covering.
| vsuperpower2021 wrote:
| I'll add onto this a complaint I have that I don't see
| mentioned often. News articles always cover the first half
| of a story when it's hot and never follow up. It's
| obnoxious if you have an attention span longer than
| whatever is happening at the exact moment.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This again is where Wikipedia is often invaluable, so
| long as the story is in fact covered there. And is why I
| wish news organisations would adopt a Wikipedia-like
| approach to complex stories.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Because every news place I've signed up for make it a giant pain
| in the A$$ to unsubscribe, so they just lost all of my trust. The
| only one that didn't suck was when I got the FT (paper) version
| for a year for like 800 airline miles. Oddly the digital
| subscription was MORE. That was great and 10 years later I'm
| still using pink paper to light my fires.
| noirbot wrote:
| This is a big part of it for me. I used to subscribe to a news
| site that I generally liked, and when I went to cancel it for
| financial reasons, the experience was so painful that it turned
| me off of wanting to engage with the entire company again, even
| though I liked their writing and coverage.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| I feel like I pay a lot for news. I pay for: * WSJ * NYTimes *
| Economist * LATimes * SJ Mercury News * Apple News
|
| And yet I constantly run into paywalls (which I circumvent). How
| much per month does the news industry think is fair for me to
| pay?
|
| I wish I could just pay a fee per article I read. I think the
| business model is broken because there are too many individual
| entities and they all want a subscription. And this makes no
| sense in the age of the internet.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I'm more likely to pay money to never see "news".
| meiraleal wrote:
| The payment for news is the influence they get on society. There
| will always be billionaires and millionaires willing to subside
| it.
| 65 wrote:
| I used to work for newspapers (as a software engineer) so I'm
| very familiar with this conundrum.
|
| Ultimately it's the value proposition, particularly with regional
| newspapers. I worked at a regional newspaper and their
| subscription price was more than the New York Times. Their
| subscriber base was basically all old, suburban white people who
| still got print newspapers. Print is still the cash cow of
| regionals to this day.
|
| They had terrible technology. Stories, of course, were always
| presented as... stories. They were stuck in their ways. No
| emphasis on, like the post mentions, creating good data products
| - e.g. events, restaurants, weather maps, etc.
|
| A big hurdle for newspapers is, yes, on giving away their news
| for free in the early days of the web - creating a certain
| expectation. But also their arrogance of not adapting to the
| times. The Charlotte Agenda was one of the only digital only
| profitable news publications before it got bought by Axios. They
| made money from a jobs board and other ideas (that I am now
| forgetting) that would cater to a regional audience.
|
| News people tend to think "journalism is sacred" to the point of
| myopia. Their product is outdated. I read the New York Times for
| national news, but regional news (which is the majority of
| newspapers) consistently don't appeal to me. Why would I pay to
| read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood? Yes, give me
| important stories, but also give me visuals and data and products
| that would fit into the "not video" segment. Even feature stories
| just don't have much pizzaz - who really wants to read an
| interview - I want to watch an interview. Give me information
| that can't be expressed in video and that isn't 2000 words long
| with long, drawn out flowery language.
|
| Needless to say I don't work in news anymore. The people are very
| interesting and I'd work in news again. But at the end of the day
| newspapers are selling fax machines.
| exodust wrote:
| For a different perspective on print news, consider for a
| moment the vastly improved _reading environment_ in your
| typical newspaper reader 's home.
|
| When visiting my Aunty, it was obvious why newspapers are
| favoured in her house. They had a big sun-room at rear, with
| big tables where numerous newspapers were found spread out in
| various stages of completion. One glance across the table
| provided immediate feedback on a range of headlines, pictures,
| and articles. You can instantly see how long a piece will take
| to read. So with coffee in hand, you sit down and _enjoy_ the
| experience.
|
| Newspapers when spread out on tables provide superior
| readability than a single screen tablet where scrolling and
| wrestling all the annoyances is a test of patience.
|
| If someone invents a lightweight digital "book" the size of a
| newspaper but containing less pages, maybe 10 or 20 double-
| sided digital e-ink pages that can be turned like real pages, I
| believe people will buy it.
|
| The spine would allow the book to lie flat on any page, like a
| ring-bound book. When you get to the end, obviously you could
| choose to load up the next 10 pages from that publisher, or
| switch to a different publication. Importantly, the book can be
| left open, laying around the house for the next person to
| wander in with their coffee, sit down and have a relaxing
| browse though stories both local and global. No annoyances, no
| pop-ups, no tracking how long it takes you to read a page or
| any of that nonsense.
|
| Before we label regional people "outdated", perhaps consider
| they simply like better reading experiences with their morning
| coffee.
| vundercind wrote:
| Paper UI beats digital in a _lot_ of ways. I haven't replaced
| my several-hundred book library with ebooks not because I
| love all these heavy, bulky objects, but because the UI of an
| ebook is a lot worse for anything but entirely linear cotton-
| candy fiction reading. It's got (enormous) advantages on
| weight, searchability (... though, a _good_ index is better
| IMO) and not needing separate large-print editions for some
| readers, but basically everything else about the UI is worse.
|
| I'd be thrilled if ebook devices could somehow close that
| gap.
| hatethissite42 wrote:
| > who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an
| interview. Give me information that can't be expressed in video
| and that isn't 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery
| language.
|
| Me. I am exactly opposite on this. I don't want to watch a
| video if it could have been an article. I don't think this is
| uncommon, either.
| bell-cot wrote:
| _Sometimes_ me. But 99% of the time, my preference is for a
| competent journalist distilling the interview into an
| article. Thus sparing me all the ways that politeness, chit-
| chat, and long-winded stuff can turn a 1,000-word article
| into a 4,000-word interview.
| 101008 wrote:
| I'd prefer the other way around. Reading the raw interview
| instead of the biased report of a journalist. I want to see
| all the quotes, not quotes out of context, summaries of
| answers or stuff like that.
| enobrev wrote:
| To follow the gist of the leading post on this thread, we
| should easily have access to both. I'm perfectly happy to
| read a summary; Then then journalist's take; And ideally
| the quotes would link to the transcript of the full
| interview, and ideally those would timecode to the audio
| / video of the full interview.
|
| In modern times there's no reason we can't have all of
| these things for all our news.
| jzb wrote:
| Ideally, you'd have both. Gimme a transcript of an
| interview but a well-written article in front of it with
| additional context and a better narrative.
|
| A lot of detail readers might want makes for shitty
| interview questions and/or the interviewee(s) may not be
| the best source(s) for that.
| rchaud wrote:
| There is no such thing as a 'raw interview' unless you're
| sitting right there with them. Every printed interview is
| edited for 'concision and clarity', and the interviewee
| for the most part knows what questions are coming.
| Journalists also quote interview responses verbatim, so
| where is the bias if they're printing what was said?
| troyvit wrote:
| Radio and podcasts actually. Politico does this, and
| cpr.org (my employer) does it too. They'll have a blurb
| about the topic, a link to the podcast, and then a
| printed, edited version of the interview. I love it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I don't want to watch a video if it could have been an
| article.
|
| Same for me. I can read a transcript of a talk in 5 minutes,
| while it would take an hour to listen to the video.
| cryptonector wrote:
| If I can watch/listen at 2.5x speed, I might prefer that over
| reading. It's a question of bandwidth and comfort.
| trilobyte wrote:
| I used to be this way, but I've started to err on the side of
| video because there's a lot that's unspoken/unfiltered
| through the journalists biases if you watch someone in an
| interview. Body language, what they leave unspoken, answers
| to questions that seem conflicting or irreconcilable with
| previous answers.
| randomdata wrote:
| If it is important, I want to read it. If it is merely a
| curiosity, I want to listen to it while doing something else.
| The newspapers deliver mostly curiosities.
| driscoll42 wrote:
| 100% I hate the videofication of the internet. So much
| content is locked behind a video that is vastly more
| difficult to pull detail out of and search and just text.
| Videos are a great supplement to most text, but rarely do
| they make a good primary source of information.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an
| interview
|
| News websites have pushed video in various forms, as it
| generally has higher ad revenue, but people often skip right
| over it for the text.
|
| A perk of text is you can glance through it extremely quickly,
| to see if there is anything interesting.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Part of this was Zuckerberg outright lying to everyone about
| video's impact. I was involved in a newspaper doing this and
| we did a big push to video because FB told us it got more
| impact. Actually digging into the numbers showed this wasn't
| true, or if it was then people weren't clicking through the
| video to somewhere we could serve ads to them. It ended up
| losing us money and diverting time and effort when it was
| sorely needed elsewhere.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Look, I agree that this was a terrible, terrible situation
| that caused a _lot_ of pain for publishers (and contributed
| to many outlets becomingly meaningfully worse for me).
|
| That being said, this was a bug in the code. All of us
| write bugs, and so we should maybe not be as harsh to other
| people who do. Was it a convenient bug? Yes it was, it
| helped push a narrative around video and provided more
| videos for people on FB. Was that intentional? Almost
| certainly not, although they should've fixed it much, much
| quicker.
| hobs wrote:
| At facebook's size and for the duration that lie was
| told, no, that's inexcusable.
|
| That's a knew or should have know territory - they were
| pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the
| new feature, they changed the industry around it and
| wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug"
| - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know,
| double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal
| for advertisers.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| When this happened, Facebook was a much, much smaller
| company. They made the decision around pushing videos
| before this code was written, because of the engagement
| of videos on Facebook and Instagram.
|
| Source: I was there, and tangentially involved in this
| hobs wrote:
| Ah yes, 1.5B users, absolutely tiny :)
|
| When my company made a mistake that cost our customers
| 750k, we fell on our sword and recouped them the cost.
|
| We had 11k users at the time :)
| gumby wrote:
| > Part of this was Zuckerberg outright lying to everyone
| about video's impact.
|
| Perhaps I'm missing some important aspect, but what would
| be the benefit of lying about this? How would serving video
| that didn't promote engagement help FB at all? Just more
| storage and bandwidth without increased opportunity to
| serve an ad -- backwards from how I understand FB's model.
|
| People do say something false for a believed gain all the
| time. But usually when I hear something false it's a
| misunderstanding or misspeaking. So based on my (relatively
| naive) model of how FB works as a business, "lying" doesn't
| seem like the right word here.
| ruined wrote:
| they've admitted to knowingly reporting impossible
| metrics, which is lying as far as i'm concerned.
|
| these specific metrics were used to indicate to business
| accounts what kind of content was appreciated, and cited
| in executive keynotes, essentially demanding an internet-
| wide "pivot to video".
|
| one lawsuit has already settled with a payout and it
| seems like a second one is ongoing.
|
| i believe the intent was that video embeds are watched in
| the feed, whereas articles are more often links out.
|
| it was incredibly destructive as nearly every news outfit
| cited this as the motivation for gutting their
| investigations and writing staff.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/6fc9fda0-f801-4a56-b007-430cea
| edc...
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/c144b3e0-a502-440b-8565-53a4ce
| 547...
| ipaddr wrote:
| There are many reasons why Facebook would want to push
| videos at the time. There was probably a strategy shift
| to video at the board level then it trickled down into
| this.
|
| Facebook gets paid for showing ads and videos were
| playing automatically on hover. It looks like more
| engagement but the call to actions is lower (no one
| clicks on a link).
|
| The strategy probably worked better on instagram.
| robbie-c wrote:
| Is this related to what almost killed CollegeHumor/Dropout?
| IIRC facebook were lying to them about how well their
| facebook videos were performing, so they hired a large team
| based on that ad revenue. When them + advertisers found out
| that facebook were lying, they had to let go almost
| everyone apart from a skeleton crew.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Have worked in newpsapers. Can confirm the "Journalism is
| sacred" attitude, accompanied by a "we don't need to think of
| the economics or the reader - we write what we (i.e. other
| journalists) think is good copy, and someone needs to pay us
| for doing that" attitude.
|
| The stupid thing is, though, that they're right. Our
| democracies need investigative journalism to survive, or we get
| what we're seeing now - corrupt politicians looting the public
| coffers. What has happened in the UK over the last ten years
| would not have happened back in the 90's, not because
| politicians were better people back then, but because the
| journalists would have had a field day reporting on their
| shenanigans.
|
| You can't have this paid for by taxes. The BBC in the UK, and
| the ABC in Australia, have both been suspiciously quiet about
| government shenanigans and have generally not rocked the boat,
| which desperately needed rocking at times. There's just too
| much weight behind the never-spoken-out-loud threat of revoking
| the charter if the boat gets rocked too much.
|
| We're seeing news organisations funded by billionaires, but
| they do interfere editorially, and we know that, and more
| importantly the politicians know that. Billionaires can be
| leant on to stop investigative journalists from doing their
| thing.
|
| It needs to be funded by the readers. But the readers are
| reluctant to pay for this (as TFA says). It's a conundrum, but
| we need to sort it out soon.
| Leherenn wrote:
| > "You can't have this paid for by taxes. [...] There's just
| too much weight behind the never-spoken-out-loud threat of
| revoking the charter"
|
| Sounds like an implementation issue more than a fundamental
| truth. In Switzerland, the public broadcasters are funded by
| a special tax as well, but any change to it would have to be
| approved by the population.
|
| At the same time, I'm not sure the SRF/RTS is actually better
| at reporting shenanigans.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Where do blogs, twitter, chat rooms, etc fit into all of
| this? They are yet more options we have now.
| troyvit wrote:
| My opinion is about as strong as my knowledge is weak
| buuuut here's my take. There's no editorial control over
| blogs or social media or chat. That opens them up to
| everything from typos to honest mistakes to outright
| disinformation. And people are using them for that.
|
| However that lack of editorial oversight also means instant
| information, which also can't be beat.
| jzb wrote:
| "It needs to be funded by the readers. But the readers are
| reluctant to pay for this (as TFA says). It's a conundrum,
| but we need to sort it out soon."
|
| Readers often _say_ they want one type of coverage but
| actually _consume_ others, too. (e.g., people complain
| _mightily_ about "clickbait" headlines and so forth -- but
| write an in-depth article with everything people _say_ they
| want and often it gets a fraction of the traffic.)
|
| But, yes, the best path to producing news that a community
| _needs_ in the form of investigative journalism and not being
| driven by entertainment factors is if the news is paid for by
| readers.
|
| Of course the other problem here is "L" in the article:
| Subscription fatigue. I do value quality news, I do subscribe
| to several publications local, national, and global in scope.
| But every now and again I look over my credit card statement
| and think "holy shit, that's a lot of little charges".
|
| As a side note, I love this article and I wish I knew the
| author to go out for beers and discuss/argue about media.
| tivert wrote:
| > Readers often say they want one type of coverage but
| actually consume others, too. (e.g., people complain
| mightily about "clickbait" headlines and so forth -- but
| write an in-depth article with everything people say they
| want and often it gets a fraction of the traffic.)
|
| I think that just means "readers" is a group of many people
| with different habits and opinions.
|
| Not to mention the addicts' problem of genuinely wanting to
| quit but not being able to.
|
| I think what you're actually pointing to is a failure mode
| of the market itself, as in it doesn't produce what's good,
| it produces what sells now (which is not the same, despite
| the confusion of many).
| tracker1 wrote:
| For that matter, online community sites generally do okay for
| staying informed of local news and events.
|
| On the national level, it's partly a matter of commoditization.
| Most national or global News is so well reported, usually,
| you're going to find many sources.
|
| Media bias and govt collusion, perceived or real, is another
| reason why some are looking beyond traditional media sources
| alone.
|
| That doesn't even get into new media and domain specific news
| sources.
|
| But above it all. The same reason people don't pay for every
| streaming service. They can't afford to and shouldn't be
| expected to. People don't tend to get their news from a single
| source anymore. Nobody is going to pay for a half dozen news
| sites or more.
| ghaff wrote:
| My town used to have a quality local paper but now Facebook
| is pretty much the only source for news.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really
| wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview. Give
| me information that can't be expressed in video and that isn't
| 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery language.
|
| I want. I grew to despise video format, unless it is a movie or
| a TV series.
| tivert wrote:
| > Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really
| wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview.
|
| I think you need to check your personal biases there. _I_ want
| to read an interview, rather than watch it. Reading is
| typically faster, allows for skimming, can can be done anywhere
| with little fuss (e.g. no headphones).
|
| That's why I tend to _hate_ video content that could be
| presented textually. Video should only be be for things that
| are necessarily visual.
|
| I'd really only want to listen to an interview if it's someone
| I'm _so_ interested in that I want to take it slow and make
| time for it.
|
| And that's not just for news. I work in a company where
| "documentation" is typically a pile of years-old, 1-2 hour long
| meeting recordings, _if you 're lucky_. All that content would
| be _soooo_ much better as text.
|
| > Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off
| neighborhood?
|
| Because I might go to that neighborhood sometime? The whole
| point of a regional newspaper is to give a view of a local area
| not a hyperlocal area.
| lupire wrote:
| Do you have map of all carjacking locations? Do you maintain
| it by teaching each individual news story?
| troyvit wrote:
| > I read the New York Times for national news, but regional
| news (which is the majority of newspapers) consistently don't
| appeal to me. Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a
| far off neighborhood?
|
| It's messed up, but very little national news actually affects
| you. It's the carjackings, the city council meetings, all the
| boring boring stuff that actually decides things like your
| mortgage taxes, driving habits, crime rates in your
| neighborhood, etc. And it's the state level stuff that decides
| whether you can conceal and carry, the discounts you can get on
| electric cars and solar panels, the quality of the schools that
| are teaching the kids that will (hopefully) fund your
| retirement and such.
|
| But nobody (including me[1]) cares about it, so nobody wants to
| pay for it, so reporters aren't getting paid to cover it.
| That's because we've successfully gamified (inter)national news
| to make it feel important, and it leads the way in the culture
| wars that we all think actually matter.
|
| [1] I spend about $50/month on local and state news sources and
| I read those subscriptions on average about once a month.
| bwanab wrote:
| I can't even imagine the number of times I've been reading an
| article about some event that takes place in a very specific
| area for which understanding that area is crucial to
| understanding the story and yet - no map! Nada. Nothing but
| words and maybe a few pictures of people doing something that
| while being nice shots convey no information other than that
| people were involved. It's maddening.
| isk517 wrote:
| >I read the New York Times for national news, but regional news
| (which is the majority of newspapers) consistently don't appeal
| to me. Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off
| neighborhood?
|
| I think this sentence says a lot about why regional news paper
| are going under. In the case that someone was interested in a
| local carjacking why read about it in the paper when you could
| probably find out directly from the source on some local social
| network group (Facebook/Nextdoor/etc)? In the event that this
| is a trend why bother waiting for the newspaper to report on it
| when the internet makes it easy to read direct statements or
| directly question your local government about it? The local
| busy bodies using social media do a better job than the local
| news paper for about 99% of the non-events that are usually
| reported on.
| httpz wrote:
| I see news as three parts: facts, opinions, and curation.
|
| There are plenty of free and reputable news sources and paying
| doesn't seem to increase the credibility of the news.
|
| So we're effectively paying for the opinion and curation.
| However, I don't feel the need to pay to read about a random
| journalists opinion nor the curation of a (possibly politically
| motivated) editor when I can read hundreds of people's opinions
| nicely curated by upvotes on sites like Reddit and Hacker News.
|
| I have to admin, I spend far more time reading comments than the
| actual article.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Because it's not a good and it's not a service. It's not
| enjoyable, not pleasurable, and usually not well-made. It doesn't
| inspire thought or confidence and it's not actionable. It's my
| responsibility to be informed and it's a requirement of a free
| country that we all be informed, but it's not something I'm
| willing to trade for money because money is valuable and
| knowledge of current events is just drudgery (pun only intended
| after the fact).
| altdataseller wrote:
| +1. It doesn't entertain me, and it doesn't help me make more
| money. And I don't need it to survive. I think that pretty much
| sums it up
| willdr wrote:
| Does this argument then reinforce the value of government news
| orgs like we see in Australia (ABC) & England (BBC) - if
| England's was to exist without the draconian tv licence?
| Edited: I didnt mean impartial but rather non-commercial,
| updated.
| mrmlz wrote:
| But it all comes down to the execution of it. Sweden has a
| Public Service thats financed by a tax-like-system.
|
| Swedish public service is imho very bad. Its shallow, narrow,
| angled and generally never (or rarely) leaves you feeling
| informed. Their debates are laughable, their interviews are
| short, uninformed (the interviewer is) and is generally
| closer to gotcha-journalism than whatever a random Youtube-
| interview is where they get to complete their sentences.
|
| The Swedish PS has an enourmous budget and has very little to
| show for it. It should be reformed.
| martin_a wrote:
| > The Swedish PS has an enourmous budget and has very
| little to show for it. It should be reformed.
|
| Same goes for Germany. It's also a system heavily under
| critique. There are something like 20 public tv stations
| and 50 public broadcasts but they all cater to a rather
| narrow audience of age 50+ people with lots of folk music,
| old shows and whatnot. Young people are not represented.
| It's a shame, there could be so much good stuff out there.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > to a rather narrow audience of age 50+
|
| Not so narrow if you take into account that median age in
| Germany is 45.3y old, average age is 49.8y old and you
| take a look at its population pyramid. Add to that +65
| people are probably the biggest consumers of medias
| because they have more free time.
| pjc50 wrote:
| UK political coverage is _really_ bad precisely because of
| "bothsidesism". I feel the TV license has outlived its era.
| graemep wrote:
| Britain, not England!
|
| I do not think it is all that good. I think the biggest
| problem is the nature of news media. It tends to shallow
| coverage, and video more than audio, and audio more than
| print.
|
| I agree with the GP that people in a democracy should strive
| to have a informed opinion, but I think the best way to
| achieve that is to read books on the issues, not follow the
| news.
|
| People cannot evaluate the accuracy of what they read either
| - that is why "Gell-Mann amnesia" is a problem. Again, it is
| a less prevalent problem with books and more detailed
| analysis (but it still exists, of course) than with news
| media.
|
| The sheer complexity of a modern society makes it very hard
| to be well informed. Most people in the UK do not even
| understand the taxes they pay. I can guarantee that almost
| all otherwise well informed and educated people in the UK
| cannot explain national insurance correctly (the second
| biggest source of revenue, generating about two third of what
| income tax does), or how VAT works and what it is imposed on
| (just behind NI).
|
| Understanding of economics is even worse. Anything niche like
| competition in software and online services (the sort of
| thing we often discuss on HN) is non existent. Even issues
| like education and healthcare that are not niche but are
| complex are not well understood.
|
| At the end of the day most people vote tribally (i.e. the
| party they identify with) or emotionally.
| arethuza wrote:
| Actually - the UK not Britain - the latter leaving out NI?
| graemep wrote:
| I just looked at my comment and realised, then I saw your
| comment!
| beefnugs wrote:
| "it is not actionable"
|
| Yeah this part really sucks, top of the line premium journalism
| leads to something like the Panama papers... no consequences
| whatsoever. So we get to know the world is shit, but nothing
| will be done about it whatsoever.
|
| If there was some renaissance where actual journalism resulted
| in a series of deeper investigations on perceived jerks' deeper
| crimes, then maybe it would make a comeback
| rayiner wrote:
| Because it's mostly not useful? I feel like people have some
| nostalgia for "the news." But consider your own industry. How
| many people find tech industry news coverage useful and
| informative? Why does anyone think the coverage is better for
| anything else?
| RollAHardSix wrote:
| I guess I should post...something. Lack of relevancy. I don't
| watch the news, don't even watch the weather, I don't vote or
| care about politics, I don't listen to the radio in the car, I
| went years without even looking at Hacker News, don't use reddit
| outside of work-related subs, don't use facebook, or other social
| media. I don't even use youtube except when I want to see some
| highlight video of Iverson or Pippen or a player soccer highlight
| (but not match recaps), or the occasional music of an artist
| stuck in my head. Why would I? The news isn't going to mow my
| yard, politics won't change a single thing about my life which
| couldn't be changed through more hard work. There is just nothing
| in the news for me. I suspect this feeling will continue to grow
| sharply with the youngest generation (I'm mid thirties personally
| but my teenage daughter has shared her classmates feel apathetic
| towards current events etc).
| wespad wrote:
| > The news isn't going to mow my yard, politics won't change a
| single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through
| more hard work.
|
| Ain't that the truth.
| presentation wrote:
| Personally I find that the weather is pretty actionable.
| asdff wrote:
| Highly regional dependent. Some places in the U.S. you could
| do without any weather reporting. Hot yesterday? Probably
| will be hot today. Cold today? Probably cold tomorrow. It all
| comes from NOAA anyhow. You could just drink right from the
| spigot like the meteorologists do, cut them out, and not miss
| anything.
| presentation wrote:
| I live in Tokyo so during the rainy and typhoon seasons
| it's the difference between staying dry and getting soaked
| - but it is definitely like that in the winter (except
| instead I pay attention to the snow forecasts in the nearby
| mountains to know when I should pack up and go
| snowboarding...)
| zht wrote:
| what about your daughter's ability to get an abortion or health
| care coverage if she is unemployed?
| harimau777 wrote:
| Being informed doesn't help without the power to change
| things.
| autoexec wrote:
| being informed is how you know what needs changing.
| asdff wrote:
| You don't pilot the boat though. You are trapped in the
| current with the rest of us controlled by moneyed forces
| unknown. Americans are docile cattle in comparison to
| other peoples who have the passionate collective culture
| needed to actually totally unseat an unpopular
| government.
| brainwad wrote:
| You have the power to change things for yourself, by moving
| somewhere where things suit you. Especially true for a
| young person.
| esperent wrote:
| > teenage daughter has shared her classmates feel apathetic
| towards current events
|
| So, a teenager feels apathetic... and you're claiming this is a
| new development?
|
| > politics won't change a single thing about my life which
| couldn't be changed through more hard work
|
| Hard disagree. It won't _immediately_ change anything. But on
| the scale of months, years, decades? It has the potential to
| change nearly _everything_. If not for you, then surely for the
| marginalized.
|
| If you're from the UK - Brexit was not an inevitability.
| Different parties in power, even a different PM at a certain
| point, and it wouldn't have happened. And it's demonstrably
| wrong to claim that isn't changing the lives of everyone in the
| UK by a huge amount.
|
| If you're from the US - are you really so dumbly apathetic that
| you're going to claim that the choice of the next president
| won't affect your life?
|
| There are a few countries that are stable enough (currently)
| that an argument could be made any political actions like
| voting won't change much. But these countries are few and far
| between,and even those are not guaranteed to stay stable.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| These kinds of comments are always good times to repost
| Michael Huemer's "In Praise of Passivity", which tackles
| these arguments against not following the news in a
| generalized but imo very effective way.
|
| https://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media/files/Studia_Humana/Studia_Hum.
| ..
| card_zero wrote:
| Perhaps you do in fact care about some selection of specific
| news, such as tech news, sports news, news of cultural tends,
| business news, and arts and entertainment news, for instance.
| Just not "news" news. And perhaps you get your news in
| specialist or indirect ways. I imagine you have an idea of
| what's going on generally, somehow, and keep up to date with
| more than the length of the grass outside.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The truth that is unfolding is that people today have much less
| agency and influence than people had in the past, resulting in
| that news don't matter anymore. You are in your mid thirties
| and should be at the peak of your influence and agency in the
| world, and dependent on accurate information (news) to make the
| best decisions. But everything in the industrialized world is
| owned and controlled by geriatrics, including all and every
| aspect of government.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| 1. Ridiculous fragmentation. 2. Ridiculous pricing.
|
| There are currently articles from two paywalled sources on the
| front page of HN, Bloomberg and New Yorker. Neither of them are
| what I consider "the news", so subscribing to only these two
| would not be sufficient.
|
| The New Yorker charges $10.83 per month (obfuscated by pricing in
| "per week"), for rather niche content. Bloomberg charges $34.99
| (!) per month - enough to cover 2-4 movie streaming services
| depending on subscription level.
|
| New York Times, another approximately $13 per month (obfuscated
| by making even the "per week" pricing nearly impossible to find,
| i.e. you _know_ they 're going to make it a pain to cancel). The
| Washington Post? I _think_ it would be 60 EUR (i.e. I assume they
| do region-based pricing) per year for the annual subscription,
| but they made it hard to find out what the price after the trial
| period would be (i.e. if I had considered paying them, I 'd now
| be put off because I'd expect sleazy behavior).
|
| The NYT and WP are much less bad than I actually thought, but
| that still means you are paying the price of a streaming service
| subscription, but unless you limit yourself to one source and
| never follow links people send you, you keep getting hit by
| paywalls from all the other media that you didn't subscribe to.
|
| None of this gives me local media, where the situation is even
| worse. Everything aside from a few low quality sources is
| paywalled, and each paywall is separate, even if the newspapers
| belong to the same group... so if you pay for your local
| newspaper/edition, but the article was published in the other
| region's newspaper (from the same company), tough luck, pay
| again. The first article I found on one such site was based on a
| WSJ article... which, if I wanted to read it, would be another
| ~$10/month (don't know the US price) paywall.
|
| The more respectable of the two major local ones offers two
| separate subscriptions, one for ~30 USD/month, but that only
| gives you some articles, and another for about $40 USD/month that
| actually gives you access to all of their articles. Only their
| weekday edition though, their sunday edition is extra.
|
| So, to get _any_ meaningful value (in the sense of no longer
| hitting paywalls every time I click a link, I 'd probably have to
| subscribe to at least $50/month worth of subscriptions. Just
| doing that would be a chore in itself.
|
| Then I'd have to sign in on every device where I actually want to
| read these news. So that's at least my personal phone, work
| phone, personal computer, work computer (sometimes people send
| links at work). I have free access to some media through a
| corporate subscription, and just the hassle of having to log in
| is usually enough to either find a paywall bypass or skip the
| article.
|
| Then, it's really hard to convince me that their product is
| superior to the free alternatives. I can see the various ways
| that the free alternatives suck (clickbait etc.), but I've also
| seen the paid ones engage in different but equally infuriating
| practices (e.g. not getting to the point and rather blathering on
| for pages and pages with meaningless speculation just so readers
| feel like they're getting something for their money).
|
| Also, even if you pay, many will subject you to ads and other
| abusive experiences (some will gladly remove that pain if you pay
| just a little more...)
| testrun wrote:
| I think the reasons are:
|
| 1. Interests: We are interested in certain categories(for
| instance finance and sport), but if you subscribe to a news
| organisation (say New York Times), you get the whole caboodle,
| but only their version of finance and sport.
|
| What many people prefer is to have multiple sources of finance
| and sport, but that means that they need to subscribe to various
| news outlets to get it.
|
| 2. Short: We want the the short and easy digestible version
| (preferable video, but if you insists audio).
|
| 3. Sweet: And don't make me think.
| calebh wrote:
| Some people here have mentioned microtransactions for news, and
| that reminded me of an app I used to use called Blendle. Back in
| the day you used to be able to top off your account and pay <$1
| for each news article. I used to use it quite a bit. From what I
| can find online, the business model never succeeded, and the
| majority of the people who downloaded the app never actually made
| any microtransactions. It's a shame because I really enjoyed it.
| eitland wrote:
| Blendle was really cool, but they
|
| 1. didn't have the stuff I was looking for (tech comes to
| mind). I was still trying to use it hoping more magazines would
| come along.
|
| 2. changed their model. It is a few years ago now, but I think
| there were two things:
|
| 2 a) the original model had a time limit were you could look at
| an article and if you immediately realized it wasn't your thing
| you could go back within x seconds and not pay.
|
| 2 b) IIRC they also switched from a reasonable pay-per-view
| price to an "all you can eat (from our very limited buffet)"
| model. I think it was at this time I stopped checking and gave
| them up. "Pay monthly and have access to everything"-models are
| only really attractive if you have access to everything you
| want: Spotify and Apple Music are good examples here.
| d_k_h wrote:
| <$1 isn't a micro-transaction imo. It needs to be a fraction of
| cent.
| ggm wrote:
| I paid a guardian subscription for years. They upped the price
| twice, significantly more than inflation overall and they nagged
| me endlessly for donations. When you already pay being begged at
| is tiresome. I decided to stop paying and put up with the
| begging. I gave my money to another independent news source for a
| year or two instead and I will revisit this in a while.
|
| Their international edition was fantastic. Printed on airmail
| tissue paper and federating several other news sources, weekly.
| I'd pay for that again.
| vsuperpower2021 wrote:
| Why won't some people pay for blockbuster movies?
| rickydroll wrote:
| Cost. I added up the cost of subscriptions to cover what I read
| for "free," and it came to over $2500/yr. Then, there is the
| inability to archive stories without going to paper and turning
| my house into a hoarder's palace.
| focusgroup0 wrote:
| > Why won't some people pay for propaganda?
|
| edit:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
| is why I don't btw
| Peteragain wrote:
| I'll agree the problem with "unbiased" news (BBC locally) is the
| uncritical regurgitation of positions, and the questions that are
| not asked. The alternative is to read bias media from all sides
| and compensate for the bias. Voice of America, Russia Today, BBC
| world service, and yes, SBS Australia. You know where they are
| coming from. The Murdoch press cannot offend anyone around the
| world and so their news must inevitably be content free.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Just because most news isn't news. If something major happens in
| the world you will know without following news.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Important news often go unnoticed, drowned in the main stream
| of news.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm one of those people and paying for the news is like paying
| for the word on the street. It'll reach you eventually.
|
| You're actually paying for their articles, which they write and
| angle so that you should feel like you get some value for your
| money.
|
| So I guess you can conclude by saying, paying for anything makes
| it profitable to someone, which also makes it exploitable to
| squeeze more profits out of the consumer.
|
| I'm more ok with paying for a low quality toolbox than a low
| quality thought.
| L-four wrote:
| It's to hard and to expensive.
| Refusing23 wrote:
| MOST news is negative
|
| and negativity makes me sad
|
| so i just avoid news all together. i do read up on a few specific
| topics every now and again but... overall, i dont need the
| negativity in my life
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Why don't I? Because journalists are merely peddlers of
| sensation, taking my money so I can feel angry and sad at their
| pleasure. Sincerely fuck that noise, they are cancers of society.
|
| You could, of course, argue I am placing the cart before the
| horse. Journalism is a cancer because I am not giving them my
| money, you could argue.
|
| But you know what? Fine. That doesn't change the fact they are a
| cancer. I am not paying for cancer. Sincerely fuck that noise.
|
| The world would be much more pleasant without journalism.
|
| Note: Mother passed from gastric cancer. If I am calling someone
| or something a cancer, _I fucking mean it._
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Journalists are taking your money? The people investigating
| corporate and political corruption are society's cancer?
|
| In the past, people wanting to get rid of journalism have not
| been on the right side of history.
| usrusr wrote:
| It's not just that partisanship has increased: the age of ad-
| funded has deeply spoiled us with its ability to easily sample
| the whole spectrum. Even people who hardly ever put that to use
| (e.g. me) would perceive subscribing to a single source (or two)
| as a _downgrade_ from what they have. Not a good setup to sell
| something.
|
| News media really need to look into what they can do to offer
| spectrum for a non-excessive price. "Spotify for news" could be a
| way, or (they surely would not want to sell out to a platform
| taking control of everything money!) wide spectrum syndication
| networks ("subscription at x includes guest pass options at y, z,
| a and b"). The challenge is getting all that not only across the
| opinion spectrum, but also across borders because that's how much
| we are spoiled.
| coremoff wrote:
| I like your idea of spotify for news; it's quite similar in
| idea to the "If YouTube had actual channels" from yesterday
| [1].
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Another issue with news is syndication, that is multiple
| outlets running the same story. If I want to watch Peeky
| Blinders then I have to go to Netflix, if I want to watch Game
| of Thrones I have to go to HBO, there is no (legal)
| alternative.
|
| But say there is some piece of breaking news and I click on a
| NYT article and get a "please subscribe to read this article",
| I might be tempted if they were the only ones running the
| article but I can just go to google news, search for the topic,
| and find 10 other outlets running the same story, 5 of which
| require no subscription so I just go to one of those.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Another issue with news is syndication, that is multiple
| outlets running the same story. If I want to watch Peeky
| Blinders then I have to go to Netflix, if I want to watch Game
| of Thrones I have to go to HBO, there is no (legal)
| alternative.
|
| But say there is some piece of breaking news and I click on a
| NYT article and get a "please subscribe to read this article",
| I might be tempted if they were the only ones running the
| article but I can just go to google news, search for the topic,
| and find 10 other outlets running the same story, 5 of which
| require no subscription so I just go to one of those.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| This. We need multiple sources because everything will have a
| certain amount of bias baked in even if they're trying to be
| scrupulously honest. There will always be a zone of uncertainty
| and within that news organizations will generally choose a
| point on the side of whatever they think their readership wants
| to see.
|
| And beyond that there's the reality that even the reasonably
| honest ones care more about being able to report than about the
| accuracy of the report. The threat of denied access gets most
| everyone to lie.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I think one thing people are missing the point on is that it's
| quite addictive to have live up to date news. Twitter is
| constantly debating the latest talking point, you can get instant
| notifications. But it's actually quite exhausting after a while,
| you're no better off knowing something minutes after it happened
| when all the analysis is very shallow because nobody's had time
| to look at the bigger picture around an event.
|
| I've been trying to digital detox a bit and I've found it's quite
| enjoyable switching off from a lot of that and buying a newspaper
| on a Saturday. I usually either pick The Observer (weekend
| version of The Guardian) or The Times.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| Because you don't need "news".
|
| What do you need "news" for? To do what with it exactly?
|
| Are any of the "news" items actionable in any sort of benefitial
| way to you?
|
| What's the signal to noise ratio?
|
| The answer of course is no, none of it is actionable, and almost
| all of it is garbage and noise.
|
| This would be mostly true even for highly accurate news and high
| quality reporting.
|
| And if the information was valuable, it wouldn't be called "news"
| to begin with.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| I haven't seen it framed this way, but yeah - well put.
| pnut wrote:
| I say this as a person who does not follow news, after a
| decades long news addiction.
|
| In its absence, there is no accountability pressure for any
| individual or organisational actor. It doesn't matter whether I
| as an individual know what's going on, nothing I can do anyway,
| but history is overflowing with societal change being forced to
| the surface through public scrutiny.
|
| All kinds of horrible things happen when nobody has to look
| over their shoulder to see who's watching, and very obviously,
| the legal system is designed only to address escalations, not
| to generate them.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| This is the modern justification of the news given in the
| 60s, but it ignores all the harm the news does too. For most
| of the existence of news media, they have been weapons used
| to push political or ideological themes by the people who
| could afford to fund them.
|
| It should still be possible for us to have public
| accountability without a sports and entertainment section.
| The funding for and publication of investigative journalism
| is definitely important, but we have not yet found a good
| model for it yet.
| openrisk wrote:
| Not sure what is your definition of "news" but sticking to the
| common generic usage of the term this comes as an incredibly
| thick stance.
|
| There is a vast universe of information that is collected and
| reported by the news industry: from global news on wars,
| pandemics, disasters, to business / market / technology news,
| to political news, all the way to local news.
|
| All them are "actionable" one way or an other, although not in
| the same way for everyone. Biases and varying signal to noise
| ratios are real, but your remedy is akin to choping off your
| head because you have a headache.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| And one of the problems is that it is all intermingled
| together. For every useful / actionable piece of news there
| are a 100+ pieces of celebrity gossip, tweet-listicles,
| marketing PR releases, and irrelevant news pieces.
|
| The news is as if a restaurant served you your meal out of a
| filled trash can, and then acted surprised that you don't
| pay. It's not really shocking, is it?
| Johanx64 wrote:
| Seems like another attempt to rationalize infotainment
| addiction frankly.
|
| > your remedy is akin to choping off your head because you
| have a headache.
|
| Does anyone even remember a single instance where you have
| gone like "oh, shit, If only had I red the news" and then
| seriously regretting their choice of not reading the news?
|
| Yeah, that doesn't happen, now does it?
|
| There's virtually zero consequences for not reading any news.
| If anything, there's only positives. Whenever anything of
| substance and significance happens, you will get to know
| about it without reading any news.
|
| You're acting like there would be no information flow and
| information exchange without the "news". While the most
| actionable and relevant information comes exactly from those
| - other types of information exchange.
|
| Now on the small offchance, if some news source does actually
| contain some valuable and directly actionable (to you)
| information with high signal to noise ratio, then surely go
| ahead and read it, why wouldn't you, it's actionable.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Are any of the "news" items actionable in any sort of
| benefitial way to you?
|
| Of course they are, if you live in a place with good local news
| coverage and you have some kind of stake in your local society.
| For example, news about infrastructure plans have a huge effect
| on how companies conduct their business, which will have an
| impact on the daily lives of people working there. This will
| never get national coverage, because it's not of national
| interest.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Local news is highly actionable. I learn what's going on in my
| community.
| yunwal wrote:
| This really depends on your local news source though. Mine is
| just listings of various petty crimes that happened this
| week.
| vundercind wrote:
| Local news has all but vanished over the last couple
| decades, except in large cities.
|
| I guarantee there's a new wave of local corruption dragging
| down the economy and slowly getting worse, as local
| officials feel out just _how_ corrupt they can get in this
| new environment.
| rpdillon wrote:
| This stance is quite reminiscent of Aaron Swartz' take.
|
| http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
|
| I think there's a lot of truth to it, though I wouldn't want to
| live in a society where I couldn't get news when I sought it
| out.
| sebstefan wrote:
| I spoke to a guy who had the same opinion recently
|
| Absolutely refused to watch any kind of news or to follow
| politics whatsoever
|
| In the same beat he told me in complete seriousness that a
| small town near him in Michigan had apparently been turned into
| Ghana-city after getting a million migrants from Ghana.
|
| An information that he had heard from an older colleague on the
| shop floor of his factory
|
| That would be the entire yearly immigration flow of the united
| stated being exclusively from Ghana and going exclusively to a
| small town in Michigan
|
| It's a claim so outrageously easy to dismiss if you're even
| remotely informed that it makes you wonder what else that guy
| might believe
|
| Just how exactly are you supposed to have a working critical
| thinking mind when you don't have any data in your brain to lay
| the foundation for it? The guy has the right to vote, by the
| way
|
| So, yeah, obviously I'd disagree. You can't make smart choices
| without good data and getting the news contributes to this
| whether you realize it or not. Plus, democracy is more than
| voting freely, it relies on having educated and informed
| citizens to function.
| blargey wrote:
| There's a logical leap between "read the news" and "become
| more credulous, or well-informed about underlying statistics
| like broad immigration rates".
| yunwal wrote:
| > Just how exactly are you supposed to have a working
| critical thinking mind when you don't have any data in your
| brain to lay the foundation for it
|
| Should the news be this foundation though? I think you'd be
| better off reading a few non-fiction books or magazines every
| year, perhaps informed on your choices by top headlines.
| Reading the news for detailed analysis on highly partisan
| topics is likely to make you less informed, not more.
| sebstefan wrote:
| You should read non-fiction books and magazines, they still
| won't cover completely what you could've gleaned from also
| reading, I don't know, Reuters, just to pick one nobody
| really seems to ever criticize.
|
| The example I picked about imigration numbers is the tree
| hiding the forest
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| A quarterly magazine is all that's needed for
| (inter)national news. Perhaps monthly for local.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Better no data than data of questionable accuracy/honesty.
| Sure, this may lead to extreme cases like this (though he may
| still be right about the whole anecdote and wrong about the
| ridiculous number), but such credulous people would be in a
| worse position anyway if following the "news".
|
| In the end, there's nothing worst than believing yourself to
| be "informed" of "data/facts" through medias. Ages old
| Socrates' "I know what I don't know".
| Johanx64 wrote:
| I ran into an gullible simpleton the other day, who happens
| to not watch any news. (subtext implication follows) If only
| he had "watched the news", surely he would have been cured of
| his condition and clued in to the truth.
|
| What would actually happen in practice is that he be
| parroting back 'facts' by a news source that probably would
| not be to your liking at all.
|
| Because the "problem" ultimately is not him reading or not
| reading the news... it's somewhere else entirely, isn't it?
|
| > Just how exactly are you supposed to have a working
| critical thinking mind when you don't have any data in your
| brain to lay the foundation for it?
|
| Your foundation for reliable data, critical thinking and
| making "smart choices" is watching the news?
|
| No further comment necessary.
| almatabata wrote:
| > Are any of the "news" items actionable in any sort of
| benefitial way to you?
|
| I have read multiple articles detailing corrupt activities from
| politicians. Knowing this I made the explicit decision not to
| vote for them when I had the opportunity to do so. I would
| consider at least part of it actionable.
| godshatter wrote:
| I'm similar, I don't follow the news right as it comes out very
| closely because it's too much and too obviously working on
| emotions. I do later read semi-historical information after
| enough time has passed that a more rational perspective can be
| discussed, though. I do this to avoid being corralled into one
| way of thinking through manipulation of the narrative (in
| purpose or by bias) in the moment, but later I want to see how
| the chips fell after time has allowed for a more balanced
| perspective with nuances.
| aszantu wrote:
| personal opinion: the world feels orchestrated, the only thing
| the news are good for right now is the latest jumpscare/world
| ending scare, then buy the stock that's probably gonna go up. And
| I can get that info from the memes.
|
| example: monkeypox, WHO issued a new scare -> bought some stock
| that makes mpox vaccine, that went up 10%, only question now
| would be: when do I sell?
|
| Preferably watch what the WHO is saying about the issue next
| time, then sell if they call it off
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The simple answer is that the free baseline news is actually
| pretty decent and individual news outlets tend to overcharge for
| something that is of marginal value. With very few exceptions
| (like the NYT), quality is universally very low, journalists are
| underpaid, etc.
|
| What's missing in the market is a Netflix like subscription model
| where you don't have to cherry pick one or a handful out of
| hundreds/thousands of news outlets and instead just get access to
| everything. That's worth a few dollars per month to me but since
| nobody seems willing to build that platform, the money stays in
| my pocket. I haven't bought a news paper in well over a decade. I
| use an ad blocker. And I'm pretty well informed. Usually, I have
| no shortage of stuff to read that is interesting and high
| quality.
|
| And it doesn't help that paywalls are easily bypassed. I
| sometimes read articles behind paywalls via the usual means of
| archived web pages. And honestly, mostly I don't feel like I'm
| missing out on a lot of good content. Mostly that stuff just
| echos what you can read for free elsewhere or is just stating the
| bleedingly obvious.
|
| Worse, some of that paid content seems aimed at people that don't
| have a lot of time or attention span; so we're talking very short
| articles without a lot of depth or substance. E.g. Bloomberg
| seems to peddle a lot of that. I appreciate that people exist
| that need that. But that's not me. The opposite also seems
| popular: excruciatingly long form articles with a low signal to
| noise ratio and lengthy descriptions of the journalist's feelings
| about it all. There's a lot of filler content like that. Not
| worth paying for either as far as I'm concerned.
|
| The reality is both free and paid news sources tap the same
| sources of actual news. Competition for bringing actual news is
| fierce and it's rare for exclusive reporting to stay exclusive
| for more than a few minutes. The value of paying for early access
| is minimal.
|
| Most of these paid outlets are of course owned by big media
| corporations who are more busy creating share holder value than
| paying their journalists or investing in the quality they pretend
| to deliver. The irony is that if they had some platform they
| could share subscription revenue on, they might have something
| that's worth a lot more than the sum of each of their crumbling
| little news empires. But greed seems to get in the way for this.
| instagraham wrote:
| Slightly related to topic but I like how the comments are on a
| column to the right of the post.
|
| The tendency of many news outlets to shut down their comment
| sections has taken out the discourse.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The site is a Diaspora* pod:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)>
|
| It's got its plusses and minuses. Presentation, however, is
| pretty good.
| ccozan wrote:
| In many european countries we pay already for news ( the TV tax
| ). In Germany is pretty hefty ( ~150 euro per year afaik ).
| hcfman wrote:
| They are expensive. There's no one news source to rule them all,
| so you would have to buy about 5 subscriptions just for the news
| of one small country, that's hellishly expensive.
|
| If for example, all of the newspapers in the netherlands could be
| had for say 7 euros a month I would likely be a subscriber. Are
| they suggesting that that would not be enough to survive on ?
| hcfman wrote:
| And better yet, would they suggest that not doing that and
| having more than that price for just a single paper works out
| better for them?
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| I pay for more news now than I ever have in my entire life. Most
| of through Patreon. I pay for podcasts. I pay directly to
| journalists. I pay directly to independent news organizations. I
| buy books written by journalists.
|
| What I don't pay for is 'traditional media'. I don't consume any
| news behind a paywall other than the few rare 'extras' I get
| through patreon.com.
|
| My ability to access information has never been better and I
| don't mind paying the actual journalists who do the work.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| News is propaganda[1]. Why would I _pay_ to be force-fed
| propaganda?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
| cchi_co wrote:
| Media can have biases or agendas, actively engaging with
| multiple sources and critically evaluating the information is
| the key to mitigate the influence of propaganda
| openrisk wrote:
| The problem is that news organizations didn't just get disrupted
| by digitization (more specifically the adtech innovation), they
| got _disrupted without replacement_.
|
| In an era of rent-seeking digital business models, where trillion
| dollar digital oligopolies have become the only viable option to
| operate in the economy, nobody wants to do the hard work of news
| collection, processing and dissemination with its rather
| precarious economics. Adding insult to injury "AI" threatens to
| squeeze the last drop of blood left.
|
| This slow motion disruption (with uncertain and ugly end-states)
| plagues most other industries that deal heavily with information
| (finance, insurance etc.), more or less for the same reasons:
| digital illiteracy of management, short-termism and complacency
| from protected market silos etc.
|
| There is no valid reason why "adtech" is _the_ thing that drives
| the entire digital universe. One can imagine a combination of
| "newstech" and "banktech" [1] and many other "industry-techs"
| that collectively reflect more accurately all the diverse
| services people need.
|
| What would a fit-for-purpose "newstech" platform look like? There
| are plenty of well-remunerated execs whose job is to figure it
| out. Free hint: open source software will eat the world.
|
| [1] Not everybody in the information spreading business is a
| digital laggard. Bloomberg built an empire on his early
| incarnation of "trader-tech" - but this is more an exception
| confirming the rule.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > There is no valid reason why "adtech" is the thing that
| drives the entire digital universe.
|
| Every phrase that is conveyed/transmitted must be paid for
| somehow. If not state-funded, journalism must find funding that
| scales to cover the production costs.
|
| Advertising money is (a) abundant and (b) seeks the broadest
| possible delivery.
|
| The WWW (e.g. browsers, WWWtech) is an optimal match for ad
| money.
|
| For decades before, Advertisers and Journalism maintained one
| another in a state of equilibrium. Journalism cultivated an
| audience and was gatekeeper of what was "printable" (tolerable
| to its paying audience); Advertisers were gatekeepers of
| marketing gimmicks and brand reputation.
|
| These two tensions were complementary. An audience with
| education and money to spend represented value to journalism;
| the audience, together with advertising, paid the salaries,
| business costs, and legal fees of journalism. QED.
|
| But then came WWWtech, which gave Advertisers everything the
| latter ever wanted: access to motivated spenders, day and
| night, all the time, everywhere. WWW ads are relatively cheap
| to produce and fast to market; WWWtech provides a deluge of
| fascinating facts about the market.
|
| Journalism was jilted. So it reworked its channels.
|
| But good journalism is important to Democracy. People care
| about their communities, voters do need factual information.
| There should be astute, principled, critical evaluation of
| social and economic events, of government policies and
| corporate activities.
|
| Today, the only ways journalism is surviving (hardly) are
| through i) funding by the state and subscribers, or ii) by
| consolidating journalistic brands to deliver monetisable
| content that is unhitched from stabilising principles.
|
| State funding has risks but may be the most effective option.
| Otherwise, we see that Anything Goes, as Cole Porter said.
|
| Now the citizens of Democracy itself are struggling to
| understand why peace, order, good government, and factual
| information are so hard.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Every phrase that is conveyed /transmitted must be paid
| for somehow. If not state-funded, journalism must find
| funding that scales to cover the production costs._
|
| For an earlier equilibrium, see "pamphleteering":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer
|
| Publishing static content is extraordinarily cheap. Even with
| a dynamic site, such as a wiki, you can serve millions of
| occasional readers for $20/month.
|
| As a 'newspaper' class resource, Wikipedia's all-in hosting
| for fully read/write content (meaning, visitors can edit,
| it's not static), is about $0.03 CPM, handling ~6.74B visits
| a month (80B visits a year) for $2.4M a year or
| $200,000/month.
|
| So that's 8 million visits a month for $20, as a R/W
| membership wiki instead of a RO static site.
|
| To be clear, this is not salaries. "Production costs" depend
| on whether someone has something to say and feels compelled
| to say it. The less meaningful the message to the messenger,
| they more they only say it for the money, and the more money
| it takes.
|
| Adding salaries to wikipedia's number drops from 8 million
| visits per $20 per month, to 400,000 visits per $20 per
| month.
|
| > _State funding has risks but may be the most effective
| option._
|
| It's certainly enough, even _de minimus_.
|
| Even with salaries baked in, costs remain low enough for
| patronage, public funding, or subscription models instead of
| advertising models.
|
| At most any scale, the cost of saying something to the public
| is a rounding error.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Publishing static content is extraordinarily cheap._
|
| The main cost of reliable journalism isn't publishing the
| content. It's getting reliable content to publish.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _isn 't publishing the content_
|
| Yes, I showed content costs 20x publishing cost if
| staffed + crowdsourced as in this example.
|
| > _getting reliable content_
|
| This is why I mentioned cost varying inversely with how
| compelled someone feels to say something.
|
| The additional 45M in my example buys you a lot of
| reporters even with overhead all-in.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> cost varying inversely with how compelled someone
| feels to say something._
|
| How compelled someone feels to say something has little
| or nothing to do with how reliable what they are saying
| is.
|
| _> The additional 45M in my example_
|
| Where is that in your example?
|
| _> buys you a lot of reporters_
|
| Buying reporters is not the same as buying reliability.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Where is that in your example?_
|
| It's the math behind "Adding salaries to wikipedia's
| number drops from 8 million visits per $20 per month, to
| 400,000 visits per $20 per month."
|
| Put another way, it costs 20x for the employees. The
| budget actually goes 20x the 2.4M to 48M, or 45M after
| the hosting is paid.
|
| > _Buying reporters is not the same as buying
| reliability._
|
| Just like hiring workers is not the same as buying
| completed work. This is true of all paid effort.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> State funding has risks but may be the most effective
| option._
|
| State funding doesn't solve the problem of getting good
| journalism. It just means journalism is biased in favor of
| the state, instead of biased in favor of whatever ideology
| the private owner has. If anything, bias in favor of the
| state is worse. Pravda and Isvestia in the Soviet Union were
| even less reliable than our mainstream media is now.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Can we at least try to acknowledge that there are many
| shades of gray between:
|
| - news funded by oppressive regimes with an explicit goal
| of furthering their own agenda
|
| - news funded by extremely rich and powerful people with an
| explicit goal of furthering their own agenda
|
| If you squint a little, these are essentially the same.
|
| There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is
| going to report on stories that would threaten the status
| quo of rich & powerful?
|
| At the same time, there need to be strong protections in
| place that make it hard for the government to meddle with
| day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely
| report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
|
| This setup shouldn't pose a problem for any nation and
| government that considers themselves democratic.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who
| else is going to report on stories that would threaten
| the status quo of rich & powerful?_
|
| The way to enable stories that threaten the status quo of
| the rich and powerful is to enforce freedom of speech for
| everyone, so anyone who is being screwed by the rich and
| powerful can say so, publicly, and not get canceled.
|
| "Publicly funded journalism" does nothing of the kind,
| because the funding of "publicly funded journalism" comes
| from...the rich and powerful. Either through the
| government (who do you think runs the government?
| certainly not the poor and powerless) or through
| "nonprofit" organizations that can't survive, let alone
| pay the costs of journalism, without donations from the
| rich and powerful.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Yes, the government is powerful, but you ignored the 2nd
| part of my comment which addressed the concern you're
| repeating again.
|
| > At the same time, there need to be strong protections
| in place that make it hard for the government to meddle
| with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to
| freely report on things that reflect poorly on the
| government.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> If you squint a little, these are essentially the
| same._
|
| So are all the "shades of gray" in between. _Every_
| source of journalism we have is funded by _someone_ who
| wants to further their own agenda. We have _no_ source of
| journalism whose purpose is to just report the truth and
| let the public draw their own conclusions. Let alone one
| that can actually stick to that purpose in the face of
| the temptation to push a favored narrative.
| gspencley wrote:
| While I would agree that there is a hole for certain news and
| information that isn't being filled (specifically investigative
| journalism and foreign affairs), I think there is a valid point
| to be made that, in the age of smart phones and social media,
| what use is there for the local newspaper and news network when
| if something happens close to you there is raw footage of it
| all over social media that shows exactly what happened without
| editorial. And that footage gets to you much quicker. Before
| the media companies can publish an article and find a way to
| spin it for sensationalism, complete with ads.
|
| In this regard, I think there is a replacement. And for local
| news, I would argue that in many instances the replacement is
| far better since it is quicker to publish and has the potential
| to be far more objective.
|
| EDIT: actually I think that hole is being filled, at least in
| part, by independent documentary filmmakers. What got disrupted
| were the mega conglomerates like Fox, CNN, MSNBC etc. And while
| spin and misinformation will always exist, because news is
| published by humans, I don't know why we would trust those
| conglomerates any more than any other random joe.
| mort96 wrote:
| I'm drowning in news everywhere I look, _paying_ to see even more
| seems weird
| margalabargala wrote:
| Is what you're drowning in news, though? Or is it something
| else, masquerading as news?
| mikhael28 wrote:
| Why would I pay for news when I have HN?
| CM30 wrote:
| Practically speaking, because there's no need to, at least for
| 99% of the population. Any relevant information you can think of
| will probably get covered by a few hundred/thousand independent
| sites for free, or posted on social media, or covered in videos
| on sites like YouTube, etc.
|
| And that's kinda the internet's thing. Any market that was based
| on information has now seen the bottom fall out of it, since
| anyone can compete with anyone else when it comes to
| providing/giving away said information.
|
| Probably also doesn't help that a lot of the other things news
| outlets used to be able to capitalise on (classified ads, comic
| strips, sports scores, etc) have now been debundled and can be
| found on numerous other websites that only provide that service.
|
| Either way, while a lot of people will blame
| Google/Facebook/eBay/Amazon/Sinclair/whatever for the situation,
| the honest answer is that traditional news coverage is simply
| because financially non viable as a product. At best, you'll get
| a small audience that wants something specialist and will pay for
| it, but that'll never be the majority of the population.
| cchi_co wrote:
| The challenge is balancing the convenience of free content with
| the need for reliable!
| rnts08 wrote:
| If news were 100% neutral and delivered without ads/product
| placements and could be 100% trusted, I'm sure there are people
| who would pay for it.
|
| "News" as it is presented today is not a "product" that anyone
| should pay for.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Just like people would pay for art if paintings were 100%
| beautiful and 100% meaningful. And pay for music if a song was
| 100% good.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| There's nothing that's more expensive than free.
| elif wrote:
| Personally, I feel like the editors and writers get enough value
| from me through their shaping and framing of how stories are
| presented to me. Whether through blatant advertisers or just
| simple ideological dissemination, the real price is my sympathy
| to the exact verbiage that the writer desires to present to me.
|
| It is already enough of a chore filtering through all the
| different bias to find ground reality. Paying for one that 'i
| like' is just succumbing to that editors worldview.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| So you pay them in exposure?
| simianparrot wrote:
| Because I have to do most of the job for the "journalists" when
| reading their pieces, because they rarely if ever mention
| sources, rarely ask good questions to interviewees, and more
| often than not are _factually incorrect_ whenever I fact check
| them.
|
| After repeatedly catching all manner of journalists writing
| complete garbage about topics I am knowledgeable about, I have
| been fighting against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect by checking
| everything. Turns out most of it is just as bad.
|
| Why would I pay for that?
| d_k_h wrote:
| There is a general quality issue. Do they even use editors any
| more? the bad writing alone should be embarrassing.
| hacsky wrote:
| Why would i pay for gossip?
| AstroJetson wrote:
| I would be very happy to pay for news. IF YOU THEN DIDN'T TRACK
| THE FUCK OUT OF ME.
|
| I don't want to start looking at "Democrat" adds when I click on
| a Biden Article. I don't want to see adds for the "Republicans"
| when I click on a Trump Article. Lather, rinse, repeat for
| Olympics, local news, world news, cricket, etc.
|
| So to stop targeting, I don't log in. Figure out how to take
| donations, I'll send you money. I got my local PBS station into
| this.
| iambateman wrote:
| Because I get all the news I want for free...
|
| It's really as simple as that.
| redmattred wrote:
| It's not valuable enough for them personally to want to pay for
| it.
| bernardlunn wrote:
| Scanning headlines is free and enough for me
| charles_f wrote:
| I don't read news (and then don't pay for it) because of the
| detrimental effect it had on my mental health when I did. Some
| people see that as egotistical, but I'm just too anxious already
| to allow other people to inject me with new and exciting ways to
| stress about the future.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It's normal to be anxious about horrible things in the world
| that you are (seemingly, and probably) powerless to do anything
| about.
| gcatalfamo wrote:
| I will pay for news when people competent on the different
| matters will be writing them.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Why would I pay for something that is actively working against my
| interests? I'm with Bryan Caplan's position that most of the news
| can be safely eliminated from one's consumption with zero loss to
| one's quality of life:
| https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.h...
|
| Of course there is still a question of how one would support
| quality investigative journalism and someone to hold the powers
| that be accountable, although one wonders how much the news have
| been truly doing that in the recent years, as opposed to being a
| mere extension of a political party.
| maldusiecle wrote:
| Which do you think is cheaper to produce, agitprop or deep
| investigative reporting? If no one pays for news, which do you
| think will grow in proportion to the other?
| ok123456 wrote:
| What is passed off as "deep investigative reporting" is
| actually agitprop, especially when reporters interface with
| and are concerned with maintaining access to the national
| security apparatus.
|
| Yet, at the same time, the same journalists think they're
| "defending democracy from darkness."
|
| I have no interest in funding that mind poison.
| Aunche wrote:
| I hate that propaganda has become a thought-terminating
| cliche. First of all, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
| "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply
| isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II.
| Also, just because you suspect that some journalism from a
| publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the usefulness
| of all journalism from that publication like the Washington
| Post's opioid database.
| ok123456 wrote:
| > "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply
| isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II.
|
| I thought it was Pearl Harbor.
|
| >just because you suspect that some journalism from a
| publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the
| usefulness of all journalism
|
| Usefulness for whom? If by useful you mean to manufacture
| consent to do whatever businesses and governments would
| have done if it weren't for the pesky public getting in
| their way, then yes, sure. We wouldn't have had the
| second Iraq war, or the first for that matter, if it
| weren't for the hard work of the journalists at the New
| York Times and Wall Street Journal.
| Aunche wrote:
| > I thought it was Pearl Harbor.
|
| Japan wasn't stupid enough to rouse a sleepy giant for no
| reason. It's no coincidence that the majority America's
| western fleet was docked on tiny islands thousands of
| miles away from any then states. The US had also
| implemented an embargo and provided significant aid to
| the Allies through Lend Lease. If they didn't attack
| America during Pearl Harbor, they would attack a ship
| that's blockading critical oil shipments. Propaganda
| played a huge role in American's acceptance into these
| escalations [1].
|
| > We wouldn't have had the second Iraq war
|
| Yes, I knew you were alluding to this, which is why I
| brought up WWII as a counterexample. My point is that
| just because you think their geopolitical reporting was
| counterproductive doesn't change the value of their
| opioid coverage [2] which lead to multi-billion dollar
| lawsuits against CVS and Walgreens.
|
| [1] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/great-
| debate
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2019/07/20/op
| ioid-fi...
| ok123456 wrote:
| I understand your desire to connect the propaganda
| industry with the "last just cause"--83 years ago--but
| lying to the public is not virtuous.
|
| Was it virtuous or justifiable for Jeffrey Gettleman at
| the New York Times to fabricate, out of whole cloth,
| stories of rape [1] to soft-shoe the genocidal policies
| of a foreign government? Who benefits?
|
| [1] https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/new-york-
| times-int...
| Aunche wrote:
| Just because an author of the New York Times article made
| some angry tweets and some people disagree with her
| narratives doesn't mean that they were fabricated. That's
| besides the point though. If you're happy with the
| Intercept's reporting that gets heavily cited by the
| article you posted, does that mean you're happy to pay
| for it?
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| This reads like a poor attempt at moralizing. Why would i
| imagine news revenue is directed morally? Why is the relative
| size relevant?
| stavros wrote:
| I think the point is "if you aren't paying, you're getting
| the cheaper of the two".
| cryptonector wrote:
| Not sure that paying would make things better anyways. If
| everyone was paying then there would be enough revenue
| for the news to produce the real/biased
| reporting/agitprop that their customers demand.
| chiffre01 wrote:
| How exactly is news working against your interests?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Influence, anxiety, noise. That's how I interpret his
| comment.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| How about the obvious and shameless propaganda?
|
| Oh wait, most people here agree the with ends, so the means
| must be Ok.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I'm with Bryan Caplan's position that most of the news can be
| safely eliminated from one's consumption with zero loss to
| one's quality of life
|
| I follow one or two very local news sources[1], who post about
| three to five stories a week. I find those valuable: new
| restaurants opening, construction going on, what's going on
| with local organizations & politicians, some local history.
| It's up to ten minutes a day. And, I choose to pay a
| subscription to support each of these.
|
| Outside that, I 100% agree with you. National news? Complete
| waste of time. World news? Somehow an even bigger waste.
| Reading random vomit on Twitter? Good lord, taking up smoking
| is a better use of your life than that. No way in hell I'm
| wasting my life or money on any of that junk. It's despairing
| to see so many people I know spending hours every day reading
| national news junk to absolutely no purpose. You can know
| everything you need to know about the world in ten minutes a
| day. More than that is just throwing your time down the
| garbage.
|
| [1] An example: https://racketmn.com
| levkk wrote:
| > No way in hell I'm wasting my life or money on any of that
| junk. It's despairing to see so many people I know spending
| hours every day reading national news junk to absolutely no
| purpose.
|
| Now imagine you don't have access to those anymore.
| Overconsumption of news clearly is a problem, but shutting
| yourself off to the what's happening in the world is somehow
| worse.
| coldpie wrote:
| > but shutting yourself off to the what's happening in the
| world is somehow worse
|
| How?
|
| Russia's doing something stupid in Ukraine. People in the
| middle east are killing each other again. The Olympics just
| happened in France. Republicans are running nutjobs for
| office again. Sweet, I'm up to date in 15 seconds. I can go
| back to reading a book or playing guitar or cooking dinner
| or weeding my garden or arguing on HN.
|
| How is this worse than spending 2 hours reading into all
| the details of the stuff I just mentioned, and then not
| having any time left over to do the things that actually
| make my life worth living?
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| On average it's not, at least not for the average person.
|
| But not everyone is average, and for some of those who do
| invest the time in going beyond superficial headlines,
| the payoff is considerable in terms of power, prestige,
| influence, and wealth.
|
| There is also the fact that if everyone disregarded the
| news, society would quickly disintegrate as bad actors
| leveraged people's ignorance for the own personal ends.
| Thus, there is a social responsibility aspect to keeping
| abreast of current events.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You can read up on what is happening like once per
| quarter in like a couple of hours. Following 'this just
| in' with 'developing stories' is a waste of time.
|
| E.g. I read the wiki entry for Trump's assassination
| attempt after like a week and saved myself hours of
| rumours and guesses.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| I think https://www.slow-journalism.com/ is trying to do
| what you describe.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > There is also the fact that if everyone disregarded the
| news, society would quickly disintegrate as bad actors
| leveraged people's ignorance for the own personal ends.
| Thus, there is a social responsibility aspect to keeping
| abreast of current events.
|
| Can you provide an example of this? I honestly can't
| think of a single time when I learned something in the
| news that fit this description.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| I keep up with the news, but I can see the point OP made.
|
| The average Johnny McOfficeWorker in the West is unaffected
| by and has no control over the conflicts, political
| struggles, or general bad stuff happening halfway around
| the world. Personal circumstances aside (i.e., a family
| member in a conflict area), the only reasons a typical
| person even cares are 1) feeling fulfilled by being an
| informed voter, and 2) entertainment.
|
| And unfortunately, I suspect more people care about the
| entertainment value than they do the civic value.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Being uninformed works well as long as the political
| system is sort of ok. But for the (democratic) political
| system to work sorta well, most voters needs to be
| somewhat informed about national and even international
| issues (since they are connected).
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| I wonder what the best argument is for a median American
| needing to watch the news in order to do their civic
| duty. E.g. how will the average Joe be able to impact a
| century-long conflict in Palestine?
|
| At what point is it just people living a delusion,
| overestimating their ability to impact the rest of the
| world, refusing to accept that they're just an NPC with
| zero agency when it comes to major issues outside of
| their immediate neighborhood?
| soerxpso wrote:
| > but shutting yourself off to the what's happening in the
| world is somehow worse
|
| I see this point sometimes, never qualified further. Can
| you elaborate? In what way will my quality of life diminish
| if I have no idea what's going on outside of my local area?
| Provide an actual example.
| bombcar wrote:
| Almost all examples end up boiling down to "you might
| vote wrong if you don't pay attention to the news" to
| which I say, well that's easy enough, I don't vote.
| lxgr wrote:
| (Daily) news isn't nearly the only option of learning about
| what's happening in the world. And I'd argue it's not even
| the best either, by a long shot.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Yeah sometimes people advocate for it but might end up making
| problematic decisions when it comes to voting. Many people may
| vote after all but if it's not based on news it can be
| problematic. Solely relying on Wikipedia or History might not
| give full context and could overly rationalize the decision
| making. After all, people want their policy makers to make
| their inhabitants happy (irrational) and not just optimize a
| (simplified yet rational) metric.
|
| I don't think though there is unbiased news. Generally a
| classic recommendation has been to read across multiple
| sources.
| troyvit wrote:
| One metric for investigative journalism, in my opinion, is to
| look at how many journalists are in jail:
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/16414/jailed-journalists-time...
|
| This is only one data point and doesn't include journalists who
| were railroad out of their jobs, disappeared, murdered, etc.
| stavros wrote:
| > there is still a question of how one would support quality
| investigative journalism and someone to hold the powers that be
| accountable
|
| I don't think there is: You pay for it, since it's in your best
| interests to. I'd pay for that. Unfortunately, in my country,
| there aren't any outlets like that that I know of, everything
| is government propaganda.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You mind namedropping the country? It seems like the common
| setup is pro-elite but pro or anti government seems like a
| tossup.
| stavros wrote:
| It's Greece, but you're right, government is pretty much
| the elites.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Old enough to remember Cronkite or MacNeil Lehrer - there was a
| time with more facts less ideology. Ever since the news became
| a profit center it just isn't as useful. One literally has to
| follow double digit numbers of outlets to get a reasonable
| picture of reality. It is simply too costly. The News rooms
| have become their own undoing.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Old school news anchors were NOT neutral. The stories they
| chose and the language they used shaped perceptions just as
| much as now, only they had precious little competition back
| then. They so completely shaped the population's perception
| of that era that retroactive analyses using better evidence
| to reach new conclusions about the events of that time are
| reflexively rejected by most people, demonstrating
| incuriosity and close-mindedness out of loyalty to
| established narratives. That is ideology.
| strangattractor wrote:
| I am not making a "those were the good ole days" argument -
| the News "business" changed in a fundamental way. The
| objective became to "make money" as opposed to "deliver
| news". The profit motive changes everything - taking that
| thinking to a logical conclusion you end up with 2 minute
| videos that are chosen specifically to punch your buttons
| so you will keep watching. The way in which people consume
| their news now is simply chaos.
|
| https://niemanreports.org/articles/the-transformation-of-
| net...
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| More from Caplan here on this:
| https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-stop-re...
| bithive123 wrote:
| The "news" is never "new". There is nothing in the news that
| people haven't been doing to each other for thousands of years.
|
| Some people complain that Hollywood just keeps making the same
| movies, but they'll watch the same news for their entire lives.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| >The "news" is never "new". There is nothing in the news that
| people haven't been doing to each other for thousands of years.
|
| Huh? You can easily name the news that literally never happened
| before e.g innovation and tech
| wang_li wrote:
| Me reading in the news that for the eighth year in a row the
| city has come in on budget, crime is low, and school
| achievement is up is great and I enjoy it. Because it affects
| my life directly. The value of news, repetitious or otherwise,
| is that it's part of the feedback loop of governance.
| spking wrote:
| I've been a paid subscriber to County Highway for over a year now
| and can't tell you how nice it is to sit down with a coffee and
| read the paper every once in a while.
|
| https://countyhighway.com/about
| rambojohnson wrote:
| why would I pay for a narrative?
| wdotica wrote:
| For a few years I subscribed to my city's newspaper, because I
| figured that what I want is a reliable source of _local_ news and
| not just national news, which I can get anywhere. What I found
| was that Twitter /X accounts and free news websites peppered with
| ads were better even for that purpose!
|
| The paper I subscribed to would have the front page "news" be a
| huge history report about some local curiosity (an old prison, or
| a long-dead civil rights activist, or an industry that no longer
| exists). However, if I wanted to know information about the local
| Family Court judge candidates, or why a bridge is closed, or why
| a protest is happening on a certain street, I'd need to go online
| anyway. Oftentimes a local TV reporter's Twitter account could
| give me up to the minute information. The newspaper was not only
| too slow, oftentimes they wouldn't even bother to cover the
| interesting event!
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| The main issue for me is that I'm going to do everything possible
| to avoid ads (and tracking) in my life, especially if it's
| something I'm paying for. There isn't, to my knowledge, a single
| mainstream news source that offers an ad-and-tracking free
| subscription.
| colordrops wrote:
| Because they are all biased propaganda one way or the other and
| are working for someone else's interests, not mine as the
| subscriber.
| reylas wrote:
| I would pay for news, I won't pay for opinions.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| _Why do some people pay for news?_ I don't know but we could ask
| them.
| bhelkey wrote:
| In depth investigation could better reward the original
| publication. If news site 'A' spends a year investigating a
| piece, five minutes after they publish, news site 'B' can
| summarize their findings.
|
| Why subscribe to 'A' when 'B' is cheaper? It costs a lot less to
| summarize good journalism than it does to do good journalism.
|
| With paper news, the news service that breaks the story gets a
| day of exclusivity. Perhaps half a day of exclusivity with
| evening editions.
| j45 wrote:
| My guess is the news you like might not be reaching you.
|
| It's kind of like how youtube can become more interesting as a tv
| experience than cable tv.
| ta8645 wrote:
| After a decade of imbibing the national news every day, I just
| stopped cold turkey. It never informed a single decision I made
| in my everyday life. At best, it amounted to gossip and
| entertainment. At worst, it made my life much worse with
| negativity and an exaggerated sense of danger and impending doom.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| I would love to subscribe to a syndicate that accumulated
| micropayments for each article I choose to read, then charged my
| credit card one lump sum at the end of the month.
|
| I don't want subscriptions to specific newspapers. There are not
| enough hours in the month to take advantage of all of them.
| lkbm wrote:
| Are there newspapers that:
|
| 1. Don't dox private individuals for no good reason (rules out
| NYT, Washington Post, and Forbes)
|
| 2. Have ethical business practices around a subscriptions, such
| as letting you cancel easily? (Rules out the thousands of local
| papers owned by USA Today)
|
| 3. Have basic fact-checking (rules out...almost everything?)
|
| ProPublica seems like the best, especially since I consider
| investigative journalism extremely important. I've heard good
| things about Bloomberg, but it's extremely expensive. The
| Atlantic and The Economist have traditionally had pretty good
| content, and I at least haven't noticed them violating basic
| journalistic or business ethics.
| dingnuts wrote:
| fact checking is always so ideologically fraught (which is why
| it rules out everyone) that I have given up and instead just
| try to hear every narrative. They aren't of equal weight, of
| course, but it's good for unpassionate understanding of the
| different warring perspectives.
|
| A great place to start, IMHO, is allsides.com and an RSS
| reader.
| kkylin wrote:
| I _really_ like the Financial Times. It was a breath of fresh
| air compared to other newspapers. If nothing else, I liked the
| _tone:_ matter of fact, no drama. But it 's (i) not cheap; and
| (ii) canceling was a bit harder than subscribing. (I found I
| wasn't reading it enough to justify the cost. Subscribing was
| easy but canceling required a phone call -- bit of unnecessary
| but understandable friction.)
| yawgmoth wrote:
| Yes, there are regional papers that don't often cover large
| stories that achieve your criteria.
|
| At least there are a couple I can think of, LGBT papers in
| particular.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| > Broad subscription to newspapers was a brief and exceptional
| phenomenon.
|
| But people weren't even paying for the news back then!
|
| That $.25 for the daily newspaper didn't even cover printing and
| distribution of the paper it was printed on. The price was just a
| filter to separate consumers who actually wanted the product vs
| those who would use it as fuel to insulate or heat their homes.
|
| _Advertisers_ paid for the news. They always have.
|
| The difference between now and "the old days" -- what put news
| into a crisis -- is that they used to sell their own ads. When
| the Internet came along, they abdicated that control to ad
| networks, which eventually consolidated to Google and Meta, and
| are now confused by the fact that they're only getting ten cents
| on the dollar.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| My brother used to be a reporter and editor.
|
| IIRC, he said Craigslist killing classified ads did major
| violence to papers' finances.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Absolutely. I was working at a newspaper when it got started.
| This is a near-verbatim conversation I had with our
| publisher:
|
| "Hey John, I was wondering about our classifieds revenue. How
| much of our money comes in from that vs. display ads?" [those
| are the designed ads with photos and graphics etc.]
|
| "Almost exactly half. Like 49-51% depending on the month.
| Why?"
|
| "Well I was talking to some guys from the _SF Weekly_ ,
| apparently there's this guy out there named Craig..."
|
| I explained that there was nothing stopping "Craig" from
| cloning his site in every market, and developed a clone that
| we could license to other papers around the country before
| Craigslist could get traction. Unfortunately, a new publisher
| came in, and when he got word of my project, axed the entire
| operation -- "This would destroy our classified ads revenue!"
|
| Years later, Steve Jobs said that he was happy to
| "cannibalize" iPod sales with the new iPhone. Really wish I
| had the wits to explain that as well back then.
| indigo0086 wrote:
| I just listen to No Agenda, a veritable news source by composting
| most news sources.
| d_k_h wrote:
| Micropayments can work.
|
| They have to be micropayments though. That means show me the
| headline, a brief synopsis, and if I want to read the full
| article I pay a few fractions of a cent.
|
| The problem is that most services want to make a killing without
| doing any real work. Automated ad feeds, new services etc without
| any internal reporting doesn't provide a service that people want
| or need. Also, people are not going buy dozens and dozens of
| services at $5/month to $20/month each. Even a buck a month is
| too much when you get beyond a certain point.
| _moof wrote:
| I would happily pay for the BBC but they don't want my money.
|
| The problem isn't that people won't pay for news. It's that we
| won't pay for "news."
| RIMR wrote:
| Because I don't read one single outlet, I need to read many to
| understand what is happening, and subscribing to many different
| outlets is expensive. So I just paste the links into incognito
| mode, or 12ft, or Archive.org, and I read it for free.
|
| Then I use the money to buy other things that I actually want.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| For me, it's (K) alone. The quality of news via subscription
| (news+) is atrocious, as required to monetize. I am a sometimes
| subscriber to The Economist and I listen to BBC and KQED daily. I
| also like Al Jazeera. I do read some news sources like South
| China Morning Post and National Review when I want to understand
| propaganda. There are some decent youtube news shows but I've not
| watched enough to know which are good.
|
| I wish the article had gone into comedy news as really ushered in
| by Jon Stewart.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Until the news(paper) offers something of tangible values like
| classified, public notices, comic, and LOCAL advertising, the
| news isn't then worth buying.
|
| And coupled with pretty poor coverages of "journalism", there is
| pretty-near zero incentive to buy just only the news.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-16 23:01 UTC)