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.
> 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.
I do get the point that following news constantly all day long is a bit like doom scrolling and doesn’t add much to a good life. However, I would not go as far as saying „complete waste of time“. It is Saturday morning and I just read a long interview with Wladimir Kara-Mursa, one of the Russian opposition politicians who was recently released from prison as part of a prisoner exchange. In the interview, Kara-Mursa talks a lot about his time in Russian jails, Putin‘s system, and being a opposition politician in Russia. Does it to relate my everyday normal life here in Germany? Well of course it does not at first glance. But at second and third glance it does and most importantly it helps me appreciate what I consider my normal everyday life in a democracy and it informs my decision making when it comes to the upcoming elections and the way different parties position themselves towards Russia and the war in Ukraine.
That being said, I don’t think it makes much sense to follow any type of news all the time all day long, but I would really miss it if it was no longer available as it helps me put things / my life into context and make more informed decisions at the ballot box. And sure I am willing to pay for that type of journalism.
> 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.
> 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?
1) Don’t read the news. It IS optional. Personally, if there were a good reason to read it, it would be based on curiosity and interest in knowing about humanity at large.
2) someone should be reading the news, because of economics, politics, and voting.
In the current global economy - your fate is dependent on the fate and actions of others.
The actions of Russia have hampered economies in the EU. This has currently obscured the strength of the underlying EU economy, making the US economy appear stronger.
Simultaneously, Italy, which had a lower dependency on Russian energy, is doing better and hopefully reducing some of its loan burden.
That’s just… fun to know?
Sheikh Hasina’s government in Bangladesh collapsed, the interim / caretaker government which has come in is headed by a Nobel Laureate. Their mandate is to prepare for another round of elections.
They don’t call themselves ministers, but advisors (iirc). I thought that was an interesting wrinkle and potential counter example for discussions on government, which happen regularly.
I don’t know how to frame my point better, but it does feel that this comment thread presupposes only a few narrow options.
Perhaps breaking from news is good when it’s just overwhelmingly negative, and designed to harm you?
But perhaps its great when its a way to address your interest and curiosity ?
Then funny part “stronger US economy” has stock crash not related in any way to events in Ukraine or Middle East. It crashed because finance guys had scheme borrowing Japanese currency and buying stocks with it.
So it is always that you might have illusion of knowing what is going on.
I love talking heads “experts” making assumptions but it is just talking and real stuff is always deeper.
So I rather people voting on their core values whatever those are than “perceived wisdom they are so informed”.
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.
The solution may be to go back when news wasn't some action filled adventure to be consumed every hour. Social responsible news should inform the public and provide the necessary background so people can form their own views and conclusions, rather than current system of news companies that carves an audience to whom they can provide entertainment and engagement.
To make a second reference, Yes, Minister has an excellent sketch over UK news papers, beautifully illustrating how each paper has carved up their own piece of the population and provide entertainment to serve those readers. It almost 40 years old and still fairly accurate description.
It not an uncommon sentiment to hear people saying that Wikipedia is a better platform for news than news organizations, since the content will stabilize fairly fast on that which everyone agrees on, and contentions over facts becomes noticeable. The general resistance to emotional loaded words also helps combat some of the worst aspects of news.
> 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.
There are lots of examples of politicians resigning from press reports about them. Just recently a senator from NJ stepped done because his court case caused tons of negative publicity.
Public shaming has been less of an issue the past 10 years but it’s still kind of a thing.
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.
You make a valid point. I live in a small city and something’s that matter (what’s going on with road work: bike lanes). I went to a meeting a few years back and had to explain what was going on to a neighbor, because no coverage and the city didn’t post a lot of good information.
A lot of news is too much analysis or “what might happen next” rather than “this just happened and here’s what it means”.
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.
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).
> 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.
They are greatly affected, especially if the US ends up fighting wars or the international economy is undermined when others fight wars. Their taxes go now to prevent those conflicts (which would be much more expensive later). Other global phenomena, like mpox, climate change, etc. do not respect borders. Foriegn powers do not respect borders, including by supporting their political allies right in McOfficeWorker's own country.
As far as McOfficeWorker's influence, probably nothing is more influential in international affairs than the average American's opinion (see my nearby comment for more about that).
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?
> E.g. how will the average Joe be able to impact a century-long conflict in Palestine?
The 'average' American has so much influence, in fact, that the cornerstone of Israeli foreign policy and national security is the support of average Americans.
How that mechanism works is an interesting question, but not too hard to imagine: Israel is much too small to defend itself, and therefore depends on support from the most powerful country in the world. That support happens largely because average Americans want it. Imagine, for example, if one of the current candidates said, 'if elected, I will cut off all support to Israel' - probably they would lose the election.
The beliefs of average Americans have great influence over many things, which is why powerful people spend so much time, money, and effort trying to persuade them. Look at Fox News and MSNBC; look at Russian and Chinese (and probably other) social media influence operations; look at the near infinite political propaganda; look at Musk, who spent $40B on such influence, and at how much time he spends posting in order to influence people.
Another way to influence average Americans is to convince them to surrender their power and not even try. That leaves the field more open for others to control events.
> 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.
I think not being subject to having your rights removed by legislation is a privilege.
Consider this: a woman in Texas doesn't follow the news. She tries to seek out an abortion. Now she is unable to get that healthcare she previously was able to. Similar things can arise with voting rights, where now people need to bring very specific forms of ID to vote. Essentially, I think my point is not being aware of which groups in power are actively working to limit your rights is probably not good.
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.
I have a theory, to the effect that impacts on you are determined by the magnitude of the news as well as an exponential decay of the distance.
To take an extreme example, if Godzilla were to show up and level Tokyo today, that would clearly be terrible but the actual impact on me is much less than that some roads nearby are closed because of a marathon.
Unless I can do something to prevent Godzilla, there is no reason to follow the news from far away, except the leftover limbic system of my brain that still thinks its 10000 BC and we are in a small hunter gather band.
For most of history humanity grew it's food locally, it depended on local items, got killed by local actors as you state. Each locality was its own anti-fragile little kingdom.
But this is no longer true and this is something we saw during covid. If a factory blows up in Tokyo that makes the live saving medicine/device that you depend on to keep surviving, it's no different for you than your city catching on fire. If all the crops die in some foreign place and you live in a food importing country, trouble is coming. If a war is blowing up ships then supplies you need for your business may not show up any more and bankruptcy could be on the menu.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
In the past, a lot of news outlets were prestige buys by the super wealthy. They would buy a news outlet so they could make sure that they have a place that will say everything they want to hear being said. This often allowed for some objectivity over subjects that the magnate didn't care about, but it put very strict limits on the ones that the magnate did.
Plus, the news has always been majority sponsored by publicity, and news rooms have always been careful to print or broadcast narratives that sit well with the people who give them the money. Few things have really changed in these dynamics.
Forgive my cynicism, but I do not believe you, and I do not believe the linked article. Profit is not the only incentive to deceive. Power, legacy, and prestige (which the article claims was the ultimate goal) are all incentives to deceive, mislead, or otherwise engage in narrative craft.
The objective was always "make money" - it never changed. What changed was the means of making money - originally journalism, now advocacy and activism.
The New York Times, in particular, clearly now is an advocacy organization instead of a news organization.
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?
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 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.
> "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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
No, the fact that even the families of the victims say they fabricated stories about their daughters, and that they had no sources outside government propaganda mouthpiece, is what makes the stories fabricated.
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.
> 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.
In Romania we have YouTube channels that do only investigative reporting and people fund them through YouTube membership, super tips and Patreon. Can look up recorder Romania if you are curious
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 naïve) model of how FB works as a business, "lying" doesn't seem like the right word here.
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.
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).
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.
Yes, I believe so. We had less staff issues, we tested the waters before going all-in, but it was still a diversion of effort and emphasis for zero gain (for us - I believe Meta did well from it).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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).
> 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).
Yeah, this is one of those situations where markets don't provide the optimum outcome.
News used to be an industry with a few dozen providers, and journalistic integrity was a known thing - you did not read "News of the World" for actual factual news, and everyone understood that. Likewise if The Times stated something, it was probably true (same for The Guardian, only misspelled). They certainly put their slant on things, appealing to a particular demographic, but kept the facts pretty straight.
Now the news organisations are not required to tell the truth, and can pick a niche and tailor their copy to that niche with no integrity at all. Because there's so much competition and the market is huge, readers are able to pick and choose, finding news outlets that will tell them exactly what they want to hear, reinforcing existing beliefs. And, of course, driving everyone apart, making us all more extreme by reducing the set of common facts that we have.
I don't think the answer is the culling of "misinformation" because that leads to the Orwellian situation of the government being able to shape the official truth to their needs.
I think the answer is finding some way of funding journalists to go do their thing with no interference, and let them police each other for integrity and truth.
> "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.
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.
The BBC used to call out the government, but yeah that has clearly changed.
Australian ABC still does call out the government. In fact they were raided for reporting on the Afghan files. The politicians have threatened revoking the charter multiple times.
The ABC generally leans socially liberal which means it's usually the conservatives complaining though.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics.
On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise).
On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all.
At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere).
One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated.
There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
State-support for media can take a wide range of forms, several of which are fairly resistant to control, coercion, and/or curruption:
- Distribution supports, as with discounts on US postal rates for printed matter, a policy dating to Benjamin Franklin.
- Tax breaks for publsihers.
- Legal notices and other advertising. Legal notices are simply an obligation put on third parties to take out box ads within newspapers. Other advertising might be for government services by some governmental unit. As with other forms of direct payment, there are both multiple levels of government (local, regional, state, federal), and numerous independent units. A larger city/metro paper might well represent numerous towns and cities, as well as multiple counties, and even possibly multiple states if near a state-line. Each of these could contribute independently to the news organisation, and cutting off or controlling all such spend would be difficult to coordinate.
- Direct tax-based subsidies for news. As with ad spend, again a news organisation would have numerous sources of support, with a strong degree of independence amongst those.
Many people seem to jump straight to "one level of government providing 100% support to one global news organisation". That's not at all what I'm envisioning; there would and should be a multiplicity of both funding sources and funded organisations.
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.
Investigative journalism is something rather more than happening to be in the right place with a camera and mic.
Hard-hitting investigative journalism takes a long time, much research, analysis, interviews, FOIA requests, document leaks, etc., etc. It also all but inevitably requires some reasonably well-funded legal defence capacity as well. Publishers are known for their prodigious ink and paper budgets, but also legal retainers.
I've watched some brilliantly produced independent documentaries where the filmmakers procured funding, went on the ground and did the hard work. MY point was that you don't need the backing of some biased mega-corp to greenlit these types of things.
Local journalism is key to fighting corruption and malpractice by firms, government, nonprofits, and individuals. Taxes are higher and more regressive. Voter turnout is lower. And the impacts are regressive, hitting poorer households and communities more than wealthier ones. Local journalism provides insights and accountability.
After a local newspaper closure, local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the closures reduce firm monitoring by the press. This effect is not driven by the underlying economic conditions, the underlying local fraud environment, or the underlying firm conditions. Taken together, our findings indicate that local newspapers are an important monitor of firms’ misconduct.
"When the local newspaper leaves town: The effects of local newspaper closures on corporate misconduct"
"We are becoming a nation of local news haves and have nots"
We have known for some time that the decline of local news hurts local communities — lower voter turnout, more corruption, higher taxes, etc. What’s now clear is that the spread of news deserts is happening unequally. It has hurt poorer and older communities most — and is creating a nation of local news haves and have nots.
Individual producers can undertake some of these functions, but to a far lesser degree than a well-funded journalistic institution with a mission of serving the public.
(There are of course so-called "news" organisations which don't take a public-serving mission. That doesn't take away from the fact that there are also those which do.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work
Maybe that is true for you, but this is not true for minorities and people who are fighting for a cause (abortion and trans rights, for example). Not being willing to cast a vote because it doesn't change anything for you doesn't seem like a virtue.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
I ran into an gullible simpleton the other day, who happens to not watch any news. (subtext implication follows)
If only had he "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 would be parroting back 'facts' by a news source that 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?
Have I stumbled into an alternate reality where people believe "the news"™ is two buildings in new york facing each other, one shoveling lies for one side of the political spectrum and the other mirroring, with nothing of value ever coming out of it?
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".
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.
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.
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)#Yellow_journa...>).
But I'd suggest that the population for whom quality, relevant news is of high interest is relatively small.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You'd trust the news over a government evacuation order though? I certainly wouldn't. The news does a terrible job of covering war, especially now a days where it seems there are fewer embedded journalists actually on the front lines versus just covering a generals press conference dozens of miles away from any action.
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.
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.
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).
The point is you should be able to operate you own paywall. The tech is mature enough in 2024 to make it work.
Make the browser store you credit/debit card info, make the browser handle the payment UI, make the browser expose JS apis to invoke payments and receipt fetching against pluggable payment providers.
My ideal world looks like this. New html button element:
`<pay amount="1.00" currency="USD" reference="my-article-123" checkoutUrl="https://...">Unlock for $1.00</pay>`
Clicking it opens browser checkout flow. The url you get from stripe/paypal or another whitelisted payment provider that has implemented the spec, some flow similar to OAuth. On a successful tx, a signed receipt (something like a jwt) is returned from the provider and saved by the browser, on disk on your computer.
The webpage can then load signed receipt references from the browser api, sends it to the backend which can return the article content if the receipt jwt is valid.
It can be fixed if the right people from Chrome and Stripe got together in a room and brainstormed for a bit. Then everyone else would follow.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
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).
> 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?"
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.
In TFA you say it should be funded "on a progressive basis", how do you suggest this be implemented? Most funding sources you suggest cannot discriminate based on user income; ISP fees, subscriptions, advertising... none of these can be applied progressively. You're really back down to more income taxation.
To a first approximation, varying fee by average neigbbourhood income might accomplish much of this. An assessment baked into income taxes (state or federal) could of course accomplish this directly.
Offering different pricing tiers is another option, with a "basic" package that includes most sources, and one or more premium tiers which includes either greater availablity, or more immediate / current access to, entertainment and sport content, for example.
Basic informational content, including news and cultural lore (classic books, movies, music, etc.) would be in the basic tier.
> news and cultural lore (classic books, movies, music, etc.)
Is the aim to recreate a state directed facsimile of the entire media ecosystem? All of this seems totally redundant to the market offerings, just now with bureaucratic overhead and the removal of personal choice, but it's tax funded so it's somehow better?
It'd be simpler just to collect progressive taxes and give cash to the poor, who can pay for news and media (or food) according to their own preferences.
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.
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!
my argument is that media is the only real loyal opposition, and so being appointed for the term would have them do their actual job instead of the influence peddling they're reduced to now.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I only every bought like 2 newspapers regularly, canard enchainé (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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, á 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?
That's pretty close to what I'm suggesting, and a superbundling / megasyndication is one possible shape (or at least interim waypoint) to getting there.
The term I've used in the past is "universal content syndication".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
The vast majority of stories don't make it to wikipedia, and wikipedia just regurgitates shit it gets from the news. If I could find an answer online I wouldn't need the news to actually do their job.
The overwhelming majority of stories I've found it useful for me to look up on Wikipedia ... tend to be there. Most of these tend toward natural disasters, industrial / infrastructure incidents, business/political news, possibly something in technology or the sciences. Not so much "human interest", celebrities/gossip, entertainment, etc., though I suspect some of those might also find their way to Wikpedia, modulo BLP considerations (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...>).
Wikipedia does not merely regurgitate news, but processes, synthesizes, and very often balances multiple viewpoints.
And, just to give a current example, the sinking of Bayesian doesn't merit its own article (yet?), but there is a section on the page covering that yacht:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The main reason is that there is a glut of free news, or quasi free (ad sponsored).
Also, some people get nonfree news as part of some streaming package. They are not paying for news per se, but it's there and they consume it from time to time, even if not avidly.
You can consume free news via the radio also (which people mainly do in their car these days, I suspect). During the heyday of television, people consumed free news via broadcast TV which you could catch with an antenna. A few people probably still do.
There has hardly ever been a need to pay for news since the dawn of the radio era.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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>).
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.
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.
> the poor should not be denied access to media: news, entertainment, books, music, video, whatever.
The poor are not denied access this currently. Everything in your argument hinges on the claim that government funded and directed media will be superior to the status quo. Why?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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 ?
I won’t pay because I find it too expensive. Publications want hundreds of dollars a year for access when in reality all I want is to read a handful of articles per month if that. How about you charge me per article up to a monthly max? No, everyone wants to sell you a subscription.
Apple News is a good idea, but I’d still rather pay per article.
I consider the news to be like an infinite TV show with rich, unpredictable plots, no agenda, and, as an added bonus, kinda realistic. Apart from being good entertainment, I owe all my capital to following the news, and it has also saved my ass a couple of times when situations were about to get dangerous.
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.
Certainly (A) for me. The news that matters is local, but my local paper got purchased by McClatchey, shut down its press, cut staff to the bone, and started publishing ads that pretend to be editorial content. That last was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I cancelled my subscription.
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.
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.
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.
Our government wants to tax public media even though you not consume them.
Considering how propagandistic and low quality broadcast of our public media are, this proof that their audience rapidly fell down (especially after 2020-21) and they are in financial crisis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Forty years ago, one wasn't paying that much for it, directly. The newspapers were supported largely by advertising. But the ads have gone online, and the subscribers pay more for less.
(And advertising killed liberal democracy? How? Was it my group house running a classified for a new housemate? Was it [defunct department store] advertising its Presidents Day sales?)
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.
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.
There's also the Economist as I've noted many times, which has a three-tier support: subscriptions, ads, and bespoke consulting through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
That not only provides multiple funding legs, but also strongly incentivises robust journalism as the publication is effectively an advertisement for the EIU's reports (many of which contribute to substantive reports in print).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
"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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>The Stasi and SS would have committed genocide for such data. (And did. With IBM's aid and support.)
I'm fucking sorry? How many millions did the stasi genocide again? Everyone knows that IBM provided infrastructure that facilitated the Holocaust, so which other genocide are you equating with the Holocaust here exactly? Insanely disrespectful thing to post
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 mid-2019, 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.)
- 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.
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.
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...)
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.
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
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?
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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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
(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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I think people forget that initially the lab leak was being pushed -hard- by the far right with zero evidence other than speculation and rather than stir up the masses lots of new orgs abstained from it with no clear evidence. After more data came out and more analysis then it became much more credible theory with experts having looked over it rather than the bot armies on twitter/Facebook/etc.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
>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).
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.
>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.
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.
As someone who grew up quite a while ago with the BBC, there's some serious delusion going on here about the historical and present day nature of that institution.
Whether or not it is true that the BBC has (or has not) been "captured by wokeness", the objections to this tend to hinge on its reputation for objectivity and dispassion in the past.
But the BBC has never been objective or dispassionate. It has been a steadfast supporter of the status quo. If it didn't treat socialism and communism with the idiocy that modern day Fox News does, it certainly offered them no serious coverage outside of a few intellectual "talk shows", even then only as a curiosity set against "what we all know is the truth".
The fact that someone might be upset that the BBC or other similar organizations choose not to give "full coverage" to conservatism should not obscure that the same organizations have never provided much to any "radical" cultural or political phenomenon.
The cherry-picking was always real, and it is generally only Americans who live under the ridiculous idea that there can be "objective" journalism. There isn't, and there never has been, and there never will be (in the context of broadcast or daily media, anyway).
"It was never objective" is similar to Scientific American apologists who say "science was always political."
> It has been a steadfast supporter of the status quo
Yes, but at one time, "status quo" didn't mean one party. It meant two, either of which might happen to be in power. You're correct that they didn't give much coverage to groups outside of that "mainstream."
> the ridiculous idea that there can be "objective" journalism.
There are degrees of seriousness in the approach to that ideal. You can go into the New York Times archives for the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to see what it looked like when it was taken seriously.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was a giant nothing-burger and no one had any real information about it before the election. It took time to responsibly analyze the contents are accurately report on it, and none of that happened until well after the election. Reporting on it at all before the facts were available would have clearly been inflammatory for no good reason.
> no one had any real information about it before the election
The information was out there and the 50+ "former intelligence experts" have admitted that they had no idea what they were talking about, and what's more, they're still proud of it.
The media just didn't do their jobs. A real reporter would have said, "This is fishy. I wonder what the facts are." A real reporter would have called the Post and said, "Show me what you've got."
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.
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...)
The difficult in finding any pricing data (I spent several minutes trying to find out what the print price for the Sunday NYT is for an earlier response, let alone subscription rates) is ... dispiriting.
That's before getting to the ease or lack thereof of subscribing / cancelling.
There are well over 100 news sources which are routinely submitted to HN. Subscribing to each of those individually would cost a small fortune.
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
The point of the propaganda model is that the filters equally affect any media corporation. It is a question of incentives, not political affiliation. Diversification of news consumption doesn't solve the issues of ownership, advertising funding, sourcing of news, etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
> Most news is negative, useless and have no material impact on your life.
About 15 years ago I heard the concept of the information-action ratio[1] and it totally changed the way I consumed news. As you note, most things in the news are irrelevant to me in the sense that I can’t take any meaningful action based on them.
I still read some news—and pay for $1/week subscriptions to multiple newspapers, which they have so far let me renew indefinitely if I threaten to cancel every six months—but I spend much less time following national and global news than I used to.
> State of Hawai'i, which is most authoritarian state, required vaccines or testing before flying in
So your bar for "authoritarian state" is not wanting people with a highly infectious, airborne disease to vacation on a remote island where every single hospital was overcapacity?
You understand that there were no ICU beds available, emergency services were overwhelmed, nurses and doctors were working perpetual overtime with insufficient resources, etc, right?
"Take a test to show you don't have covid before flying to an island with zero capacity to handle more sick people" seems like an incredibly basic, common-sense measure.
I can't read OP's comment anymore as it has been flagged, but in response to your comment alone: the question isn't whether it's a good idea for someone to travel to Hawaii while positive for Covid in the early days of the pandemic, it's whether the state has the legal authority to halt the liberty of interstate travel[0].
If your answer is that emergency situations warrant such "basic, common-sense" restrictions, then my rebuttal is that a) governments will manufacture as many emergency situations as needed, and b) what is basic and common-sense to one may not be to another and in either case, that ratchet will only go one way; in the direction of authoritarianism.
[0]: This liberty has most recently been under controversy again in the context of states wanting to ban travel to other states for the purposes of obtaining an abortion.
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.
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.