This idea that "media" has always owned "news" is frustrating. Would be akin to lamenting the death of almanacs and how facts are now out of reach for people that read them.
There is certainly a shift happening. But the idea that most people benefit from knowing world news is dubious. To that end, what I regret is how out of touch with local news we all seem to have become.
Yeah I'll even go a step further. Sometimes I feel it's actively psychologically harmful for a nonstop treadmill of very remote prescribed drama to piped into every citizen's head (election/israel/ukraine/etc).
Not to say those things don't matter at all, but I've noticed (take NPR for example) a huge bias toward negative news that is completely out of my control and often around political problems (as opposed to say scientific problems).
100% on point! Every time I'm getting my oil changed or I'm at a doctor's office, they've got the news on in the waiting rooms and it seems like the whole world is on fire and every house near me is burning and everyone is dying. Then I go live my life and everything is fine.
The reporting feels like it has no connection to reality. Yeah, the stuff happened. But that stuff just happens. Buildings catch fire, people die in car accidents, robberies happen, etc I just don't need to know about every single instance of it that happens on the surface of the planet.
Right. I saw a flash animation showing that in many ways we live in the most peaceful and stable period in history (http://www.fallen.io/shadow-peace/1/).
It was a shock to me because I felt like I had always been saturated with the idea that things are especially bad now. I do put the blame on media because when they report problems I feel they intentionally avoid establishing historical baselines.
This is particularly egregious in how racial news is covered. All the more so, as I'm pretty sure it is part of a feedback system that is actively making things worse.
Which is not to claim that "racism is dead." But I don't know why you would amplify failures while silencing successes. Or, if you do, I don't know why you would be surprised to see more of what is amplified. :(
Agreed. I basically have no knowledge of what's happening within 30 min of me while world news is everywhere. I also agree that world news is mostly useless. Why do I care about most of it? How will it ever affect me? But it gives them infinite stories to write to make more clickbait so we'll click on their site and either see ads or pay for access. They dug their own graves.
At think at its core, the question is "how do you make people value journalism in such a way that they'll pay for it, pay for the quality of it?"
Everyone's taste is now shaped by the most profitable marketing, perhaps more than anything else. So en masse, we are funneled into whatever content delivery will extract the most overall money.
How could high quality news ever compete with that?
The other factor is unbundling of newspapers. People used to pay for foreign bureaus and investigative journalism because they had to in order to see the classified ads for an apartment they wanted to rent or the score of last night's game.
Free “Alt” weeklies have been a thing pre-internet, but maybe some landlord’s thinking was that someone paying $1 for a newspaper was a better tenant (true or not).
News is pretty boring. I mean I do find it interesting, but if I’m going to be honest, I only pay for it (like 5 magazines and 4 newspapers) cuz I know the world would fall apart if actual news disappeared, but actually paying for my own reading probably isn’t worth it.
The user needs to be able to ask themselves afterwards "did reading this article, imbibing this knowledge, add $1 of value to my life? and is this article an efficient way to obtain that value?".
Back in the early days, when our local paper went digital, I couldn't get a simple subscription that just gave me the paper, the WHOLE paper in a PDF, you had to use their app to get the page you wanted to see, etc. It was horrible.
That was back when I believe the paper honestly reported the news.
Enter the New York Times, the world leading experts in pushing a narrative that the facts can support (or get close enough to support to fudge it). They aren't honest brokers, and most of the industry followed them into the toilet.
To be fair to the local news company, the tooling to create a PDF was probably not something they had. And I'm sure they were sold on the idea of an app by whoever does own their authoring tools.
Reminds me of the odd story of microfilm. I may be out of date, at this point, but my understanding is a ton of libraries were convinced to destroy large parts of their archive to convert into microfilm on the idea that this would be more resilient and easier to work with. Sadly, it has turned out to be neither.
They showed how you can make more money as BSaaS provider than news paper provider. Of course all the tycoons will switch over. Those who didn’t, died.
I’m sure it’s been done before, but I wouldn’t mind free synopsis, pay small per-article fee for full version.
The tease paragraphs used on every news site always feel “mean” to me in some way. The text fades out, or it cuts off mid-sentence.
If there was a bespoke intro+conclusion that actually communicated something valuable, I would reach for the Apple Pay button to drop 3$ for the added context and analysis.
Could even have a little marker in the full article, a little past the full fat intro: “Single Article subscribers should start reading here”
There’s no easy solutions though, I’m not going to pretend that works, even if I would like that.
These days you mostly see "above the fold" used to refer to website content, but it originated from the way newspapers would cram their top headlines into the upper half of the front page, so it would be visible at a glance in a newspaper machine or on a newsstand. If the headlines (or the local top stories in the "ears" of the front page) grabbed you, you dropped your nickel/dime/quarter and got the paper.
If you can feel confident based on headlines that yes, there's at least a few things in today's NYT that will interest you, it seems like paying $1 to get a PDF or whatever makes sense.
Oh! I had no idea that was the etymology. Learned something today. Thanks!
I think digital needs to fight a little harder than just headlines and above-the-fold style intros. I think including a short conclusion is valuable. Also valuable to write this free micro-article separately, with the intention of being a complete thought. It means people could post something here or other social media, and the unpaid state would actually communicate something.
That would make me feel better about paying, since it doesn’t feel like I’m being fished. The faded out text and incomplete sentences do make me feel that.
I hate the faded out text too, but I think it's hard to strike a balance where your conclusion is complete enough to tell the reader what the story is about, without also just giving away all the important information, while also not just being clickbait.
Consider the inverted pyramid theory, which says that your news story should begin with the absolute most essential info (who what where when why and how) in basically the first paragraph. This allows readers to skim and still get the essentials; it also makes it easy for editors to trim stories as necessary. Your conclusion/summary is that first paragraph -- and for a lot of people, that's all they need to read.
I wonder if a better model for journalism is the model employed by Hindenburg Research. They find stories that when published will have a devastating impact on a company, short the company, then drop their research and reap the change in market conditions. For everything there isn't a market for prediction markets and side-effects on other assets might make up the gap.
The way I see it, this would require these publications to be truthful about their reporting, if it was revealed they weren't the market would no longer react as strongly to their signals.
I’m not very familiar with them, but how do they protect sources? If you work somewhere, and want to make something public that will tank the price of your company, filtering your insider trading thru a journal like that seems pretty effective if they shelter their sources like any other big news org.
Nyt is still trying to make me pay their exclusive membership while I read ar most 3 of their articles monthly. Ans I'm still very inclined to pay 12$ and even probably more to get a spotify like subscription for articles but no one is offering it.
I think they’re too narrowly focused on subscriptions and I used to work in journalism.
I don’t want buy the whole paper for some arbitrary length of time, with maybe a few exceptions in print that are already hyper focused on my specific interests (New Yorker, NYRB).
They need to have a button that says .99¢ for this article, one click, apple pay, no sign up flow that makes me navigate away, no dark pattern bullshit.
It has to be so close to instant that it operates right in the moment an article catches my interest.
And maybe, if I buy five articles in one month, maybe give me an auto-renew subscription option.
I don’t think this is a hard problem, I think the issue is:
1. Wanting to force a subscription model for revenue predictability, etc.
2. Mimicking of crappy web bad patterns for capturing user juice and retention.
3. Editorial drift that’s chasing social media clicks and compromises the product.
This sounds entirely unappealing to me -- not to say you're wrong, just to say that not everyone agrees and your preferences might not be as widespread as you think they are.
(And its likely someone, somewhere has focus grouped or A/B tested this. It's not a novel idea. But there's a reason it doesn't exist, probably that it results in LESS money for the content producer)
It could obviously live side by side with an actual subscription, and I’m sure this has been gamed out and called too risky in a hundred meetings.
But newspapers need to reconcile that in an era of hypersmall publications (aka blogs, substack, etc.) they are no longer in a market which is about the overall package (the paper) but the individual writer.
The business model does not reflect this reality, tie the transaction to that value, or respect that diversity of authorship is the value of the web. I want to read 20 authors from 20 papers, not 20 from 1. There is less and less value in having “a venue” to subscribe to apart from the support it gives individual authors to do in-depth work.
I never understood how something like individual journalists, writers, reviews, etc on Substack or on their own blogs haven't formed something like a journalist cooperative.
It's owned and operated by the journalists themselves, and they all maintain their independent and individual reporting. But now with the added support of 20-30 other journalists to work together for the really big stories.
And it's easy enough to have the overarching cooperative submit for grants, donations, or other revenue-generating activities to support the journalism.
I would LOVE to have the big/fancy/major newspapers to have the option of paying $0.50 or $1 for articles. I don't read papers often, but once in a while, if something major is happening, I would love to read a 2-3-4 page analysis, with graphs, maps, etc. in a 'serious' newspaper. And than happens once per quarter.
No business survives by offering the bare minimum service for the lowest price. The $5/yr you might spend on stories is not worth them making their subscriptions be less valuable. Absent sustained recurring revenue and a trusted relationship with readers, they'd basically be doing click bait all over again.
The hardest (technical) problem for that flow is the fixed cost of transactions making such small payments unappealing. To even make such a flow appealing, we need to first find a way to not lose 15% (or more) of a $1 transaction to payment processing.
It should be $1 for limited-term access to the whole site, not one article.
Not just journalism but all subscription media should have non-subscription options. All the streaming video or music services should allow 1 day access for $1 or 1 week for $5. It costs them nothing to do so and I don’t think it will erode their monthly subscribers since it’s going to be cheaper for a month.
I can't tell if an article is worth reading until after I've read it, or a decent chunk of it. So I wouldn't pay for articles on this basis. I do pay for movies like this, but in that case I've already read reviews, been told by a friend that it's good, or seen it win awards (and all that information is free).
I'm guessing not a huge amount. Most people probably don't bother. But don't actually know to what degree porosity of paywalls is either a positive or negative factor.
(giant image) 2 sentences talking about some dude I've never heard of.
close
Huh. I wonder. I mean, obviously it wasn't the only nail in the coffin and they need money but I mostly see nytimes, Wired, BI, etc links and look for an archive link or just move on.
I'd value it more but half of the time they don't even do any actual reporting. It's just rewriting the same crap 5 other papers wrote from a 100 character release from the AP.
Yeah, I value quality, honest reporting. The problem is most of the time they all are in the same race to the bottom. I saw a video on youtube the other day from "Forbes Breaking News" titled "Biden's dog bit secret service agents on 24 different occasions".. WOW Forbes that's definitely breaking news! It's really important that we watch that RIGHT THIS MOMENT isn't it? Really important info there.
These "journalists" and their papers can whine all they want. The reality is they are out of touch and toxic. Yeah, you lost to comment sections because people can actually just read through them.
You also lost because half of the time when I see a tiktok or video on twitter about an event, it's from the source. Someone, on the scene, actually looking at what's happening. Then the bigs swarm on that person's DMs "CAN WE WRITE AN ARTICLE?!"
And as far as investigative journalism goes, youtube is full of people doing it 100x better than most of the crap I see these days in big orgs. Do I want to watch the 25min rundown of the whole situation from the perspective of some dude who spent the last 3 months researching with his team? Or do I want to read a 3000 word article that bloviates about irrelevant things while occasionally repeating the same factoid they based the whole piece on?
I'm just one person with a pretty cynical view of most things but my view is that news orgs lost because they dug their own graves. Because they continued to be out of touch and manipulative and wrong in so many cases that I stopped caring about whatever clickbait garbage they were trying to serve me.
I mean sentence 3 says who the guy is. You're not supposed to recognize his name.
And BI is recycled garbage but NYT breaks stories left and right. The cycle is such that anyone who breaks a story will get their story rehashed by everyone else including clickbait artists. But realistically the old guard of NYT, AP, NPR, WaPo and the like are actually uncovering the big stories and doing the legwork of just listening to all the players. Them plus the galaxy of niche players and scrappy independent journos who score occasional scoops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/news-media-ind...