I studied Journalism and trained as a Journalist a lifetime ago (1999-2002), before the internet really (technical term looming) fucked everything up. Thing is, even back then we were studying the impact of the 'Janus view of the Press' - this concept that any and every news publication was a two-headed beast, seeking to find the balance between great, objective journalism ... and money to keep the lights on.
Back then is was more philosophical than existential - we debated whether it was morally acceptable for a writer to take into consideration the size of a company's ad account when covering them in a story; now that the focused channel of broadcast media has been fragmented, so advertisers no longer pay a premium for access to readers and viewers of the nightly news, every journalist has to be mindful of their commercial impact (though this still needn't impact their writing choices) because they may be out of a job next week.
Plus ça change and all that. I'd like to see more debates around how to fund the new model (now that we've discovered it was the channel, not the content, that people actually valued for a couple of hundred years), not all this hand-wringing about the impact of money on objectivity because that's an old, boring conversation. Ultimately, advertising has been funding journalism for a long, long time. I wish it wasn't so, but I also wish it rained doughnuts.
Is it necessary to debate about funding models for journalism? Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this.
You can debate about government intervention, if capitalism does not incentivize as people want. Maybe the government should pay for some of the journalism? Maybe we need more control and oversight for "high-quality" journalism?
I think as the 'Fourth Estate' there's a definite need for Journalism to stay well away from government funding, control and oversight - while I would contend almost all journalists are capable of setting aside any biases such a funding model might create, 'Journalism must be done fairly, and it must be seen to be done fairly' and being dependent on the government makes it hard for a populace to believe it's objectively investigating the government.
But you encounter the same issue if you suggest, say, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ought to fund "high-quality" journalism. (When was the last time the WashPo ran a scathing attack on Amazon?) Even some kind of group model - part government, part philanthropist, part donors will always create a perception of bias.
I'm mixed on your point about Capitalism. Yes, 'the market' will deliver what the people want, but not always what they need ('in the public interest' v 'of interest to the public'). A government example might work here - would taxpayers in one state willingly contribute money to a road project in another? I suspect not - taxes aren't voluntary for just that reason. Longform investigative journalism, I feel, would similarly not be funded by sufficient people. And I think that would usher in a new era of corruption in most capitalist nations.
I think qznc has a valid point: as I get older I see less and less point in discussing how things would work in an ideal case when we have no realistic way to get to there from here. Concrete ideas like "should the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation fund "high-quality" journalism?" are well worth discussing; abstract debates around "what would be the ideal model?" can very easily become detached from reality.
> Longform investigative journalism, I feel, would similarly not be funded by sufficient people. And I think that would usher in a new era of corruption in most capitalist nations.
That's a great point. I don't have much feeling about the BBC (I've spent most of life in Australia), but my 'go to' thought when discussing the impact of Media on revealing corruption is The Moonlight State, which ultimately brought down the State Government of my home state Queensland ... and was created by the ABC.
Indeed, one could argue that a commercial provider wouldn't have invested in longform (I really meant long-term as much as length) as much, but state-sponsored broadcasters had the time and space. So I don't think it could be the only journalism, but you make an excellent point about it having a special place (especially when protected by legislation from becoming the DPRK Mouthpiece).
To be fair, the BBC has arguably been getting worse in the quality of its reporting/news coverage for a while now. There's definitely been an tendency for them to sensationalise stories on their website, and some of the opinion articles are the kind of thing you'd see in a standard newspaper rather than the quality you'd expect from them.
> Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this.
Depends on what you call 'working well': we currently witness the direct consequences of the commoditization of what could arguably be considered as a public service--namely, access to trustworthy information for all--, but somehow some still have faith in that model.
You are perfectly right that money will find its way, but the question is: whose money, and for what goal? Big corporation or mogul's money, who want to buy mindshare in public opinion and trade it for influence in the political sphere, like, say, the good media networks of M.Berlusconi, Bouygues and tons of others?
Capitalist press is pretty bad, and always has been. ""Freedom of the press ... is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.""
I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring. It just seems that PR-media-marketing juggernaut is always on the look for things that are perceived as trustworthy and trying its best to simulate them. Hope that at least HN will remain unpopular enough so that we will still be able to have real discussions here in the future ;)
I hope that wink is a realization that sponsored content (in the form of "Show HN" and the linkbait submitted by heavily interested parties) has already arrived.
At least there is a tradition of stating your affiliations and monetary interests up front. But still, good point. Recent bitcoin debacle is a good example - with both parties accusing each other of staging a FUD-spreading campaign in social media and on discussion sites.
> I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring.
To be fair, magazines and newspapers have always had "sponsored content" or "native advertisement" (whatever you wanna call it) and we managed.
Yes, but suspecting that every article has an unstated source of influence other than author's own opinion is the whole new level of paranoia. Articles throwing lavish praise at some particular corporation are the easiest - just dismiss them. But when there is no evident source of influence, my mind races to build a mini-conspiracy theory - who is trying to tell me this and why? As I've said, tiring.
I've said it before: There is no value in proper journalism because there's too damn much of it in the market. I think the subscriber model will work much better once 70% of these companies have died off and the remainder can get back to real journalism. If the better ones have to survive the storm by taking on sponsored content, that's what has to happen.
At one time we had tons of newspapers for every moderately large city, and now all of those papers are now online and expect to make money covering all the world's news like they did before. The problem with that is none of them are geographically limited anymore, they distribute everywhere, which probably sounded awesome to them until they realized all their old competitors and a couple million more they had never heard of were all doing the same thing and eating their lunch.
The problem with news online right now is there is just way too much of it, there is demand, but when you can get more or less the same information on 5,000 different sites, who the hell cares what your particular site has to offer? Add to it some blocking users of adblock or switching to a subscriber only model, and you have a clear reason why these companies can't make money.
The vast majority of national and world news printed in newspapers is written by the Associated Press.
There are licensing fees associated with AP, but it's not like the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald has a reporter on staff to get the latest scoop on the upcoming Supreme Court nomination.
The internet severely disrupted newspapers' business, and it took a while for them to figure out how to adapt.
Many of them have settled in and become profitable, mostly using a free-for-X-number-of-articles model.
Unfortunately, many newspapers initially took the approach of making everything free over the internet.
This conditioned the readers for free content, and made it tough to get money in the door for online access.
That seems to be changing though.
The source of the content is irrelevant (however interesting, TIL). There are too many companies disseminating the same content, as you point out, for free to make the other companies viable unless the consumers feel particularly inclined to that given company. The New York Times, for example, would probably have an easier time getting subscribers than the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald because they have more reputation, deserved or not.
From pure market forces though which the vast majority of consumers operate on, they have no reason to subscribe to NYT -or- DTH because there are a thousand other small papers distributing that same article as you've pointed out for free.
That makes a lot of sense. It follows, then, that the way forward is to hyperlocalize, either geographically or in a particular subject matter. And come to think of it, I would find much greater value in a detailed news site about my city, or even my particular section of my city.
In Austin we have the fabulous Austin Monitor [1]. You want to know whether Commissioners Court is going to add shoulders to your county road? The Monitor's your destination. And on the topic of sponsored content, I just visited it, and found this editorial comment:
"I’ll use this space to note that, while sponsorship revenue is key to our survival, we remain hesitant to test the waters of sponsored content for the Monitor. Many – most? – of our colleagues around the news publication world have settled on this concept as a way to quickly boost revenue in an ecosystem starved for it. But we worry about the impact it would have on our credibility.
"That said, we’ve experimented with a version of what the Voice of San Diego calls “Partner Voices,” a space for sponsored content from area nonprofits. To make this work – read: to keep it off the Monitor‘s page – we figured we’d post it on the CoTMF website. Thus far, we’ve found little interest, but we’re happy to continue to entertain the idea."[2]
It has been tried (though you could argue not well.) I feel like it was either Yahoo or AOL who tried hyperlocal news and it did not gain traction.
However, you could argue that this lack of traction was due to the climate of the users and what they were interested in at the time, they also (if I remember correctly) were actively paying local "reporters" who had a specific local beat.
That's not authentic and not really what I want. There is zero chance that a single reporter reporting to a mothership in another city could generate better content than a local paper. After thinking about it, what I want already exists in limited ways. Some examples for my city:
clatl.com
atlanta.eater.com
atlanta.curbed.com
In addition to these, I think a small monthly paper devoted solely to investigative journalism in a particular city or town would generate enough paying subscribers to be viable, but I could be wrong.
They exist but they're largely labors of love that probably depend on certain demographics. The chains with local stringers for smaller city papers are terrible.
You're probably thinking AOL. AOL bought patch.com for hyperlocal and failed, laid off staff in an attempted turnaround, failed the turnaround, then sold to it to an investment firm www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/01/15/aol-hands-off-patch-to-turnaround-firm-hale-global
Still, it's extremely easy to take an article and create a legal replica of it. And since most users care about articles, not about magazines, And a lot of content isn't that time sensitive for most users, it's hard to see how competition will decrease.
There is good journalism out there - you just have to be more picky to weed out all the bad sources. Fivethirtyeight is probably my favorite resource. Even though they have a niche, that niche is data driven articles, which to me means evidence driven journalism. I'll never get 100% of my news from them, but it is a strong start.
I honestly am not sure how they make money. I know they are owned by ESPN (so... Disney by extension?), but not much more than that.
"Good" journalism is extremely subjective and in my experience aligns more with the political leanings of the consumer than with any measurable qualities. I'm not saying it's ALL crap of course, there are plenty of real reporters researching real things (ironically enough, most of them are at Buzzfeed lately) but the vast majority of coverage is just parroting other publications with their own slant added to avoid copyright issues. I mean how many times has some completely made up and utterly nonsense story gone from a twitter post to all over our most credible newspapers because nobody bothered to Google it before putting on Page 1?
No. I was responding to a question about how they make money. They probably don't really but serve as a loss leader for ESPN. That's not a comment on how things should've but how they are. I do think that data journalism in general is a positive trend but am not sure it makes a big impact in the news business model.
Bah. I hardly read sponsored content. It's often marked and I find myself enjoying the piece less and instead hunting like an eagle for every clear indication of propaganda and attempted influence.
The author's main point I believe is correct: money in journalism is wildly misallocated, from overpaid mega-writers and editors, to inconsequential coverage. Things that can't hold forever won't, and that will allow new and necessary questions to be asked about journalism in this new era.
Every market goes through a rough patch and a transformation. If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history.
If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history.
Okay, but how can it change? Where will the money come from?
I'm on the side of the dystopians (is that a word?) until someone can answer those questions for me. But I'm a techie, not a student of history, and I honestly don't know.
People won't pay for actual journalism while sponsored content is free and looks enough like the real thing.
Ad revenues are tanking across the board for everyone except the platforms. Ad expenditures are rising, though, so there's a suggestion that this will not continue forever and that one day ad-supported business models will become viable again.
But probably not soon enough, or at high enough levels, to support journalism as it used to be. That's dead and gone. All we're talking about now is what comes after.
The real sadness is investigative journalism, especially as a democratic tool. Without someone poking their nose where it's not wanted (and a mechanism for paying them to do that) our society is at a much greater danger of corruption.
I'm not a dystopian. There is a public appetite for actual journalism, so eventually there will be a business model to cater to that. What that looks like though... no idea
I'm pretty sure this is a "yellow journalism period" on the internet but it will get worse before it gets better since the common man needs to completely lose faith in these rags like they did with tabloids.
Clickbait is alot like the tabloids and yellow journalism of print media, honestly.
> Where will the money come from?
Subscriptions most likely. It'll be newspapers written to favor the desires/biases of the upper middle class who would consider dropping $100/year for such a thing.
Yes, ads and causes seem to be the two big sources of money. I cannot think of a third one.
We agree that ads are dead. That logically leaves us with causes.
The problem with causes are that they are inherently biased. However, there are usually sources for each side. Maybe we should embrace the bias? Instead of looking for objectivity and an ideal of journalism, we could try to balance biases.
Google started with Page Rank, which tries to calculate authority (and thus implicitly objectivity) into a single number. Maybe AI technology can identify all relevant causes for each topic, balance bias, and present a wealth of opinions and the facts they agree on? Sure, the "balance bias" step is the problematic one, because here a gatekeepers occurs.
In the 30s, business opposition to FDR and the New Deal programs ushered forth a wave of propaganda inciting distrust in government control of the economy while promoting the ability of American industry to raise living standards.
As a result, the Roosevelt Administration countered with a series of public service films informing the public of subversive private propaganda and demonstrating ways to detect hidden or covert biases.
At first I laughed when I heard about this. I couldn't imagine anyone putting that much effort into analyzing news. But using AI? You might be on to something...
Consumer Reports survives purely on subscriptions without any advertising, no? (Certainly the equivalent in my country, Which?, does - accepting any kind of advertising would compromise their independence, since by their very nature they review everything - and as a result they're significantly more expensive than comparable magazines, but enough people are willing to pay that to make it viable)
Here in Brazil, they all survived on ads money, what lead to all of them going out of business once this fact got published on the internet. We don't have any one left that I know of.
This is the future. At this point it's impossible to un-do disruptiveness of banner ads. One reason that People block banners is due to how disruptive and gaudy they are.
Native ads camouflage among real content for a few reasons.
1) people like the how articles are presented on the rest of the website, so these ads are not disruptive
2) Many people don't notice the 'advertorial' or 'sponsored content' disclaimers. This reduced the 'bounce rate' of people that view this advertising there fore higher engagement
This is the future if everything has to be free. Since you can't make money by creating content for readers, you have to instead create content for advertisers and propagandists.
There is plenty of content that will always be free and free of advertising. That's content made by people who either care about a subject or that are otherwise given the feeling that they contribute to something larger than themselves (wikipedia for instance, plenty of blogs, courses and so on).
The problem is that newspapers evolved in lock-step with the advertising industry and that they had carved out an - in retrospect - extremely fragile position based on a balance that they thought was stable. Unfortunately for many quality news publications it turned out that wasn't the only stable state, the other one is the state in which they are simply gone, maybe a few with hopefully benevolent wealthy sponsors would endure. This was an unforeseen consequence of reducing the value of printing presses to near zero.
The problem is that the content that's "free and free of advertising" probably won't be very good, or very well researched, or independent.
High quality content often depends on access (which can be hard or impossible to get even if you're a real journalist), a lot of time, and quite a lot of input from support staff (editors, subeditors, researchers, picture editors etc).
> So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak.
If by content you mean specifically news and product reviews, that's certainly possible. If by content you mean "long-form writing on a specific subject", then you're quite wrong and the parent is right.
High quality content comes from two sources, similar to high quality software. It either comes from an organization which makes and sells high quality content to make money (the new York times::Microsoft) or it comes from individual contributors who create it out of passion for the subject (wikipedia::FSF)
People will produce "long-form writing on a specific subject" but usually only if they have an axe to grind. They are not necessarily independent and their work is not necessarily subject to the editorial checks and balances that you get from a properly set up news organisation like, for example, the New York Times.
You're moving from a situation where stuff is mostly trustworthy to mostly untrustworthy.
Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. I don't think it would have as many users if this were not the case ;-)
Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it.
This is completely false: every act of writing or releasing Free software is a political act. That's the point of doing it, of giving your labour away. Free software only exists because of the social and political opinions of its authors.
"Everything is political" is fine in theory but, the reality is that Rails or Node.js or Bash or Linux works equally well for dictatorship filtering the internet and the dissident speaking out despite it.
Software is a tool. The idea that hammer is imbued with the political views of the person who crafted it is a bit of romantic mysticism. The political actor is the person using the software.
To put it another way, if my software cared what my political opinions were, it wouldn't be used. One of the greatest freedoms afforded me by Free Software is freedom from others' political opinions on how to use said software.
I'll contest this point. There are tons of online sites and resources that provide high quality content for free out of their users' passion for the subject rather than a financial motive.
Heck, in the technology and gaming worlds, arguably ALL the decent quality content is like this. I mean, if you want tech information, do you go to sites run by large media companies like Wired or the likes, or read content on a site like Hacker News or Stack Exchange or someone's personal blog (or a topical site like CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine)?
And it's even more clear in the gaming world, where stuff like Kotaku or IGN is basically just clickbait whereas all the interesting stuff is on Youtube or Reddit or internet forums or fan sites or specific blogs and wikis. Heck, in the latter, the commercial media going away would probably make for better journalism in general, since the smaller sites aren't scared of negative attention.
Good luck finding high quality content on YouTube or Reddit, because roughly 99.9% of it is garbage. It would take a full-time staff the size of the New York Times, and with a similar level of research and linguistic expertise, to winnow the crap and convert it into something a normal person might care about.
Hacker News or Stack Exchange are better quality but the useful information content is still quite low, and it's the sort of stuff that appeals mainly to a small and rather expert audience. Indeed, that applies to Wired as well.
Do you really think combing Reddit for info is a substitute for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal etc?
Depends what kind of info you're looking for. Are you looking for information on the current middle east geopolitical situation? Then not really. Same deal if you're looking for some sort of longform investigative journalism like the recent one about one of the Truecrypt founders.
But if you're a web developer or programmer looking for information about the latest Javascript frameworks or what not, then yes. You're going to find better information in blogs and on social sites that on a mainstream news site or publication, because the former cares about the specific subject and the latter has to try and cover a wide range of things to less of a degree.
And in gaming... well, the 'professional' journalism is terrible quality to begin with. The only sites that cover anything remotely interesting are fan or volunteer run, and the most interesting sources for gaming related media are indeed social media sites. You're not gonna find anything as in depth at this on most sites:
Even for more normal 'news' stuff, there are usually tons of free and fan run alternatives. For example, no one tries to get news about Pokemon from a mainstream source, because they've got other things to focus on and don't know a lot about gaming in general. Instead, they go to one of the many fan run sites, like Bulbanews or Serebii.net. This holds true for most gaming related niches, where there'll be a few sites that provide it directly (hours ahead of the mainstream media) then a flood of copycats a bit later.
But it all depends. It's not a substitute for 'professional' media for certain, rather more serious subjects no. But for tech, gaming, entertainment or other such subjects, the free news sites are perfect for anyone's needs.
Of course. However, the simple-minded truism that you can find obscure technical information in obscure places doesn't make YouTube or Stack Exchange a replacement for the New York Times, which is actually kind of the like the main point, you know? ;-)
> And in gaming... well, the 'professional' journalism is terrible quality to begin with. The only sites that cover anything remotely interesting are fan or volunteer run, and the most interesting sources for gaming related media are indeed social media sites
So Edge was never interesting and Stuart Dredge is wasting his time on the Guardian....
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>"But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found
practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look
was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I
found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway
into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible.
Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it,
I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I'm
sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there
was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it
till college."
But what I am interested in is the insights, not necessary the facts that led to them being created (as long as I trust the author who converted facts into insights).
So I am happy to read an article about the evolution of (random example) people's savings and investing behaviour. I don't necessarily need name dropping of the fintech unicorns who are involved with making it happen.
This is just another of the long list of things that you can only trust if you pay for it. You are the product not the client of most media you consume.
If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust.
Nothing it trust-worthy any more. Newspapers are selling their reputations in a fire sale. Buzzfeed actually makes money by ignoring any idea of objectiveness or the separation between editorial and advertising.
> If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust.
General skepticism, independent vetting, and referencing multiple sources are good ideas.
Among the problems with sponsored content/native ads/advertorial is that people rail against it as if all the other editorial is completely devoid of any bias, point of view or financial consideration. It's sleight of hand and misdirection, in part.
Ad blockers block most native ads because they get loaded dynamically and have trackers associated with them to provide accurate billing and accountability to advertisers. So that part of the article is at least wrong. Every native ad that I'm aware of loads almost exactly like a banner ad.
Most people don't particularly want or need objective news. If they want it straight, they can pay premium prices for it through outlets like Consumer Reports or from specialty newsletters. When they don't want it, they pay by renting part of their attention to advertisers, marketers, and salespeople.
I wonder what will happen to journalism when AI becomes so strong that it can recognize ads and remove or mask them, even when the advertisements are placed inline in the running text.
I would then declare AI to have passed a turing test. To be able to understand the nuance and have an opinion on what is an advertisement? That's smarts.
Back then is was more philosophical than existential - we debated whether it was morally acceptable for a writer to take into consideration the size of a company's ad account when covering them in a story; now that the focused channel of broadcast media has been fragmented, so advertisers no longer pay a premium for access to readers and viewers of the nightly news, every journalist has to be mindful of their commercial impact (though this still needn't impact their writing choices) because they may be out of a job next week.
Plus ça change and all that. I'd like to see more debates around how to fund the new model (now that we've discovered it was the channel, not the content, that people actually valued for a couple of hundred years), not all this hand-wringing about the impact of money on objectivity because that's an old, boring conversation. Ultimately, advertising has been funding journalism for a long, long time. I wish it wasn't so, but I also wish it rained doughnuts.