Or go back to the original form, but delivered digitally: a mix of news, editorial content, and paid ads, all served from the same server, with no moving banners, pop ups, sticky headers, third party servers, scroll-alongs, click-to-read more, etc.
This. Small unobstrusive ads, with a custom CSS so they are either for mobile or PC. No flash, no popus, no moving banners. Just a small square with a picture/promotion.
If anyone in the comments can figure out a sustainable business model for news that doesn't involve bloat-inducing ads or unrealistic expectations of consumers paying subscription fees, I'll Venmo them (money to buy) a beer.
Posting content with little to no validation of fact isn't a valid form of journalism and isn't any kind of "counter movement" IMO. That's called a gossip column or tabloid.
I don't understand why paying for single articles isn't more popular. It's the same for streaming services: I should be able to pay for that one TV-series I want to watch, or that one movie that's only available on that one streaming service I don't have.
I mean, you can do the latter already. You can buy a season or a single episode of a show on iTunes, Amazon, etc. You can also rent or buy single movies across many different platforms.
It’s just absurdly expensive compared to a streaming service. This is partly due to legacy pricing (I don’t think the price of a movie or TV show has gone down in many years, and all the providers charge the same) but also because I’m sure a lot of revenue for subscription services comes from people who buy the subscription but don’t use the service.
Transactions (micro or not) have wall-time, monetary and psychological overhead. If you split this among dozens of items and providers it only gets worse.
Paying per article may make sense for in-depth analysis, investigative journalism and other large pieces. But for the daily news it's probably just too small a unit.
I've been thinking for a while about this now, and I feel micropayments would probably have a huge impact around this. Maybe have a library app with most of the publications where you load some money in and for every article that you read halfway through (kinda like the Spotify model for incentivising artists) it automatically pays them from your end.
The main fallacy I see here is that you need to have money all the time in your account before you could read or you won't be able to read any articles. One way to mitigate this is that for every article you read you have the option of saving it later so you have something to read. The second one could be to show them ads.
P.S. I've been working around building an app for this for a while now.
This hits the nail on its head: Convenience in payments is such a great factor in making such models successful. People should be able to make these small and (individually) insignificant payments without having to jump through three factors of hoops.
This doesn't actually work. Micropayments from readers will never substitute for ad revenue, and convenience isn't the reason.
Even if you removed all friction from the system, and had the government mandate every citizen of the United States 18 years or older automatically has $12 per month taken from their pay (a typical content service subscription cost) and put in a microtransactions fund to distribute to the sites you read, you'd only be covering about 20% of what US advertisers currently spend. An 80% revenue cut would put most newspapers out of business: it certainly wouldn't let them remove their ads while operating as they currently do.
The reason micropayments will never add up is that advertisers have more to spend than consumers. They have more to spend because a portion of every purchase consumers make is funding that advertising. When you pay your car loan, buy groceries, fill your prescriptions, you're giving advertisers money to spend. And you're giving them a lot more per month than you have left over to fund your own microtransaction pool for the month.
Wow, I did not think from that perspective at all. Thank you for giving an in-depth overview too. I need to think of some way that works as a value add for the newspapers and provides a better reading experience for users.
I've been really happy with Scroll (.com). $5/mo to remove ads on some news sites. The money goes directly to the publisher, minus the company's bit. It's really good now, and I wouldn't complain if the price went up as the site list expanded.
Nowadays I can't even go to news websites so I get my news primarily from HN, Twitter, or Reddit, where news is condensed and I rarely get to see the other point of view (in other words, good journalism).
Obviously I understand they need to make money, but at the same time most of the news articles even posted to HN have some limit to reading (even with JS blocked). Maybe a student pass would be good for students like me. I don't think I'll have a problem paying for them... but then I'll have to manage each of these subscription.
It would be nice to have a Netflix for news (to pay for all news subscriptions in one go).
> I suggest they become more creative with their business model or at least try to see the value in moderation.
The vast majority of news sites were free from the get-go, with the NYT being one of the first major websites to put up a website [0]. That's roughly 20 years of giving free content out on the web. The author is (partially) right that "the article text is all anyone really cares about". The thing is, plaintext is absurdly easy to disseminate and copy.
for most of the history of newspapers, ads were themselves a reason to get the newspaper, especially for coupons and classified ads. Of course, print ads, like print pages, were much more deliberately and better designed than what we experience today online.
The San Jose Mercury-News and WSJ both had full-content websites before NYT.
The Mercury-News even had a selective email feed of wire service content called Newshound. For $5 a month, you got up to 5 "hounds" (sets of search criteria), and every article matching your criteria was individually emailed to you, whether a wire story, a syndicate story, or one internally generated within Knight-Ridder. This was in 1993 if not earlier yet.
It's hard to imagine now, but papers like the Merc News – thanks to basically having a virtual monopoly – were basically printing presses for money. They most definitely had the capital to fund ventures that could save the company, such as their own Craigslist or Groupon. And I believe they and other news companies did blow a good chunk of money on failed tech ventures. In hindsight, they should've continued throwing money at greenfield projects, since just about any longshot success would've been better than the current state of things. But it's too easy and reductive to say, "Well the news industry should've just invented Google/Facebook if it really wanted to survive".
I was actually looking at the source-code of the page first to see if it has any CSS (to my surprise it actually has a stylsheet with only two rules, for performance reasons it would have been a lot better just to have it directly in a style tag). Once there I was wondering what's up with all this text and thought the entire site was a single-page-application where you could read all his articles :)
Hmm .. also some google analytics at the bottom.0 under the book
I still use log parsers (awstats and matomo) .. really am just interested in number of unique/non-crawler visitors and don't care about the rest really.
Not sure that speed is really the factor that matters. That content loads quickly and would exacerbate that there’s frequently little worthwhile content. The internet has stretched communication to be a nation and worldwide thing. Eventually we’ll figure out that local concerns matter more - until then we’ll have to suffer through some really bad media that doesn’t affect any of our lives while most of our communities crumble due to lack of attention.
Agree. Focusing on web application performance is entirely beside the point. Most modern news sites are typical modern web applications.
The issue is that the value of the words themselves has changed, both in the economic sense as well as culturally, not to mention the problem of the erosion of trust.
The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough. For most newspapers, ads are needed to run a profitable digital business. Ads cannot be removed for paying subscribers, since paying subscribers are precisely who advertisers want to target. And if you want to display ads on the internet, you have to track people just like your competitors Google and Facebook do.
> If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a text-only static version of their website.
I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.
you do not have to track people in order to display ads on the internet, you just incorporate the ad on the webpage, and whoever visits the page sees the ad
I don’t understand the relevance of that argument in this context.
Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort they can cut out anything else from the page.
The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see people blocking ads online.
Plenty of people block ads because the ads themselves are annoying. People don’t cut ads out of paper newspapers because it’s more annoying to do that than it is to just ignore the ads.
So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?
Precisely.
There is an entire multi-billion dollar industry built upon instilling fear in advertisers that their ads might not be fully "optimized," whatever that means these days. Google is at the head of this list.
Amazingly, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pepsi, Boeing, and every other large non-tech company managed to become enormous companies by advertising in significantly less targeted ways through newspapers, television, radio, billboards, magazines, etc...
The notion that ads not targeted by Google or Facebook are wasted money is a lie invented by the targeting industry to keep itself in business.
It's been tried. What that usually means is you manage the ads yourself, or it's some really small ad network which doesn't have that many advertisers on it competing to give money to the website. Advertisers are as lazy as anyone else, they don't want to have to deal with numerous agencies to deploy ads, they want one, maybe two, and would certainly like it a lot if they had some metrics to show their boss.
Yeah, at a really low CPM. Not trying to justify the awful practice of user tracking, but why would I pay you $3.00 per thousand impressions if you’re going to be showing my ad to demographics that will rarely buy my product?
Companies want to optimize their marketing dollars, so they’re going to pay pennies if you don’t track users.
> 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 think that the necessary conditions for mass market ad supported quality journalism have largely disappeared. Except for perhaps a handful of nationally prominent newspapers, 20th century dailies didn't turn a profit on "quality journalism" (investigative reporting or in-depth analysis). It was too expensive to produce relative to the revenue it yielded even before the Web. But geographic and technological barriers to competition meant that newspapers could command high margins on low-production-cost material (police reports, sports scores, weather forecasts, classified advertising...) and end up with enough money to make employees and owners happy, even after bundling in some prestige reporting that won Pullitzers.
It's kind of like how Bell Laboratories did some unprofitable and groundbreaking basic research back in the heyday of the AT&T monopoly. The lack of competition in AT&T's main line of business inflated prices but also let executives choose to fund a few unprofitable ideas that they considered worthy.
Now competition is fiercer and prices are lower. We're also not getting the positive side effects from monopolies that people had conceptualized as natural features of "the telephone business" or "the newspaper business."
> I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.
I guess the real question that we have to answer as a society is: what's more important: democracy or an unfettered free market economy.
If the answer is democracy, the economics of our society can be changed to make it work for journalism. Maybe those changes will mean some Chicago-school economist's equation won't yield the highest value for some term, but that's perfectly fine. Despite some popular misconceptions, modern economic theories do not communicate the true, revealed nature of human society. The economy needs to serve society, not the other way around.
I think is somewhat of a solved problem via PressReader.com or it's variant. Depending on where you are getting access is free if you have a library card.
Whether using it via browser or dedicated apps, it's as close to reading a real newspaper as can be. I particularly like the low-noise way of aggregating comments on articles. If there is comments with an article, a little indicator with the the number of comments is shown which can be clicked to read or ignore as desired.
Ads are the monster, but developers are at least partly to blame. Most news and magazine sites could be served up as single pages, but instead are implemented as Javascript-heavy single page applications that load 50 different elements asynchronously, because it’s just so much more fun to build that than it is to write HTML and some CSS.
Maybe news papers should get back to their roots. Embed ads To users who don’t pay (don’t use google ads, embed them, like they used to working with companies).
Further offer good coupons based on the users location and offer more coupons if they register for $3 / month subscription
They should easily be able to make decent money this way.
Touché. I agree with you about user fatigue and have already changed news sites I check for this reason. Also it was very effective and rewarding demonstration for those of us who read to the end…of the article not the book.
News is unbearable, but not because of the format. Recognize that reading the news becomes habit because the news of the day becomes useless fast.
I realize that this is a contradiction from me, a HackerNews reader, but I feel that part of the reason I come here is for inspiration - on new technologies, ideas, and new code (show HN). When I refer to news earlier, I'm talking about the stories and articles you might have found in a newspaper. They may contain inspiration but IMO are much more clickbaity and only written to fill space.
Agreed. I cannot stand news from major news sites. Good articles exist on smaller sites, where there is a legitimate attempt to cover something interesting in a thorough and well-researched manner (for example today I just read this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-decode-the-brain-scientist...). But good articles on mainstream sites are rare. Most of them just make me angry.
It used to be that I was just contemptuous of mainstream news and annoyed by bias. Apart from basic critical reasoning skills, back in 1998 I took a course on mass communication and learned a whole host of dirty tricks they use, and it's just gotten worse sense then. Now it's gotten to the point where it's maddening to see brazen deceptions promoted by mainstream sites, and just absolutely sickening and not a little bit terrifying to see this huge push toward "authoritative" news sources by the likes of YouTube and Facebook.
So, given that there's so little I can do to stop the onslaught of deceptive, grossly misleading propaganda, I try to ignore it for the sake of my own emotional health. (That includes Hacker News, which I rarely visit anymore)
- On a touch screen including a laptop you can scroll with your finger.
- Space scrolls down several lines.
- Scroll wheel
- Up and down arrows scroll down a line at a time.
- Page up and page down scroll down almost an entire page leaving what was the bottom-most section previously now the topmost section so that readers aren't disoriented or lost. Some apps let you configure this overlap size.
- If you like vim you can add extensions to your browser and use j and k.
- Home and End keys go to the very top and very end respectively.
- Windows you can hold down middle mouse and drag to scroll. This isn't common in linux where people rely on middle mouse paste but is possible to configure
In general however you do it grabbing the scrollbar in chrome is inefficient. You must grab a smallish UI element on the side of your screen. Your keyboard and mouse are always at hand.
Scrollbars are a better visual indication of the ability to scroll than a way to actuate said scrolling. This is why they are smaller. Even thicker scrollbars were still a small part of the screen.
The problem with the newspaper/news industry is that the value their audience places in the product is less than the value that advertisers place on access to that audience. Additionally the cost to generate and deliver that product exceeds what the audience is willing to pay and in many cases the value of that audience is low enough that even advertisers don't offer enough to cover the costs.
Print newspaper subscription revenues were pretty much a break-even with the costs of delivery. That does not include the costs of paper, ink, printing press and associated personnel, or the cost of actually staffing and running a newsroom. A large part of both their revenue and audience attraction was the classifieds section, which was killed off by craigslist.
This is completely true and frustrating. It is possible to have fast loading web pages that incorporate decent levels of ads but making that change is hard.
I track 60 or so news sites (mostly US and EU based) and as of today:
On a "Fast 3G" connection
the average article takes 45 seconds to load
and is 3.8mb in size.
We do not need a complex, graphical browser that autoloads resources and runs Javascript in order to request or display a page of text-only content. "Reader Mode" is great but it is not available for every website.
The time spent by the browser on those 431 requests is significant. What if a simpler client was used, e.g.,
time printf "GET /magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.newyorker.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" |openssl s_client -connect www.newyorker.com:443 -ign_eof > /dev/null
curl -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane
time tnftp -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane
time links -dump https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane > /dev/null
Guess how many seconds this one request takes when we do not use a popular graphical browser to make it
The advice to use the text only versions for NPR and CNN is solid advice.
I think news is negative and by and large news organizations serve elite interests. In the USA this is mostly to make democrats hate republicans and vice-versa (the slave class, formerly known as the 'middle class', is thus easier to manipulate and control). Since I like to keep my news ingestion to 5 or 6 minutes a day, I use The Guardian's (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news) free morning email of top stories. Really a nice service.
Also compared to corporate/elite lacky news sites like MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, ABC, etc., I find Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/) to be a breath of fresh air.
Edit; I also like The Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics because they're kind of just raw feeds of a bunch of articles that may not surface on choosier aggregators.
I think that Amy Goodman on Democracy Now is about the furthest a person could be from a “wingnut.”
I agree that too many people are overly devoted to either Fox News or MSNBC. Just my opinion but these two “news” services seem to care most about fracturing US civil society. We need more acceptance that in fundamental ways most Democrats and Republicans want the same things: opportunity for their children and themselves, security of our country, etc. It does not make money to run news stories that bring people together.
> I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN.
This may be true of you individually, but not you statistically. We used to have more minimalist news sites, but they were outcompeted by sites heavy with trackers, banners, ads, and all the other cruft we love to hate. This is largely because, given the option between paywalled quality and free crap, most consumers end up choosing the latter.
I subscribe to the paper version of my local paper because it is so much easier to actually get information from. It's so well designed. I think the reason people have gravitated to online news is herd mentality. What I like about paper news: my focus is more under my control. I can evaluate and skim whole articles at once. I am not constrained by what if visible in the window. Also, no distractions. Every time I open my computer or phone I am waylaid by distractions. I am a software / AI engineer and I think we have created a dystopia.
One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.
Yea, pretty much 100% the web is destroying news. Everyone wants a free ad supported product now and the only way that model works is if you get enough page views. So news websites have to prioritize content that generates views, rather than good reporting. Which is slowly killing journalism.
Yeah, but the market effect is very different when readers view articles individually verse having to buy the entire paper.
If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.
With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks.
This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.
> If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.
This also depends on how much competition you have. If there are maybe half a dozen competing newspapers, outrageous gossipy headlines and perhaps the promise of a nude woman on page 3 will sell an entire newspaper to a specific target market towards which you can tailor your advertising. Another newspaper can make lots of money by targeting a different market segment.
This is how clickbait works, too. Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Brietbart, and the Daily Mail could have all been paper newspapers that someone would buy in a competitive enough newspaper market. One of them is!
I'm torn because unbundling also allows for niche publications to get the readers who are interested in reading a few articles but not enough to pay for a full subscription to a publication they may or may not like. I guess another solution to that would be the heavily-discounted "intro" period offer or x-free articles per month. For me there are a few magazines I enjoy reading the occasional article from but don't want to pay for a subscription because the costs would quickly get out of hand.
But I acknowledge that paying per article could hurt the "subsidies" within a paper, for example the revenue from sports section readers helping pay for investigative journalism, leading to a race to the bottom as you point out.
The San Jose Mercury-News used to be hugely profitable for exactly this reason. They had the biggest classified section of any paper in the country. The Monday edition was maybe 4X as thick as its modern equivalent.
The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time. It was called "yellow journalism", it incited the Spanish-American War, and it was the business model of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In other words, if you are an excellent journalist, you get a prize named after the guy who founded and ran the Gilded Age equivalent of Buzzfeed.
Each US city used to have maybe dozens of newspapers of varying quality and bias. (This is similar to the UK newspaper landscape--in fact, the lower end of that landscape includes the Daily Mail, which translated its tabloid journalism model rather seamlessly to the era of clickbait.) What started killing print journalism was radio and later TV journalism, which were far less substantial (because they lacked the information density of the written word) but far more appealing (because of the ease of consumption and the stimulation of sound and video). This is what culled the vast newspaper markets down to the city-wide monopoly or duopoly system. And because the remaining newspaper readership consisted of the more literate and invested members of the population, print journalism briefly had more journalistic value.
Then cable news disrupted the broadcast networks, talk radio disrupted the editorial oligopoly of the major newspapers and TV news, and finally the internet broke the whole thing wide open. Including the glorious period of time when "blogs" were considered a serious threat to "legitimate journalism".
Because this theory gets the timeline right but the value judgements wrong. The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away.
People who were previously “engaged” with local newspapers are now the commenters on news sites.
> The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away.
Sorry, but it is. Functionally literate people can read and comprehend many more WPM than are typical for human speech. As a consequence, written media are fundamentally capable of much higher information density than visual or audial media, with the exception of certain types of visual or spacial information which can still be printed or included with the written word.
And that would matter if the goal of writing was maximizing information density. Surely you wouldn't say that gzip is the highest form of the written word.
This is a good point. Communication, across various mediums, propogates ideas. Information density is interesting, but this style of thinking overlooks persuasive impact.
I don't watch videos online if I can help it, because they're too slow. If I do, because there's no transcript available, I crank up the speed to x2 or x4 to mitigate the frustration.
Any "persuasive" impact from video is lost on me because I'm bored and frustrated after about 30s of watching (and that's after skipping the first 30s of "welcome to my youtube channel, today we'll be doing what the title says we'll be doing, as you know because that's why you clicked on this link" waste of time).
> The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away.
IIRC, media studies consistently showed a weak positive effect of print news (the more consumed, the more people learned) on knowledge of current events and a stronger negative impact of both radio and TV news (the more of such “news” was consumed, the less people knew about actual events.) The idea that print is, in practice, a higher form of media with regard to news is pretty strongly substantiated.
Audio and, especially video are great for conveying emotion, but except for very specific kinds of information aren't a great vehicle for conveying complex information.
Correlation when controlled for other explanatory factors is as strong as evidence gets for causation; real “proof” of material facts is never incontrovertible the way mathematical/logical proofs can be.
Because the written word is more sophisticated and information-dense than the spoken word, which means print had to be displaced by another written medium.
This. At a minimum RSS keeps you off bloated sites for headline/article browsing. Some sites like Arstechnica give you full text RSS feeds with their subscription.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadPosted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798835
The article already mentions that.
https://text.npr.org/
It’s just absurdly expensive compared to a streaming service. This is partly due to legacy pricing (I don’t think the price of a movie or TV show has gone down in many years, and all the providers charge the same) but also because I’m sure a lot of revenue for subscription services comes from people who buy the subscription but don’t use the service.
Paying per article may make sense for in-depth analysis, investigative journalism and other large pieces. But for the daily news it's probably just too small a unit.
P.S. I've been working around building an app for this for a while now.
Even if you removed all friction from the system, and had the government mandate every citizen of the United States 18 years or older automatically has $12 per month taken from their pay (a typical content service subscription cost) and put in a microtransactions fund to distribute to the sites you read, you'd only be covering about 20% of what US advertisers currently spend. An 80% revenue cut would put most newspapers out of business: it certainly wouldn't let them remove their ads while operating as they currently do.
The reason micropayments will never add up is that advertisers have more to spend than consumers. They have more to spend because a portion of every purchase consumers make is funding that advertising. When you pay your car loan, buy groceries, fill your prescriptions, you're giving advertisers money to spend. And you're giving them a lot more per month than you have left over to fund your own microtransaction pool for the month.
Obviously I understand they need to make money, but at the same time most of the news articles even posted to HN have some limit to reading (even with JS blocked). Maybe a student pass would be good for students like me. I don't think I'll have a problem paying for them... but then I'll have to manage each of these subscription.
It would be nice to have a Netflix for news (to pay for all news subscriptions in one go).
The vast majority of news sites were free from the get-go, with the NYT being one of the first major websites to put up a website [0]. That's roughly 20 years of giving free content out on the web. The author is (partially) right that "the article text is all anyone really cares about". The thing is, plaintext is absurdly easy to disseminate and copy.
for most of the history of newspapers, ads were themselves a reason to get the newspaper, especially for coupons and classified ads. Of course, print ads, like print pages, were much more deliberately and better designed than what we experience today online.
[0] https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes...
The Mercury-News even had a selective email feed of wire service content called Newshound. For $5 a month, you got up to 5 "hounds" (sets of search criteria), and every article matching your criteria was individually emailed to you, whether a wire story, a syndicate story, or one internally generated within Knight-Ridder. This was in 1993 if not earlier yet.
It's hard to imagine now, but papers like the Merc News – thanks to basically having a virtual monopoly – were basically printing presses for money. They most definitely had the capital to fund ventures that could save the company, such as their own Craigslist or Groupon. And I believe they and other news companies did blow a good chunk of money on failed tech ventures. In hindsight, they should've continued throwing money at greenfield projects, since just about any longshot success would've been better than the current state of things. But it's too easy and reductive to say, "Well the news industry should've just invented Google/Facebook if it really wanted to survive".
I still use log parsers (awstats and matomo) .. really am just interested in number of unique/non-crawler visitors and don't care about the rest really.
The issue is that the value of the words themselves has changed, both in the economic sense as well as culturally, not to mention the problem of the erosion of trust.
> If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a text-only static version of their website.
I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.
So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?
Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort they can cut out anything else from the page.
The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see people blocking ads online.
Precisely.
There is an entire multi-billion dollar industry built upon instilling fear in advertisers that their ads might not be fully "optimized," whatever that means these days. Google is at the head of this list.
Amazingly, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pepsi, Boeing, and every other large non-tech company managed to become enormous companies by advertising in significantly less targeted ways through newspapers, television, radio, billboards, magazines, etc...
The notion that ads not targeted by Google or Facebook are wasted money is a lie invented by the targeting industry to keep itself in business.
Companies want to optimize their marketing dollars, so they’re going to pay pennies if you don’t track users.
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.
It's kind of like how Bell Laboratories did some unprofitable and groundbreaking basic research back in the heyday of the AT&T monopoly. The lack of competition in AT&T's main line of business inflated prices but also let executives choose to fund a few unprofitable ideas that they considered worthy.
Now competition is fiercer and prices are lower. We're also not getting the positive side effects from monopolies that people had conceptualized as natural features of "the telephone business" or "the newspaper business."
I guess the real question that we have to answer as a society is: what's more important: democracy or an unfettered free market economy.
If the answer is democracy, the economics of our society can be changed to make it work for journalism. Maybe those changes will mean some Chicago-school economist's equation won't yield the highest value for some term, but that's perfectly fine. Despite some popular misconceptions, modern economic theories do not communicate the true, revealed nature of human society. The economy needs to serve society, not the other way around.
Whether using it via browser or dedicated apps, it's as close to reading a real newspaper as can be. I particularly like the low-noise way of aggregating comments on articles. If there is comments with an article, a little indicator with the the number of comments is shown which can be clicked to read or ignore as desired.
Further offer good coupons based on the users location and offer more coupons if they register for $3 / month subscription
They should easily be able to make decent money this way.
I realize that this is a contradiction from me, a HackerNews reader, but I feel that part of the reason I come here is for inspiration - on new technologies, ideas, and new code (show HN). When I refer to news earlier, I'm talking about the stories and articles you might have found in a newspaper. They may contain inspiration but IMO are much more clickbaity and only written to fill space.
It used to be that I was just contemptuous of mainstream news and annoyed by bias. Apart from basic critical reasoning skills, back in 1998 I took a course on mass communication and learned a whole host of dirty tricks they use, and it's just gotten worse sense then. Now it's gotten to the point where it's maddening to see brazen deceptions promoted by mainstream sites, and just absolutely sickening and not a little bit terrifying to see this huge push toward "authoritative" news sources by the likes of YouTube and Facebook.
So, given that there's so little I can do to stop the onslaught of deceptive, grossly misleading propaganda, I try to ignore it for the sake of my own emotional health. (That includes Hacker News, which I rarely visit anymore)
If I can't drag the scroll bar to the bottom, what other ways are there to scroll all the way down fast?
(Other than using another browser of course.)
- Space scrolls down several lines.
- Scroll wheel
- Up and down arrows scroll down a line at a time.
- Page up and page down scroll down almost an entire page leaving what was the bottom-most section previously now the topmost section so that readers aren't disoriented or lost. Some apps let you configure this overlap size.
- If you like vim you can add extensions to your browser and use j and k. - Home and End keys go to the very top and very end respectively.
- Windows you can hold down middle mouse and drag to scroll. This isn't common in linux where people rely on middle mouse paste but is possible to configure
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-m...
On Mac this is apparently called "smart scroll"
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-mouse...
If you just want it on chrome there is an extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...
In general however you do it grabbing the scrollbar in chrome is inefficient. You must grab a smallish UI element on the side of your screen. Your keyboard and mouse are always at hand.
Scrollbars back in the day were large and thick.
Print newspaper subscription revenues were pretty much a break-even with the costs of delivery. That does not include the costs of paper, ink, printing press and associated personnel, or the cost of actually staffing and running a newsroom. A large part of both their revenue and audience attraction was the classifieds section, which was killed off by craigslist.
I track 60 or so news sites (mostly US and EU based) and as of today:
Article Performance Leaderboard (Site): https://webperf.xyz/Data and Speed Tests: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Cz...
The Harry Potter ebook is 1.3MB in size yet we wrap 25kb text of a news article in all this unnecessary crap.
It is all avoidable, even without AMP.
p.s: HN takes 950ms on 3G with no cache.
The average load time is 102.127 seconds
431 requests"
Author is asking for "text-only"; this of course only requires one request.
We do not need a complex, graphical browser that autoloads resources and runs Javascript in order to request or display a page of text-only content. "Reader Mode" is great but it is not available for every website.The time spent by the browser on those 431 requests is significant. What if a simpler client was used, e.g.,
Guess how many seconds this one request takes when we do not use a popular graphical browser to make itI think news is negative and by and large news organizations serve elite interests. In the USA this is mostly to make democrats hate republicans and vice-versa (the slave class, formerly known as the 'middle class', is thus easier to manipulate and control). Since I like to keep my news ingestion to 5 or 6 minutes a day, I use The Guardian's (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news) free morning email of top stories. Really a nice service.
Also compared to corporate/elite lacky news sites like MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, ABC, etc., I find Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/) to be a breath of fresh air.
I contribute to The Guardian and Democracy Now.
https://theintercept.com/
Edit; I also like The Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics because they're kind of just raw feeds of a bunch of articles that may not surface on choosier aggregators.
Is it?
https://text.npr.org/
You can access some 10 stories, not much more. There is no apparent functionality beyond that.
At least for NPR, their text interface is a step in the right direction - but a slap in the face at the same time.
I agree that too many people are overly devoted to either Fox News or MSNBC. Just my opinion but these two “news” services seem to care most about fracturing US civil society. We need more acceptance that in fundamental ways most Democrats and Republicans want the same things: opportunity for their children and themselves, security of our country, etc. It does not make money to run news stories that bring people together.
This may be true of you individually, but not you statistically. We used to have more minimalist news sites, but they were outcompeted by sites heavy with trackers, banners, ads, and all the other cruft we love to hate. This is largely because, given the option between paywalled quality and free crap, most consumers end up choosing the latter.
One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.
If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.
With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks.
This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.
This also depends on how much competition you have. If there are maybe half a dozen competing newspapers, outrageous gossipy headlines and perhaps the promise of a nude woman on page 3 will sell an entire newspaper to a specific target market towards which you can tailor your advertising. Another newspaper can make lots of money by targeting a different market segment.
This is how clickbait works, too. Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Brietbart, and the Daily Mail could have all been paper newspapers that someone would buy in a competitive enough newspaper market. One of them is!
But I acknowledge that paying per article could hurt the "subsidies" within a paper, for example the revenue from sports section readers helping pay for investigative journalism, leading to a race to the bottom as you point out.
This could still be the case, but it should work more like craigslist.
The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time. It was called "yellow journalism", it incited the Spanish-American War, and it was the business model of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In other words, if you are an excellent journalist, you get a prize named after the guy who founded and ran the Gilded Age equivalent of Buzzfeed.
Each US city used to have maybe dozens of newspapers of varying quality and bias. (This is similar to the UK newspaper landscape--in fact, the lower end of that landscape includes the Daily Mail, which translated its tabloid journalism model rather seamlessly to the era of clickbait.) What started killing print journalism was radio and later TV journalism, which were far less substantial (because they lacked the information density of the written word) but far more appealing (because of the ease of consumption and the stimulation of sound and video). This is what culled the vast newspaper markets down to the city-wide monopoly or duopoly system. And because the remaining newspaper readership consisted of the more literate and invested members of the population, print journalism briefly had more journalistic value.
Then cable news disrupted the broadcast networks, talk radio disrupted the editorial oligopoly of the major newspapers and TV news, and finally the internet broke the whole thing wide open. Including the glorious period of time when "blogs" were considered a serious threat to "legitimate journalism".
People who were previously “engaged” with local newspapers are now the commenters on news sites.
Sorry, but it is. Functionally literate people can read and comprehend many more WPM than are typical for human speech. As a consequence, written media are fundamentally capable of much higher information density than visual or audial media, with the exception of certain types of visual or spacial information which can still be printed or included with the written word.
Any "persuasive" impact from video is lost on me because I'm bored and frustrated after about 30s of watching (and that's after skipping the first 30s of "welcome to my youtube channel, today we'll be doing what the title says we'll be doing, as you know because that's why you clicked on this link" waste of time).
IIRC, media studies consistently showed a weak positive effect of print news (the more consumed, the more people learned) on knowledge of current events and a stronger negative impact of both radio and TV news (the more of such “news” was consumed, the less people knew about actual events.) The idea that print is, in practice, a higher form of media with regard to news is pretty strongly substantiated.
Audio and, especially video are great for conveying emotion, but except for very specific kinds of information aren't a great vehicle for conveying complex information.
Is proven by causation, not correlation. There's a difference between "the consumption of media" and "media consumers".
Reuters and the WSJ are old proofs that people ARE willing to just pay for quality news.
Note also that national news is fine; it's local news that's in trouble.