I've been a reader and subscriber to a small Dublin (Ireland) newspaper for the last year or so [0]. It has a staff of ~5 and is mostly funded through subscribers (there's some small ads). I enjoy the experience of getting an interesting monthly paper and it's definitely true that it helps me understand what my local elected officials are doing.
Another interesting example in Ireland is Noteworthy which is journalism that is crowdfunded per story [1]
Advertising-dependent, though. News is not going to work right until the readers pay a significant chunk of the revenue. Purely because the incentives are all wrong for the advertising model - optimising the revenue means doing journalism badly (clickbait, articles designed to inspire emotional reactions instead of inform, partisanship, tribalism, etc).
I had such high hopes for that wikinews thing. I'd gladly pay for unbiased reporting. Maybe all the recent political fiascos (in many nations) will start making people more receptive to the idea.
How do we define "unbiased" here? We can't separate the observations and reporting of it from the humans involved in those.
I am not being rhetorical. It is a genuine question which I am highly interested in.
Even though I don't believe in the existence of completely unbiased news but I do believe that there is a scale here on which we could rank news for bias(or some other more appropriate term). I just don't know what the mechanism for that would be?
We do know of some obvious sources of bias that would be good place to start. Like separating financial incentives from reporting. But that is not the only major source of bias.
I personally liked Glenn Greenwald's approach with the Biden story he published on Substack. He clearly had strong opinions, but he provided references for his assertions that his readers can look into for themselves. The more that we can "hyperlink" journalism to sources, the less an individual writer's bias matters, I think.
By stark contrast, Bloomberg's controversial piece on alleged Chinese spy hardware had no named sources and no references for readers to follow up on, and furthermore companies Bloomberg alleged to have been compromised all reported the allegations were false. The piece even featured an artist's idea of what the hardware might look like, not an image of an actual device, and the only way to know it was an artist's rendition was to read the fine print under the picture.
I'm not sure there's any way to know the truth, but the article should not have been published, in my opinion, without some way for readers to dig further into the available facts independently of Bloomberg's reporting.
When I did my MBA, I was supposed to read a lot of articles on the subject and then form my opinion from them. That was too much work, so I just searched for articles that supported my existing opinion. A lot easier. I never failed to find supporting evidence for my opinion. I originally supposed that this meant I had correct opinions. I've since learned that actually this means there are supporting articles for almost any opinion on a subject.
My point is that sources allow follow-up. Even if, in the extreme case, the sources are garbage, that's still useful information. Bias is to be expected from journalists but disinformation is not, and disinformation thrives when it's divorced from sources/context.
Smarter Every Day did an episode in which a journalist explained how to look for sources when something (in her example, a climate change meme) seems potentially dubious, which highlights an example where the source is actually great and the bias is one we'd normally find positive, but the way the information is recontextualized is misleading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUiYglgGbos
Take it a step further: In journalism, the single largest bias on display at any publication -- from the New York Times down to some hyperlocal startup -- isn't in the content; it's in what they choose not to cover.
Lack of coverage can form opinions just as strongly as coverage can.
> The more that we can "hyperlink" journalism to sources, the less an individual writer's bias matters, I think.
The correlation between the quality of research/argumentation and the amount of hyperlinks in the text is essentially zero, and some of the worst partisan hacks of all political stripes are prolific generators of footnotes and links.
Greenwald provides no more evidence for the actual claims about Biden's computer than Bloomberg did for the Chinese spy story. He does of course provide a lot more hyperlinks to circumstantial stuff, a lot of angry links to mainstream media not taking the story seriously (which is his main focus) and more sympathetic links to reportage by the likes of the Daily Caller, but the Chinese spy story's credibility certainly wouldn't have been boosted if Bloomberg's house style involved angrily linking to everyone who said they didn't think there was any truth to it and accusing them of mounting a coverup operation, or by links to support the circumstantial case everyone already knows (yes, China can and does mount surveillance operations; yes, Supermicro manufactures in China).
If anything, I'd say the opposite is often the case: aggressive hyperlinking is often a way to encourage people to overlook the obvious bias and thinness of a story is by appealing to the "if it's got lots of hyperlinks it must be complete, accurate and important" strand of faith in stuff that's written down. Ann Coulter and Michael Moore don't fill their books with footnotes because they want their readers to look beyond their biases....
Unbiased was probably a poor choice of words, there's always biases of some sort. As you said motivations, financial in particular, are the main problem.
I guess there's also an onus on us readers to do some of our own fact checking. I'm busy though!
That's exactly my concern as well. Too busy or unmotivated to do fact checking every single time. So much so that I have stopped looking at most(political and others) news altogether as I feel I am doing disservice by studying multiple sources and fact checking. It just gets too tiring. Now on most political conversations I just excuse myself by saying even though I should care and me choosing to not care is only possible due to my privileged position in society, I choose to use my privilege for the sake of my mental peace.
Few people really want unleavened news: it's boring. You can certainly get it, and you can even pay for it if you really need it (Bloomberg terminals!). This is doubly so for local news.
I think we need to distinguish what specifically we're against, and that's hyper-partisanship. Working backwards from how a story might affect a party or candidate. Cherry-picking details to assemble a case where giving even a slightly fuller picture would present the opposite.
But fundamentally for news to be interesting it really does have to convey a story, to engage the reader's sense of drama somehow.
That's exactly what good journalism does. It informs and entertains, while providing a balanced view of the subject and covering all the salient points. It's very difficult to do right, hence the reason that journalists used to be respected and there are awards for it.
They don't carry most local news. I live in a town of about 7,000. We had a "labor of love" local paper for a while but haven't for a long time so Facebook or Next Door is pretty much my only source of information about what's happening in town. But it's not hard to do the math and see why it's really hard economically.
How much would it cost to produce a weekly newsletter/newspaper for the town with a sustainable income for one or two people? Maybe $100K/year? Now you're talking about every town resident paying over $10/year--and most won't. Can maybe knock that down with some advertising--of course, now someone has to sell ads too and we have very few businesses in town.
$10/year as a subscription to an online service, probably not. Especially when it's a paywall. But 25c for a copy of an actual paper newspaper once a week? Sure, a lot of people will. Businesses will buy 5 copies to put in their reception area.
It's weird how the online vs print business models change (source: I ran a newspaper for a while).
In my town, I doubt you'd sell all that many. There aren't many significant business--and what there is are essentially a spillover from the adjacent small city in one part of town. We did have a small paper for a time that was quite good but the publisher got ill and it shut down. And to the degree there are other chain local papers in the area, our small rural town is essentially ignored.
Yeah, the economics for hyper-local is still not great. I do wonder what the minimum population that could support a newspaper is. That might make an interesting spreadsheet model someday.
Population is one variable. There's also some sort of concentration/community factor. e.g. there are college papers (although that works mostly because there's a lot of free labor). But I could imagine a coherent urban neighborhood working better for hyper-local than a spread-out largely residential small rural town.
I agree, but I think it's the other way around. The urban neighbourhoods I've lived in are all very much a part of the city rather than actual communities themselves. Whereas the rural village I grew up in, that was an actual community. Though not much news ("headline: Bessie the cow escapes her field again" ;)
25c won't even remotely cover the cost of distribution alone, and I doubt that post-Corona many businesses will have a need for reception areas any more.
I tend to agree. In Norway the paid subscription model is proving to be more sustainable than the advertisement model. This seems to be the case in other niche markets as well. The subscription model doesn't require many subscribers to outweight the advertisment model. I wrote a linkedin article on the subject a year ago https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thousandth-subscribers-outwei...
> Advertising-dependent, though. News is not going to work right until the readers pay a significant chunk of the revenue.
That caught my eye too. Your second sentence is why I put a good chunk of change into https://thecorrespondent.com/, and now send them $5/month. I'd be willing to chip in a couple of bucks per month for ad-free local news, otherwise I'm not interested.
Interesting. I just realized that I do subscribe to the local independent business news journal (it's about $90/yr). What is interesting is that it contains little in the way of click-bait and "made ya look" content compared to the local newspaper and TV station sites. They do cover "real" non-business news, and when they do cover the same news as the other local news outlets, the quality of coverage is better (and feels less editorialized). Still no cure for reader comments, though.
I'm thinking of things like specialist newsletters for niches, e.g. SemiAccurate:
> Professional membership allows instant access to the entire site and all content. It includes immediate access to all news, analysis, and summaries of the news. It also includes access to all regularly published analysis, all news, white papers, and related materials. Pricing is $1,000 for a year’s worth of access. We do not offer refunds for cancellation or termination.
That doesn't make any sense logically - wouldn't there still be pressure to form emotional relationships and tribalism if even if they are still paid? They seem more likely to leave or complain if it goes outside their desired bubble. It has the same logical flaw of the vapid cliche "If you're not paying you're the product." - No you can still be the product even when you are paying. Paying more is never a guarantee of value - worse yet it has been found doing so sets a sunk cost fallacy to justify the quality of what was spent.
Cost may set a ceiling in terms of "paying $20 for a rocket" only getting you some fireworks or a model one at most but there is no guarantee that throwing $20M blindly won't end with you getting the same model rocket with a coat of paint and the seller moving to a Caribbean Island.
If you have steady subscription revenue then you don't really care that much about how many times each story is read. It's more about how to appeal to a readership. Yes, this can be partisan, absolutely. But only if the target market is that partisan readership. There is also a valid non-partisan market that is worth going for. So not all media will be partisan, there will be a spread across the spectrum, with some attempting to be strictly neutral
Advertising-driven journalism must get an emotional response in the title to be read, and every click matters. More extreme positions invoke a greater emotional response[0]. There's no room for non-partisan, sensible, balanced coverage because no-one clicks on it when the other option is an article designed to provoke fear or anger. So ad-driven journalism has to go to the extremes to maintain revenue. Hence we see the middle ground becoming a media wasteland, while the extremes get crowded.
[0] political campaigns have the same thing: get people angry or afraid and they'll vote. Middle-ground, balanced, logical positions don't get people angry or afraid, so they don't vote. Extreme positions on issues actually work better than "sensible" positions.
I just don't think the math works. Can a local newspaper even keep a journalist fed and housed on its revenue anymore in many of these smaller towns? I am not sure that many of them can, yet alone tech costs, editors, salespeople, etc.
In Canada, we have a massive local news conglomerate called Postmedia. They own probably 80% of newspaper readership in the country. They have consolidated and consolidated. They use the same web design across all properties. They have slashed salaries, outsourced printing, and sold the front page to advertisers. A lot of their staff are just a guy in their community.
They can't seem to make it work. Unless readers are willing to pay, I just doubt there is enough money to have a human do a lot of the work anymore for local news.
They are better off getting people to signup for a newsletter and go digital. Local
means local businesses will have a strong interest in promoting to the subscriber base.
Someone has to prepare the actual content for a newsletter too, the only thing you "save" by going digital is the cost for print and distribution.
To make it worse: newspapers in cities and large-ish towns can keep afloat, even when going digital as there is a young subscriber base... but a small rural community? Most of them are old people which means they are unable to consume the content any more. That in turn raises serious questions about legal issues - is a "publication in a local newspaper" still compliant with a law requiring it, if the newspaper is unable to be read for half the population?
Sure, but that's not a function of being old. Some people can't afford to buy a newspaper every day either, or they live far from town and only go in once in a while.
That's a 100 year old rule based on the traditional permanence of paper. Not because it's accessible. Old people largely don't have the eyesight to read the newspaper effectively. They aren't combing the classifieds for legal notices.
Reading a newspaper requires buying the newspaper. Reading an electronic newspaper requires buying a computer or a phone and an Internet subscription, that's orders of magnitude more.
Or it requires going to the library (in both cases). There are reasonable arguments about what level of friction is acceptable. Certainly no one's buying a newspaper to read public notices. The only thing that probably comes close to universal notification is postal mail to individual households.
1. As with books, the physical media doesn't actually cost a lot under most circumstances vs. paying for the person or people who are attending boring meetings, interviewing people, and writing stories.
2. A lot of local once you get out of urban neighborhoods and dense suburbia doesn't even have a lot of businesses.
I'm not sure "smaller towns" is the issue. Hyperlocal works in engaged communities, no matter what their size. In dormitory towns where fewer people engage with community activities, and where there are fewer independent businesses but more chain stores, the model falls down.
76% of incorporated places in the US have a population of less than 5000. I’m not sure a 50k+ place can be referred to accurately as a small town - where I’m from, cities with populations that large have managed to maintain their local papers anyway, unlike the smaller towns.
A small town doesn't generate 10+ pages of news a day. And considering something like 25% of the people are under 18, I doubt that most adults are going to read the local newspaper every day. 10 pages per week sounds like a more reasonable estimate.
Taking both of the replies below into consideration, we end up with ~3M yearly impressions, or $3K-$21K in revenue. No one is going to survive with that.
Perhaps the right model is to aggregate to the county level. I mean, does a town of 5000 actually generate enough 'news' to support a reporter?
I live in a town (suburb) of 80K people and our local paper's twitter has ~6000 followers and seems to tweet about 3-4 times a day.
This. No one cares enough to pay. Social media is more than adequate for most and there isn't any pesky "other side". The only model that makes sense is national level operations that have a "... and now from your neighborhood" segments in tv or in the print just have a local section to get a little local interest.
At The Factual (thefactual.com) we're proving that people will pay for news if (a) it saves them time (b) is affordable. This doesn't yet fund the news ecosystem but we plan to do so via licensing of articles in the near future.
I don't know if our model will work for local news but as we get large enough concentration of readers in various locations we'll test it out.
In a perfect world, craigslist would dissolve and hand the reigns to each locality's websites back to local newspapers. they've done serious damage hollowing out the classified ad revenue model.
Having worked in this space, I can tell you there’s no putting that genie back in that bottle. Classifieds were great for the verticals that made money because it was the best distribution model given the economics pre internet. Now the marginal cost of disseminating classifieds type information is so close to zero that there will always be competition driving the profit margins down, on a per vertical basis. Just let that sink in. That means that there is no defensive moat on general classifieds, because someone can swoop in and make one vertical so compelling that they can start to generate network effects that can be hard to counter.
Local newspapers make a good chunk of their money by placing "public notices". Basically every time a law changes or something like that, there's a requirement that it be published in local newspapers.
There's a startup called Column, formerly eNotice, helping local newspapers modernize this revenue stream:
https://column.us
My point is that there are whole revenue streams that people outside the industry are not even imagining. Local news can still work in some places, it just needs to be somewhat optimized to compete in this new environment.
This is what happens in my country, public notices from the county get 2-4 pages in the free door-to-door newspaper.
I don't like it myself, I'd rather they send me a letter instead, or use the fancy new digital messaging system. But that system is dead in the water I think, because the company that was set up to build it gets to charge for every single message they process; I just looked it up [0], they charge 40 cents per message, about half the cost of a postage stamp. But it means that if the county wants to send a message to all inhabitants of my city, they have to pay €60.000.
No wonder it only seems to be used to send me annual bills.
It's exasperating. We have the same requirement in the UK, so when I've made planning applications, I've had to book a notice in the Oxford Mail (cost: £120). Probably 100 people in our town (population 3,000) read the Oxford Mail. Everyone, on the other hand, reads the free community website, but I'm not allowed to place the notice there.
in india at least, there are actually more "new" newspapers and magazines that are primarily print coming up. this is interesting because while the world over the opposite is the case.
On observation, it was found out that the government has to take out public notices of tenders and they are mandated to do so by print newspapers in local language and local area. enter small papers who print 10-20 copies, show a 1000, employ a couple of guys and take all the ad revenue. works out nice for them. the bigger ones with bigger readership have pages upon pages of government ads and they churn out employment for people.
its really not about "truth" any more than not offending the reigning government because doing so would cut off their revenue stream so everything works out smoothly
> The plan is to be entirely advertising dependent
As a potential consumer of said news, I can accept this as long as the advertising scrupulously follows the old-school model, with no click-tracking or impression counting.
If advertisers are just paying for placement, and the price of that placement is decided up-front and based on overall readership volume, then everyone's interests are reasonably well-aligned with those of the reader: The news outlet gets sustained readership (i.e., actual subscribers) by offering a high-quality product overall, and advertisers support that sustained readership by making sure the ads are reasonably pleasant, or at least not too obtrusive. Readers, by getting a more stable and less frantic and annoying reading experience, are more incentivized to actually subscribe and become a regular reader, which in turn offers the news outlet and its advertisers a stable base.
If they take a single step down the path of impression or click tracking, though, I would expect that whole house of cards to come tumbling down as quickly as it always does. Even Medium, which doesn't actually have advertising, ended up devolving into one big noisy awful doomscrolly gadfly chum bucket. It was inevitable. Their "pay for reads / pay for likes" model for paying authors creates exactly the same perverse attention economy incentive structures that caused the rest of the internet to collapse into a twitching heap of listicles.
Short term and long term trends can be very different. I personally have been burned enough by clickbait headlines that I have stopped clicking on them. Which is not the kind of trend that’s obvious in daily analytics, but it’s still critical over time.
Companies often look at customers as interchangeable commodities, but after some growth it’s easy to have poisoned the well where most people have already tried your product and disliked it. That’s a death spiral in the making.
It's also a question of framing. If we're talking about easy-to-measure things like total number of pages, or volume of traffic, or dollars earned, sure, the Internet is growing like gangbusters.
If, on the other hand, we're talking about murkier issues like impact on public discourse and its implications for civil society, or impact on individuals' psychological wellbeing, stuff like that, then the picture is arguably quite a bit less rosy.
I can get into that. You’re now questioning the chicken and the egg problem. Did people always have these thoughts or is it because the internet exists so we have them?
I would say the internet just shed light on bullying etc that always existed so if anything it’s better because of that fact.
Trying to judge the internet is like trying to judge electricity, it’s a commodity not some idealistic sanctum
I don't want to be too pessimistic but, this will fail.
It won't scale. Look at medium, I read it when it was free then I stopped once the paywall hit.
I think news needs public help. and public funding
One model I've heard about, is to get news into the not-for-profit category, give it full tax exception and make the conditions of that status such that it has to meet standards and not have an editorial line.
News has always been owned by wealthy people who did it in the public good and to use it as a tool of control. I think we need to be very eyes open to the distortion and conflict corporate owners eventually have with their news outlets.
Arguably, local papers failed because local businesses in smaller cities and towns got hollowed out by big box stores and there was no ad revenue coming from corporate HQ to support the papers. It's not the newspapers that were broken, it's the regional economies of towns that are bedroom communities with fewer locally owned businesses. It's globalization, basically.
A news organization is fundamentally just a political actor that needs patronage to keep convincing people to maintain patronage, where a media business that uses news requires a local advertising market that is a function of the local-ness of the economy. Maybe the real future of news is a kind of secular community church supported by donations and tithes or wealthy patrons, which people use for topical moral lessons and sermons, and as a community hub. Substack, The Intercept, NPR, and to some extent Quillette, are like that. Towns will have "news pastors," and media companies will install people in remote outposts to instill their culture in the populace.
The conceit of journalists who think they are a 5th estate of society and somehow necessary is completely divorced from the economics of what made their trade viable. Journalism is advertising to sell advertising. It's the carnival barker or pamphleteer who brings in rubes to clip coupons and view ads. Just because very-serious news is the fancy freakshow doesn't change its economics. The media business is about hiring people to make spectacles of themselves and selling advertising on it. (hence social media dominated) Without relevant regional advertisers, there is no business.
Paid/subscription content (like Substack) is an oddly unique business model in that it's a super premium direct product that is not subsidized by advertising. It's not actually a media business but we think it is because it hawks writing, but it's really more like an art/spiritual patronage broker than a media business.
I have long said that everyone should subscribe to their local news source. Something that covers not more than 50,000 people total.
If anything important to you happens nationally you will hear about it. However the local stuff that matters to you but not the vast majority of the world is easy to miss.
I don't follow my own advice though. Good luck to these...
The problem with a lot of news publications is that they’re not very accurate in the sense that the have a political bias or write overblown claims and skip a lot of important details.
The amount of articles I’ve read this year about Trump that were completely taken out of context.
All these issues with business models are probably an indication that for most people the product that is provided is not worth it.
I think that news today’s adds stress to people’s life. I see people getting stressed about things that will have no direct impact on them, sometimes I think why bother, I’d probably be happier if I never read the news.
On the Media is a great program about media and the making of news. They had a very interesting episode a while back about the economics of local news as well as how critical it is to the health of our society[1].
Once you stop paying people to sit in board meetings and town council sessions and listen for interesting stories you suddenly see a lot more corruption. It would be great if people could focus less on national/international news and more on what's going on locally. Local news helps tremendously by reporting on, contextualizing, and digging into all the local government/business/other activities that most people don't have time to focus on.
For my part I've found a few (verified) local outlets run by local citizen that I subscribe to and I think it would be good if more people did the same.
I would not deal with the organizations in the article though as by admitting they are "for profit" they have already made their values and incentives clear. If they are siphoning off a large portion of their proceeds to go into the owners' pockets there is no way they can produce a quality product. This is not unique to the news industry.
While I agree that hyper-local news is absolutely vital to discovering and highlighting corruption and ineffectiveness (my local city board screwed up on a grant for transportation, because one of our elected officials is incompetent and lazy. A complete lack of local news ensured he could sweep it under the rug, to the detriment of the elderly and rural poor around me), I don't understand your last paragraph.
How is being for profit inherently against being fair and honest? If they are up-front with their funding sources (like how NPR makes clear whether they have donors who are involved in any story they report at the start of the story), then what is the harm? Bias would be clear, at that point.
By stating they are for-profit, they state what their incentives are. Does that mean they will be unfair or dishonest? Not necessarily. But it does mean that their incentive is not providing fair and honest coverage, but getting as many eyeballs on ads (or subscriptions) as possible. In the news "industry", this has repeatedly been shown to lead to:
* yellow journalism (what click-bait was called before there were clicks)
* content driven by their owners' and advertisers' best interests rather than the best interests of the public at large
* content geared toward the views of the majority at the expense of the rest of the public.
OTM is amazing. The programme had a long-running feature, "Present and Future Business Models for Monetizing the Newspaper Industry" (here's the "new jingle" announcement ... from ten years ago: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/132848-hot...)
This Google search seems to find many of the segments:
I wonder if the incentive actually is to "produce as good a product for their customers as possible," or if it's to find the optimal place on the "price to produce" vs. sale price*popularity curve.
I would also posit that in spite of the fact that, while perhaps "For profit operations produce most good things in this world" (for some very specific definition of "good"), news media is in fact a niche where not-for-profit organizations do have a history of being superior to for-profit counterparts (e.g. BBC, NPR, AP, etc)
It is the second and it is a good thing one is for availability and the second is for making desired products and implies at least novelty to keep the willing to pay high.
Just focusing on quality pure would result in a comically overluxury white elephant of a product as optimizing it would result in more and more cost and overwroughtness.
We have a military service (because defense is crucial to our nation's wellbeing), a postal service (because verified communication is crucial to our nation's wellbeing), and so on. I don't understand the resistance to things like a healthcare service or a local news service. Those things are necessary to the stability of our society, loss or profit be damned.
Do you think a news service, funded via taxes and beholden to elected officials, would keep 'open and honest' as its purpose for more than one election season?
That may be way too snarky, but it's an honest question. I do not see state controlled media, without massive, massive investment in checks and balances made public in an easy to digest and incredibly accessible format, as being useful.
Essentially, I would think they would have to publish what they publish, and also publish whatever it was they chose not to publish, to ensure there are no biases.
This may be OT, or perhaps not, let's see where it takes us.
I hope you can educate me about Americans in a way that could help us to think of a different business model for journalism, and other services to improve the commons which require real funding.
I'd like to respond to the part of your comment where you say
> I don't understand the resistance to things like a healthcare service
I also wonder why many Americans seem to reject universal health care. Here in Australia anyone can walk in to a public hospital and get treated for free. Why do so many Americans think it is better to have to pay (the most expensive prices in the world) and be tethered to your employer for health care?
I put that question to a Trump voter who asked me, who pays for the health system in Australia? I told her taxpayers. Everyone pays a little bit, and that works because everybody benefits. She told me her answer straight away. She said it's not fair to have open access hospitals because then illegal immigrants will get free health care.
Is that why (some) Americans reject "socialised medicine"? Because they are afraid that outsiders will take advantage of a system they pay (expensive prices) for? It sounds like a version of Stockholm syndrome(?). If there are other reasons, please enlighten me. I'd really like to understand this.
> Because they are afraid that outsiders will take advantage of a system they pay (expensive prices) for?
Inside my community bubble, this is basically the biggest reason. They don't want to subsidize (through taxes), using their own words, people who don't work to support themselves or illegal immigrants.
Some of the people (again, inside my own life) with this opinion don't have, or even seem to care that they don't have, health insurance themselves.
> The Bay Citizen was a non-profit news organization covering the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded as the Bay Area News Project in January 2010 with money provided by Warren Hellman's Hellman Family Foundation. On May 26, 2010 the organization launched the website, baycitizen.org. In June 2010 The Bay Citizen began producing content for the newly added biweekly two-page Bay Area Report published in The New York Times.[1]
> The Bay Citizen was part of a small but growing number of similar news organizations across the country dedicated to locally focused public service journalism, including Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and MinnPost.
But then Hellman died and they wound up folding into the Center for Investigative Reporting:
> Warren Hellman died on December 18, 2011, of complications from treatments for leukemia. Jeffrey Ubben, co-chairman of the board of directors, assumed the chairmanship.[7]
> In May 2012, The Bay Citizen merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting.[8][9] In May 2013, The Bay Citizen newsroom merged into the CIR.
> The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California;[1] it has conducted investigative journalism since 1977.[2] It is known for reporting that reveals inequities, abuse and corruption, and holds those responsible accountable.
> In 2010, CIR launched its California Watch reporting project; in 2012, it merged with The Bay Citizen. In 2013, it launched an hour-long public radio program and podcast, Reveal, that airs on 470 public radio stations.[3][4] The budget for the CIR was approximately $9.3 million in 2016. The current business model emphasizes cooperation with partners and other news outlets rather than competition.
92 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadI've been a reader and subscriber to a small Dublin (Ireland) newspaper for the last year or so [0]. It has a staff of ~5 and is mostly funded through subscribers (there's some small ads). I enjoy the experience of getting an interesting monthly paper and it's definitely true that it helps me understand what my local elected officials are doing.
Another interesting example in Ireland is Noteworthy which is journalism that is crowdfunded per story [1]
0: https://dublininquirer.com/
2: https://www.noteworthy.ie/
I am not being rhetorical. It is a genuine question which I am highly interested in.
Even though I don't believe in the existence of completely unbiased news but I do believe that there is a scale here on which we could rank news for bias(or some other more appropriate term). I just don't know what the mechanism for that would be?
We do know of some obvious sources of bias that would be good place to start. Like separating financial incentives from reporting. But that is not the only major source of bias.
By stark contrast, Bloomberg's controversial piece on alleged Chinese spy hardware had no named sources and no references for readers to follow up on, and furthermore companies Bloomberg alleged to have been compromised all reported the allegations were false. The piece even featured an artist's idea of what the hardware might look like, not an image of an actual device, and the only way to know it was an artist's rendition was to read the fine print under the picture.
I'm not sure there's any way to know the truth, but the article should not have been published, in my opinion, without some way for readers to dig further into the available facts independently of Bloomberg's reporting.
Having sources doesn't eliminate bias.
My point is that sources allow follow-up. Even if, in the extreme case, the sources are garbage, that's still useful information. Bias is to be expected from journalists but disinformation is not, and disinformation thrives when it's divorced from sources/context.
Smarter Every Day did an episode in which a journalist explained how to look for sources when something (in her example, a climate change meme) seems potentially dubious, which highlights an example where the source is actually great and the bias is one we'd normally find positive, but the way the information is recontextualized is misleading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUiYglgGbos
Lack of coverage can form opinions just as strongly as coverage can.
FWIW, as a former fan of Greenwald, his editor came out looking like a far better journalist than he did in that exchange.
The correlation between the quality of research/argumentation and the amount of hyperlinks in the text is essentially zero, and some of the worst partisan hacks of all political stripes are prolific generators of footnotes and links.
Greenwald provides no more evidence for the actual claims about Biden's computer than Bloomberg did for the Chinese spy story. He does of course provide a lot more hyperlinks to circumstantial stuff, a lot of angry links to mainstream media not taking the story seriously (which is his main focus) and more sympathetic links to reportage by the likes of the Daily Caller, but the Chinese spy story's credibility certainly wouldn't have been boosted if Bloomberg's house style involved angrily linking to everyone who said they didn't think there was any truth to it and accusing them of mounting a coverup operation, or by links to support the circumstantial case everyone already knows (yes, China can and does mount surveillance operations; yes, Supermicro manufactures in China).
If anything, I'd say the opposite is often the case: aggressive hyperlinking is often a way to encourage people to overlook the obvious bias and thinness of a story is by appealing to the "if it's got lots of hyperlinks it must be complete, accurate and important" strand of faith in stuff that's written down. Ann Coulter and Michael Moore don't fill their books with footnotes because they want their readers to look beyond their biases....
I guess there's also an onus on us readers to do some of our own fact checking. I'm busy though!
I think we need to distinguish what specifically we're against, and that's hyper-partisanship. Working backwards from how a story might affect a party or candidate. Cherry-picking details to assemble a case where giving even a slightly fuller picture would present the opposite.
But fundamentally for news to be interesting it really does have to convey a story, to engage the reader's sense of drama somehow.
How much would it cost to produce a weekly newsletter/newspaper for the town with a sustainable income for one or two people? Maybe $100K/year? Now you're talking about every town resident paying over $10/year--and most won't. Can maybe knock that down with some advertising--of course, now someone has to sell ads too and we have very few businesses in town.
It's weird how the online vs print business models change (source: I ran a newspaper for a while).
That caught my eye too. Your second sentence is why I put a good chunk of change into https://thecorrespondent.com/, and now send them $5/month. I'd be willing to chip in a couple of bucks per month for ad-free local news, otherwise I'm not interested.
But then go the next step and realize that there are already quality news sources for those who are interested and willing to pay.
I'm thinking of things like specialist newsletters for niches, e.g. SemiAccurate:
> Professional membership allows instant access to the entire site and all content. It includes immediate access to all news, analysis, and summaries of the news. It also includes access to all regularly published analysis, all news, white papers, and related materials. Pricing is $1,000 for a year’s worth of access. We do not offer refunds for cancellation or termination.
https://semiaccurate.com/subscribe/
Eh?
Cost may set a ceiling in terms of "paying $20 for a rocket" only getting you some fireworks or a model one at most but there is no guarantee that throwing $20M blindly won't end with you getting the same model rocket with a coat of paint and the seller moving to a Caribbean Island.
Advertising-driven journalism must get an emotional response in the title to be read, and every click matters. More extreme positions invoke a greater emotional response[0]. There's no room for non-partisan, sensible, balanced coverage because no-one clicks on it when the other option is an article designed to provoke fear or anger. So ad-driven journalism has to go to the extremes to maintain revenue. Hence we see the middle ground becoming a media wasteland, while the extremes get crowded.
[0] political campaigns have the same thing: get people angry or afraid and they'll vote. Middle-ground, balanced, logical positions don't get people angry or afraid, so they don't vote. Extreme positions on issues actually work better than "sensible" positions.
In Canada, we have a massive local news conglomerate called Postmedia. They own probably 80% of newspaper readership in the country. They have consolidated and consolidated. They use the same web design across all properties. They have slashed salaries, outsourced printing, and sold the front page to advertisers. A lot of their staff are just a guy in their community.
They can't seem to make it work. Unless readers are willing to pay, I just doubt there is enough money to have a human do a lot of the work anymore for local news.
To make it worse: newspapers in cities and large-ish towns can keep afloat, even when going digital as there is a young subscriber base... but a small rural community? Most of them are old people which means they are unable to consume the content any more. That in turn raises serious questions about legal issues - is a "publication in a local newspaper" still compliant with a law requiring it, if the newspaper is unable to be read for half the population?
The mandate to publication in the local newspaper in laws is precisely to account for as wide and barrier-free distribution as possible.
2. A lot of local once you get out of urban neighborhoods and dense suburbia doesn't even have a lot of businesses.
If half of them visit the local newspaper daily and read ten pages, there's 250K daily page views, roughly 90M annual impressions.
At $1 CPM, that's $90K in annual revenue.
At $7 CPM (what the NYTimes claimed 10 years ago), that's $630K revenue.
With that, they could probably afford a staff of 2-5, depending on the town and cost of living.
If they're in a town of 5000 people, it's unlikely that they will make enough money to survive.
Perhaps the right model is to aggregate to the county level. I mean, does a town of 5000 actually generate enough 'news' to support a reporter?
I live in a town (suburb) of 80K people and our local paper's twitter has ~6000 followers and seems to tweet about 3-4 times a day.
I don't know if our model will work for local news but as we get large enough concentration of readers in various locations we'll test it out.
There's a startup called Column, formerly eNotice, helping local newspapers modernize this revenue stream: https://column.us
My point is that there are whole revenue streams that people outside the industry are not even imagining. Local news can still work in some places, it just needs to be somewhat optimized to compete in this new environment.
I don't like it myself, I'd rather they send me a letter instead, or use the fancy new digital messaging system. But that system is dead in the water I think, because the company that was set up to build it gets to charge for every single message they process; I just looked it up [0], they charge 40 cents per message, about half the cost of a postage stamp. But it means that if the county wants to send a message to all inhabitants of my city, they have to pay €60.000.
No wonder it only seems to be used to send me annual bills.
https://www.logius.nl/onze-organisatie/zakendoen-met-logius/...
On observation, it was found out that the government has to take out public notices of tenders and they are mandated to do so by print newspapers in local language and local area. enter small papers who print 10-20 copies, show a 1000, employ a couple of guys and take all the ad revenue. works out nice for them. the bigger ones with bigger readership have pages upon pages of government ads and they churn out employment for people.
its really not about "truth" any more than not offending the reigning government because doing so would cut off their revenue stream so everything works out smoothly
As a potential consumer of said news, I can accept this as long as the advertising scrupulously follows the old-school model, with no click-tracking or impression counting.
If advertisers are just paying for placement, and the price of that placement is decided up-front and based on overall readership volume, then everyone's interests are reasonably well-aligned with those of the reader: The news outlet gets sustained readership (i.e., actual subscribers) by offering a high-quality product overall, and advertisers support that sustained readership by making sure the ads are reasonably pleasant, or at least not too obtrusive. Readers, by getting a more stable and less frantic and annoying reading experience, are more incentivized to actually subscribe and become a regular reader, which in turn offers the news outlet and its advertisers a stable base.
If they take a single step down the path of impression or click tracking, though, I would expect that whole house of cards to come tumbling down as quickly as it always does. Even Medium, which doesn't actually have advertising, ended up devolving into one big noisy awful doomscrolly gadfly chum bucket. It was inevitable. Their "pay for reads / pay for likes" model for paying authors creates exactly the same perverse attention economy incentive structures that caused the rest of the internet to collapse into a twitching heap of listicles.
Companies often look at customers as interchangeable commodities, but after some growth it’s easy to have poisoned the well where most people have already tried your product and disliked it. That’s a death spiral in the making.
If, on the other hand, we're talking about murkier issues like impact on public discourse and its implications for civil society, or impact on individuals' psychological wellbeing, stuff like that, then the picture is arguably quite a bit less rosy.
I would say the internet just shed light on bullying etc that always existed so if anything it’s better because of that fact.
Trying to judge the internet is like trying to judge electricity, it’s a commodity not some idealistic sanctum
I think news needs public help. and public funding One model I've heard about, is to get news into the not-for-profit category, give it full tax exception and make the conditions of that status such that it has to meet standards and not have an editorial line.
News has always been owned by wealthy people who did it in the public good and to use it as a tool of control. I think we need to be very eyes open to the distortion and conflict corporate owners eventually have with their news outlets.
Happy to be wrong btw.
A news organization is fundamentally just a political actor that needs patronage to keep convincing people to maintain patronage, where a media business that uses news requires a local advertising market that is a function of the local-ness of the economy. Maybe the real future of news is a kind of secular community church supported by donations and tithes or wealthy patrons, which people use for topical moral lessons and sermons, and as a community hub. Substack, The Intercept, NPR, and to some extent Quillette, are like that. Towns will have "news pastors," and media companies will install people in remote outposts to instill their culture in the populace.
The conceit of journalists who think they are a 5th estate of society and somehow necessary is completely divorced from the economics of what made their trade viable. Journalism is advertising to sell advertising. It's the carnival barker or pamphleteer who brings in rubes to clip coupons and view ads. Just because very-serious news is the fancy freakshow doesn't change its economics. The media business is about hiring people to make spectacles of themselves and selling advertising on it. (hence social media dominated) Without relevant regional advertisers, there is no business.
Paid/subscription content (like Substack) is an oddly unique business model in that it's a super premium direct product that is not subsidized by advertising. It's not actually a media business but we think it is because it hawks writing, but it's really more like an art/spiritual patronage broker than a media business.
If anything important to you happens nationally you will hear about it. However the local stuff that matters to you but not the vast majority of the world is easy to miss.
I don't follow my own advice though. Good luck to these...
Once you stop paying people to sit in board meetings and town council sessions and listen for interesting stories you suddenly see a lot more corruption. It would be great if people could focus less on national/international news and more on what's going on locally. Local news helps tremendously by reporting on, contextualizing, and digging into all the local government/business/other activities that most people don't have time to focus on.
For my part I've found a few (verified) local outlets run by local citizen that I subscribe to and I think it would be good if more people did the same.
I would not deal with the organizations in the article though as by admitting they are "for profit" they have already made their values and incentives clear. If they are siphoning off a large portion of their proceeds to go into the owners' pockets there is no way they can produce a quality product. This is not unique to the news industry.
1. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/local-news...
How is being for profit inherently against being fair and honest? If they are up-front with their funding sources (like how NPR makes clear whether they have donors who are involved in any story they report at the start of the story), then what is the harm? Bias would be clear, at that point.
This Google search seems to find many of the segments:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=3v2rX-ixKMXQtQaSg4u4C...
For profit operations produce most good things in this world.
Their incentives are usually to produce as good a product for their customers as possible, since that generates the most profit.
I would also posit that in spite of the fact that, while perhaps "For profit operations produce most good things in this world" (for some very specific definition of "good"), news media is in fact a niche where not-for-profit organizations do have a history of being superior to for-profit counterparts (e.g. BBC, NPR, AP, etc)
What's "good" is determined by customers. Of course, for news that is often that which confirms our beliefs.
I was mostly annoyed with the "for profit ventures are inherently bad" message. I think it's a profound and fundamental misunderstanding of the world.
Just focusing on quality pure would result in a comically overluxury white elephant of a product as optimizing it would result in more and more cost and overwroughtness.
Mothers produce most good things in this world.
> Their incentives are usually to produce as good a product for their customers as possible, since that generates the most profit.
Their incentive is to produce as cheap a product for their customers as profitable.
Some businesses compete on quality, but it's not universal.
That may be way too snarky, but it's an honest question. I do not see state controlled media, without massive, massive investment in checks and balances made public in an easy to digest and incredibly accessible format, as being useful.
Essentially, I would think they would have to publish what they publish, and also publish whatever it was they chose not to publish, to ensure there are no biases.
Edit - whoa. I made another comment about that with NPR as the example, and got confused.
I agree with you, 100%. But They also have private donors and are listener/viewer supported.
I hope you can educate me about Americans in a way that could help us to think of a different business model for journalism, and other services to improve the commons which require real funding.
I'd like to respond to the part of your comment where you say
> I don't understand the resistance to things like a healthcare service
I also wonder why many Americans seem to reject universal health care. Here in Australia anyone can walk in to a public hospital and get treated for free. Why do so many Americans think it is better to have to pay (the most expensive prices in the world) and be tethered to your employer for health care?
I put that question to a Trump voter who asked me, who pays for the health system in Australia? I told her taxpayers. Everyone pays a little bit, and that works because everybody benefits. She told me her answer straight away. She said it's not fair to have open access hospitals because then illegal immigrants will get free health care.
Is that why (some) Americans reject "socialised medicine"? Because they are afraid that outsiders will take advantage of a system they pay (expensive prices) for? It sounds like a version of Stockholm syndrome(?). If there are other reasons, please enlighten me. I'd really like to understand this.
Inside my community bubble, this is basically the biggest reason. They don't want to subsidize (through taxes), using their own words, people who don't work to support themselves or illegal immigrants.
Some of the people (again, inside my own life) with this opinion don't have, or even seem to care that they don't have, health insurance themselves.
I'm going to predict that whoever cracks this coconut eventually will not have set out to do so.
> The Bay Citizen was a non-profit news organization covering the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded as the Bay Area News Project in January 2010 with money provided by Warren Hellman's Hellman Family Foundation. On May 26, 2010 the organization launched the website, baycitizen.org. In June 2010 The Bay Citizen began producing content for the newly added biweekly two-page Bay Area Report published in The New York Times.[1]
> The Bay Citizen was part of a small but growing number of similar news organizations across the country dedicated to locally focused public service journalism, including Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and MinnPost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bay_Citizen
But then Hellman died and they wound up folding into the Center for Investigative Reporting:
> Warren Hellman died on December 18, 2011, of complications from treatments for leukemia. Jeffrey Ubben, co-chairman of the board of directors, assumed the chairmanship.[7]
> In May 2012, The Bay Citizen merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting.[8][9] In May 2013, The Bay Citizen newsroom merged into the CIR.
- - - -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Investigative_Repor...
> The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California;[1] it has conducted investigative journalism since 1977.[2] It is known for reporting that reveals inequities, abuse and corruption, and holds those responsible accountable.
> In 2010, CIR launched its California Watch reporting project; in 2012, it merged with The Bay Citizen. In 2013, it launched an hour-long public radio program and podcast, Reveal, that airs on 470 public radio stations.[3][4] The budget for the CIR was approximately $9.3 million in 2016. The current business model emphasizes cooperation with partners and other news outlets rather than competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group