> The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough.
Nope, it's enough. News is just not what you think, it's far from simple business. The biggest value news outlets provide to people who own them is the value of influence and controlling the narrative. So they are deliberately chasing after the eyeballs to spread their influence and no business model that narrows the audience much is even considered.
> I'd love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency.
There are two motivations for running a news outlet, both with extensive historical precedent:
- You want money.
- You want to spread your view of the world, inflicting your culture on other people.
There isn't a lot of immediate financial gain associated with the second approach, but the gains are real enough, long-term, that there tend to be plenty of such outlets receiving subsidies from people who believe in the message.
But in the modern US, while we still have outlets of that type, there is a very strong belief that they shouldn't count as "news", and that they are less legitimate than "neutral" journalism. That reserves moral legitimacy to the money-oriented approach, and that approach is necessarily driven by attention. News that nobody reads can't sell.
Tragic absolutely, shortsighted - no. You can't operate without money and news organizations can't survive in todays environment. The way we consume and gather around information simply isn't the same anymore.
> Why should I give a flying fuck for the sustainability of this model?
That model? Yeah, screw that. But major news organizations like the New York Times still depend in a huge part on advertising revenue to stay afloat - subscribers alone do not make up the shortfall. So if we want to destroy the content farms we also run the risk of destroying the news organizations that produce the original stories.
> A solution is not following the news, but rather reading expert insights about current events (root causes of massive inmigration, drug wars and the involvement of three-lettered federal agencies, deregulation of private healthcare and higher education, etc.)
But... but that would lead to the public turning against those responsible for these things. Cannot let that happen!
Sarcasm aside: there is an insane amount of money and profits involved and I am not sure how a publication that delivers proper journalism is supposed to be financed. The funding needs to be massive to account for headcount as well as legal defense, a lot of advertising to tell people about its existence, and it should not be ads (create an implicit threat on the publication to not report on those who book ads), philantropists (people rich enough to fund a newspaper are exactly those people that should be investigated) or taxes (politicians can cut these at any moment)...
> I sense that they are intentionally covering the situation in non-inflammatory way.
We want more of this though right?
I sense that many people can't understand the difference between opinions or editorials and news.
I sense that many people actually enjoy the inflammatory way news is sometimes covered unless it's different from the way they'd like to see it.
I sense that people can't understand how a single new outlet can have varying opinions and points of view on a single issue and will choose a single one out of many to make their point.
Imagine how different things would be if people were intelligent consumers of news.
I don't think you can have a news industry dependent on clicks and profits and have no sensationalism. I also don't think you can have a completely unbiased media when people, based on their consumption, don't seem to want it. It's unrealistic given the different biases and motivations that people have.
> Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism
To be honest, that's the past and present of most news as well.
Newspapers would have never been around based on advertising alone. The fee usually paid for printing and sending, and classifieds made up the bulk of the revenue. Now that they're decoupled and both news and classifieds are pretty much free, it's no wonder that news is struggling.
Hard news has (almost) never been a wildly profitable endeavor in and of itself.
> I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business
It won't. Very few people who current aren't paying for news are just going to start. The incenssent news readers pay for news already. The others will move on to other less reliable content.
> I think a much more parsimonious explanation is that news websites make money from their audience. It doesn't help to send your audience to other sources - you'll lose money.
This cannot be the explanation, because journalists working for publicly funded organizations that don't get their money from eyeballs on ads suck at linking to their sources too. It's not a regrettable consequence of news industry business models, it's a culture problem in journalism.
> The problem is that journalists are getting caught in a vicious circle. Either they present true news and have little viewers, or present gossip or echo what people want to hear and have lots of viewers.
I think the problem lies in that the assumption that investigative journalism, of the kind that is vital to democracy, must be profitable. But why would that be the case? And if it cannot be profitable, should we not institute good journalism as a matter of public policy?
In other words, let's return PBS and NPR to their former funding levels, when they could afford to have actual journalists and newsrooms and operate somewhat independently of the market.
How to make people care about the truth is a matter for another discussion (and certainly not a problem in Facebook's charter).
> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.
The product of good journalism is investigation, reporting, and insight. What news organizations sell is a writeup. This is a mismatch. I'm interested in paying for the ideas, not the prose.
When, say, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Stormy Daniels hush money last year, everyone else re-reported it soon after. If you had a Journal subscription you got the news slightly sooner; otherwise, wait a tiny bit and every news organization from VICE to Breitbart has their own story about it too. Paying for the original source makes you feel good about supporting journalism, but that's it.
It's rather like the companies who produce a high-quality open-source product with a medium-quality cloud-hosted offering and then blame open source when Amazon also offers their high-quality product in the cloud. If the interesting and valuable part of your work is freely copiable and you're only charging for a delivery channel that anyone can provide, I feel bad for you but I'm entirely unsurprised your business model isn't working out.
Perhaps one answer, as with some open source code, is to see journalism as a social good in itself, worth supporting as an activity even if we don't have a way to turn its output into a profitable product. Perhaps another is, like other open source, to find people who have a commercial need for good journalism and have them subsidize it in the process in some way.
> The media is financed by ads to the tune of around 50%.
That's because it's the easiest and most profitable business model available. Kill it off, and media will shift to a different model. Advertising isn't necessary for media to exist, and it's not like people want media to exist because of ads.
> That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop.
Sort of, kind of. Some news reporting is the part that's necessary for democracy. Not the entirety of what news sites serve today, and definitely not the larger media industry.
News reporting is already pretty much as low as it can get, thanks to advertising-based business model. Facts and reasoned opinions matter little; fake news and outrage-inducing reporting generates more page views, leading to more ad impressions, and thus more money for the news organization.
>> why we should believe that there is a business model out there that doesn't grossly warp coverage
We should believe that this business model exists if we believe that there is a demand for a truly unbiased, unwarped news outlet. If there is truly a demand, then whatever outlet provides it will be so successful that the business side will have no trouble selling advertisements (or advertorials, which are only a problem to me if not called out - and in many cases just end up functioning as extremely high quality native ads, rather than ruining journalism).
The problem arises if there is not a substantial demand for this, but that is much more of a civic problem than a journalism problem. If someone writes perfect, high quality, objective journalism, but no one reads it or even cares to know it exists, what then?
My read? Some reporters will be out there, gathering news, and the very best will rise. What we call journalism (editorials and investigative pieces) will remain in existence, but will move to personal blogs, websites of what were once traditional newspapers, and new media (places like Grantland, Slate, The Atlantic's website, Vanity Fair's site, etc.). There will also be a major increase in local, citizen generated coverage of news, and what used to be local newspapers and news stations will becoming aggregators of local content. I don't really think much changes about journalism beyond opening it up to more people and changing the medium/deliverer of news.
> As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership.
This is a red herring - the amount of revenue/profit produced by news media outlets is trivial. Not just nominally as compared to any other industry, but also as compared to the other sources of income that the owners of these outlets have.
The primary reason for the editorial lines that large news outlets take is to push ideas through the electorate, and to generate references that politicians and businesspeople can use to justify their support of certain issues/legislation that the owners of those outlets also support.
> I think that they're just doing whatever makes the most money.
You're assuming that the end goal is profits, although it is not. Profits are what keeps media companies running, but their main goal is power and influence over public opinion.
Nope, it's enough. News is just not what you think, it's far from simple business. The biggest value news outlets provide to people who own them is the value of influence and controlling the narrative. So they are deliberately chasing after the eyeballs to spread their influence and no business model that narrows the audience much is even considered.
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