I still don't get this. There have only been a handful of newspapers that seem to have tried anything different than the same model that they used in the 80's and they have done ok, but most of the newspapers I feel like I take a peek at are barely worth more than the paper they are printed on even if they have a solid Sunday edition, and their websites end up being trashy from ads, bad design, slow page loads, or any of the other reasons. Most of the articles in web or print end up being roughly equal quality to an equivalent mediocre to random web article as they rushing to be first.
In my opinion most newspapers haven't showed me something I want to buy/spend money on/visit to collect a few token ad dollars. Did Google really steal your money because I chose New York Times over some random newspaper with lackluster articles/reporting? I feel like even radio and local/regional TV still does a good job of giving me a reason to choose them over someone else.
Or their websites actively scare you off, like the San Francisco Chronicle, which hits me with 3 modal pop-ups in a row every time I try to read one of their articles. If I was ever inclined to pay them I most certainly am not now.
I feel like the technical quality of the writing has degraded over time as well. With all the staff cuts, copy editors were apparently some of the first to go, and you can really tell.
Lobbyism can be quite profitable. Why invest money in improving your website when you can invest it in lobbying for a law that gets you a better return on investment?
Nothing can fix the fact they lost their captive audience. The same could be said for "nationwide" papers and even the the big broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Foxnews.
The internet checks them all and then tops it with letting you choose as many of the big players or none. If anything it has shown to many just how bias news sources can be which means customers who previously had no real choice are not held back anymore.
They need to up their game, be damn sure to publish journalistic pieces and not editorials under the guise of them. If they lost the trust of their core audience they will need to actively focus on rebuilding it and that takes time and may not even be possible for some.
* as others have mentioned some sites are just atrocious either with ad spam or just bad formatting. I do know when my father sends me links from AJC that I cannot view them on my phone as it cuts off half the page but they work fine on the iPad. Its like the link specified the view port size.
The problem is that the newspapers were already a cartel, and Google and Facebook broke them up.
There were several large networks:
Associated Press
United Press International
Reuters
Agence France-Presse
etc.
Newspapers generated little unique content. They tended to both act as a distributor for AP/Reuters content, and share their content back into the network.
Another example... The sports, stock and weather pages? Yeah, not always generated by the paper - I worked for the NZ Metservice who had a great business gathering together the feeds and generating the layout, shipping print-ready pages direct.
Along come Google and Facebook who are perfectly capable of de-duping the articles from AP, allowing a winner take all competition among the papers. Add to that the ability to render the data pages themselves from feeds that they can buy and there's a lot less of a reason for the end customer to pay the local news organisation.
That’s not a cartel, cartels by definition have pricing power.
That example is like saying people who collaborate on a github repo have pricing power.
Finally - the main advantage of newspapers was being able to keep reporters paid and independent.
Today, all news is victim of the news cycle effect and if you aren’t buzzfeed you are either the winner of the network effect or dead.
The network effect was recognized as bad for society as a whole, but the internet has made information gathering subservient to ad clicks.
If this version of the information hunter gatherer society, where people must venture onto the net and hope they aren’t going to eat compromised information, is appealing then sure, let’s lay the blame on the medium.
Ok, say you strip away all of the syndicated content. How much unique content is fair to expect from a local newsroom. They aren’t anything like content mills. Some stories take 9+ months to develop. They sometimes inform law enforcement and often change the state of the world in very significant ways. I’ve spent the last year as a technologist in a newsroom and I am in awe of how remarkable an impact a big story can have on the real world. It’s hard work, and I’ve turned down job opportunities for literally double what I’m making because I believe in the cause of journalism so deeply. I see what vile hated that they have to endure every day, and try like hell to keep them safe from a myriad of digital adversaries.
The advertising business model demands attention; it’s the only way to assure value for advertisers. Its been the enemy of media integrity for over a hundred years. In our market-worship society we collectively place little value on honestly, and the numbers back that up. Since 2000, over 270,000 newsroom employees have lost their jobs. Despite all the hubbub, only about 25K coal jobs have disappeared in the same timeframe. It’s as if we have ceded verification of truth to a UI provided by a private corporation that is managed by AI systems, instead of other people. Oops.
Unless society supports people being able to dedicate their lives to uncovering truths and righting abuse, ‘speaking truth to power’ there won’t be people that can devote the energy and resources to do that well enough to have a meaningful impact.
Strip away the wire services and the ads and the articles that pay the bills in traffic for a moment. How do we compensate people to do good work on a story that might change the world for the better, or invest all of their valuable skill towards something that doesn’t lead anywhere of immediate value. There are membership models, tipping, merchandise, but what is the right way to pay for this type of work? For most people it isn’t a gig, and not something they can do on demand in a real time marketplace. For most people they just decide to dedicate themselves to that kind of work and go all in, and the best way to pay talented people according to the market is to pay them decent salaries and give them benefits. Only when a journalist can meet their basic needs for living can they devote their attention to fighting the impossible battles they face in the public sphere.
So how does the organization that provides that security for journalists get compensated outside of advertising or state sponsorship?
If we could craft something more beautiful to give to our grandkids, what would it look and feel like?
The beauty of programmatic advertising is that it enabled the rare publisher to profit. When the pool of advertisers is massive and where they advertise is mostly decoupled from their ad campaign being set up, you don’t get individual companies “pulling their ads” from places. You do, but the publisher still makes money because there are so many advertisers and the cost to be on the market for them is near zero.
The masses panicked and now good news is hidden behind the paywall. That’s okay for me. I’m on the inside and I will use my differential knowledge. While those who can’t afford news will be outcompeted by virtue of their having shittier knowledge.
They will be fat. Their unvaccinated kids will die. Their money will go to fund my roads. They will go on Robinhood and Coinbase and give their wealth to me. Their taxes will go to fund art galleries they will find no time to visit.
And in their ignorance, they’ll do all this while taking stances that will only make them give me more. Beautiful.
About the only price I have to pay for this is that they’ll get angry when they face these facts: that they collectively chose a poorer life than available and that they collectively chose to give to those with more than them.
> The masses panicked and now good news is hidden behind the paywall. That’s okay for me. I’m on the inside and I will use my differential knowledge. While those who can’t afford news will be outcompeted by virtue of their having shittier knowledge.
Except we live in a democracy and thus the masses can vote in a leader who can take away all those benefits you get "on the inside".
I guess you do you and I'll do me and we'll see. For what it's worth, pirate the WSJ business section and trade off it and tell me how it goes. EMH my ass b
It seems to me that journalism suffers a "tragedy of the commons"-like situation: since many news stories are available free of cost, there is little incentive for individual citizens to pay for subscriptions that fund the information-gathering necessary for robust free press.
Is there any way that the government can subsidize newspapers without exerting influence? Perhaps the government could offer tax credits (not itemized tax deductions, but credits against the final amount due) at a given rate for newspaper subscriptions, up to an annual limit per taxpayer? E.g., each dollar spent on newspaper subscription yields a tax credit of $0.75, up to a limit of $150. A newspaper could be defined content-neutrally as printed matter delivered daily to subscribers. To prevent abuse (such as kickbacks to subscribers), the government could require that participating newspaper companies limit the benefits of subsidized subscriptions to (1) delivery of a physical newspaper and (2) online access to the content of the physical newspaper.
Or maybe the government shouldn't pick winners in the market. I am a subscriber to the Wall Street Jpirnal because they produce high-quality content which is significantly less biased than other major mewspapers. I figure if it gets bad enough, much of the media goes out of business. This leads to a higher demamd leads to more and better news.
Indeed, I'd argue there are you tube broadcasters with high-quality reporting, often better than traditional media.
Also, have you considered the environmental impact of subsidizing use of paper? Why can't it be digital? I subscribe only to the digital version of the WSJ. This has the added benefit of being cheaper for consumer and publisher, increasing demand.
The thing that's nice about the Journal's bias though is that it's clear. That's why I like financial journalism (e.g. Bloomberg). Their bias is apparent: Make more money for corporations. It's easy to correct for, and once you understand that, it's easy to parse the signal. Reading other publications it's more difficult to understand what their perspective is, and therefore more difficult to correct for it.
As mentioned by another comment, their bias is clear. They also provide a very clear distinction between opinion/editorial content and reporting. Their reporting is typically non-partisan, or even slightly left-of-center.
Anti-regulation response: "Thanks. I will evaluate it on its merits with the responsibility being mine."
Pro-regulation response: "Oh, was it regulated? No? No thanks. I only accept regulated things otherwise I have to accept responsibility for my own evaluation."
What always strikes me as odd is how the US discourse around regulations stays always on a hypothetical level, while literally 50 other states have regulations for decades and know where it works and where not.
This feels a little like discussing whether airplanes are a realistic means of transportation while the rest of the world uses them for years and isn’t really a rational approach towards reality, but rationalizing ones believes. Airplanes are made by the devil, therefore they can’t be good.
The way this discourse unfolds in the US says more about the state of the nation than it says about the practicability of any regulation.
Can you fuck up things with overregulating? Sure thing! Can you fuck things up by not regulating? Sure thing! And while hitting the right balance can be tricky at times, this is not a theoretical matter you can observe it empirical and ask yourself if it works.
I know the tribal partisan divide in the US leads some to leave their head at the door, but come on, this is just silly.
No, they don't need one. The article shows how some groups are pushing for legislation to allow news orgs to form a cartel, in order to compete with the likes of Google and friends, who themselves enjoy a high concentration of market share.
So, instead of promoting a competitive economy with fewer cartels, there's a push to promote cartels within the economy, ostensibly to... compete?
Nice. These are, indeed, interesting times. Cartel economy it is!
I think all business has to know what they are selling. Google and Facebook know it very well. They sell ads. All their business endeavours hence are to sell more ads.
On the other hand, newspapers seems to not know that they are selling.
If it's content or information, then they don't create enough unique and valuable content that enough people are willing to pay enough amount.
If it's content distribution or platform for opinions or civil discourses, they are almost anachronistic.
If it's ads, they simply don't have enough eyeballs.
That's more or less how Russian printed press worked in the 1990s and early 2000s. All major newspapers and magazines not telling you how to have sex after properly tying your girlfriend to the bed were losing money, and each was owned by a major businessperson who wanted to control the narrative or at least to look like they were able to.
They should change their business plan. It's clearly not working anymore. Most newspapers in my country are basically dead and kept alive by government's money, ie, tax money.
It would be ridiculous to expect a law to help them. They should build a competitive business.
I see comments like this a lot, but I rarely see proposed alternative business models. The only one I can think of off-hand is ProPublica. Anyone else got anymore? I'm sometimes afraid that the reason newspapers don't pivot to any other structure is because there really aren't any viable models outside of subscriptions (which very few people pay for) or advertisements (which just makes for a sucky experience).
I didn't say taxpayers should absorb their operating expenses. My only point with my comment is that there's a lot of armchair analysis but not even armchair solutions
It's nobody's job to come up with a new business model, except maybe C-suite powerbrokers. But it represents a great market opportunity for whoever does find an alternative business model...
I think news orgs are a special case though. Treating them like regular corporations and letting them profit-seek without regulation is how you end up with Fox News and co.
What's the problem with that? Every news org receives money from companies or individuals with specific interests. You should be able to know what to read and how to read it. I don't think anybody takes Fox seriously (or at least I hope nobody does). You do not need government to "protect" you from that. It doesn't work. Look at Latin America and you'll see how government gets involved in news creation.
>I don't think anybody takes Fox seriously (or at least I hope nobody does).
Try hanging out with a different crowd.
My observation is that if you get information from only one source (or only sources of one ideology), and they repeat it over, and over, and over, you'll end up believing it - no matter how intelligent you are. Blind repetition is all that is needed. I've interacted with very smart people who mostly watch Fox News and will believe stuff that a simple Google search would debunk. Likewise for many liberals who have "interesting" beliefs regarding diet or health.
I think good journalism is one of the signs of a healthy society. Whether the government can foster good journalism or not is a different story. But if most journalism is of the Fox News or Huffington Post ilk, your society's "health" is at risk.
Finally, if you really believe government shouldn't be involved, then remove all laws that provide special protections to the press (if any exist). Examples are shield laws almost every state has. If you accept for special government privileges for journalists, you shouldn't claim no government intervention.
And that's just the thing. Many, many people don't have time to shop around gathering a variety of high-quality news sources. Many will just run Fox, or CNN, or whatever as their primary news source. And that implicitly shapes their view of the world.
A large non-trivial amount of people use Fox News (and maybe some added sources that are effectively in the same sphere) as their primary and only source of information. And they definitely take it seriously. It has enough veneer of legitimacy and polish and portrays a particular, comforting world view to them.
And of course, if you just have a diet of fringe media, no matter your leanings, that will also impact your view of the world.
>And that's just the thing. Many, many people don't have time to shop around gathering a variety of high-quality news sources. Many will just run Fox, or CNN, or whatever as their primary news source. And that implicitly shapes their view of the world.
Everybody has time, if they are interested, to get informed. Time is only an excuse.
Depends on both degrees of informed and capabilities of the investigator.
It can literally be a full time job however. If you can truly keep up with world news and details with the best essentially any intelligence agency (or large financial institution) would gladly take you on board for a good rate doing perfectly honest and legal work just from being able to piece it all together and make the proper inferences and connections.
Informed or not isn't a binary but a dizzying collection of them that can wind up ironically mixed with things like DNA pioneers pushing megadosing crankery.
>My observation is that if you get information from only one source (or only sources of one ideology), and they repeat it over, and over, and over, you'll end up believing it - no matter how intelligent you are. Blind repetition is all that is needed. I've interacted with very smart people who mostly watch Fox News and will believe stuff that a simple Google search would debunk. Likewise for many liberals who have "interesting" beliefs regarding diet or health.
The problem is getting information from only one source.
>Finally, if you really believe government shouldn't be involved, then remove all laws that provide special protections to the press (if any exist). Examples are shield laws almost every state has. If you accept for special government privileges for journalists, you shouldn't claim no government intervention.
I never said I agreed with such laws. With shield laws they can say whatever they want quoting "sources".
Anonymous speech is the cornerstone of free society - without it a mafia state prevails all too easily.
Not to mention its role in helping to move on from shared delusions and letting problems be transparent. There is a reason why the Dust Bowl wasn't like the Great Leap Forward despite both being grand agricultural fuck ups prompted by bad leadership. The one wasn't addressed with "this is fine" and started to receive corrections instead of doubling down for sake of face.
Same reason as why it is acceptable as a limitation of free speech to prevent proof of ballot choice - while people can and should advocate what they believe it being open leads to all sorts of nasty attacks like vote buying and extortion.
How do you expect to stand against bad actors without anonymous speech then? Using that as a rationale against anonymous speech rings of opening the abbot to Viking raiders for fear that someone might be pilfering coppers from the offering plate.
Fox is fine if you can discern the difference between their news shows and their opinion shows. The news programming is good, the opinion programming is click-bait.
Yep. Same with pretty much every other business that asks for law changes, bailouts, etc. If you can't compete, then that means change your business model or go out of business. It's how capitalism works.
And that should be true of everything from media outlets to banks to farmers to car manufacturers and shops.
As it's often said, the mission of journalists is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Making people feel uncomfortable is of course a lousy way of staying competitive.
Newspapers aren't competing with google or facebook. No more than newspapers were competing against news stands. Newspapers are competing against each other and those that have the power to force google and facebook to give it preferential treatment will do well. Those without the power to strong-arm google and facebook will do poorly.
Newspapers biggest enemy are "authoritative sources" and the preferential treatment these "authoritative sources" get. Small and local newspapers are going to suffer as their top enemies ( NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, Foxnews, MSBNC, WashingtonPost, etc ) get the "authoritative source" special treatment on social media and the internet overall. This applies to other smaller outfits like huffpo, vice news, vox properties, etc. As they get squeezed more and more, they'll fold if they are independent or if they are owned by a larger parent companies, the parent company will either absorb them out of existence or slowly shut them down.
When the CEOs of Facebook, google, apple, etc all bend to pressure by "authoritative sources" and pledge to give them special treatment on their platforms, it spells doom for smaller competitors.
Look at how many nytimes articles we have here. As time goes on, it'll get worse and worse. The diversity of news, thought and speech online is slowly being destroyed by a handful of state backed news companies.
Apple, Google, Facebook, etc are each worth hundreds of billions of dollars. NYTimes is worth a fraction of that. Yet the nytimes is able to bully these massive tech companies. Strange huh?
How much would "special treatment" on facebook, google, apple, etc be worth? Tens of billions? Hundreds of billions?
Imagine you had a business and you could force google, apple, facebook, etc to show your product to customers first . How about you could get them to only show your product. How much would that privilege be worth?
Say they get their cartel, and negotiate a link tax of a penny per link or whatever. How does that play out?
Will Google and Facebook drop news altogether? How much would that harm them? Do they just do a deal with Reuters and AP?
Say they drop news altogether. Does that just boost the popularity of aggregators like reddit with less than a billion monthly active users? Does it really change anything for the newspapers?
A fee for linking is a stupid idea. Sites pay for backlinks, not the other way around. Because they can then run their own ads and make money. Were I google, I would just blacklist these sites and they would die. Sites wouldn't have much recourse; good luck suing on antitrust grounds in such a situation.
You would think that an article on Politico about the effect (or not) of Google/Facebook on ad revenue for newspapers would at least have a disclosure that Politico makes money from ad revenue.
Sorry, a little off topic, but I wonder how partnered publishers are doing financially with Apple’s new News+ service. I am somewhat surprised to find myself cheerfully paying $10/month for spending perhaps 90 minutes a month reading material there. I assume that Apple is giving about 70% of the prorated proceeds to publishers and keeping about 30% for themself.
I sometimes contribute to The Guardian but the. Aridity in News+ is fun.
Meh, if Major League Baseball gets a special anti-trust exemption, I think the newspapers are at least as deserving. A vigorous free press is a rare and valuable thing, and we'd be fools to give that up in favour of Googbook-bait listicles.
Other sources of news - radio, TV, and the internet. And other sources of commentary - radio, TV, and the internet. And other sources of advertising - radio, TV, and the internet.
Newspapers aren't in the paper business. They're in the news business, and commentary business, and they're really in the business of finding ways to get you to see advertising.
[Edit: Newspapers mostly don't compete with other newspapers because almost all cities are down to only one newspaper. Their only "paper" competition is USA Today.]
Local news TV has been infamously consolidated to conglomerates and often clearly makes a mission to do as little journalism as possible - often overreporting one story in development with speculation and forgetting about the actual resolution.
You do see some good work in complaints forwarding "name and shame" occassionally where they pressure for resolution about bueracratic failures and dodgy businesses fixing the situation as it is the easiest way to make the problem go away.
It's worse than that. A significant portion of of American "local" news is actually just parroting Sinclair Broadcast Group which is a national group trying to push right wing opinion.
I don't see newspapers as being competitors to google and facebook. newspapers create content and google and facebook distributes it. this law doesn't seem to be aimed at balancing this relationship.
EDIT: I think Facebook and google should pay for each click through to a newspaper
If they aren't making money through clickthroughs somehow (subscriptions, ads, or donations) they are frankly doing it wrong and deserve to be out of business because they don't know what the hell they are doing.
Is there any field where you need to pay to advertise someone else? That is abject insanity even if it "worked" it would be a death spiral as short term gaind peter out as nobody wants to mention you.
Given that Google and Facebook are natural monopolies, what newspapers are demanding seem fair to me. The law just levels the play field. The alternative--breaking up these Internet giants--isn't in the public's interest and probably won't work.
Because people value the convenience of Google's integrated services. Market fragmentation is unnatural in the software world. Generally, the winner takes all in a given category. If we break up Google, one part of it will end up vanquishing the other parts.
> People value the convenience of Google's integrated services
So, short-term convenience should prevent us from breaking up a monopoly? The long term benefits of having a competitive market far outweigh the inconvenience of having to use tools from separate companies, or buy ad space from separate markets.
> Market fragmentation is unnatural in the software world
Oh yeah, that's why we have one text editor, one operating system, one browser, one CMS, one type of forum software, one chat app, one web framework, etc. Right? Having a fragmented market with tens, if not hundreds of competing solutions would be weird.
In my opinion most newspapers haven't showed me something I want to buy/spend money on/visit to collect a few token ad dollars. Did Google really steal your money because I chose New York Times over some random newspaper with lackluster articles/reporting? I feel like even radio and local/regional TV still does a good job of giving me a reason to choose them over someone else.