> If your business is solely dependent on tracking scripts, tricking users with clickbait titles and using archaic ads - then you’re destined to fail regardless.
If that were true, they had 2 decades to fail and they didn't. People like to read the news.
News websites are failing every day. Even Buzzfeed had big layoffs a few months ago. If your revenue model relies on making your website increasingly less user-friendly, it might have kept your head above water for longer than some competitors, but it can't be sustainable.
The successful newspapers appear to enforce strict paywalls. I pay for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times because their content and analysis is good and original. (They also have decent events from time to time.)
The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.
The real reason they are failing is not user-unfriendliness or tracking though. It's the intense competition and the broadening of the publisher base by 1000x with the advent of the internet, and the natural supply-demand adjustment to very low rates of return from advertising. This leads them to increase the advertising load in order to make ends meet, hence using more trackers.
the news business has been in economic free fall for the last two decades. at this point, most local newspapers have already folded. have you heard of Newsweek? print ad revenue (formerly their bread and butter) falls year after year, and online ad revenue is peanuts in comparison.
I'd say they have failed. Many outlets have gone out of business, many are unprofitable and propped up by ulterior interests (e.g. billionaires and nation states wishing to influence narratives). Quality has suffered in many ways.
Yeah, to put it mildly, J. Random Web Developer’s view on the news business is … not helpful. It’s not as if news orgs don’t hate their current monetization models; a quick spin through Poynter would have confirmed that for him, while
he probably should be aware that many outlets are focusing on subscriptions, partner content, and so on. But the nature of the web is that the vast majority of consumers are conditioned to have stuff for free, and if they can’t get news from the WSJ they’ll get it from Breitbart, and if they can’t get it from Breitbart they’ll get it from a Romanian teenager running a fake-news clickfarm on Facebook. And that’s without getting into the first- and second-order effects the Web has had on local journalism and newspapers, which have suffered from the twin scourges of the superstar economy (why pay for the Paducha Picayune when I have every national paper at my fingertips?) and the miserable margins of online ads compared to the print ads that used to be their mainstay.
The problem is that the ad-supported Internet model hollowed out American journalism, turning it into a howling wasteland of listicles and tracking pixels, and the industry is simply hanging on for dear life at this point. If the OP had some recommendations for a better user experience that wouldn’t essentially kill what remains of the non-top-shelf (NYT, WSJ) or hyper-focused (TPM, Axios) journalism market, I’m all ears, but there’s nothing there that’s helpful.
That's the thing though, there isn't much reading or depth.
The majority of sites are like those cheesy carnival games trying to get people to "step right up" and are just as rigged as the games to try and keep you around, blasting your face with ads.
I largely find that the majority of news sources really aren't worth the adware tithe they enforce. Hell, these days I often just go to Wikipedia and read the summary if an event is that important.
The only other news I really care about is local, and I'm lucky to have local news sites that are pretty much plain text.
I have noticed that, and I contribute a decent amount myself. There also appears to be a lack of information around a lot of different topics (namely, the last one that I noticed, was common insects). I do try to encourage others to edit when possible, but I've definitely passed it up out of laziness before too.
I've made a grand total of 3 edits to Wikipedia in my life. All were reversals of blatant falsehoods that somehow made it into articles (Such as one Dr. Zero attempting to weaponize the semantic internet to enable Chinese hegemony). In all cases, my edits were removed due to lack of attribution for the change, nevermind that the original changes didn't have attribution. At that point, I decided it wasn't worth the aggravation and didn't bother trying to contribute anything.
> These anti-consumer practices will only stop when these organizations start losing money.
Nope, I'd wage they will double-down on it even if they start losing money. That's a well known spiral: don't expect anyone but the most useless employees to remain until the end.
I thought that news+ would help turn this around, but the experience of reading a magazine on the iPhone is laughably terrible. It’s just a pdf of the print edition!
This has been a long slow process. I thought there would be some business model innovation before now, but it apart from subscriptions it doesn't seem like anyone has cracked it.
Subscriptions are a solid business model, and I think it's important for fund serious newspapers / investigative journalism. However, by putting them behind a paywall, these important stories may no longer have the impact they once did.
The solution is to hit F9 to enable reader mode using a modern browser. If it can't render, I close the tab. There are extensions I'm sure which force reader mode on selective lists of particularly egregious sites.
Reader view is also great for this article, which uses fonts that are too big, especially in the header. It's not quite a dumpster fire, but isn't great either.
Part of the difficulty here is that the function newspapers are intended to serve isn't to generate profits, nor even to be cost-effective.
Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society.
This costs a lot of time and money. The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. Where should the resources necessary to achieve the above goal come from?
> The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias.
The government itself can not do this, but it could demand that there is a neutral news organisation which is allowed to collect the necessary money to function from its citizen, like the public broadcasting system in several countries. This would help as a somewhat trusted ground source, IMHO.
A small minority bitterly resent the license fee and/or believe that the BBC are just a propaganda wing of whichever political party they dislike; the vast majority regard it as a beloved national institution.
In a poll by Ipsos Mori, 59% of respondents named the BBC as the one news source they trust the most. That level of trust remains consistent across the political spectrum, with readers of the right-leaning Daily Mail and the left-leaning Guardian both reporting high levels of trust in the BBC.
Depends on the nation. I suspect it would be fine in a lot of Europe, and is already the case in a lot of Europe I believe. In the former British colonies,and the United States in particular, that wouldn't fly over too well. The US public broadcasting networks are often not news outlets but entertainment sources (kids shows, education, etc). The US and to some extent the rest of the colonies hold a lot more distrust for the government than European nations and a government funded news organization would be considered a government shill.
Also, a US government news organization would have to contend with laws which would make it difficult for them to function .
I would argue that no news source is unbiased, at least I've yet to find a news source that has no bias whatsoever about any topic related to politics and society.
I started reading The Guardian a few years ago because the site loaded so fast, and that in turn literally caused me to change my views on various issues. Perhaps food for thought for the other news sites.
This is a ludicrous position. Apart from the fact that they have different editorial positions from each other. They cannot be both unbiased.
The BBC makes some effort to be unbiased - by giving air time based on e.g. based on success at the ballot, but inevitably reflects the metropolitan position of most of it's employees.
The Guardian has taken a clear turn towards a clickbait approach in the last several years. Much of the newspaper is now as as sensationalist as a tabloid, although The Guardian has taken the opposite side of the culture wars from most of them as its niche.
I still find some quality reporting in The Guardian, but it too is clearly facing the same financial pressures as other newspapers.
I'd happily pay for membership of The Guardian if there was an option to block all the opinion pieces. The actual news part of their operation seems to make a good-faith effort to report impartially, but it's being pushed out by an increasing quantity of rabble-rousing opinion. I'd be more than willing to support the former, but I couldn't in good conscience support the latter.
Neither the BBC nor The Guardian are non-biased they both have view points.
The Guardian are pretty open about their's, the BBC claim to be non-biased while giving people like Nigel Fromage, pro-brexit right-wingers, climate change deniers an easy ride.
Ha, the comment [currently] right above you accuses them of giving disproportionate airtime to right wing politicians and viewpoints. Maybe that's an indicator that they're somewhat successful in their aim to be neutral.
Well, if people aren't ready to pay for "accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society" may be said sources of such information should naturally die-off and people which weren't ready to fund them should bear the consequences which will be disastrous?
On other hand, this bias thing is not inherent. ABC survives somehow in Australia, even though current clowns in the shitshow in Canberra work hard to kill it.
Perhaps not everyone agrees what newspapers are 'meant to be'.
Maybe their owners and managers generally seek to maximise profits. Maybe those which have an overriding mission (NYT? WSJ? The Guardian? The Economist?) are exceptions.
As a customer, I don't care about your profit. The more obviously you try to maximize it, the more sacrifices you make on the product (by e.g. using ads, "native advertising", tracking, and other scummy business practices), and the less I want it.
In the limit, the newspaper that follows "maximize profits" route look like Breitbart.
Most aren't out to maximize profits for personal gain. It's almost a joke at this point that you don't get into the business to make real money anymore.
The corporations that [in some cases, once and no longer] held the media properties that are suffering sought those kinds of gains—in more recent years it seems to be left to either companies or "benefactors" who want the outlets to persist who buy them up and inject money into them rather than taking exponential profits.
Sadly, many things that look like efforts to maximize profits are more desperate efforts to keep the lights on. In fact the numbers I hear talked about with any fervor the most are readership and awards.
Side note: the actual money-making business for the publisher I've been working with is their custom-content business. Basically arranging, design, and print/digital distribution of advertisements and catalogs for other businesses. This is completely distinct from any editorial products.
I run a company that has a bunch of small-town local news websites and we run into this all the time. It takes money to keep a website running. And in order for people to have the time to go into the field chasing down stories, they need to get paid. And our own advertising that we run to get and retain readers costs us real money. But where does/should our money come from?
Right now we're get some money from businesses advertising on our sites, but it's small money because it's small businesses in small towns. Just enough to keep the lights on, with a little left over for reinvestment into the company's mission. None of the founders have taken even a single paycheck. And taking business's money makes me nervous because I feel pressure on every article we write to make sure we're business-friendly to not scare away advertisers, which is not a good pressure for a news company to have.
And in towns of 5k-10k residents, your audience is limited to the point where referral ads or Google ads are pointless. Probably half of our company meetings have some kind of "where are we going to get money" conversations.
This is a vital mission and one I'm intensely curious about. I previously was a devops engineer and manager for a large regional newspaper, so this issue is near and dear to my heart.
I spoke more about the company recently in another thread [1].
The company is called Citieo [2]. We're based out of Michigan. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere.
Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. We see a lot of NIMBY-ism and fear propagated on social media and in outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, and we want to foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face.
We still have a lot of work to do (a lot of work) but we're a pretty small organization working as hard as we can with not a lot of money.
I think the unfortunate assumption fact is that intentions and especially original intentions don't really matter with how much they drift.
Newspapers really mostly cost time - it is just that people can't spare the time - much less with the relevant abilities.
I am not sure if there is one without problems in some way. Even independent funding can always be corrupted. I sadly must question the historic effectiveness of the newspapers at the first goal.
In the past they were really /even worse/. Kent State was initially greeted with a "the damn kids had it coming" reaction and the Winter Soldier testimonies of War Crimes committed or witnessed in Vietnam were outright ignored on the east coast. We remember Woodward and Bernstein well for their role in the Pentagon Papers but they were outliers and even they relied upon covert betrayals showing the ineffectiveness of the news institutions at being effective oversight under those circumstances when there was an entire additional secret and illegal undeclared war in Cambodia.
Internet reporting can be better at least for breaking big stories as anyone can post bombshells - but anyone can also post absolute crap.
Accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society is presumably of great value to those members of society - which is to say, people would pay for that. If that information costs $1,000 to gather and publish, and 1,500 people are willing to pay a dollar to read it (or rather, 100,000 people will pay $0.25 to read it and a collection of other stories like it), then you're in business!
Unfortunately, it's proven to be a hard problem to look at your $500 profit and refuse an additional $500 profit to run a scummy ad next to the valued story. Ethics and long-term-value decisions are just not easy to optimize for - and I don't think the government is very good at that either; they just optimize for the next election instead of profits, which doesn't seem any better.
> Accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society is presumably of great value to those members of society - which is to say, people would pay for that.
One of the main reason behind government-imposed taxes is precisely because things that benefit society are not perceived as worthwhile to pay for by individuals, even if said individuals get direct benefit from it. The mission of news platform looks like something perfectly aligned with public funding... except for the risk of government influence on published content.
Some nordic countries subsidize their newspapers after a trend in the 60's where cities and towns lost their second local newspapers and ended up with only a single (possibly biased) one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support
As a result, big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources, and use the ownership of the second local newspaper cash in from the free lunch.
Instead of helping the small publishers, the subsidies go to the biggest creating an even worse competitive situation for small publishers.
Real world Example: Sweden's media giant Bonnier News is also the LARGEST receiver of subsidies.
Exempting newspapers from sales tax seems like a good idea. Perhaps the government could go even further and match subscription fees up X dollars per year per customer, as an incentive for people to subscribe. To prevent abuse (such as kickbacks to subscribers), the government could require that participating newspaper companies limit the benefits of matched subscriptions to (1) delivery of a physical newspaper and (2) online access to the content of the physical newspaper.
> Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society.
Are they? Have they ever been?
The Daily Mail has been promoting a specific political stance since its inception. Fact and relevance are secondary. One Lord Rothermere was a bit keen on fascism in the 1930s so ran the front page feature "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" praising their good, sound conservative ideas.
W Randolph Hearst just about created the US gutter press promoting sensationalism over fact, sales over fact, etc. Pulitzer and Hearst spent decades trying to out-sensationalise each other. Yet after WW1 he leaned conservative and started promoting US isolationism. One thing he wasn't was consistent.
There's a big irony to the Pulitzer prize, established some time after his death promoting values that Pulitzer himself never did.
That most traditional newspapers have been funded by the wealthy has tended to bias them as you might expect.
IMO, the government does indirectly fund the larger news organizations, at least in the US. Political ad spending is the cash-cow of the news industry.
Should reporters be publicly elected and publicly funded? We don’t perceive politicians as subject to “state bias,” right? Would that politicize the reporting too much? Interesting to think about
> Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society.
They never ever meant to be that. They always meant to do one thing and one thing only - influence opinions. So it's hard to figure out an honest way of paying for news, because that would mean paying for newspapers that advance your interests, but reach and try to influence other people with different interests. This is also the reason why bias is not really a problem, biased news is just news as they meant to be. You just call them biased when you don't like who is trying to influence you, but nevertheless influence is always there and is what news are about.
In general big news publishers are bad for society, since they concentrate too much influence over significant parts of it.
Paid subscriptions. The people bitching about paywalls in reddit and HN comment sections are a loud minority. The fact is, they work and are worth it imo.
>the function newspapers are intended to serve isn't to generate profits, nor even to be cost-effective
By disclaiming profit you're ditching both the measuring tool, and also the motivation.
With profit motive gone, the "long term greedy" investors who wants to build out wide & stable business over decades, to ensure safe retirement & good future for children go elsewhere, and instead replaced by vultures circling the last few scraps of value.
With profit motive gone, the well prepared, diligent, and knowledgeable journalists go elsewhere, and their roles get filled in with inexperienced, energetic activists, who get "paid" with access to audience to perform activism on.
Which is exactly what we see presently among the big names in online news.
At first, I read it quickly as "NEW websites are dumpster fires." Which is also sometimes true. For lack of a better term. I hate the "tablet catered" website look on a desktop. A lot of the news sites look this way too. I'm not really sure how else to describe it.
The local newspaper here (nzherald.co.nz) is trying to introduce a premium level which you pay for.... but because they still want search engines to see the content, they just deliver all the premium content to the browser and try to hide it.... 5 minutes later, he presto, a plugin that shows the premium content. ublock origin, and there are no ads.... they are really going to have to find a better model.
Keyword/snippet SEO spamming for garbage ad pages was a thing that got cracked down on hard for good reason. Some included even a few relevant seeming paragraphs before heading into more "seeds". I wouldn't be surprised if any snippetting hit their ranking hard.
"Local" online news in a lot of the UK has all but died a death. We have a couple of big news outlets that basically publish a little local news in practically no depth and then fill the rest with clickbait "news" items of no value other than to generate clicks. There seem to be practically no real journalists and readers are "invited to send in their pictures" - without payment of course. Hopefully these dumpster files will die out soon..
Completely agree. JPIMedia seems to be one of the big players, most of their content is just from "the i newspaper". There's a little bit of local content, and it's all locked behind a "turn off your ad-blocker or else" script.
Newsquest is another. Poorly written journalism which usually looks as if it hasn't been proof-read.
In addition to the reasons listed in the article, I also notice (as someone relying on accessibility) that the overall readability of news sites has gone down dramatically in the recent years, especially considering accessibility. With all this pop up ads and "we need you to accept cookies" nonsense, it has become increasingly hard to just read a news bite. I notice in my own behaviour, that I less regularily click on links that go to news sites, since I dont want to waste my time unnecessaryil.
It’s a bad sign when your “what’s the solution?” section starts off by admitting you don’t have one.
Not to be deterred by this, though, the piece suggests a couple of shopworn ideas anyway:
> Switch over to a monthly subscription plan
For this to work you have to put up a paywall, and according to HN conventional wisdom the only thing worse than ads are paywalls, otherwise known as History’s Greatest Monster.
> Partner with brands to create sponsored articles
Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.”
> Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions
So, pledge drives! Hope you like tote bags. Public broadcasting already does this, of course; it doesn’t come near to covering all their expenses.
Look, here’s the thing. It’s true, news websites are dumpster fires! But they’re dumpster fires for a reason, namely that nobody has yet come up with a reliable business model that allows them to not be dumpster fires. They’re dumpster fires because that’s what happens when the only choices available are all bad ones.
If you’ve got an actual way to cut this knot, lots of people in the news business would be very interested in hearing it. But just telling them to stop sucking so hard, man isn’t particularly helpful.
Yes, I found this to be a shallow article with a clickbait headline (oddly, one of the things he criticizes in this very article) without anything new.
Surprised to see it so highly voted on Hacker News.
That's not what this is. Market forces will sort this mess out. There are external initiatives under way, but it will take time to transition. Until that happens, something has to be done to keep them afloat if they are meant to survive. Look at it this way, the news industry has been turned upside down since the Internet came to be. It's been like a polar shift. Now people go to Google to search for news, and the old-media models don't survive because the old revenue flows right through. Google benefits from keeping them alive -- sure it could do nothing and let them die, but that would be like killing the host -- an environmental disaster and PR catastrophe -- if all the sources went away there would be no more news for people to google. And no one wins in that scenario.
Unless humanity is certain that's what it wants to happen, it's probably prudent to save this potentially critical leg from decay. Google has the means and if it's in everyone's interest for the greater good, this is a way to keep one of its leg from falling off until market forces have time to sort the mess out, something new emerges, and everyone has time to transition. In the old days, the government would supply the subsidy to buy the time to transition, but now market forces have aligned. Private industry has evolved and has the means -- it's willing and able. Maybe this is how a healthy, well-functioning system is supposed to work. Maybe this is a glimpse of capitalism at its finest. Maybe it's progress, maybe it's not.
Who knows how this will play out? It's uncharted territory. A new chapter in the American experiment. Whatever happens, we will see.
It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming difficult.
It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume.
Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect finally wearing off:
We trialed a service that was supposed to earn us a lot more ad money (yieldlove.com). Well, revenue did go up. But while I already complained about the horrible quality of those ads (surfing everywhere else with Adblock), the scammy ads that were shown were too much even for my boss. We went back to just using normal AdSense.
It's not just news. It's ever website, with some notable exceptions, such as HN (minimal, curated, informative headlines, no bloat) or some private blogs (as the one linked - 2.2KB, 0 trackers, yet questionable headlines).
Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies) give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads, and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data, and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based blocking) already blocked 42% of the website's content. Not to mention a plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators.
And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20% blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to call "the stage before clickbait" - the ones addressing the user directly, presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest ("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and wonderful again").
Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once in a while.
One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful, traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by bothering me with paywalls.
I'm developing a very new approach to tackle this problem with my project https://wishpage.tv/ Its still moving but a request based approach to news might work for a small niche.
Blendle.com works fairly well for news consumption. It's the microtransaction model, but they've got it fairly streamlined, they have most of the big names signed up and their daily summary is nice.
Seconding this, I tried Blendle after seeing it mentioned here a year ago. The UI is minimalist with no ads, and the publisher gets paid per article. As someone who doesn't want to pay for separate full subscriptions to NYTimes, WaPo, and other papers because I don't voraciously read enough articles each day to make it worth the cost, Blendle has been a good alternative.
News needs to evolve. Right now, we are not frustrated with news websites, but with the way they try to make money, and put obstacles in the way of users getting what they want - news. Infact, for the most users, they are so used to website that they wont even look at the part which displays ads. And there is no point showing ads to the regular readers - unless the ad inventory buyers are unlimited - as the same ad loses relevance over time. Right now, the focus of the news sites is to get as many users as possible (not just views) without focusing on the core users.
My feeling is that it wont be a tweak in the business model but more in the way news is offered. One often talked about ideal case is that ads become so relevant that they are not intrusive, but that is yet to take scale, and is costly even for the ones who try to do it.
There are good websites which get enough money to live on donation and do produce the content worthy of it. Then there are different ways of consuming news which have worked. Like Inshorts - news in 60 words, mostly a jist without clickbait - which works really well in India, and can survive on ad model around relevant content.
Last thing I feel is bringing an offline model online, which for some reason these websites did away with. Newspapers mostly worked because everyone had an opinion after reading the news. News sites dont like community and moderation and prefer to have them on social media, but that is where the opportunity lies. Make room for discussion, get users engaged, let the author explain his point, and then you dont have to show too many ads on the user's first visit. Maybe this is an extension of twitter, or maybe it gets dirty (hence moderation), I think it will work given how it works now on reddit and even whatsapp groups.
News websites, if you're going to have a monthly limit of n articles (NYT, HBR, etc.), let me first have the option of continuing to read after loading the page. Too many times following some link (from Hacker News, Twitter, etc.) leads to an article I don't want to read but counts against my tiny monthly allowance.
I have a mobile phone with a 4.5" screen and since most news websites have chosen to have an huge fixed header and footer in every page I can only read 1 or at most 2 lines of text.
172 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadIf that were true, they had 2 decades to fail and they didn't. People like to read the news.
The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.
The revenue graph here gives a good overview of how the industry has declined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Crisis
The problem is that the ad-supported Internet model hollowed out American journalism, turning it into a howling wasteland of listicles and tracking pixels, and the industry is simply hanging on for dear life at this point. If the OP had some recommendations for a better user experience that wouldn’t essentially kill what remains of the non-top-shelf (NYT, WSJ) or hyper-focused (TPM, Axios) journalism market, I’m all ears, but there’s nothing there that’s helpful.
The majority of sites are like those cheesy carnival games trying to get people to "step right up" and are just as rigged as the games to try and keep you around, blasting your face with ads.
The only other news I really care about is local, and I'm lucky to have local news sites that are pretty much plain text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
'News' has always been problematic because the publishing business exists to sell advertising, track you and push the news organization owner agendas.
Finding trustworthy reliable information has never been more difficult despite the tsunamai of information at our fingertips online
That's still a lot more writers than your regular newspaper in terms of consumers:writers ratio.
Maybe, but _most users_ are using a browser that will not be blocking ads by default anytime soon.
Nope, I'd wage they will double-down on it even if they start losing money. That's a well known spiral: don't expect anyone but the most useless employees to remain until the end.
Subscriptions are a solid business model, and I think it's important for fund serious newspapers / investigative journalism. However, by putting them behind a paywall, these important stories may no longer have the impact they once did.
"Modern browsers". A pejorative term.
> I could write up an entire essay about all the shady practices that most news sites are guilty of, but here are just a few top level issues:
Proceeds with a random list of complaints you could apply to most sites in general.
> using archaic ads
I don't know about you, but archaic ads didn't track me, use up many resources, and were just fine.
> Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user experience of course)
Article writer then offers a suggestion that has been tried in the past, and something people frequently complain about news companies doing.
> Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions
Promotions? What are "promotions?" Promoting a product? You want news agencies to place a larger emphasis on advertising?
And all three suggestions literally fly in the face of:
> Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present
All these things are "advertising" so the user would be blocked from reading.
> News outlets should not be spamming their main revenue supply (the users) or misleading people with false information.
Like you did? Your headline is as much a lie as many of the headlines you seem to hate on news sites.
Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society.
This costs a lot of time and money. The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. Where should the resources necessary to achieve the above goal come from?
The government itself can not do this, but it could demand that there is a neutral news organisation which is allowed to collect the necessary money to function from its citizen, like the public broadcasting system in several countries. This would help as a somewhat trusted ground source, IMHO.
In a poll by Ipsos Mori, 59% of respondents named the BBC as the one news source they trust the most. That level of trust remains consistent across the political spectrum, with readers of the right-leaning Daily Mail and the left-leaning Guardian both reporting high levels of trust in the BBC.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/58001/b...
Also, a US government news organization would have to contend with laws which would make it difficult for them to function .
The paranoia that it would be abused is very rational given that mere Whitehouse Access has been abused as a carrot/stick to influence reporting.
The BBC news.bbc.co.uk and theguardian.co.uk
are both examples of well funded, non biased news sources.
The BBC makes some effort to be unbiased - by giving air time based on e.g. based on success at the ballot, but inevitably reflects the metropolitan position of most of it's employees.
I still find some quality reporting in The Guardian, but it too is clearly facing the same financial pressures as other newspapers.
The Guardian are pretty open about their's, the BBC claim to be non-biased while giving people like Nigel Fromage, pro-brexit right-wingers, climate change deniers an easy ride.
On other hand, this bias thing is not inherent. ABC survives somehow in Australia, even though current clowns in the shitshow in Canberra work hard to kill it.
Maybe their owners and managers generally seek to maximise profits. Maybe those which have an overriding mission (NYT? WSJ? The Guardian? The Economist?) are exceptions.
In the limit, the newspaper that follows "maximize profits" route look like Breitbart.
The corporations that [in some cases, once and no longer] held the media properties that are suffering sought those kinds of gains—in more recent years it seems to be left to either companies or "benefactors" who want the outlets to persist who buy them up and inject money into them rather than taking exponential profits.
Sadly, many things that look like efforts to maximize profits are more desperate efforts to keep the lights on. In fact the numbers I hear talked about with any fervor the most are readership and awards.
Side note: the actual money-making business for the publisher I've been working with is their custom-content business. Basically arranging, design, and print/digital distribution of advertisements and catalogs for other businesses. This is completely distinct from any editorial products.
Right now we're get some money from businesses advertising on our sites, but it's small money because it's small businesses in small towns. Just enough to keep the lights on, with a little left over for reinvestment into the company's mission. None of the founders have taken even a single paycheck. And taking business's money makes me nervous because I feel pressure on every article we write to make sure we're business-friendly to not scare away advertisers, which is not a good pressure for a news company to have.
And in towns of 5k-10k residents, your audience is limited to the point where referral ads or Google ads are pointless. Probably half of our company meetings have some kind of "where are we going to get money" conversations.
What part of the world do you operate in?
The company is called Citieo [2]. We're based out of Michigan. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere.
Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. We see a lot of NIMBY-ism and fear propagated on social media and in outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, and we want to foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face.
We still have a lot of work to do (a lot of work) but we're a pretty small organization working as hard as we can with not a lot of money.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971460
[2] https://citieo.com/posts/citieo-real-life
I'm curious about Citieo and Soli; I'll send an email to the support address on your website, if that's alright.
Newspapers really mostly cost time - it is just that people can't spare the time - much less with the relevant abilities.
I am not sure if there is one without problems in some way. Even independent funding can always be corrupted. I sadly must question the historic effectiveness of the newspapers at the first goal.
In the past they were really /even worse/. Kent State was initially greeted with a "the damn kids had it coming" reaction and the Winter Soldier testimonies of War Crimes committed or witnessed in Vietnam were outright ignored on the east coast. We remember Woodward and Bernstein well for their role in the Pentagon Papers but they were outliers and even they relied upon covert betrayals showing the ineffectiveness of the news institutions at being effective oversight under those circumstances when there was an entire additional secret and illegal undeclared war in Cambodia.
Internet reporting can be better at least for breaking big stories as anyone can post bombshells - but anyone can also post absolute crap.
Unfortunately, it's proven to be a hard problem to look at your $500 profit and refuse an additional $500 profit to run a scummy ad next to the valued story. Ethics and long-term-value decisions are just not easy to optimize for - and I don't think the government is very good at that either; they just optimize for the next election instead of profits, which doesn't seem any better.
One of the main reason behind government-imposed taxes is precisely because things that benefit society are not perceived as worthwhile to pay for by individuals, even if said individuals get direct benefit from it. The mission of news platform looks like something perfectly aligned with public funding... except for the risk of government influence on published content.
As a result, big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources, and use the ownership of the second local newspaper cash in from the free lunch. Instead of helping the small publishers, the subsidies go to the biggest creating an even worse competitive situation for small publishers.
Real world Example: Sweden's media giant Bonnier News is also the LARGEST receiver of subsidies.
https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/bonniers-dominans-okar-i-mediesve...
That sounds like Sinclair. Seems the U.S. ended up in the same place.
Are they? Have they ever been?
The Daily Mail has been promoting a specific political stance since its inception. Fact and relevance are secondary. One Lord Rothermere was a bit keen on fascism in the 1930s so ran the front page feature "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" praising their good, sound conservative ideas.
W Randolph Hearst just about created the US gutter press promoting sensationalism over fact, sales over fact, etc. Pulitzer and Hearst spent decades trying to out-sensationalise each other. Yet after WW1 he leaned conservative and started promoting US isolationism. One thing he wasn't was consistent.
There's a big irony to the Pulitzer prize, established some time after his death promoting values that Pulitzer himself never did.
That most traditional newspapers have been funded by the wealthy has tended to bias them as you might expect.
They never ever meant to be that. They always meant to do one thing and one thing only - influence opinions. So it's hard to figure out an honest way of paying for news, because that would mean paying for newspapers that advance your interests, but reach and try to influence other people with different interests. This is also the reason why bias is not really a problem, biased news is just news as they meant to be. You just call them biased when you don't like who is trying to influence you, but nevertheless influence is always there and is what news are about.
In general big news publishers are bad for society, since they concentrate too much influence over significant parts of it.
By disclaiming profit you're ditching both the measuring tool, and also the motivation.
With profit motive gone, the "long term greedy" investors who wants to build out wide & stable business over decades, to ensure safe retirement & good future for children go elsewhere, and instead replaced by vultures circling the last few scraps of value.
With profit motive gone, the well prepared, diligent, and knowledgeable journalists go elsewhere, and their roles get filled in with inexperienced, energetic activists, who get "paid" with access to audience to perform activism on.
Which is exactly what we see presently among the big names in online news.
"Local" online news in a lot of the UK has all but died a death. We have a couple of big news outlets that basically publish a little local news in practically no depth and then fill the rest with clickbait "news" items of no value other than to generate clicks. There seem to be practically no real journalists and readers are "invited to send in their pictures" - without payment of course. Hopefully these dumpster files will die out soon..
Newsquest is another. Poorly written journalism which usually looks as if it hasn't been proof-read.
Not to be deterred by this, though, the piece suggests a couple of shopworn ideas anyway:
> Switch over to a monthly subscription plan
For this to work you have to put up a paywall, and according to HN conventional wisdom the only thing worse than ads are paywalls, otherwise known as History’s Greatest Monster.
> Partner with brands to create sponsored articles
Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.”
> Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions
So, pledge drives! Hope you like tote bags. Public broadcasting already does this, of course; it doesn’t come near to covering all their expenses.
Look, here’s the thing. It’s true, news websites are dumpster fires! But they’re dumpster fires for a reason, namely that nobody has yet come up with a reliable business model that allows them to not be dumpster fires. They’re dumpster fires because that’s what happens when the only choices available are all bad ones.
If you’ve got an actual way to cut this knot, lots of people in the news business would be very interested in hearing it. But just telling them to stop sucking so hard, man isn’t particularly helpful.
> Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.”
I disagree. No one said to have everything be sponsored and when the content is good (and clearly marked up as sponsored) it can be fine.
Surprised to see it so highly voted on Hacker News.
* Gooole News Initiative https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com
* Google Digital News Fund https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/
* Google News Lab (2017) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
* Subscribe with Google (2018) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
* The Google News Initiative, One Year In (2019) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
[1] "Google announces a $300M ‘Google News Initiative’ (though this isn’t about giving out grants directly to newsrooms, like it does in Europe)" https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-announces-a-300m-go...
Unless humanity is certain that's what it wants to happen, it's probably prudent to save this potentially critical leg from decay. Google has the means and if it's in everyone's interest for the greater good, this is a way to keep one of its leg from falling off until market forces have time to sort the mess out, something new emerges, and everyone has time to transition. In the old days, the government would supply the subsidy to buy the time to transition, but now market forces have aligned. Private industry has evolved and has the means -- it's willing and able. Maybe this is how a healthy, well-functioning system is supposed to work. Maybe this is a glimpse of capitalism at its finest. Maybe it's progress, maybe it's not.
Who knows how this will play out? It's uncharted territory. A new chapter in the American experiment. Whatever happens, we will see.
It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming difficult.
It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume.
Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect finally wearing off:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies) give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads, and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data, and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based blocking) already blocked 42% of the website's content. Not to mention a plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators.
And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20% blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to call "the stage before clickbait" - the ones addressing the user directly, presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest ("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and wonderful again").
Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once in a while.
One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful, traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by bothering me with paywalls.
My feeling is that it wont be a tweak in the business model but more in the way news is offered. One often talked about ideal case is that ads become so relevant that they are not intrusive, but that is yet to take scale, and is costly even for the ones who try to do it.
There are good websites which get enough money to live on donation and do produce the content worthy of it. Then there are different ways of consuming news which have worked. Like Inshorts - news in 60 words, mostly a jist without clickbait - which works really well in India, and can survive on ad model around relevant content.
Last thing I feel is bringing an offline model online, which for some reason these websites did away with. Newspapers mostly worked because everyone had an opinion after reading the news. News sites dont like community and moderation and prefer to have them on social media, but that is where the opportunity lies. Make room for discussion, get users engaged, let the author explain his point, and then you dont have to show too many ads on the user's first visit. Maybe this is an extension of twitter, or maybe it gets dirty (hence moderation), I think it will work given how it works now on reddit and even whatsapp groups.