>> And to achieve that you're going to force businesses to host content that hurts their bottom line (the loss of income from the advertisers that will pull out from working with a company that hosts such content).
NYT makes more money from subscriptions than from ads (60% vs 30%), and as a (formerly) paying subscriber I'd like to think it lends them some independence. That aside, many other news sources would find Sen. Cotton's opinions pretty mainstream (certainly these opinions may have even had majority across the general public) and publish such views just fine, without advertisers pulling out.
>> In the country where you live all news organizations are forced to publish everything a politician says?
Of course not. They publish on their own accord, and extremists get an outsized exposure because they are interesting to read (just like click baits, right?). It's how I'd have expected most news organizations to work, you know: reporting on the unusual and unexpected.
For me, NYT stopped being a news organization the moment it decided some opinions are forbidden from being published: not because they are fringe (a significant part of the American public agreed with Cotton), not because they come from fringe sources (he's a Senator after all), but because they are contrarian.
>we’d be much better off if the average person got their news from the NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc.
Man I don't know about that. In some ways, yes I agree with you. But in other ways I can't.
None of the major entities produces news and commentary from the labor point of view, for example. It's hard to get them to talk about media consolidation, news for profit, and a whole pile of other issues too, and it all boils down to a couple things:
1) AD driven models favor those who can buy the products and services pitched in the ADS
2) Conflicts of interest abound! The massive media consolidation we saw after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 really did a number on one of the basic dynamics we depend on, and that is many owners, many models, competition all tended to work as checks and balances. A small, indie house could run a labor story, or talk about Net Neutrality without having a conflict rooted in a big corporation not wanting to publish news and commentary that would impact it's bottom line in a negative way. Just one example.
Today, we've got investigative journalism relegated to niche players who are doing good, often quite expensive work that isn't being seen due to suppression and a misinformation problem that is not easy or cheap to solve.
Your point isn't invalid. I am saying it's more complicated than that.
> 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.
> There was a time when subscriptions formed a much greater proportion of journalistic income.
Actually, that is totally false. Historically, print advertising formed a far greater proportion of newspaper revenue than subscription revenue did.
In fact, only in the digital age (and the collapse of advertising revenue) has subscription revenue overtaken advertising for some publications. [0]
You're mythologizing an imagined past which never existed. Every kind of journalism, from The New Yorker to the NY Post, has consistently been heavily subsidized by advertising to survive, with advertising forming the bulk of revenue.
> or other income, like, say, Al Jazeera
Personally, I find advertising a much more palatable funding source than pollution from a dictatorship.
> What are the odds that your 20 subscriptions and my 20 subscriptions will overlap?
The odds that they will completely overlap are low. However, most people don't have 20. Even those who do mostly read a number of prominent sources: nyt, wapo, wsj are the big three for news these days. Most people subscribe to one, maybe two and read that. This is arguably bad for competition and bad for "indie journalism".
Also, I take issue with some of the points of view espoused by the nyt. Their news content is fairly good (if biased), but my subscription would also go to pay their editorial board. I don't want to purchase that news, because I don't want to fund its production. I wish I could buy a news-only subscription: no "lifestyle", no "fashion", no "editorial", etc. I don't want that stuff. Just news.
> The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well.
Depending on what you mean by "well". I haven't "read" the newspaper in any traditional sense - i.e. reading it as a whole product, not picking a single article - in decades. I haven't subscribed to a traditional newspaper (I exclude special interest magazines) for even longer. I know for a fact that the work of real journalists (investigative, etc.) is being routinely suppressed or restricted by their major newspaper employees because of reasons having nothing to do with reporting. I am getting much more high-quality content from independent journalists (including Substack ones, but not only) and writers than I could ever have found in any newspaper. I struggle to find anything that traditional newspapers like NYT do "well" for me. They have a variety of topics? Who cares. If I'm interested in what a certain author has to say or in a certain topic - which rarely happens with NYT nowdays, but nevertheless - I don't care who pays the salary to the writer. I know that there's no chance a single subscription - or even several of them - would cover even part of my interests, I'd be needing my hundreds-strong RSS feed anyway. So what's the point? What exactly is being done well there?
> IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.
What about the independent journalists and outlets that rely on said advertising revenue? Or the more mainstream ones that do likewise?
Seems like this may make it worse for those, unless you've got a way this can only affect ad network providers rather than those utilising their services.
So? I'm not sure how this means that news orgs won't suffer from losing business to competitors with superior tracking.
> Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around
Markets change. Advertisers have different expectations. Readers have more news to choose from. This is a silly argument.
> The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere
Sure, but why? Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they trim the fat elsewhere AND keep the tracking to make more money?
The point you make doesn't really make sense. Yeah, it's theoretically possible for news orgs to stop tracking in the same way that it's theoretically possible for me to take out a knife right now and cut off my legs. News orgs can make up their losses elsewhere and survive in the same way that I can still get around with a wheelchair.
But why on earth would I or the NYT do that?
I respond to you with these questions because it seems to me that both you and the OP speak out against these practices because you feel they are unnecessary. My point is that they are necessary. You just don't acknowledge the forces that make them so.
> Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions
by institutions I'll assume you mean journalistic ones. Cause employees of non-consumer facing corporations have far more freedom.
The thing is, journalism, good journalism, and certainly public service journalism, no longer requires an institution. Don't believe in the lies that claim otherwise.
> It's not so much an issue of freedom of thought in the newsroom, it's that they literally can't afford to continue publishing such pieces as it's causing them to massively bleed revenue.
Do you have a million friends to support this data point?
I agree with everything you said. The point that my friends unsubscribed, and they took an action because they were losing business due to people leaving them for that article comes across a little naive to me, in an otherwise well thought out response.
> I now subscribe to the WSJ. That way I can get the business and financial news I'm interested in by people who are educated in business and finance, rather than activism.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of NYT. I'm curious if you're putting NYT's reporting and NYT's op-eds into the same bucket.
> I let my NYT subscription lapse because their articles were clearly pushing an agenda rather than reporting the news.
There aren't many large publications that publish w/o an angle, whether that effort is in the name of truthiness or personal gain is difficult to discern.
In my opinion, the only solution to the 'getting unbiased news consistently' problem is solved with news aggregations. Looking at the diff between the major publications on any specific story may not reveal which angle/agenda is the most true, but it will reveal the variables that are being used to steer the ship.
> the "one company" media in the US has lost authoritativity and credibility with anyone who thinks
I think quite a bit, and I greatly value many publications. The NYT in particular is an independent company, and so is not part of any 'one company' news media. That said, I do wish there was more diversity in ownership; in particular, I wish there were serious publications that served an audience besides the intellectual middle-upper class.
> I pay for my NYT and WaPo subscription, but probably can't (or won't) be paying for Atlantic.
Ironically, I think the way the Atlantic iterated on their model put me off. While NYT and others went to a paywall with limited free views, Atlantic blocked anyone with an adblocker.
So, when I chose to subscribe to some journalism outlets, I was engaged with the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ. I was already trained by the Atlantic’s adblocker blocker to ignore them.
Now they’re moving to a reasonably hefty-sounding subscription model. Great, but my media budget has already been consumed by NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, and a handful of professional journals. And, again, they’ve already trained me to ignore their site.
I have no trouble imagining an alternative timeline in which they had my money, but the manner in which they iterated on their model killed it for me.
> I think the problem is the addition of "opinionated" content media outlets publish to generate outrage. E.g. IMO the NYT is the gold standard of journalism but a lot of their opinion pieces are not even fit to print
A lot of their journalism isn’t that great anymore either. (In the last 3-5 years, there has been a massive upheaval in the ranks as revenues have declined and experienced journalists have left.)
> You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall.
Excuse me but why would I want to pay for that ? I don't earn by reading articles online and the news websites are already littered with advertisements and autoplay videos. I get tracked around the web by these ads and I'm supposed to even fund that ?
Thank you but I will pass.
> The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times.
... and can't you do the same with Infowars ? Critically read it and look past the headlines ? Perhaps the truth will be there somewhere too. (albeit as a total negation of the Infowars article)
> The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era.
Considering most of the nation doesn't trust the NYT, not sure it was much of a trick. People trust foxnews more than the NYT. Think about that.
The real trick that the NYT ( along with CNN, MSNBC, etc ) pulled was forcing google, youtube, facebook and much of social media to give it an unfair privileged position to increase network traffic. They got a short term boost but it wasn't as significant as they'd hoped and it certainly won't last. Already, the subscriber growth has declined along with overall traffic.
Keep in mind that if we get a recession, the first thing the new subs will cut is the NYT subscription. I'm speaking from experience here. Also, as people get older and have more experience reading the NYT, their mistrust of NYT increases. Not a good sign for a trust based product.
And their activities ( hirings, stories and agenda pushing ) isn't helping.
My two cents is that advertisement is what is killing journalism.
YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences.
Why is that? Because all that happens in the privacy of your own computer. Usually any newspaper that publicly have printed such bullshit in their pages will be dead. Public will react to it.
What is different? Facebook, YouTube, etc. are personalized. You are shown what you are interested in without public accountability. Niche radical content gets a lot of views for its own controversial nature. Views and money.
Who wants to investigate, hire good writers and expend the money that it takes to write a good article when you can hire some one without ethics for a fraction of the price and get as many or more views as radicalization grows?
YouTube, Facebook and others say that they are not responsible of the content they offer. I think that it should be true for things like comments. But for the monetized content they are 100% responsible of incentivizing that radicalization and killing good journalism in the process.
> if they are a legitimate news outlet, those biases have little to do with their advertisers
I don't believe this to be true. Or at least under that definition I think that there are few if any "legitimate news outlets". I'm not trying to be edgy. I just have zero faith that all of these businesses that make money by advertising have internally created a system of checks and balances such that they write whatever they want even if that will directly lead to layoffs of journalists because they've pissed off advertisers who will no longer fund them.
Maybe a simpler analogy is that newspapers are junkies shooting up heroin (advertising dollars) and telling us "don't worry, we got this under control, it won't affect our decisions".
NYT makes more money from subscriptions than from ads (60% vs 30%), and as a (formerly) paying subscriber I'd like to think it lends them some independence. That aside, many other news sources would find Sen. Cotton's opinions pretty mainstream (certainly these opinions may have even had majority across the general public) and publish such views just fine, without advertisers pulling out.
>> In the country where you live all news organizations are forced to publish everything a politician says?
Of course not. They publish on their own accord, and extremists get an outsized exposure because they are interesting to read (just like click baits, right?). It's how I'd have expected most news organizations to work, you know: reporting on the unusual and unexpected. For me, NYT stopped being a news organization the moment it decided some opinions are forbidden from being published: not because they are fringe (a significant part of the American public agreed with Cotton), not because they come from fringe sources (he's a Senator after all), but because they are contrarian.
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