On one hand, if there is a new media outlet via new distribution model that's winning the market, fair. So if an online-only news source is taking away traffic and money away from physical newspapers, there's part of me that'll feel sad, but whatcha gonna do.
On the other hand though, it's a completely different model in my mind to scrape/link/copy/extract somebody else's hard work and news and editorials; and then become the majority/sole recipient of monetization (direct or via ads or other means). It's not good for society, it's not good capitalism either as it'll simply dry out the sources and then nobody can play and have fun anymore.
Fewer than 50% of Google searches result in a click these days. Largely thanks to the helpful (to the user) excerpts they provide ... and (I think) the trashy SEO-focused barely readable writing that you often find upon clicking through.
News has always enjoyed / suffered a tricky carve-out in our understanding of the interaction between the first amendment and copyright because (by its nature) its value to the public is in dissemination.
So while it's generally not okay to wholesale-copy a news article, it's always been okay to quote it (and, in the concrete and particular case of Google and Facebook, it's also always been okay to point people to it).
So the disruption of the revenue model (surprise; turns out people were only getting the ads as a consequence of buying the paper, they weren't why they bought the paper) is particularly tough because the core activity that is disrupting the model (making news universally accessible and useful) is by itself a public good.
(It's worth noting that the newspapers in this story have to go through the anti-trust door on this topic specifically because [I assume] there isn't any meat on the bones of claiming ownership of the news Facebook / Google are aggregating.)
Potentially stupid questions: Aren't there efficient techniques to prevent web scraping? And if Google really scrapes web content from them without their permission, wouldn't that be commercial copyright infringement which falls under criminal law?
That's the thing I don't understand about the current situation.
> Aren't there efficient techniques to prevent web scraping?
Not especially, since internet browsers make GET requests the same as scrapers. There are techniques around blocking user agents, rate limiting, etc. but that's an arms race against the scrapers.
The tricky part about blocking Google is that if you do, your site won't show up in Google search results. :)
Google in particular always uses an identifiable agent. So you could serve one set of content to Google and a separate set to actual visitors, preventing Google from scraping the content.
They clearly want the benefit of being scraped (the traffic) without the cost (the loss of traffic from people who don't click past the headline to the article).
1. Are there techniques to prevent web scraping? Yes. Are they "Efficient", and even more importantly, effective? Debatable
2. However, more to the point, what's the end game there? If there are 10,000 outlets out there; and arbitrary number, say 100 of them block scrapes; now the other 9,900 will show up in Google/Facebook search and shares, and those who implemented scraping protection will quietly fade into non-existence.
It's a damned-if-you-do:damned-if-you-don't choice of modern media consumption model. I assume that most outlets have decided that the exposure, trickle of users and monetization they DO get is superior to the influx of users drying out. It's consequence of the oft-quoted platitude that these days, for most people Google and Facebook ARE "The Internet" :-/
The sad thing is that newspapers allow that themselves. They can block out google and FB but they don't want to. It's a similar tragic fate to that of a drug addict. However if content-makers want to overcome this they need to cut off big tech access to their content, at least temporarily.
The frontpage of HN is mostly news articles and some blogs. They get a lot of exposure, a lot of readership. Yet somehow google + FB end up making the money.
Facebook and Google control demand. If a newspaper doesn't let them post their content the aggregators will just grab an article that is nominally the same from a different publisher that does provide them access.
Copyright is a thing. When many newspapers and news sites have the exact same content, they're generally licensing it from a large news agency which actually wrote the story, it's not someone just illegally ripping off their paywalled content.
On the other hand, if multiple sites can each write equivalent content, then there's nothing wrong with competition eliminating whomever is weakest - the more expensive (not free), the less viral (harder to share), etc.
Newspapers allowed Google and Facebook to drag them to their territory of online ad-monetized business models in which they have no way of competing (because of tech discrepancy).
This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money.
It is a sad state, but hardly it is fair to blame someone else for it.
Own it up, create credible news products, and monetize it like news were monetized for hundreds of years - you pay to read it.
The lawsuit admits that what we call "news" is really entertainment with the goal of producing content, not to inform the public, but to maximize CPM. Fox News already made it official [1]. Now you have to explain it to your viewers/readers too and make life less stressful for everyone.
I get a lot of value from my local newspaper. It is monetized with (local) ads but they are unobtrusive and non-invasive. The content matters because there is a limit to how much it can fit in an edition.
I can simply skip the pages with ads if I do not want to read them.
And sometimes the ads are the only thing I am interested in, when I am looking for something specific or want to see what is new. That is the beauty of it.
Now compare that to the horror story that is the online news. Content is created by the droves. Ads are everywhere, obtrusive and invasive to user experience, not to mention all the tracking and mining of user data. I never purposefully check the online ads. It is a lose-lose-lose situation for the business, the advertiser and for the user. The only reason it exists is because it is 'free', coming with two caveats. One obvious - we get what we pay for. The other not as obvious - we are what we read.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Newspapers and magazines have derived most of their revenue from ads since long before Google and Facebook. They're lucky to break even on subscription fees.
Seriously newspapers spent the entire 20th century charging people as much as $100 for classified ads, job postings, real estate listings, etc. Craigslist murdered them and they deserved it. Everything after that has been sour grapes.
I think local papers give lots of value, but at the same time if I am a for-profit business, my goal isn't to help out the local newspaper, it's to make (and possibly save) as much money as possible. I don't know the success numbers of job classified ads, but I doubt it comes anywhere near the success numbers of places like Indeed or StackOverflow Jobs or Dice, all of which charge substantially less money and reach a larger audience.
People have a really rosy memory of local newspapers, but I grew up in a small midwest town with an "award winning" local newspaper in pre internet days, and I remember it mostly consisting of poorly written drivel and AP wire articles.
I'm sure it was a mixed bag but Corporate Media did not break the Epstein story. They famously avoided it, @see Amy Robach and ABC News leak. The Miami Herald, a local paper, broke the story thanks to a great journalist there.
IMO you are really discounting just how massive the importance of local journalism has historically been.
PE firms are now buying up and destroying these once great outlets, including the Miami Herald.
I don't think the local newspaper in their community would have broken the Epstein news story either. The Miami Herald is one of the largest in Florida, and where many of Epstein's crimes took place.
This is right. It's not Facebook that ate the media's lunch, it was craigslist, ebay, and any marketplace that allows free listings. They've been trying to make up that revenue ever since. Subscriptions were always a pittance.
That's not to say Facebook didn't make things worse. They make everything worse; They even ruined wishing friends happy birthday. But the news vs the internet is a much older story than middle-aged social media platforms.
The news companies had their opportunity to win this, but they moved far too late.
It's not that they were a pittance, it's that they were eaten by the cost of printing and distribution. But the internet doesn't have that.
The problem was the chronology of how this happened.
Newspapers had paid print subscribers and advertisers and were profitable. Then the advertisers were eaten by eBay and Craigslist, so they went into the red. But their paid subscribers were still print subscribers, so they still had all the costs of printing and distribution. So they responded by laying off reporters.
Then they had no content worth subscribing to, so the subscribers went away. At that point they're just worthless clickbait mills chasing online ad money.
But the model of paying to subscribe to high quality content which is then distributed over the internet so that money goes to the reporters instead of the distribution costs, that works fine.
The real "problem" with it is that it works fine without a newspaper company. The reason you had a hundred reporters working together in the same building was so they could share a printing press. Without that need, you end up with individuals doing reporting on substack. Which works, but not for the shareholders of the New York Times.
I mostly agree with your assessment apart from this part:
> Without that need, you end up with individuals doing reporting on substack.
Content that is produced on substack is opinion, not news. It is produced from a comfort of a chair, not from a war zone or a hurricane zone. Nothing wrong with that (if opinion is what you are after), but you actually need to have a news organization to produce news coverage. A single person can not do it in a professional and repeatable way.
> A single person can not do it in a professional and repeatable way.
Putting aside whether this is even true, there is no requirement for a substack to always be exactly one individual, or for that individual to be unable to hire a third party proof reader or fact checker. That still doesn't require a billion dollar media corporation.
There is also no requirement for it to be opinion rather than factual reporting. Most of what existing large media companies produce is not factual reporting.
Hm I think we have a misunderstanding. Who said that a news company has to be publicly traded multi-billion dollar media corporation? My local newspaper is a news company. It can not effectively be replaced by someone on substack, let alone a news company with aspirations of more than local news coverage. Substack is OK for opinion, not news. That was my whole argument.
Why exactly can't your local news company be replaced by "someone on substack"? If the individual reporters who currently work for that company would quit and host the same reporting on substack (either as a team or individually), what would be the major difference to the user?
For starters, an individual can not be at two different places at the same time to report (for example about a fire and a football game happening at the same time). If they report about both tomorrow, then it is not news anymore.
Also an individual may not have the same knowledge or understanding to report about science, sports, education, economy or crime with same quality.
If you propose multiple individuals forming an organization and using substack as a platform, that is fine, you just replaced paper or a website with substack, so the platofrm changes but they would still be running a news organization/news company.
I consider the reporters as just a part of a local newspaper (IMHO less than half of people working on it), so them moving to substack and abandoning all the non-local-news functions of the local newspaper (syndicated 'external' news, advertising, printing, etc) results in a substantially different kind of news organization than the local newspaper was, not just the same thing on a different distribution channel. It would effectively mean the death of the local news company as a concept, as the replacement is something quite different with a rather different business model, incentives and thus perspective.
I would go further. Facebook are just filling in a need and by doing so, making it worse. They never created anything. Calling the problem 'Facebook' won't help in the broader sense, i think that ultimately it's a distraction but people are happy with it because it allows them to outsource their problems rather then acknowledge them.
News media organisations were forced into bed with Google and Facebook by a tragedy of the commons. Readership was going to go to those platforms as long as any small proportion of media organisations published there. Smaller orgs like the ones involved in these lawsuits had only two options - publish on FB/G or miss out on a large proportion of readership.
> monetize like news were monetized for hundreds of years - you pay to read them
Very, very few news organisations have been sustained only or even primarily on readership spend. Your local paper you paid $1.20 for per issue barely paid for its own distribution with that money, much less the staff writers and freelancers doing the actual reporting. Unfortunately advertising dollars have been paying for news for much longer than FB/G have existed.
My local paper was bought by USA Today. They shut down the printing press, and laid off everyone except a literally handful of reporters/staff. Printing is done at another paper they bought in another medium sized town 60 miles away.
They increased the cost of the paper subscription (even online) and force us view the ads, even with a online subscription. Last time I looked at a giant Sunday paper, 3 articles were local, and from the reporters, the rest was from the USA today pool reporters or AP. The other fun thing was cancelling, that requires a telephone call, only during east coast business hours (we are west coast) and then 20 min of them doing anything they could to keep me from actually cancelling.
I'm not sure how your post is related at all? Is USA Today one of the small news organisations involved in these lawsuits? My understanding is that USA Today is a behemoth news organisation.
Yes, my understanding was always that subscriptions and newsstand sales basically paid to get a physical paper into people's hands. But actually creating the content for that physical paper was paid for by advertising. I'm sure the specifics varied but, to a first approximation, those were the basic economics.
Put the paper online for free and, again to a first approximation, you now need the same advertising revenue to support the same reporting, editing, etc. But with the classifieds blown up and advertising generally going from print dollars to digital dimes, the revenue available to put out a newspaper cratered while the relevant costs didn't go down much at all.
If you can tell an advertiser you've got XX,000 subscribers paying some nominal amount for your newspaper, that tells them that there are that many people who (probably) read the paper, and that they have some small amount of disposable income.
That was of course the long-time model of the trade press. You had XX,000 qualified subscribers and you supported sending an issue out every week or month with ads sold against those subscribers.
My idea has been to build a centralized subscription service, somewhat like Apple News, but structured differently.
You buy a monthly subscription that grants you credits each month. You can allocate those credits to whichever news sources you want, and for that month you get unlimited access to your chosen outlets.
That's just monthly newspaper subscriptions with extra steps.
Better to do the music subscription route, where the user sub revenue is automatically divided amongst all the newspapers the user accesses for the month.
IIRC Google tried to do this with display ads, where you would see pictures of cats instead of display ads on the news pages and pay the website the few cents they would have made on the impression. Dunno what happened to it but people who are willing to pay for content always overestimate the size of the market of other people who are willing to do the same.
The problem is that, increasingly, those local news sources simply don't exist. My town doesn't have a newspaper. There's a website that hosts local news in my state but there is just hardly ever anything there. I get more news from Facebook or Next Door.
>"This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money."
People have this notion that the media used to be way more honest and impartial before the digital age but I doubt that was ever the case. Papers were playing fast and loose with the truth long before the ad revenue model in order to get subscriptions (edit: and quite frankly, to be partisan and shape public opinion). The internet no doubt accelerated things, but I assert it only exacerbated what was endemic to journalism itself.
Even George Washington had to deal with sensationalism and slander: "He regarded the press as a disuniting, "diabolical" force of falsehoods, sentiments that he expressed in his Farewell Address."
I think people have short memories. They perceive that the news used to be better, so they assume it was always that way and that the current supposed decline is unfixable- after all, such a state of affairs has no precedent!
Similarly with claims of censorship over covid. Yes it is a cause for concern, but no, it probably won't lead to the Ministry of Information, as some people claim. But crucially, even if it does, that isn't in itself dystopia, our governments created propoganda ministries during WW2, and they don't continue to exist today. Military censorship has always existed but the propoganda ministry of WW2 was much more active than just censoring military information.
For a while during the last half of the 20th century, this type of sensationalism was staved off though, as the FCC had determined anyone with a news broadcast license had the public responsibility to present different sides to controversial issues. And for a while, it worked pretty well.
Thank you for your research and insight. I was trying to figure out why both sides stopped being presented.
In the 90s, 2000s both sides were still presented until Omaba, got really bad under Trump. Now a cnn panel of 6 people all have to agree with each other or they won't be back next week.
Yeah despite being abolished in 1987, the lack of fairness doctrine took about a decade or two for the market to adjust (as conglomerates like Sinclair grew). We're only recently getting back to early 20th century sensationalism levels it seems.
No one is willing to pay for news because as soon as a piece is published there are thousands of other publishers posting copycat articles. The copycats have next to zero expenses and post on aggregators like facebook with no fee so everyone just reads them. It's a tragedy of the commons that only the government can solve since people prefer to read their news through facebook/google blurbs for free.
> tragedy of the commons that only the government can solve
Tragedy of commons are not always solvable by governments, in this case most certainly not as people in government have their incentives aligned with getting favorable publicity from media.
Government can be a more effective regulatory mechanism for say polluted air or river because cleaner air benefits everyone equally. Media is not the case. Media benefits to those who can control it and putting government in charge will give us another CNN and FOX News.
The problem with monetizing news the old fashioned way is cultural. When a user posts a paywalled article on Reddit or Tildes or any number of other similar sites, they are often crucified for it and asked to post low quality blogspam versions instead. People are used to the idea that news should be free, and seem unwilling to give up that idea.
Newspapers and Google/Facebook (hereinafter "Big Tech") are not competitors, regarding the product of news. The former produces news, the later does not. Access to news can be sold. Readers will pay for it.
The question is what exactly does Big Tech produce that is saleable. IOW, what does Big Tech produce that can be sold. What do they produce that people will pay for. With respect to news product, Big Tech are intermediaries, what we colloquially refer to as "middlemen".
Newspapers may be willing to provide some news "for free", e.g., via a website. However newspapers also can sell subscriptions. Newspapers have a saleable product. The saleable product is what attracts an audience, irrespective of whether readers are paying subscribers or not.
Big Tech generally provide access to the work of others "for free". Generally, Big Tech has no saleable products (cf. services) of their own labour. Any audience that Big Tech attracts is reliant on the products of others. Big Tech generally does not produce the content it uses to attract an audience. The content belongs to someone else.
To any reader who sincerely believes Big Tech has "products" (cf. services) of their own labour, please consider how much revenue could Big Tech "earn" without acting as intermediaries for the work product of others. IOW, how much revenue could Big Tech earn solely from selling their own "products". Would Big Tech still be "Big".
NB. "cf. services" as used above means please distinguish products (tangible) from services (intangible).
The sellable product that Big Tech sells is aggregating and ranking billions of pages of content somebody else produced, so when you type a few characters into a search box, the most relevant results show up in few milliseconds. The ability to do that turns out to be more valuable than the actual content being read if measured by a typical ARPU of Big Tech vs ARPU of News co.
One of the problems of course is that Big Tech then does not actually sell this valuable product but chooses to monetize it with ads instead, which did democratize access to information, but also incentivized creation of huge quantities of low quality information and misinformation (again mostly for the purpose of monetization with ads). Whether we are better off as a society is another question.
First, there's no mention of the legal theory under which they're claiming damages. Is this something to do with caching, aggregation, AMP, or what? The only thing the article touches on is Google being a monopoly for ads, but that would seem to be a very small part of how Google contributed to undermining the news industry.
Also even if these newspapers are successful, does anyone foresee any of the damages actually going towards reporters' salaries for doing real investigation again? It would seem that the case is really just an attempt at extracting some money for whatever private equity firms are currently feeding on the carrion.
I agree. Any time I see daydreamy claims like "treble damages", I feel confident that someone is getting scammed.
Either newspapers are trying to extort the runaway success of Google and Facebook or lawyers are trying to loot what remains of the newspaper industry. Given the lack of legal basis here, I'm inclined to believe the latter.
IMO all this talk of "antitrust" with regards to big tech is a red herring. At best, it will just facilitate the synergy of government and corporate power, through a "do this or else" cudgel.
What we need is strong privacy legislation (ala GDPR) so that we can actually opt out of being data subjects, and mandated interoperability (through open protocols and published APIs) such that companies have to compete for each user's business rather than just abusing Metcalfe's law.
That legislators don't understand this feels like it's because they don't want to understand this. They see a growing power and their focus is on how they themselves can control that power, rather than how to prevent it for the benefit of all (ie preserve freedom).
PE is known to do interesting things. I would not have thought that part of the value they saw in dying newspapers is a well-timed lawsuit against big tech. Even if it only has a 25% chance of winning, I could see PE taking that bet and baking it into the value of the scraps they bought.
Here's a good, long read about what's been going on with newspaper ownership.
That is all fine and dandy, but if Google and FB decide to drop them all-together, and offer you news that isn't "protected", then they are screwed even more then today. It is dying industry, well, the model is dying, not the need for news.
It's been dying for too long, but it isn't really, no? What gets to the frontpages of HN and reddit are copyedited articles, not tweets. And like 85% of my twitter timeline is links to those articles. So, who are we fooling, people do want to read edited articles.
>The newspapers have missed the opportunity to monetize for themselves
What do you think that opportunity was for most even decent-size city newspapers? A few national/international brands have done OK but that's because the NYT, say, has subscribers all over the world. Even something like the San Francisco Chronicle never had that same opportunity.
Maybe if everyone had pushed back harder on making content available for free and paywalls were more the norm in the early days of the newspapers going online. But I sort of doubt that would really have worked.
They could have formed a joint venture to build a Craigslist killer, go after MLS listings, any number of things that would enhance their traditional business with desirable services. Instead they just stood by and watched the world change.
I'd imagine these lawsuits' chance of success will very strongly hinge on where they are impaneled. A jury in a conservative, working class or populist area will probably be pretty sympathetic to striking back at Big Tech, regardless of how weak the merits of the case are. An appeals court may later throw the verdict out. To my understanding, the US is the only developed democracy to still use juries for civil matters (and even for criminal cases it's relatively rare). I am personally anti-populism, and think that civil cases with large financial stakes should be decided by an (appointed not elected) judge- not a random group of folks who can afford to skip work for two to four weeks.
The standard explanation we all learn in business school is that newspapers had geographic monopolies pre-Internet, so they were able to rake in astonishing profit margins via advertising (like 30-40% margins). Their lunch was mostly eaten by Craigslist, years before Google and Facebook- plus the fact that the effectively infinite number of websites out there drove advertising prices down a ton
> I am personally anti-populism, and think that civil cases with large financial stakes should be decided by an (appointed not elected) judge- not a random group of folks who can afford to skip work for two to four weeks.
US Federal judges are all appointed, not elected, so not much to worry about there.
The judge and jury serve different purposes in the US system. The judge's job is to decide questions of law, the jury's is to decide questions of fact. Appeals courts can generally only consider failures by the initial judge on questions of law, meaning it only gets overturned if the first judge really screwed up their job.
Given that, it's not clear to me how removing the jury improves the system.
Many state judge are elected- for a very long time, the US was the only country in world history to ever elect judges. It's unheard of, not just in the developed world, but also among developing countries. (We were however joined by Bolivia in 2011). And of course many important civil cases are heard in state court. This reminds me of the famous quote by a judge in West Virginia, Richard Neely. He actually said this!
“As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else’s money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me. ”
A bunch of randoms might not be good at deciding the facts. You'd think someone experienced would be better at this than a load of people who won't be held to account.
So basically you're saying that the lawsuit will be decided by sentiment, and not legal precedent?
I think that's a concern, but I also have more trust in juries than they are given. As an example, many meritless lawsuits against gun manufacturers have been won by the manufacturers.
This also strikes me as a legal stretch--regardless of how good for society local newspapers were, it feels like horse breeders suing car manufacturers.
Accountable news outlets are much more important for democracy than cars.
Eager reporters are a stone in the shoe for any government. That is why they are murdered (outside of the US).
You should do whatever it takes to allow newspapers to procure and publish relevant news. The alternative is twitter, youtube, facebook, and that socialmedia Trump wants to launch. The world is heading to a very dark place.
> regardless of how weak the merits of the case are.
Why would you think the case is weak?
Documents recently disclosed by state AGs [1] strongly hinted at widespread fraud on AdX, Google's ad exchange. It was the top thread here about a month ago.
It's absolutely not surprising that in the light of these revelations, the primary victims of this fraudulent system seek reparation.
According to the Axios article, the lawsuits are about antitrust, not alleged fraud. As I detailed, the reason newspapers are in a precarious financial position is because they previously held a geographic monopoly on classifieds advertising in their cities, but now the Internet (starting with Craigslist) destroyed their monopoly & greatly lowered classified rates by its sheer size. This would have happened, and indeed already did, without Google or Facebook existing
The document made public also stems from antitrust proceedings. I don't know enough about US legal to comment on the way these companies bring their case, though.
> now the Internet (starting with Craigslist) destroyed their monopoly & greatly lowered classified rates by its sheer size. This would have happened, and indeed already did, without Google or Facebook existing
It is one thing to accept that your position has been challenged by a new technology. But it is another thing that this new techology is monopolized by a single actor, which apparently uses any fraudulent way it can imagine to abuse market participants. While we can agree that newspapers were bound to suffer from new media (they already did when radio and TV appeared), they still deserve protection from fraud and abusive monopoly power.
How is it a bait and switch? If the content is relevant, it's relevant. If you clicked through to something that said it was about NBA basketball and it was instead about knitting, _that_ would be a bait and switch.
First, if i get paywall page instead of the article then it is not relevant, because it is about paying and not about the original query.
Second, it does not make sense - if i use a public search engine, i expect publicly available information. If i have subscription to specific newspaper i would use search dialog in that newspaper. If a public search engine returns me paywall for a specific newspaper, it is minimal chance that it is the same newspaper i am already subscribed to.
So if a user subscribes to the paywall site, that article is "about paying"?
The article's content is distinct from the method by which the publication chooses to earn revenue. A paywall article is "about paying" as much as an ad-ridden article is "about belly-fat ads." They're both designed to make money, only one shifts the cost to the end user. I'm all for putting a lock icon next to it in Google searches, or doing whatever's necessary to signal that it's paywalled, I guess, but don't blame the search engine for attempting to organize the world's information.
I'm searching for publicly available content published on the internet. You're telling Google that there is certain public content available at this URL - that's the "bait" part. Afterwards you're telling me that no, this content is not actually available to the public - that's the "switch" part.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with paywalls, but you have to be honest and explicit about what you're offering. If the page says "Latest NBA game - pay $1 to find out who won", that's fine, but then that's what you should provide to my search engine; and if you want my search engine to index "It was close but no cigar for the Nets as they fell 111-107 to the Chicago Bulls this past Saturday." , then this should the actual content that I get when I go to that page.
When I search "30 Rock," four of the top results are pay services to consume this content. (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and NBC.) Do you view those as bait and switch? I.e. should those shows either be free, or Google should banish these from search?
I see your point, but I'm not sure Google ever made the promise that what appears in its search engine was free to consume. Perhaps the expectation is there, I get it.
No, that's the exact equivalent to what I said above "if the page says "Latest NBA game - pay $1 to find out who won", that's fine, but then that's what you should provide to my search engine." - that's delivering searches based on the publicly available data, that page is about "30 Rock" and that's what I'm searching for.
This dissonance is not really applicable to video or audio, it's a problem specific to text content, because for video we don't have widespread search for actual content like we do for text, we're searching just on the metadata so the availability of the actual content does not affect searches.
For text content, if I search for a keyword and a phrase, it gets (or should get) searched on the actual content that's available. My beef is if the site wants google to index the actually unavailable content - for example, if you're selling a book and you're making just the title and abstract available to the public without buying that book, then searches should be based on this metadata. But if you tell google "here's also the content of page 313 with an interesting factoid about 30 Rock (which is the only place in our book which mentions 30 Rock), please index that so that searchers find our book not only when searching for its title but also when searching for 30 Rock" then I would consider it acceptable if and only if that page 313 with that 30 Rock related content is actually available to public; and if you want to keep that text hidden, then that's your prerogative but in that case you don't get to use that text as "advertising" to draw in searchers.
> This dissonance is not really applicable to video or audio, it's a problem specific to text content, because for video we don't have widespread search for actual content like we do for text
Youtube? Also transcripts can inform SEO.
> if I search for a keyword and a phrase, it gets (or should get) searched on the actual content that's available.
The content is available. It exists on that web page. To consume that content, you might have to pay. Has google ever declared to only index free or ad-supported content? Maybe they have? Allegedly Google considers factors such as bounce rate when ranking content, so if those pages don't perform well, they should sink in results and it should work itself out.
I'll also point out that there aren't as many "hard paywall" content sites -- most are on a meter, so for _someone_, that article is available without paying out of pocket. (WSJ and FT being clear exceptions.) It's not Google's fault if you've exhausted your meter.
Many news websites won't paywall the first article from a Google Search (WSJ is one though).
I'd be willing to bet in these instances you're using a traffic blocker or privacy extension that's clearing HTTP referer or some other means by which the website detects you're from Google instead of being direct (paywall) traffic.
How is Google supposed to know if you have access or not? (because if you have, and it doesn't show you the relevant result, it is doing a disservice to you)
I don't think they are blaming Google. It's the news org's fault in that case, for showing the Google bot a full article while actual people get a paywall.
Well again, the people that have a subscription do not get a paywall, they get content when they click the same Google link and are probably very happy with that outocme. How is Google supposed to know who has access?
Google could log which sites have a paywall, and put an icon next to search result that you might need to pay money to access the article. I could also let google know which sites I subscribe to and if I have a WSJ subscription, it could rank those articles a little higher to similar results on sites I don't have a subscription to. For example, something similar happens when you google TV shows, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=mad+men
There is a panel on the right hand side showing which streaming services stream the show. I can tell google which ones I have and it will improve the recommendations based on that.
Even if I were to subscribe to a hundred newspapers (which nobody does), that would leave tens of thousands I don’t. Google should avoid showing me results that are 99% useless.
Google is indexing public pages as "someone" who does not have any specific access. Google has chosen not to know or care whether I have special access, and index the content as if it's not there - perhaps it's a disservice, but that's the service they're offering to their users. And the actual news sites do not and should not have any say in this, the decision of what to index and what to show to users should remain between each search engine and their users.
So if a search engine chooses to index the "content-as-if-you're-anonymous-and-not-logged-in" and if you try to trick this service into showing something else than what's actually published to everyone (serving visitors and search engines different content), then it's quite reasonable for google to treat it as a cheating attempt (because, really, it is one) and choose to penalize it in their search policies - because that's what I as a search engine user would want.
The most important factor is that on the internet local news media lose their geographical monopoly. So everyone can subscribe to NYT or WSJ no matter where they live. This effectively creates a winner takes all situation like in many other industries which get closer to a free market.
Add to that the fact that classified ads have been taken over by likes of ebay, LinkedIn, craigslist, etc. Basically the business model of the old newspapers have been disrupted and trying to blame it on popular targets like Google and FB is pointless.
Hasn't that always been the case? Even before the internet, I remember seeing copies of the NYT or WSJ on newsstands everywhere. I believe you could subscribe and it would get delivered to your door.
It does vary, depending on your region. My observation is that not all regions get extra content.
NYT papers in New Jersey used to have different content. I'm not sure if that's still the case.
West coast editions printed in Los Angeles used to have an entire extra section. The last time I checked, that section is no longer there, but there are other subtle changes. Like the weather forecast in the upper right corner of the front page.
I agree with most of this, but I suggest a 2nd look at the concept of free market. Free from what? Geographic locality? It's notable that Adam Smith's free market seems to have been free also of monopolies and cartels.
In any case, whether an open internet would have resulted in newspapers' bankruptcy is speculative... even though I share your speculation. What actually happened was that FB & google achieved control over who sees what on the internet, who earns ad revenue and how much. That is how their business models actually died. It makes sense to sue, lobby, beg or otherwise try to get what you can from them. There is no market, just them.
Maybe it would have happened anyway in a free market, but it didn't happen that way. What happened was that big tech took over content delivery and online advertising.
> ...local news media lose their geographical monopoly
I realize what you're saying, but really, local news will always have a geographical monopoly.
Can the NYTimes or WSJ even think about covering local issues? How will investigative reporting function for say a local office holder or a local environmental problem?
To my knowledge the real problem is that the traditional business model supporting reporting has dried up. Running classified ads or selling marketing inserts is an obsolete practice. This doesn't really change the need for local reporting though.
And the shift from local news to national news (cable and the internet), and news conglomerates created by private equity buying up local papers and gutting their staff, has largely not broken down any geographical monopolies, it has for the most part simply removed local news from existence.
And no, Twitter and Facebook are not suitable replacements.
This is completely untrue. You still live next a community and their politics effect you in ways they don’t people living hundreds of miles away. The problem is the internet convinces people they are apart of a global community and it’s all that matters. We need ways for communities to connect with each other that are modern and up to date other than following a local Facebook page.
High housing prices (and resultant inequality and homelessness) is one example of a big problem that is caused primarily by local politics. There are no nationwide or statewide laws preventing the construction of sufficient housing to meet demand -- this is all city-level zoning problems caused by local NIMBYs.
Sure, the few remaining quality papers can (and do) introduce local editions for markets other than their "traditional" home base. Unfortunately, the economics aren't much different than they are for the regional paper that previously covered the area.
I say "not much" because there might be a chance that people would appreciate the combination of local news combined with the national and international coverage that would be shared among all these editions. But that, also, isn't exactly new: it's what these "newspaper chains" have been doing for at least 20 years.
"local news" and "local news media" are not the same. I may pay attention to local news through google, facebook, etc, but never read the local paper or watch local TV news.
My interpretation is people just care about local news far less than they used to? I’m in a semi-major city and the local news is only a small part of my news consumption.
Which is kind of weird, right? In theory if there are local issues, maybe you can get involved. You can't directly get involved in most of what you hear about at the national/global level (even though a national stock market means you can invest at the national level and thus you have an interest there, though your investment doesn't move the needle).
To be clear, I'm suggesting what disrupted the local media revenue wasn't all Google / FB.
And I do like local news. In fact I care more about city level issues close to home rather than following the bad soap opera that is the national politics.
> Can the NYTimes or WSJ even think about covering local issues?
Yes.
The NYTimes has a Canadian desk. Eventually they'll have a Vancouver desk. Eventually they'll have an East Van desk. Eventually they'll have a Main St desk.
I just wanna know where the hell local ads are any more, lately it really strikes me how much a megacorporate desert the ads on streaming services are are - where's the low-budget ads for the local mattress discount outlet with the owner dressing up in a goofy costume, where's the furniture chain with a jingle the owner's daughter (who is now the current owner) sang when she was six, where's the spots for local events, where's the local SPCA showing me cute shelter cats, all of that stuff? Those used to be scattered amongst the spots for global corporations. Now they're gone.
Aren’t those all text ads? Images at best? It’s a very different energy from Crazy Joe dressing up like the Statue of Liberty to invite you to the midsummer sale at Spatula City.
That's why Google offers free "certificates" and "Courses" in adwords, analytics and using their services.
It's more because small businesses do not know how to market or cater online, still. Sure there are a handful of successful ecomm shops that work in niche markets that work on word of mouth, and then there's the enmasse scale giants like Amazon that have their own marking departments.
tl;dr Tools exist, people don't know. Most common small business solution is to engage their web developer to do marketing on fb/ig and SEO.
Most small businesses also don't do well with online advertising. For example, if a kebab shop near me paid $50 on adwords, they would probably only get $10 of extra sales.
Whereas if they print $50 worth of signs and tape them to every nearby street pole, they'll sell $500 more.
The most important factor is that on the internet local news media lose their geographical monopoly.
The other side of that coin, however, is that everybody knows the national news, but the vast majority of people know nothing about what's happening in their own backyard.
I'd estimate that at least 80% of Americans don't even know what days their city council meets.
The NYT and WSJ were always available outside of their respective home markets. You would maybe get each day's issue a day late. But that still meant you got the same stories on the day the local paper reported on them.
old school media feels like its on its way out. which happens right? new ways of consuming content will almost always take a longer mind share than previous technology if the newer technology offers added value.
like radio is big, but before tv ad def before streaming it was king, now it is just something you listen to when you don't have internet access or are trying to listen to a certain show that is only found on the radio (very rare this days considering most radio broadcast can be streamed these days anyways).
a smart move would be to eventually move all broadcast online, like have backup communications (analog) for emergency situations but at this point it is almost a waste of bandwidth broadcasting local tv and radio channels. if that spectrum was reclaimed by internet providers we could fix the remote areas where internet is scarce, something we has seen is a must considering how many people are still doing remote learning because of the pandemic.
anyways that was a bunny trail, newspapers are great but realistically they waste a lot of paper and online is good enough, most people do not flip through newspapers anymore, it just a waste of resources in all actuality. i get why big media is kicking and screaming, but one could argue that its better to evolve than do business as usual.
if you are like me, we knew this was coming, we were the geeky people into technology when others were saying "what's the internet gonna be good for anyways?" we were in chat rooms building bots and talking to people from new york to people in uni in amsterdam, tokyo, auckland etc. they had an opportunity to listen and evolve with the times, not sticking up for google and facebook but there was def an opportunity for old school media to embrace a new model and they dragged their feet.
"stop slipping on pimpin'" is a street term similar to, "you snooze, you loose"
> So everyone can subscribe to NYT or WSJ no matter where they live. This effectively creates a winner takes all situation like in many other industries which get closer to a free market.
Only that the winner alleged here is neither NYT or WSJ but Google and Facebook; So is it really a free market when horizontal monopolies eat others lunch?
Total gross ad revenue of Google & FB for FY21 in India: 23,213 Crores (~ 3 Mil USD).
Total gross ad revenue of Top 10 listed media companies for FY21 in India: 8,396 Crores (~ 1.12 Mil USD).
At the end of the day it's the consumer's loss, Traditional print media had strict editorial guidelines and journalistic principles. Now the digitized versions of them are in pressure to roll out content at an ever increasing rate as dictated by Google & FB for those ad revenue and So there's no need for journalists but just content-writers rehashing the title into short articles which are not even proof-read nowadays.
This was predicted in the EPIC 2014 video in 02004. If you haven't seen it, it's a very thought-provoking look at the future of news. The original requires Flash, of course.
It got a few things wrong. It doesn't mention filter bubbles and algorithmic radicalization, for instance.
A book that explores some of these concepts (in terms of the Net's impact on traditional news media) is Andrew L. Shapiro's book The Control Revolution (1999).[2]
What numerous prognosticators (yourself, Epic, Shapiro, and more) got right was that the traditional print media would be profoundly disrupted. What seems to have been broadly missed was that digital, algorithmic media would allow for individual targeting and manipulation, if not by the publishers or platforms themselves then by those who exploited them, either in partnership or as hostile attackers.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Not stalking, honest! I was looking for this particular comment to come back and respond to it.
2. Not to be confused with James Beniger's similarly-titled 1986 book. Shapiro does reference it, both are well worth reading. Shapiro's is far more politically-conscious.
I did know about individual targeting last millennium, thanks to the controversy around DoubleClick, but didn't know it would become central to people's experience of the web. I don't remember whether I thought it was ridiculously unlikely, nearly certain, or somewhere in between.
I distinctly remember thinking when using some of the early web-log platforms (Slashdot, Kuro5hin), that the combination of rating, reading, posting, and other actions by users would make for one hell of an effective preferences-determining engine.
My gross error was in thinking that by not assisting in the development of same, the world might be spared such a thing.
When Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook emerged shortly afterward, the seemed manifestly harmful on that basis alone. That wasn't nearly the half of it, of course....
Google picking up Doubleclick was also one Very Large Step for man toward the dark side. Contrary to the "personal choice and responsibility" philosophy, individual actions and blackholing didn't do much against that either, ultimately,
I have long said the problem with paying for news is that it is rarely worth paying for. When I was in grad school there was a program that gave us "free" copies of the NYTimes and USA Today (I'm sure part of our tuition paid for it but all we had to do was swipe our student id to open the newspaper box). I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read.
often things that are wide are not thought of as deep, and that there must be more misses than hits in a wide approach, those factors being taken into account I don't understand the assumption that one is boring because only hit a few times and not affected deeply with an approach designed to achieve exactly that effect.
The cynicism "the media" gets is entirely boring and mostly wrong. If you read one of WSJ/NYT/WashPo and never get near youtube, you will be well informed.
But the actual problem with your statement is that it implies some alternative to "the media", and/or that it's said as if the world without the news media is somehow similar to the one we currently life in. There isn't and it wouldn't: a democracy is a regulatory system that needs the feedback loop just like your AC needs to get measurements from a thermometer to adjust its settings. Take out that part, and democracy is done for.
Even among previously respected outlets, there’s a trend towards more clickbait style stories. It feels like a response to losing ad revenue to social media and search which is unfortunate. Things like The Wirecutter have definitely lessened the whole outlet to me.
I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read.
Maybe the problem wasn't the paper.
The New York Times' target audience isn't grad students. I don't think it's all that surprising that you weren't all that interested in it.
As we get older, we change. We learn more. We become interested in more things. Depending on how long it's been since grad school, you may be interested in what's in the Times now.
I know that I don't like the same thing I did back in grad school. I certainly know that I'm interested in more things than I was then.
When I was in grad school, I couldn't stand the taste of tapioca. Now, I love it.
I had no idea it was that expensive. I will never understand the way certain people spend money. I could buy a toolbox filled with Snap-on tools for one night of cringing.
There is a politician who's ruining the democratic party that was at that event.
I read multiple NY Times articles per day while in community college and university (2007-2012). I’d say there were multiple relevant articles every day. I think OP just isn’t interested in current events or the opinion pages. Which is fine. But likely not broadly representative of most news consumers.
The problem is that this doesn't address who the target audience for the NYT actually is. I'm young and interested in lots of things. Going by just the section headings, except for sports, I should adore getting the paper. The content is absolute garbage though. I come away having learned nothing and no more informed than if I just read the headline. It's not even entertaining as a consolation prize.
Like I'm basically exactly the right blend of pretentious artsy liberal yuppie but I've found my niches other places.
1. News isn't worth paying for when the race-to-the-bottom has already occurred. How do you persuade people to buy things which are basically free and can be viewed even without ads?
2. For many events, it's not the writing I care about but the information. IMO Google realizes the difference and bets on information over writing, whereas NYT still wants to sell writing. All publications which are trying to stop Google from scraping their information are basically insisting that their copyrightable storytelling is being ruined by Google's information extraction.
3. For general news, I often don't know what I want to know. This is where news aggregation is way better than individual outlets, at least most of the time, with exceptions going to specific domains like food or games. If WION gets the exclusive interview, then WION is where I want to go and everyone else is just re-reporting. News aggregation also allows you to take in a sense of inter-rater reliability on a per-story level. But this is all playing into Google's strengths.
Given this, I don't understand people saying this or that outlet sucks; for example, does Buzzfeed News suck? Just the name alone makes it sound like celebrity news gossip. But then once and awhile Buzzfeed News gets an exclusive interview (such as on Palantir matters), and guess what, I want them to show up on my aggregators.
> USA Today is deliberately written at a 10th grade reading level, so it’s doubtful how relevant it is for university students.
A 10th grade reading level doesn't mean they only cover stories of interest to 10th graders or younger. It just means they they use a 10th grade vocabulary and sentence structure. Most stories in the NYT could be covered at a 10th grade level and still convey most of the important information.
Sure, but it would mean articles have to run longer as concepts like mRNA or constitutional law are explained using basic words and simple sentence structures. If I’m college educated, I don’t want to waste time reading explanations.
Is there a higher reading level than tenth grade? What's the point in using plain language if you're not going to speak plainly when you can switch to a programming language or math?
Yes, if I’m reading an English-language paper I want them to use the proper language. Don’t explain to me what “budget reconciliation” is, just write “budget reconciliation.” On the off chance there’s a word or phrase I don’t know, I can look it up.
Wouldn't the same apply to e.g. the New York Times [1] and the Washington Post [2], etc.? I find any article with "explainer" in the title to be extremely condescending; it seems to me that no newspaper has a monopoly on dumbing down topics.
> All of this drama raises the question of what the debt limit really is...
>
> What is the debt limit?
>
> The debt limit is a cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is authorized to borrow to fulfill its financial obligations.
> What's a continuing resolution?
>
> It's a bill that tells the federal government's agencies, “Keep on spending like you've been spending till we can actually come to some agreement on how much you should be spending.”
I suppose it is to be expected from this site that there is more respect for tech douchebags sitting in their climate controlled offices than journalists risking their lives in warzones.
But what do they want? I mean aside from "make laws to force google to license our stuff, they must be forced to publish our stuff, and forced to pay for it", which is totally insane.
Personally just fucking let me pay $1 per article for me to read. I will NEVER subscribe to a recurring thing, but i bet you I'll start paying a lot, as I want to read many articles per month.
Paywall sure, but get the fucking subscription the hell away from me.
Sure. I may be showing my money privilege. I would pay, but that doesn't mean it's the best price. Just an example.
Yes: fast, easy, and safe. But those are implementation details, and solvable ones.
But seems to me they're not onboard with any of it. They want an account, and a bunch of BS.
I was once so tempted that i was FIVE screens into one paper's registration process when I went "fuck this" and closed the tab. Apparently they don't want my money.
Totally agree, although $1 is too much. But $0.25 sounds about right.
To be honest, just give me the price you charge advertisers to advertise to me and let me read it with no advertisements. I'd be immensely satisfied with that solution, but no way in hell am I paying $15-$30/month for every single separately affiliated site. It's ridiculous honestly when they're otherwise perfectly happy to serve me ads instead for a fraction of that price.
What they want is a tax. But they don't want to call it a "tax", because that's unpopular.
As Benedict Evans put it, when France fined Google for the same reasons:
> The shakedown continues. It’s hard to see how making tech companies pretend to ‘buy’ something that has little to no economic value to them is a path to a sustainable model for newspapers. If you want a tax and a subsidy, be honest and call it that.
So they all want to be the BBC? They should be careful what they wish for. Having revenue stream depending on the good grace of the government seems even more dangerous.
The vast majority of people are willing to pay exactly $0 for news, because they can access it for free through sites that copy articles as they're published.
I still can’t believe we are going to let a company with such a horrendous track record launch a platform that has the potential to be 90% of where we spend our waking time.
I think they're fighting the wrong fight, and too late. The advertising angle here seems moot, especially since news outlets had been self-sabotaging themselves out of relevance in the digital age for years before Google was even a thing.
1) Google found a way to get ads to consumers that is more attractive to advertisers. Whether or not they have a monopoly, advertisers won't suddenly go back to ineffective news media ads if Google is broken up and makes room for other competitors that also get ads to consumers better than legacy media does the job
2) Their ad revenue is much more limited by lack of readership than anything else.
#2 is why I said it's not just the wrong fight, but too late: online news sold out their future to Google years ago in a race to the bottom with each other. No one wanted to stop Google scraping their content because, once a few outlets allowed it, none were willing to cede readership to others that might get more attention from Google. So pretty much everyone allowed Google to scrape news content and present chunks of it in search results, and over time is means fewer people have any reason to click through. At the same time the outlets ramped up syndication and cut budgets on original work so readers had even less reason to click through to any particular site.
That's where they lost the fight.
If Google has an ad monopoly, the news outlets have no special status as victims of it and there every reason to believe their decades-long foot shooting would have placed them exactly where they are anyway.
The News Media Alliance, which is doing this lawsuit, is basically another lobbying group from News Corp, Hearst, Sinclair, etc.
Based on just those 3 names alone, you can infer this is not a group of benevolent angels or small-town newspapers. It's companies run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch with previous geographic monopolies and networks of O&O stations that are salty that they don't hold the same stranglehold over information they used to.
Clearly, this is a feigned appeal to get rent-seeking laws in their favor to profit from.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadOn the other hand though, it's a completely different model in my mind to scrape/link/copy/extract somebody else's hard work and news and editorials; and then become the majority/sole recipient of monetization (direct or via ads or other means). It's not good for society, it's not good capitalism either as it'll simply dry out the sources and then nobody can play and have fun anymore.
How many US tech websites were involved in lambasting decisions by France and Australia to force Google to play nice?
https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches...
So while it's generally not okay to wholesale-copy a news article, it's always been okay to quote it (and, in the concrete and particular case of Google and Facebook, it's also always been okay to point people to it).
So the disruption of the revenue model (surprise; turns out people were only getting the ads as a consequence of buying the paper, they weren't why they bought the paper) is particularly tough because the core activity that is disrupting the model (making news universally accessible and useful) is by itself a public good.
(It's worth noting that the newspapers in this story have to go through the anti-trust door on this topic specifically because [I assume] there isn't any meat on the bones of claiming ownership of the news Facebook / Google are aggregating.)
That's the thing I don't understand about the current situation.
Not especially, since internet browsers make GET requests the same as scrapers. There are techniques around blocking user agents, rate limiting, etc. but that's an arms race against the scrapers.
The tricky part about blocking Google is that if you do, your site won't show up in Google search results. :)
They clearly want the benefit of being scraped (the traffic) without the cost (the loss of traffic from people who don't click past the headline to the article).
2. However, more to the point, what's the end game there? If there are 10,000 outlets out there; and arbitrary number, say 100 of them block scrapes; now the other 9,900 will show up in Google/Facebook search and shares, and those who implemented scraping protection will quietly fade into non-existence.
It's a damned-if-you-do:damned-if-you-don't choice of modern media consumption model. I assume that most outlets have decided that the exposure, trickle of users and monetization they DO get is superior to the influx of users drying out. It's consequence of the oft-quoted platitude that these days, for most people Google and Facebook ARE "The Internet" :-/
The frontpage of HN is mostly news articles and some blogs. They get a lot of exposure, a lot of readership. Yet somehow google + FB end up making the money.
That kid will be killed a few weeks later and replaced by a new one. The new journalists.
On the other hand, if multiple sites can each write equivalent content, then there's nothing wrong with competition eliminating whomever is weakest - the more expensive (not free), the less viral (harder to share), etc.
This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money.
It is a sad state, but hardly it is fair to blame someone else for it.
Own it up, create credible news products, and monetize it like news were monetized for hundreds of years - you pay to read it.
The lawsuit admits that what we call "news" is really entertainment with the goal of producing content, not to inform the public, but to maximize CPM. Fox News already made it official [1]. Now you have to explain it to your viewers/readers too and make life less stressful for everyone.
[1] https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1454288815049240586
Edit:
I get a lot of value from my local newspaper. It is monetized with (local) ads but they are unobtrusive and non-invasive. The content matters because there is a limit to how much it can fit in an edition.
I can simply skip the pages with ads if I do not want to read them.
And sometimes the ads are the only thing I am interested in, when I am looking for something specific or want to see what is new. That is the beauty of it.
Now compare that to the horror story that is the online news. Content is created by the droves. Ads are everywhere, obtrusive and invasive to user experience, not to mention all the tracking and mining of user data. I never purposefully check the online ads. It is a lose-lose-lose situation for the business, the advertiser and for the user. The only reason it exists is because it is 'free', coming with two caveats. One obvious - we get what we pay for. The other not as obvious - we are what we read.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
IMO you are really discounting just how massive the importance of local journalism has historically been.
PE firms are now buying up and destroying these once great outlets, including the Miami Herald.
That's not to say Facebook didn't make things worse. They make everything worse; They even ruined wishing friends happy birthday. But the news vs the internet is a much older story than middle-aged social media platforms.
The news companies had their opportunity to win this, but they moved far too late.
It's not that they were a pittance, it's that they were eaten by the cost of printing and distribution. But the internet doesn't have that.
The problem was the chronology of how this happened.
Newspapers had paid print subscribers and advertisers and were profitable. Then the advertisers were eaten by eBay and Craigslist, so they went into the red. But their paid subscribers were still print subscribers, so they still had all the costs of printing and distribution. So they responded by laying off reporters.
Then they had no content worth subscribing to, so the subscribers went away. At that point they're just worthless clickbait mills chasing online ad money.
But the model of paying to subscribe to high quality content which is then distributed over the internet so that money goes to the reporters instead of the distribution costs, that works fine.
The real "problem" with it is that it works fine without a newspaper company. The reason you had a hundred reporters working together in the same building was so they could share a printing press. Without that need, you end up with individuals doing reporting on substack. Which works, but not for the shareholders of the New York Times.
> Without that need, you end up with individuals doing reporting on substack.
Content that is produced on substack is opinion, not news. It is produced from a comfort of a chair, not from a war zone or a hurricane zone. Nothing wrong with that (if opinion is what you are after), but you actually need to have a news organization to produce news coverage. A single person can not do it in a professional and repeatable way.
Putting aside whether this is even true, there is no requirement for a substack to always be exactly one individual, or for that individual to be unable to hire a third party proof reader or fact checker. That still doesn't require a billion dollar media corporation.
There is also no requirement for it to be opinion rather than factual reporting. Most of what existing large media companies produce is not factual reporting.
Also an individual may not have the same knowledge or understanding to report about science, sports, education, economy or crime with same quality.
If you propose multiple individuals forming an organization and using substack as a platform, that is fine, you just replaced paper or a website with substack, so the platofrm changes but they would still be running a news organization/news company.
I would go further. Facebook are just filling in a need and by doing so, making it worse. They never created anything. Calling the problem 'Facebook' won't help in the broader sense, i think that ultimately it's a distraction but people are happy with it because it allows them to outsource their problems rather then acknowledge them.
> monetize like news were monetized for hundreds of years - you pay to read them
Very, very few news organisations have been sustained only or even primarily on readership spend. Your local paper you paid $1.20 for per issue barely paid for its own distribution with that money, much less the staff writers and freelancers doing the actual reporting. Unfortunately advertising dollars have been paying for news for much longer than FB/G have existed.
They increased the cost of the paper subscription (even online) and force us view the ads, even with a online subscription. Last time I looked at a giant Sunday paper, 3 articles were local, and from the reporters, the rest was from the USA today pool reporters or AP. The other fun thing was cancelling, that requires a telephone call, only during east coast business hours (we are west coast) and then 20 min of them doing anything they could to keep me from actually cancelling.
they can F-ck off and die.
Put the paper online for free and, again to a first approximation, you now need the same advertising revenue to support the same reporting, editing, etc. But with the classifieds blown up and advertising generally going from print dollars to digital dimes, the revenue available to put out a newspaper cratered while the relevant costs didn't go down much at all.
If you can tell an advertiser you've got XX,000 subscribers paying some nominal amount for your newspaper, that tells them that there are that many people who (probably) read the paper, and that they have some small amount of disposable income.
You buy a monthly subscription that grants you credits each month. You can allocate those credits to whichever news sources you want, and for that month you get unlimited access to your chosen outlets.
Better to do the music subscription route, where the user sub revenue is automatically divided amongst all the newspapers the user accesses for the month.
IIRC Google tried to do this with display ads, where you would see pictures of cats instead of display ads on the news pages and pay the website the few cents they would have made on the impression. Dunno what happened to it but people who are willing to pay for content always overestimate the size of the market of other people who are willing to do the same.
People have this notion that the media used to be way more honest and impartial before the digital age but I doubt that was ever the case. Papers were playing fast and loose with the truth long before the ad revenue model in order to get subscriptions (edit: and quite frankly, to be partisan and shape public opinion). The internet no doubt accelerated things, but I assert it only exacerbated what was endemic to journalism itself.
Even George Washington had to deal with sensationalism and slander: "He regarded the press as a disuniting, "diabolical" force of falsehoods, sentiments that he expressed in his Farewell Address."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#Second_term
Similarly with claims of censorship over covid. Yes it is a cause for concern, but no, it probably won't lead to the Ministry of Information, as some people claim. But crucially, even if it does, that isn't in itself dystopia, our governments created propoganda ministries during WW2, and they don't continue to exist today. Military censorship has always existed but the propoganda ministry of WW2 was much more active than just censoring military information.
For a while during the last half of the 20th century, this type of sensationalism was staved off though, as the FCC had determined anyone with a news broadcast license had the public responsibility to present different sides to controversial issues. And for a while, it worked pretty well.
This was the fairness doctrine, which was abolished in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
In the 90s, 2000s both sides were still presented until Omaba, got really bad under Trump. Now a cnn panel of 6 people all have to agree with each other or they won't be back next week.
Tragedy of commons are not always solvable by governments, in this case most certainly not as people in government have their incentives aligned with getting favorable publicity from media.
Government can be a more effective regulatory mechanism for say polluted air or river because cleaner air benefits everyone equally. Media is not the case. Media benefits to those who can control it and putting government in charge will give us another CNN and FOX News.
Yes. Online adverts did not break journalism. The news media houses did this to themselves and frankly I think they are getting what they deserve.
"Opposite of reading is not reading, it is reading something like New Yorker or Atlantic". - Source unknown.
Newspapers and Google/Facebook (hereinafter "Big Tech") are not competitors, regarding the product of news. The former produces news, the later does not. Access to news can be sold. Readers will pay for it.
The question is what exactly does Big Tech produce that is saleable. IOW, what does Big Tech produce that can be sold. What do they produce that people will pay for. With respect to news product, Big Tech are intermediaries, what we colloquially refer to as "middlemen".
Newspapers may be willing to provide some news "for free", e.g., via a website. However newspapers also can sell subscriptions. Newspapers have a saleable product. The saleable product is what attracts an audience, irrespective of whether readers are paying subscribers or not.
Big Tech generally provide access to the work of others "for free". Generally, Big Tech has no saleable products (cf. services) of their own labour. Any audience that Big Tech attracts is reliant on the products of others. Big Tech generally does not produce the content it uses to attract an audience. The content belongs to someone else.
To any reader who sincerely believes Big Tech has "products" (cf. services) of their own labour, please consider how much revenue could Big Tech "earn" without acting as intermediaries for the work product of others. IOW, how much revenue could Big Tech earn solely from selling their own "products". Would Big Tech still be "Big".
NB. "cf. services" as used above means please distinguish products (tangible) from services (intangible).
One of the problems of course is that Big Tech then does not actually sell this valuable product but chooses to monetize it with ads instead, which did democratize access to information, but also incentivized creation of huge quantities of low quality information and misinformation (again mostly for the purpose of monetization with ads). Whether we are better off as a society is another question.
Also even if these newspapers are successful, does anyone foresee any of the damages actually going towards reporters' salaries for doing real investigation again? It would seem that the case is really just an attempt at extracting some money for whatever private equity firms are currently feeding on the carrion.
Either newspapers are trying to extort the runaway success of Google and Facebook or lawyers are trying to loot what remains of the newspaper industry. Given the lack of legal basis here, I'm inclined to believe the latter.
But my understanding of anti trust law is it's always running into new situations that need to be adapted to.
Even anti trust law itself was new/controversial at one point, and the concept of forcing or breaking apart private businesses was novel.
What we need is strong privacy legislation (ala GDPR) so that we can actually opt out of being data subjects, and mandated interoperability (through open protocols and published APIs) such that companies have to compete for each user's business rather than just abusing Metcalfe's law.
That legislators don't understand this feels like it's because they don't want to understand this. They see a growing power and their focus is on how they themselves can control that power, rather than how to prevent it for the benefit of all (ie preserve freedom).
Well that's clever.
PE is known to do interesting things. I would not have thought that part of the value they saw in dying newspapers is a well-timed lawsuit against big tech. Even if it only has a 25% chance of winning, I could see PE taking that bet and baking it into the value of the scraps they bought.
Here's a good, long read about what's been going on with newspaper ownership.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g...
As they should, today's google amp links are much worse content wise than daily mail articles, and that's one hell of a low bar.
What do you think that opportunity was for most even decent-size city newspapers? A few national/international brands have done OK but that's because the NYT, say, has subscribers all over the world. Even something like the San Francisco Chronicle never had that same opportunity.
Maybe if everyone had pushed back harder on making content available for free and paywalls were more the norm in the early days of the newspapers going online. But I sort of doubt that would really have worked.
Maybe something like free access without ads to paper subscribers.
I just tried to run a search query with explicit "without google" and am returned the full spectrum of google marketing tools:-)
The standard explanation we all learn in business school is that newspapers had geographic monopolies pre-Internet, so they were able to rake in astonishing profit margins via advertising (like 30-40% margins). Their lunch was mostly eaten by Craigslist, years before Google and Facebook- plus the fact that the effectively infinite number of websites out there drove advertising prices down a ton
US Federal judges are all appointed, not elected, so not much to worry about there.
The judge and jury serve different purposes in the US system. The judge's job is to decide questions of law, the jury's is to decide questions of fact. Appeals courts can generally only consider failures by the initial judge on questions of law, meaning it only gets overturned if the first judge really screwed up their job.
Given that, it's not clear to me how removing the jury improves the system.
“As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else’s money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me. ”
1 the average citizen is not the philosopher king that the Founding Fathers envisioned
2 people can't even be arsed to vote how much do they really care about their civic duty
I think that's a concern, but I also have more trust in juries than they are given. As an example, many meritless lawsuits against gun manufacturers have been won by the manufacturers.
This also strikes me as a legal stretch--regardless of how good for society local newspapers were, it feels like horse breeders suing car manufacturers.
Eager reporters are a stone in the shoe for any government. That is why they are murdered (outside of the US).
You should do whatever it takes to allow newspapers to procure and publish relevant news. The alternative is twitter, youtube, facebook, and that socialmedia Trump wants to launch. The world is heading to a very dark place.
Why would you think the case is weak?
Documents recently disclosed by state AGs [1] strongly hinted at widespread fraud on AdX, Google's ad exchange. It was the top thread here about a month ago.
It's absolutely not surprising that in the light of these revelations, the primary victims of this fraudulent system seek reparation.
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.56...
> now the Internet (starting with Craigslist) destroyed their monopoly & greatly lowered classified rates by its sheer size. This would have happened, and indeed already did, without Google or Facebook existing
It is one thing to accept that your position has been challenged by a new technology. But it is another thing that this new techology is monopolized by a single actor, which apparently uses any fraudulent way it can imagine to abuse market participants. While we can agree that newspapers were bound to suffer from new media (they already did when radio and TV appeared), they still deserve protection from fraud and abusive monopoly power.
Second, it does not make sense - if i use a public search engine, i expect publicly available information. If i have subscription to specific newspaper i would use search dialog in that newspaper. If a public search engine returns me paywall for a specific newspaper, it is minimal chance that it is the same newspaper i am already subscribed to.
The article's content is distinct from the method by which the publication chooses to earn revenue. A paywall article is "about paying" as much as an ad-ridden article is "about belly-fat ads." They're both designed to make money, only one shifts the cost to the end user. I'm all for putting a lock icon next to it in Google searches, or doing whatever's necessary to signal that it's paywalled, I guess, but don't blame the search engine for attempting to organize the world's information.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with paywalls, but you have to be honest and explicit about what you're offering. If the page says "Latest NBA game - pay $1 to find out who won", that's fine, but then that's what you should provide to my search engine; and if you want my search engine to index "It was close but no cigar for the Nets as they fell 111-107 to the Chicago Bulls this past Saturday." , then this should the actual content that I get when I go to that page.
I see your point, but I'm not sure Google ever made the promise that what appears in its search engine was free to consume. Perhaps the expectation is there, I get it.
This dissonance is not really applicable to video or audio, it's a problem specific to text content, because for video we don't have widespread search for actual content like we do for text, we're searching just on the metadata so the availability of the actual content does not affect searches.
For text content, if I search for a keyword and a phrase, it gets (or should get) searched on the actual content that's available. My beef is if the site wants google to index the actually unavailable content - for example, if you're selling a book and you're making just the title and abstract available to the public without buying that book, then searches should be based on this metadata. But if you tell google "here's also the content of page 313 with an interesting factoid about 30 Rock (which is the only place in our book which mentions 30 Rock), please index that so that searchers find our book not only when searching for its title but also when searching for 30 Rock" then I would consider it acceptable if and only if that page 313 with that 30 Rock related content is actually available to public; and if you want to keep that text hidden, then that's your prerogative but in that case you don't get to use that text as "advertising" to draw in searchers.
Youtube? Also transcripts can inform SEO.
> if I search for a keyword and a phrase, it gets (or should get) searched on the actual content that's available.
The content is available. It exists on that web page. To consume that content, you might have to pay. Has google ever declared to only index free or ad-supported content? Maybe they have? Allegedly Google considers factors such as bounce rate when ranking content, so if those pages don't perform well, they should sink in results and it should work itself out.
I'll also point out that there aren't as many "hard paywall" content sites -- most are on a meter, so for _someone_, that article is available without paying out of pocket. (WSJ and FT being clear exceptions.) It's not Google's fault if you've exhausted your meter.
I'd be willing to bet in these instances you're using a traffic blocker or privacy extension that's clearing HTTP referer or some other means by which the website detects you're from Google instead of being direct (paywall) traffic.
There is a panel on the right hand side showing which streaming services stream the show. I can tell google which ones I have and it will improve the recommendations based on that.
So if a search engine chooses to index the "content-as-if-you're-anonymous-and-not-logged-in" and if you try to trick this service into showing something else than what's actually published to everyone (serving visitors and search engines different content), then it's quite reasonable for google to treat it as a cheating attempt (because, really, it is one) and choose to penalize it in their search policies - because that's what I as a search engine user would want.
Add to that the fact that classified ads have been taken over by likes of ebay, LinkedIn, craigslist, etc. Basically the business model of the old newspapers have been disrupted and trying to blame it on popular targets like Google and FB is pointless.
NYT papers in New Jersey used to have different content. I'm not sure if that's still the case.
West coast editions printed in Los Angeles used to have an entire extra section. The last time I checked, that section is no longer there, but there are other subtle changes. Like the weather forecast in the upper right corner of the front page.
In any case, whether an open internet would have resulted in newspapers' bankruptcy is speculative... even though I share your speculation. What actually happened was that FB & google achieved control over who sees what on the internet, who earns ad revenue and how much. That is how their business models actually died. It makes sense to sue, lobby, beg or otherwise try to get what you can from them. There is no market, just them.
Maybe it would have happened anyway in a free market, but it didn't happen that way. What happened was that big tech took over content delivery and online advertising.
I realize what you're saying, but really, local news will always have a geographical monopoly.
Can the NYTimes or WSJ even think about covering local issues? How will investigative reporting function for say a local office holder or a local environmental problem?
To my knowledge the real problem is that the traditional business model supporting reporting has dried up. Running classified ads or selling marketing inserts is an obsolete practice. This doesn't really change the need for local reporting though.
And no, Twitter and Facebook are not suitable replacements.
Removing local news has created a hyper focus on national news. People forget about their local communities where a ton is happening.
This isn't good for local communities.
We need more focus on the local. Not everything is national.
They don't effect me very much because the government mainly effects the real world and not the internet world.
I say "not much" because there might be a chance that people would appreciate the combination of local news combined with the national and international coverage that would be shared among all these editions. But that, also, isn't exactly new: it's what these "newspaper chains" have been doing for at least 20 years.
"local news" and "local news media" are not the same. I may pay attention to local news through google, facebook, etc, but never read the local paper or watch local TV news.
And I do like local news. In fact I care more about city level issues close to home rather than following the bad soap opera that is the national politics.
Yes.
The NYTimes has a Canadian desk. Eventually they'll have a Vancouver desk. Eventually they'll have an East Van desk. Eventually they'll have a Main St desk.
No. They all go to Facebook and Google.
Not sure why smaller businesses don't do so. I suspect the targeting options aren't good enough to get "spatula city" good ROI.
It's more because small businesses do not know how to market or cater online, still. Sure there are a handful of successful ecomm shops that work in niche markets that work on word of mouth, and then there's the enmasse scale giants like Amazon that have their own marking departments.
tl;dr Tools exist, people don't know. Most common small business solution is to engage their web developer to do marketing on fb/ig and SEO.
Whereas if they print $50 worth of signs and tape them to every nearby street pole, they'll sell $500 more.
The other side of that coin, however, is that everybody knows the national news, but the vast majority of people know nothing about what's happening in their own backyard.
I'd estimate that at least 80% of Americans don't even know what days their city council meets.
like radio is big, but before tv ad def before streaming it was king, now it is just something you listen to when you don't have internet access or are trying to listen to a certain show that is only found on the radio (very rare this days considering most radio broadcast can be streamed these days anyways).
a smart move would be to eventually move all broadcast online, like have backup communications (analog) for emergency situations but at this point it is almost a waste of bandwidth broadcasting local tv and radio channels. if that spectrum was reclaimed by internet providers we could fix the remote areas where internet is scarce, something we has seen is a must considering how many people are still doing remote learning because of the pandemic.
anyways that was a bunny trail, newspapers are great but realistically they waste a lot of paper and online is good enough, most people do not flip through newspapers anymore, it just a waste of resources in all actuality. i get why big media is kicking and screaming, but one could argue that its better to evolve than do business as usual.
if you are like me, we knew this was coming, we were the geeky people into technology when others were saying "what's the internet gonna be good for anyways?" we were in chat rooms building bots and talking to people from new york to people in uni in amsterdam, tokyo, auckland etc. they had an opportunity to listen and evolve with the times, not sticking up for google and facebook but there was def an opportunity for old school media to embrace a new model and they dragged their feet.
"stop slipping on pimpin'" is a street term similar to, "you snooze, you loose"
Only that the winner alleged here is neither NYT or WSJ but Google and Facebook; So is it really a free market when horizontal monopolies eat others lunch?
Total gross ad revenue of Google & FB for FY21 in India: 23,213 Crores (~ 3 Mil USD).
Total gross ad revenue of Top 10 listed media companies for FY21 in India: 8,396 Crores (~ 1.12 Mil USD).
At the end of the day it's the consumer's loss, Traditional print media had strict editorial guidelines and journalistic principles. Now the digitized versions of them are in pressure to roll out content at an ever increasing rate as dictated by Google & FB for those ad revenue and So there's no need for journalists but just content-writers rehashing the title into short articles which are not even proof-read nowadays.
[1]: https://indianexpress.com/article/business/ad-revenue-facebo...
It got a few things wrong. It doesn't mention filter bubbles and algorithmic radicalization, for instance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549627 (2013)
There you link to writing of your own from 1997, "Real News":
http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/real-news.html
A book that explores some of these concepts (in terms of the Net's impact on traditional news media) is Andrew L. Shapiro's book The Control Revolution (1999).[2]
What numerous prognosticators (yourself, Epic, Shapiro, and more) got right was that the traditional print media would be profoundly disrupted. What seems to have been broadly missed was that digital, algorithmic media would allow for individual targeting and manipulation, if not by the publishers or platforms themselves then by those who exploited them, either in partnership or as hostile attackers.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Not stalking, honest! I was looking for this particular comment to come back and respond to it.
2. Not to be confused with James Beniger's similarly-titled 1986 book. Shapiro does reference it, both are well worth reading. Shapiro's is far more politically-conscious.
Shapiro's: https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-how-the-in...
Beniger's: https://www.worldcat.org/title/ltltthegtgt-control-revolutio...
I did know about individual targeting last millennium, thanks to the controversy around DoubleClick, but didn't know it would become central to people's experience of the web. I don't remember whether I thought it was ridiculously unlikely, nearly certain, or somewhere in between.
My gross error was in thinking that by not assisting in the development of same, the world might be spared such a thing.
When Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook emerged shortly afterward, the seemed manifestly harmful on that basis alone. That wasn't nearly the half of it, of course....
Google picking up Doubleclick was also one Very Large Step for man toward the dark side. Contrary to the "personal choice and responsibility" philosophy, individual actions and blackholing didn't do much against that either, ultimately,
But the actual problem with your statement is that it implies some alternative to "the media", and/or that it's said as if the world without the news media is somehow similar to the one we currently life in. There isn't and it wouldn't: a democracy is a regulatory system that needs the feedback loop just like your AC needs to get measurements from a thermometer to adjust its settings. Take out that part, and democracy is done for.
Maybe the problem wasn't the paper.
The New York Times' target audience isn't grad students. I don't think it's all that surprising that you weren't all that interested in it.
As we get older, we change. We learn more. We become interested in more things. Depending on how long it's been since grad school, you may be interested in what's in the Times now.
I know that I don't like the same thing I did back in grad school. I certainly know that I'm interested in more things than I was then.
When I was in grad school, I couldn't stand the taste of tapioca. Now, I love it.
No. Middle-career and beyond because you probably can't afford tickets to the Met gala if you're <35.
There is a politician who's ruining the democratic party that was at that event.
Like I'm basically exactly the right blend of pretentious artsy liberal yuppie but I've found my niches other places.
2. For many events, it's not the writing I care about but the information. IMO Google realizes the difference and bets on information over writing, whereas NYT still wants to sell writing. All publications which are trying to stop Google from scraping their information are basically insisting that their copyrightable storytelling is being ruined by Google's information extraction.
3. For general news, I often don't know what I want to know. This is where news aggregation is way better than individual outlets, at least most of the time, with exceptions going to specific domains like food or games. If WION gets the exclusive interview, then WION is where I want to go and everyone else is just re-reporting. News aggregation also allows you to take in a sense of inter-rater reliability on a per-story level. But this is all playing into Google's strengths.
Given this, I don't understand people saying this or that outlet sucks; for example, does Buzzfeed News suck? Just the name alone makes it sound like celebrity news gossip. But then once and awhile Buzzfeed News gets an exclusive interview (such as on Palantir matters), and guess what, I want them to show up on my aggregators.
But if you found only one relevant article in the NY Times then either you were consuming radio/TV news, or just don’t care about current events.
Which is fine, it just means you weren’t the target audience.
A 10th grade reading level doesn't mean they only cover stories of interest to 10th graders or younger. It just means they they use a 10th grade vocabulary and sentence structure. Most stories in the NYT could be covered at a 10th grade level and still convey most of the important information.
[1] From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/politics/us-debt-ceili...:
> All of this drama raises the question of what the debt limit really is... > > What is the debt limit? > > The debt limit is a cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is authorized to borrow to fulfill its financial obligations.
[2] From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/18/every...:
> What's a continuing resolution? > > It's a bill that tells the federal government's agencies, “Keep on spending like you've been spending till we can actually come to some agreement on how much you should be spending.”
Personally just fucking let me pay $1 per article for me to read. I will NEVER subscribe to a recurring thing, but i bet you I'll start paying a lot, as I want to read many articles per month.
Paywall sure, but get the fucking subscription the hell away from me.
Yes: fast, easy, and safe. But those are implementation details, and solvable ones.
But seems to me they're not onboard with any of it. They want an account, and a bunch of BS.
I was once so tempted that i was FIVE screens into one paper's registration process when I went "fuck this" and closed the tab. Apparently they don't want my money.
To be honest, just give me the price you charge advertisers to advertise to me and let me read it with no advertisements. I'd be immensely satisfied with that solution, but no way in hell am I paying $15-$30/month for every single separately affiliated site. It's ridiculous honestly when they're otherwise perfectly happy to serve me ads instead for a fraction of that price.
As Benedict Evans put it, when France fined Google for the same reasons:
> The shakedown continues. It’s hard to see how making tech companies pretend to ‘buy’ something that has little to no economic value to them is a path to a sustainable model for newspapers. If you want a tax and a subsidy, be honest and call it that.
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1414856375348482050
1) Google found a way to get ads to consumers that is more attractive to advertisers. Whether or not they have a monopoly, advertisers won't suddenly go back to ineffective news media ads if Google is broken up and makes room for other competitors that also get ads to consumers better than legacy media does the job
2) Their ad revenue is much more limited by lack of readership than anything else.
#2 is why I said it's not just the wrong fight, but too late: online news sold out their future to Google years ago in a race to the bottom with each other. No one wanted to stop Google scraping their content because, once a few outlets allowed it, none were willing to cede readership to others that might get more attention from Google. So pretty much everyone allowed Google to scrape news content and present chunks of it in search results, and over time is means fewer people have any reason to click through. At the same time the outlets ramped up syndication and cut budgets on original work so readers had even less reason to click through to any particular site.
That's where they lost the fight.
If Google has an ad monopoly, the news outlets have no special status as victims of it and there every reason to believe their decades-long foot shooting would have placed them exactly where they are anyway.
Based on just those 3 names alone, you can infer this is not a group of benevolent angels or small-town newspapers. It's companies run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch with previous geographic monopolies and networks of O&O stations that are salty that they don't hold the same stranglehold over information they used to.
Clearly, this is a feigned appeal to get rent-seeking laws in their favor to profit from.