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.
> 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.
> 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.
Isn't it? It seems that most journalism these days consists of taking things from a news agency feed and polluting them with garbage opinions. Might as well read the source.
> And at the same time, people have gotten worse at valuing objectivity, with a bias toward news sources that reinforce their existing views.
Are you sure you have the causation in the right direction? It seems to me that the news sources have gotten less objective, thanks to takeovers by PE and wealthy individuals. I'm not interested in news sources with an explicit right-wing position, which is what the major papers in my area offer, so I don't subscribe to them.
> 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.
>out of any news sources, the comments here continue to be mostly grounded and reasonable, not hyperbolic and dramatic.
Unfortunately, somber and stoic news does not have the monetary return from advertising revenue that most news organizations seek. News has become more of an entertainment endeavor rather than one for disseminating information on the state of current affairs. It also seems that the NPR and BBC have gone off the rails in this respect.
>Are you being facetious with the fake news reference?
Not really. Broadcast news is ad-supported too--hence the decline in quality. You either have subscriptions--ad-supported, or taxpayer supported--as has been historically the case in the UK. So, yes, if ads don't work, either only the wealthier get access to higher quality news, people use libraries (good luck with that), or the government funds (which has its own source of issues).
>Great work. Next up, you can resolve how to save the news media industry in the absence of ad revenue for the publishers.
I can't speak for the parent poster, but personally I don't want it saved. I stopped reading professional news years ago.
All published for-profit news has an agenda. Even if the journalist doesn't have one, it can be inserted by the editor picking and choosing which stories to run. It's hit rock bottom levels. In most countries, if you ask the locals, they can tell you which news outlets are aligned with which parties, and which newspapers publish for which prominent businesses.
For my mileage, I find places like hacker news much better sources of news. This place does a great job of aggregating the kind of high quality content that only pops up when a person /truly cares/ about a subject. You can't get that kind of quality out of someone who works 9-5 making news every day.
From my perspective, the traditional news industry gets a big fat shrug. If they can't keep themselves alive, I won't shed a tear.
> news organizations have generally terrible performance and deserve to be punished for it in search rankings.
Most news on the internet is plagiarized off of a few original sources at best and then redistributed on various sites and portals.
This is a devastating problem for a democratic society. For example, local reporting in the United States has been eroded to the extreme. When a society does not have a commitment to factuality, people become more susceptible to fake news (propaganda), conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), and tend to become more uneducated. Yes, it is true, education can be very easily undone, including in highly intelligent, well-educated individuals.
Facts do not come naturally, nor do they come out of “progress”, such as technological progress. Factuality requires hard work and a lot of money, and it requires reporters on the ground, including in foreign places, such as in the case of foreign correspondents. Unfortunately, the use of foreign correspondents for American news services, physically on the ground in foreign lands, has almost been completely eliminated.
The lack of foreign correspondents means that when a crisis abroad occurs, Americans often have to fill in the gaps and infer what is going on. This allows bad actors to take control.
Of course people do not like to hear the facts. They are hard to listen to and believe in, but they are healthy, especially for a democratic and free society. Of course they are healthy for you as an individual.
The Financial Times has excellent reporting with foreign correspondents located in various countries across the world. The Financial Times also has great tech reporting. In the 8 years that I have been a subscriber, I have only found myself disappointed while reading one single article reporting on tech. Also, of course, I subscribe to local newspapers too.
>We, the public, who are unwilling to fund quality journalism, have ourselves to blame for this.
I'm afraid that even if good journalism existed today, yellow journalism will always pay more.
>In both cases, the public is being screwed by entities they’d rather trust. The sad thing is neither of these entities appear to care they’re harming their relationship with the people they serve.
> the news media really only seems to report anecdotal stuff with a random smattering of actual facts thrown in without any context
There just isn't much money in journalism to do in depth work, which results in poor quality articles, which reduces people's willingness to pay for it.
Are you kidding me? What happened to the news industry I would not describe as "survival" - there used to be ~200k journalists in the United States. Now there are ~20k
>Much of the problems we see today are because the news media largely became unprofitable.
Close, but not quite there. Much of the problems we see today are because the news media are financed through marketing & PR spend.
This makes the media's Overton Window somewhat limited to what is a good side-dish to marketing & PR. Among other concerns, this causes all content to skew towards middle-class, college-educated middle manager viwepoint. That's not exactly a recipe for a great society. And that leaves many segments of the readership underserved.
> 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.)
There are taxpayer-supported, nonprofit news sources. They are not any better, spewing the same type of opinionated stuff (propaganda, really).
The need to make money is not the culprit there.
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