Despite a great deal of jawboning and gnashing of teeth about the state of news media and possible remedies there are a number of dimensions of the problem and potential opportunities I rarely see discussed.
I'd add to my 2022 comments the following:
- When the NY Times hardened its paywall notably in mid-2019, front-page appearances on Hacker News fell to a quarter of their previous trend. There was no policy change at HN, just voting behaviour on submissions. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (Own data based on a 2023 scrape of all HN front-page activity.)
- Most successful media have had either government support (e.g., the BBC, Deutschlandfunk) or a strong multi-tier financing model.
Of the last, the Economist suggests a commercial basis being roughly by thirds subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Public broadcasting in the US (NPR, PBS) benefit by member support, commercial underwriting (now little different from ads), and some government support (mostly to local stations). Traditionally within the US commercial publication revenue was based on banner ads, classifieds, legal notices (effectively an obligate support of newspapers by law imposed on private citizens and firms), subscriptions, and news-stand sales.
Currently, the ISP as at least a major payment gateway seems a highly underutilised opportunity. What translates to an Internet age is clearly still being worked out, though at the cost of many established institutions, large and small, failing entirely.
And I've remembered one other additional insight I'd meant to include above: I'd far prefer if more news entities operated like Wikipedia.
I'd first noticed this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which was a huge, complex, long-evolving story covering a huge area. Trying to get useful information from news media was ... maddening. Even good sources were at best useful for 1) initial reports and 2) a long dribble of additional developments, but after the first day or so reading, listening, or watching news items gave very little clear overview of the story.
There've been many, many, many such cases since. The Oroville Dam crisis (a notable press exception was Brad Plumer, then at Vox, whose single-author reportage largely equaled Wikipedia). Covid-19. Various major court cases.
Most recently, after hitting several outlets (BBC, CBC, NPR, NY Times, Guardian) over the outbreak of riots in the UK, and trying to relate the news and answer questions to an older relative, I remembered my Wikipedia trick and turned to their coverage. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gave all the relevant context far more clearly than any of five or so mainstream media sources I'd turned to.
Moreover, the Wikipedia article had on the order of 175 footnotes and references, linked in the article but separated from the text, as footnotes are, meaning that one could read the text as a narrative and NOT be constantly interrupted by attributions as one so often is in current reporting. Yes, it's useful to have sources cited, but doing so as part of the narrative is itself, in my experience, mind-numbing in its own way.
And if you're not happy with the Wikipedia coverage, there's the article's "Talk" page, which discusses issues and conflicts amongst editors, at length. At the time I'd checked, the article ran about 18 screens (on my A4 e-ink tablet), only half of which were the actual article, the remainder being references and other Wikipedia "furniture". The Talk page ran 38 screens, which is to say, twice the length of the article and four times the length of the actual text, such that virtually all major conflicts and concerns were voiced there. And of course there's edit history so the reader can see what's changed, when, and by whom.
I'd really like to see media organisations adopt a Wikipedia-like format for long, complex, and evolving stories such that it's easy to turn to such a page and get the best, concise, current state of understanding, again with sources and discussion if wanted.
Most media organisations, even those which are now fully digital, seem still to embrace the notion of a static printed product, and haven't fully embraced the capabilities of digital production, dissemination, change-control, and disclosure. It's ... disappointing.
But we do have Wikipedia, and I'd strongly suggest using it.
(A more permissive edit capability on HN, and for that matter, Diaspora*, would also be nifty. Perhaps an earned privilege, probably with strong penalties for abuse, as in "you lose privs". But SRSLY...)
I quite lite The Economist, but the cost has been increasing quite significantly. It's now 429 CAD/yr for a print subscription. I don't have time to read every issue, so it's getting difficult to justify renewing.
> Most news is negative, useless and have no material impact on your life.
About 15 years ago I heard the concept of the information-action ratio[1] and it totally changed the way I consumed news. As you note, most things in the news are irrelevant to me in the sense that I can’t take any meaningful action based on them.
I still read some news—and pay for $1/week subscriptions to multiple newspapers, which they have so far let me renew indefinitely if I threaten to cancel every six months—but I spend much less time following national and global news than I used to.
> State of Hawai'i, which is most authoritarian state, required vaccines or testing before flying in
So your bar for "authoritarian state" is not wanting people with a highly infectious, airborne disease to vacation on a remote island where every single hospital was overcapacity?
You understand that there were no ICU beds available, emergency services were overwhelmed, nurses and doctors were working perpetual overtime with insufficient resources, etc, right?
"Take a test to show you don't have covid before flying to an island with zero capacity to handle more sick people" seems like an incredibly basic, common-sense measure.
I can't read OP's comment anymore as it has been flagged, but in response to your comment alone: the question isn't whether it's a good idea for someone to travel to Hawaii while positive for Covid in the early days of the pandemic, it's whether the state has the legal authority to halt the liberty of interstate travel[0].
If your answer is that emergency situations warrant such "basic, common-sense" restrictions, then my rebuttal is that a) governments will manufacture as many emergency situations as needed, and b) what is basic and common-sense to one may not be to another and in either case, that ratchet will only go one way; in the direction of authoritarianism.
[0]: This liberty has most recently been under controversy again in the context of states wanting to ban travel to other states for the purposes of obtaining an abortion.
There's also the Economist as I've noted many times, which has a three-tier support: subscriptions, ads, and bespoke consulting through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
That not only provides multiple funding legs, but also strongly incentivises robust journalism as the publication is effectively an advertisement for the EIU's reports (many of which contribute to substantive reports in print).
I'm aware that some people find the news as it exists largely useless. I'm going to suggest that this is in fact a symptom of the larger problem I'm referencing.
And that news can be useful, even vital at times. And performs a critical role in a democratic polity. One which is increasingly not being performed, most especially at the local and regional level.
And that the proposals I'm making in TFA might be worth discussion in that light.
The closest you've come to a solution is to pay for it with taxes. Is there an example of this working in the wild? Why do you think this is the best solution? Why is the status quo a problem that needs your solution in the first place?
Governments exist, amongst other roles, to provide for the common weal, that is, sources of general improvement, which markets and other mechanisms cannot provide. Generally, this is achieved through spending and taxation[1], legislation and regulation, and in some cases specific executive roles. Most functions of government, passage of laws, operation of courts, defence, social welfare, backstop insurance,[2] and public goods and services such as schools, roads, police, fire, ports, and often services including hospitals, sewerage, water, electricity, postal services, and occasionally communications and media.
There are of course many instances of media organisations directly funded through governments, most especially in broadcasting: the BBC, ABC (Australia), CBC, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandfunk, and more, partial list here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41262025>.
Print media has more often been at least nominally privately-held, but often with major indirect public support. In the US that takes the form of discounted postal rates, legal notices, tax breaks, and direct advertising expenditures by governments. See:
Many of those subsidies have decreased, been eliminated, or no longer apply (e.g., postal discounts given Internet-based distribution) in today's world, and along with other business challenges have made commercial newspaper (or online news-media) operation all the more challenging.
A key challenge is that information is a public good, in the economic sense:
- It is (mostly) nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. That is, one person's consumption doesn't preclude others doing so (unlike, say, food or land), and it's difficult (though not impossible) to restrict access.
- Marginal costs of production, that is, the additional cost for an additional unit produced or consumed, is near nil. This has implications on how market prices fall, which is (absent other manipulation) also near nil.
- News and information have high positive externalities. That is, there are benefits to consumption which the producer cannot readily capture through market mechanisms.
A lot of this boils down to "there's no easy way to erect tollbooths on the consumption or distribution of information, and high costs in the form of deadweight losses (people excluded from access) from doing so."
But there are at least two remaining tollbooths:
- The ISP, with whom the reader has an existing financial relationship.
- Tax authorities: local (city/county), state, and national.
Each of these can charge audiences, and pay publishers, for media accessed online. My proposal is that payments be relatively nominal (on the order of $100 to $400/year for a household), and be made with minimal prejudice to qualifying publishers and authors. (Some independent arbitrator of which publishers qualify, and a mechanism, perhaps itself market based, for payment rates based on media category would probably be part of such a scheme.) Indirect supports analogous to postal-rate subsidies, legal notices, and direct government advertising might also apply.
A tax / universal content fee approach directly addresses the many issues...
Interesting use of the word weal, which apparently here is used in the sense of "well-being" rather than the other meaning of "a nasty purple wound":
> Governments exist, amongst other roles, to provide for the common weal,
Yes, but governments also exist - looking at governments in general, around the world - to further the interests of officials and their families, and provide them with money, status, disproportionate rights, and ideologically agreeable laws. And then there are organisations, which may be related to governments or effectively similar to governments or agents of governments, with a mission or interest in distorting news so that the money, status, etc., gets delivered.
So in theory, under good governance, that wouldn't happen. Additionally, the government would be all-knowing with a good grip on salience, so it wouldn't do anything biased, even by accident. And then we might as well have news distributed by a central ministry of information, which would reliably arbitrate the truth in a good way.
Since actual governments are at best kinda corrupt and somewhat stupid, it would be better for taxpayers to fund a diversity of editorially independent news media sources, right?
But that's kind of passing the buck to the grass roots. In theory, the natural power of the grass roots can cause information to be critiqued and filtered by by many independent and informed individuals so that a consensus on the facts of what is actually going on bubbles to the top. In reality, it's social media, and its accuracy depends on the power of good moderation and a good culture, which, like good governance, is brought into being and sustained by voodoo.
I think the answer is: if you've found a good, trustworthy source of information, whether a public broadcaster, a commercial media entity, or a non-commercial forum, treasure it while it lasts, and by all means bring more of these into being. Except I don't think anybody knows what those means are and it seems to happen more or less by accident. Something about open society.
> weal: "well-being," Old English wela "wealth," in late Old English also "welfare, well-being," from West Germanic *welon-, from PIE root *wel- (2) "to wish, will"
Since actual governments are at best kinda corrupt and somewhat stupid, it would be better for taxpayers to fund a diversity of editorially independent news media sources, right?
But of course. And there's nothing in public funding of media that says that multiple media sources cannot be funded.
As for the rest of your ... comment: all human institutions tend toward corruption. Government, Church, Business, Family, Academy. We recognise this, are aware of it, fight it, accept what we must, and try to pit the various factions against one another in a a balance of power. Multiple sources, as you say.
The issue with present media isn't the lack of many sources, it's the financial investments required for them to be both effective and sustaining. Which as my earlier comment (and many others on that topic) makes clear simply will not and cannot happen in a pure-play market approach. And for the most part never has.
I think there are three parts to your argument: 1) status quo is bad 2) you can design and centrally direct a better alternative and 3) it should be funded through taxation.
Whether we need 3 depends on 1 and 2. Hell, if 1 is bad enough and 2 is good enough, it could justify anything, including conscription to a literal media war. But even assuming I grant you 1 is true, nothing in TFA or your comments convinces me that 2 is true.
Most examples of state and media unification I can think of are not free, not useful except as explicit propaganda arms.
Several people have responded in ways that suggest I'm talking about publicly funding a single news source. That's not at all what I'm suggesting.
Rather, it's creating a public fund for numerous news and informational sources. How many, what qualifications they should have, and how they are individually compensated is a further element of this discussion, but all of that's secondary to the point that what I'm calling for is not a single unitary Ministry of News, but for a many entities, preferably with multiple funding streams whether governmental (at local / regional / state / federal levels), ISP / connectivity provider fees, or other indirect funding sources (subscriptions, memberships, sponsorships, foundations, philanthropy, advertising, legal notices, distribution and/or production subsidies).
> many entities, preferably with multiple funding streams whether governmental (at local / regional / state / federal levels), ISP / connectivity provider fees, or other indirect funding sources (subscriptions, memberships, sponsorships, foundations, philanthropy, advertising, legal notices, distribution and/or production subsidies).
This is broad enough to include every funding source, and you're back to describing the status quo. All of these funding sources are available currently, and they're evidently not enough. The thesis just morphs from "why won't people pay for news?" to "why won't people politically organize to create quasi-public well funded media apparatuses?"
The difference is a funding floor in the form of a diversified, universally-applied funding basis, in the form of taxes (at multiple governmental levels) and/or an ISP-implemented media fee. Media and journalism generally presently lack this, and are suffering badly for it.
The reframing question is fair, but asking why people won't pay directly for subscriptions under the present model remains a useful excercise, and is what I've attempted here.
In TFA you say it should be funded "on a progressive basis", how do you suggest this be implemented? Most funding sources you suggest cannot discriminate based on user income; ISP fees, subscriptions, advertising... none of these can be applied progressively. You're really back down to more income taxation.
To a first approximation, varying fee by average neigbbourhood income might accomplish much of this. An assessment baked into income taxes (state or federal) could of course accomplish this directly.
Offering different pricing tiers is another option, with a "basic" package that includes most sources, and one or more premium tiers which includes either greater availablity, or more immediate / current access to, entertainment and sport content, for example.
Basic informational content, including news and cultural lore (classic books, movies, music, etc.) would be in the basic tier.
> news and cultural lore (classic books, movies, music, etc.)
Is the aim to recreate a state directed facsimile of the entire media ecosystem? All of this seems totally redundant to the market offerings, just now with bureaucratic overhead and the removal of personal choice, but it's tax funded so it's somehow better?
It'd be simpler just to collect progressive taxes and give cash to the poor, who can pay for news and media (or food) according to their own preferences.
Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free.
Plus I think over the decades, broadcast news morphed into a form of entertainment. And seems well over half the news I have access to is about Sports, Hollywood and who is having sex, which I do not care about.
> Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free.
I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling? Even setting aside concerns about the quality of the product, news subscriptions are priced way too high given the amount of competition for those dollars. Then they'll monitor everything you do and sell your information to the highest bidder. Then when you realize it's not worth it, they'll put you through hell and back to cancel.
Oh, I'm old enough to remember the days when we were all subscribing to the local newspaper. I'm still thinking about subscribing to our local paper, but last time I checked it was just too expensive, taking into account that all the news I need will get to me by social media, TV, email, or text message.
My local paper is about 9% local crime stories, 1% local politics stories, and 90% AP story reprints. For that, they want $10/mo for the online product or $20/mo for a 4x a week delivery of a dead trees product.
AP will give me 90% of that for free and unedited. The other 10% I can find through other channels or is of no interest to me.
> I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling?
uHH...yes?? Hello? We used to pay $1 every day to buy newsPAPERs? Remember? Does this stuff being on the internet suddenly makes journalism a free labor or something?
Did we? I grew up middle-class and no one I knew got actual newspapers. That was always a marker for me of someone being rich. We maybe got weekly/monthly news magazines, but that's an order of magnitude cheaper.
What years ? Even in the 80s and a good deal of the 90s, many people got and shared newspapers. They were everywhere. I remember them being 15, 25, 50 Cents through the years.
Definitely did. Maybe not in your area, but many people here used to spend their idle times reading newspapers. Restaurants have them ready on the tables for people to consume as they come. Now its been replaced by phones.
Newspapers was the only the way I could get any insights on the outer world. This was in 2000s and early 2010s. There were TVs but newspapers were the only method where I could stare at pictures from all over the world and read random people's opinion.
I only every bought like 2 newspapers regularly, canard enchainé (1.20 euros/per week) and monde diplomatique (5.40/per month). That comes around to 52 * 1.8 + 12 * 5.4 = 158.4 euros per year. So for half the price I get two newspapers with potentially different view on events. 325 euros per year sounds overpriced to me given that I like to hear multiple opinions from different publications. 325 to get access to 3-4 publications that only publishes weekly sounds good.
You can also look at other french journals like mediapart who do investigative journalism. Even they only charge 120 a year (https://abo.mediapart.fr).
Funny to see people publicly out themselves as too cheap to become informed.
The currency that is limited is not money, it is time. When news is presented digitally, it's just one more thing on your always-connected screen competing for your attention with every other website, app, video, etc. With a physical newspaper, you actually (most days) carve out the time to peruse it front page to back. Of course some days its a quick glance while other days you read every article. But the physical-ness of a newspaper somehow elevates it's priority and commands your time, in a way a digital version simply cannot.
>Funny to see people publicly out themselves as too cheap to become informed.
Not that, the only news I can find on-line is about National Items. I cannot find any information about what my City Council is doing, what is being built in the City. I can find only scrubbed items released by just the Council.
In the old days, the local news paper would investigate the local politicians and report if they are doing anything illegal. Now, we have no idea, so graft could be rampant in local politics and no one would know.
You used to be able to have them put real ink on real paper and deliver multiple pounds of it to your doorstep for less than they want to charge for the bits now. It's like in the 90s banks wanted you to pay extra to use the ATM. It saved them from having the office open and hiring tellers but they wanted to charge you for the "convenience" of using the machine.
Exactly, that's the thing people keep missing in these discussions. That $0.25 for your newsstand paper didn't pay for the costs of paying reporters and journalists; it really only paid for distribution and maybe printing costs (e.g., a lot of that quarter went to the local newsstand, not the newspaper). These days, distribution costs are pretty close to zero since they don't need printing presses, trucks to drive papers around, newsstands, and all the people to staff this machinery. They do need IT personnel and some servers, but the per-viewer cost there is much less. Newspapers got the bulk of their funding from advertising back then, so readers' expectations haven't really changed that much, the newspapers have simply gotten much worse at funding themselves with ads.
But it's a good point. Classified ads were purchased by individuals or small companies usually. Now, the people things did with those, they do for free, or use some other paid service that's not affiliated with a news organization. Instead of paying for an ad in the "personals", people use dating apps (either for free, or they pay for a premium membership to get extra benefits). Instead of paying for a classified ad to sell their old car or appliance, they post it for free on Ebay or Craigslist or FB Marketplace, and in most cases pay a commission when they receive payment through the site. So basically, other services took this revenue stream away from the newspapers.
The real death of the news was that with the internet, these sleepy old papers suddenly had competition from around the world. No longer was it an essential regional monopoly or cartel of a couple news orgs being the source of truth for a given region. Now that they no longer have their moat, what do you know, old establishment folded to things people would rather spend their attention on now that they actually have the choice to do so.
True, but there's more: as I pointed out in my sister comment here, newspapers used to pull in money from classified ads too, but the internet made those completely obsolete. Basically, pre-internet, the only way to communicate with other people (other than directly or with a phone) was through TV, radio, or newspapers. Newspapers were by far the cheapest option, and most accessible to regular people (i.e., the classifieds). The internet replaced that: now people can communicate with others through the internet and various websites and other digital services.
It wasn't just about "the truth", it was about how people could participate in mass communications: the newspapers had a lock on one of the main ways to do this. The internet gave us a new communications medium.
Many newspapers gave away most of the value in their advertising power to Google and Facebook, for free, because they just didn't understand how internet advertising was going to work.
Now they've decided to blame and shame their own readers rather than actually try to compete against other media for people's dollars.
This is so true. I'd anonymously pump 50 cents into those paywalls on a daily basis if that were a way to gain access to an article, but the only online option any newspaper or magazine I know of provides is an auto-renewing subscription of $5-10 a month, with the deal being a bit better if you go annual. Problem is, there are like 6,000 newspapers and magazines in the country whose articles I might stumble upon and like to read. No, I'm not subscribing to the Akron Times, the San Diego Tribune, and the Boston Herald just because someone linked me an article from each today.
Many publications have tried the 50c for an article approach, and it just isn't worth it. Those one-off purchases at best make for a single digit percentage of revenue.
What could possibly work is mega syndication, where you pay a monthly subscription and get access to a large amount of newspapers, á la Spotify or YouTube. But for that to happen, newspapers need to change their attitude and start seeing themselves not as arbiters of truth, but producers of news as a commodity. Then you could even have "enemy" newspapers on the same subscription. Just as you have rock, classical and rap on the same subscription.
The question is, does the population actually want news or do they want to read something that confirms their world view and snugly fits with their chosen political tribe?
That's pretty close to what I'm suggesting, and a superbundling / megasyndication is one possible shape (or at least interim waypoint) to getting there.
The term I've used in the past is "universal content syndication".
Depends what it is; some of the print newspapers in the UK have moved to online subscription. It worked for the 'premium' ones with longform articles, it has not worked for the 'red top' newspapers, and they've gone back to ad-supported models and have enormously declined in quality of journalism.
I don't know how you find agreement on what our taxes have to pay for, given how polarized it all is now. I'd much rather a system where my browser anonymously pays a nickel or something to read what I want.
We've had three decades of micropayments proposals, none have worked.[1] Traditionally, publishers have strongly trended toward aggregated rather than disaggregated payment models: you pay for a full issue of a publication at the newsstand, you pay for a year-long subscription of a print publication. Or these days of online publications and streaming services, should you choose to do so.
Superbundling (e.g., a single fee providing universal access), a universal content tax, and/or a fee assessed by ISPs (if at all possible indexed to typical household wealth within an area) strike me as far more tractable options.
Among the elements of a tax-based system is that there are in fact multiple taxing jurisdictions, and access might be spread amongst them, and through multiple mechanisms. Public libraries already exhibit some of this, with funding being provided at the local (city/county), state, and federal levels, as well as other aggregations such as regional library coalitions, academic institutions and districts (particularly community and state postsecondary institutions), and others.[2] There's also the option of indirect support, which is what mechanisms such as mandatory legal notices entailed: a jurisdiction could require public posting of various sorts (fictitious names, legal settlements and actions, etc.) which effectively require private parties to pay for the upkeep of a newspaper. Similarly, discount "book rate" postage was a distribution subsidy offered to publishers of not only books but newspapers and magazines within the U.S. That's less an issue given the Internet, but the spirit of that idea might be adopted.
The idea of local papers which can rely on some level of multi-jurisdictional tax funding, perhaps some charitable or foundational support, advertising, subscriptions, obligatory notices, bespoke research, and other funding sources would give multiple independent funding channels which would be difficult to choke off entirely. That seems far healthier than the present system.
________________________________
Notes:
1. My own argument, and numerous citations to both pro and con views, is "Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not)" <https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004820/https://old.reddi...>, based on a six-year-old proposal from David Brin which has gone ... precisely nowhere.
2. Yes, I'm aware of certain issues concerning library texts in recent years within the U.S. I'd suggest that the fact that those debates are ongoing rather than settled either way means that overt control isn't completely straightforward.
There should be an intermediate syndicate that charges me micropayments for every article I choose to read, then charges one lump sum to my credit card at the end of the month. And also remits payment to each newspaper or Website.
Why not simply an all-you-can-eat time-based payment (weekly, monthly, annually), distributed on the basis of the sources you've read, preferably with some true-cost-of-production adjustment (e.g., algorithmic or AI hash doesn't get compensated on the same basis as true shoe-leather / long-distance-travel journalism).
You fill a bucket. It's drained, based on what you read/view/listen. Or otherwise equitably shared based on some global allocation basis if access nothing --- you're still benefiting by the positive externality of the informed polity which journalism creates --- if you read nothing.
This ensures a stable funding basis, you have a predictable cost basis, you can direct the allocation based on your own access patterns, the common weal benefits even if you don't utilise the resource.
Note that much of this is the same as an ad-funded media, excepting that you can't direct spending, the allocations are far less public-benefit oriented, and the costs per household are far higher: roughly $700 per person for advanced countries (North America, Europe, Japan, Australia/NZ), based on a $700 billion spend and roughly 1 billion population. What we have now costs an immense amount and is failing media and journalism badly.
I'd made this point a bit over a year ago with regards to Hacker News, based on my own work scraping a full history of Front Page views from the "past" archive.
Note that there are only 30 stories which make the front page per day, total submissions run somewhat higher, typically a bit over 100, and about 400,000 per year per research by Whaly.[1]
As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the front page.
Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149.
Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.
Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources.
Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day.
Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required.
Is grounded still around? Because that's what they offered.
For me I find skipping the daily hystronic news cycle is better for my health. Anything of significant enough import would get to me via social channels, at which point I can go find enough sources about a subject to get a proper nuanced view
It doesn't even need to be everything. to be honest I'm not really interested in paying for current events from any outlet, as I am simply not a news junkie, but if I could get some kinda combo deal for the publications that are frequent fliers in Sunday Longreads I would go for it.
In the olden days papers would target people like me who only occasionally read news with good headlines on the front and a low price for that day's print run. Now they are asking for a subscription (which is too much to pay for a single article) and acting like the archival value add is worth it to me (it isnt).
I am astounded that the conclusion the writer comes to is.. socialize the news.
Clearly people won’t pay for news because it’s flawed, the product stinks, and the information is biased. So here’s a great idea, let’s steal from everyone via taxes and force them to pay for it! Then it will be good somehow.
I don't know other countries but Polskie Radio and TVP was turned into propaganda machine of who was ruling at the time with News starting with "thanks to the XXX and despite YYY saying it was not possible/stealing/selling to the Germans". It is a reason I'm not watching TV anymore.
I'll nibble. A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from. News is required to be dramatic and sensationalist because that's what attracts attention and gets you those advertising dollar. Certain topics are off limits, because of those advertising dollars.
It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it might solve some.
> A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from.
The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather there not be an official merger of the government and media that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty picture of the government.
The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as the alternative.
The BBC has a sorta-kinda-taxpayer-funded model and manages to attract criticism from all sides, which is generally taken as a compliment to its neutrality.
> Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town for more than 15 years, according to a new report.
"not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I thought that was what police were supposed to do.
Personal biases abound in publicly funded news orgs, just as in private. But there are models where editorial independence is maintained .. including in Australia and the UK.
> After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone.
In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. C-Span is just limited to its cut from cable subscriptions but even that has made it far less sensationalist. C-Span isn't entertainment, it's pure news.
> In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks.
To further the analogy, everyone's pooling money in the same bank account, but there's still someone in charge of signing the checks. That someone is as capable of anybody else of holding biases, which has the strong potential to be reflected in the media program that the money is funding.
Not sure I agree. NPR, a nonprofit, has followed Fox News, NYT, MSNBC, etc down the biased, slanted drain hole. I listened to NPR from my childhood until a few years ago before I, sadly, had to call it quits.
It's a multifacted problem, so you're still going to have the attention problem. NPR is primarily user funded, so if your news is boring (as non-biased, non-slanted tends to be thankfully) you're going to lose out to the more..."exciting" sources.
I don't see how it really matters. A bigger issue is that some days there is just going to be nothing to report if you want "real" news.
"Today nothing happened, the end" would not work. So you would have to lower your standards for that day. On that day you would conflate what happened with entertainment and low and behold that day nothing actually happened is more popular than reality.
Loop this process over and over and we get what we have now.
I suspect we end up at the point we are at now no matter what the initial starting conditions or how you design the system.
"News" is a form of entertainment and to pretend it is not seems completely delusional to me.
I think it is like asking how do you get people to watch a movie of a professor giving a statistics lecture. You have to publicly fund it because no one is going to really watch or pay for that movie.
Australia's taxpayer-funded news [0], while maybe not as bad as some commercial news sites, is still terrible. Clickbait headlines, lack of editing, lets-just-repeat-a-bunch-of-tweets-and-call-it-an-article etc.
Last year I paid for a subscription to one of the independent sources of news here [1], but haven't made use of it because, honestly, news is pointless. I find it mostly makes me upset about things that are completely out of my control. It doesn't change my behaviour in any positive way.
I did consider continuing my subscription, just because "independent journalism" is a societal good, even if I don't consume it. But then it is in direct competition with other charities that I could donate to.
I don't know, Uri Berliner's critique of NPR was pretty spot-on, at least from n=1 of this former longtime listener. I found it increasingly difficult to stomach the lopsided coverage that no longer stuck to just the facts, but rather what to think and how to feel about them.
I'd be interested in what if any media sources you find to be unbiased, and, more importantly, why they are that way (as in causally, not as in descriptive characteristics).
The following would address specifically how (or if) journalistic business / financing models need reform.
So you're conceding that NPR and BBC are biased? Or you just want to argue?
As for journalistic business / financing models: public financing will never be anything but a tool of the power structure (whether or not they happen to be in formal power at the moment).
Private financing sometimes works, but doesn't at the moment.
I don't want to argue, I'd like to know what you believe and why.
You're welcome to share or not.
What isn't a tool of the power structure? What of advertising (see the I.F. Stone interview I've posted elsewhere in this thread), or of philanthropy (take your pick of benefactors)?
I filled out a contact form some months ago asking how I, as an individual, can purchase an individual subscription. After some back and forth they coul only offer to connect me with their sales team. No thanks.
Provide a low friction subscribe and unsubscribe flow, and I will gladly pay for your product, Reuters.
Cost of sales is actually a huge issue for all kinds of products and services.
It costs a business half or more of all revenue simply to make a sale in many cases. High-friction subscription services and all the support involved is a large piece of this.
Many products and services suffer from the fact that they are too cheap to produce to make meaningful individual revenue recovery sensible.
Raise the question with your hometown or city. What would it take for Reuters to licence gratis access to all residents through a city-paid arrangement? That's one sales contact for Reuters, and thousands to millions of readers onboarded. Vastly more efficient than one-at-a-time relations.
This is nothing new and in fact is a feature of having a for-profit 24 hour news media industry that thrives on advertising revenue and flourishes under emaciated regulation.
the repeal of the fairness doctrine in the United States means your television radio and internet news feeds are free to outright fabricate stories with impunity. commercial news means the product is tailored to the consumer, not congruent with the facts.
Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure. You can still have private news agencies, they just cannot market or sell "snake oil" in the service of the dollar. Another alternative is turning all news into something akin to NPR, or having news "co-ops" that provide the service to their listeners for a fee.
Why do you see NPR as such a positive example of journalism? It seems to me that it's been skating on its previous good reputation for quite some time now.
Likely because NPR has yet to tread on one of their beliefs with biased reporting. It will happen eventually, the rate at which it's happening is accelerating, and when they realize it happens they'll feel the same outage we all did our first time. The umbrage, the "you were supposed to be unbiased" cry
I grew up on NPR. It was always on in the background. On the way to and from daycare, in the car on Sunday mornings on the way to the uu church, playing out of a small boom box on the back porch, or winding up the miles of a long road trip. Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Schickelie mix, etc, all were the background music to my childhood. When I entered adult life, I tried to continue listening, but leading to, during, and after the 2016 election, the biases became too base, too visible to ignore
My problem with NPR is that is the spirit of remaining unbiased, they allow both sides of the political spectrum to say their piece with little to no push back. Whichever side spews the best lines of BS wins regardless of the actual facts on the ground.
Can’t speak for all of NPR but what I listen to regularly pushes back on claims from both sides. My local affiliate had an especially critical interview with the state governor and the interviewer and governor agreed that they should do these hour long interviews more often.
NPR has been pushing back harder, and will label untruths as "lies" where earlier (circa 2015/16) it was very reluctant to do so. Many news organisations in the US tried very hard through the 2016 campaign cycle to normalise what was a very-far-from-normal. I've recently been going through some Brookings Institution podcasts from ~2012--2016, and the degree to which the hard-right shift was normalised at the time is telling.
NPR in particular avoided the word "lie" as late as 2017, see:
At some point, you the audience member has to be able to whittle down two sides of an argument and determine who "wins", rather than having some broadcaster decide for you.
This is...kind of an insane take on what NPR does and does not cover?
First, the insinuation that they make an effort to remain unbiased is kinda wild. As an NPR listener and donator, that isn't at all the impression I get. They seem to overwhelmingly cater their coverage and their slant towards people a lot like me. That's why I listen and why I pay and what paying customers actually expect (whether they are consciously aware of how they are supporting and consuming their own preferred bias in media is maybe 50/50 but whatever).
People conflate bias with increased criticism of one side vs. the other. But those would only be equivalent if there was some law of the universe dictating that both sides of an issue were consistently equally deserving of criticism.
I think this would be a desire for bothsidesism, the principle that (say) flat Earth theory and spherical Earth theory are both valid view points and should be given equal amounts of coverage.
Maybe so, but that doesn't matter all that much. All journalism has a point of view and its impossible to be completely unbiased...the most suspicious kind of media consumers are those that cannot recognize the bias within the media they consume.
NPR is undoubtedly a "leans left" shop in the same way Fox is undoubtedly "leans right".
Of course, even if we were talking about the WSJ or Economist or something...that's still biased. Being dead center between the current interpretation of left or right is still a kind of bias.
> All journalism has a point of view and its impossible to be completely unbiased...
So the alternative is to not even try? To double-down or triple-down on bias and shamelessly continue to self-label as journalism? To whine & cry about "the threat to democracy" while neglecting their duties as The Fourth Estate?
I think not.
The problem is simple: stop lowering the bar. Stop calling things journalism that don't qualify. If your pet barks, would you call it a cat?
No, the alternative is to be more honest about it. The whole debate about "objectivity" is because the previous definition of objectivity produced consistent bias. And by that I mean consistent huge bias.
Objectivity meant that journalist had to identify two sides and report on both equally - even if the acts in question were not equal in any objective way. If I obviously lied and you obviously did not, articles did not reflected that at all. What was called objectivity enabled and facilitated bad actors. Consistently.
Second issue was that just a selection of topics and selection of who will be allowed to express things itself creates bias. And the rules about that consistently disadvantaged certain groups and advantaged other groups.
I understand there's a bias. But review that Leher list and you'll realize that 95% of what is passed off as journalism violates too many of those rules. That is, it doesn't qualify to be called journalism.
As threats to democracy go, there's nothing worse than a self-proclaimed journalist (read: a hack) fronting like they're fulfilling their duties as a member of The Fourth Estate. Frankly, most of them don't know the difference between cause and correlation (which is an essential / foundational concept in truth and being objective), let alone what The Fourth Estate is (and why it matters).
The problem is, the publishing industry doesn't even realize it's wrong. It's blind to its own blind spot.
First of all, funnily, Lehrer rules do not define journalism. Not even historically, origins of journalism is not that.
And some of them in fact do cause own bias - they presume how the result should look like. Lehrer rules will facilitate both side journalism where you blame both sides equally regardless of facts on the ground. As I said, it is biased toward bad actors. And against those who says the truth.
Note how they contain nothing about real fact checking. They are super easy to "be followed" while being manipulative. Stuff like "I am just reporting on what X said" whereas X said unfounded accusation that is just getting traction because you refuse to fact check it.
So we're going to nitpick Lehrer while giving current (mainstream) media a free pass? I'm sorry, I don't wish to participate in such a distraction. And the irony only highlights how broken the current situation is.
Not even close. Fox has admitted in court that their programming is not journalism. NPR definitely swings left, don't get me wrong, but Fox is completely unhinged. Their own lawyers argued no reasonable person would beleive them. They're just not comparable in any rational sense.
This is the problem with moral equivalence in judging media bias. One side can slide slightly left and still be almost completely factual (if slightly illogical), while the right can be neither factual nor logical - but we are made to pretend that the biases are equal here.
As a general principle, and I know it's not a very wise thing to say, left-leaning sources are on a different dimension of factuality than right-leaning ones.
I think that also depends on the story. You saw far different reporting on Covid from the two sources. Some of the stuff coming out of the right was crazy but some ended up being the truth and the left leaning sources clearly had their marching orders dialed in and even cast things that were eventually proven true to be “lies” at the time.
Crazy that ended up true? And what “lies”? In the country where I was back then (Hungary), it was quite different, but that’s also because abuse there was and there is still no opposition. COVID was just simply mishandled, and full of corruption, just as usual.
Yeah NPR and Fox are the same degree of biased. It's just harder for people to tell that NPR is biased because its bias is aligned better with the liberal regimes of most western countries. If the regime in your country was right leaning, you'd see most media display that bias and NPR would be your go-to example of something unhinged and biased.
Most left leaning people can't even tell when they're watching something biased towards their beliefs because to them it's just like a fish swimming in water.
> NPR is undoubtedly a "leans left" shop in the same way Fox is undoubtedly "leans right".
Oh c'mon, it's ridiculous that I need to call out a false equivalence like that.
Fox News isn't even news; they've admitted in court that they're an entertainment program. NPR is... not even remotely that. Certainly NPR has a bias, but they at least do their best to tell the truth. Fox News makes a business out of lying for outrage engagement.
> Fox News isn't even news; they've admitted in court that they're an entertainment program.
The admission they made was about one show, the one that Tucker Carlson ran before his departure from Fox[0]. Taking that and eliding it to the rest of Fox News sounds either lazy or dishonest.
An NPR host said in 1995 that if millions of people who believed in the religious concept of "rapture" actually did evaporate from this earth, the world would be a better place. After public outrage, they issued an apology but continued their relationship with the host. Does that make them tacitly support such bigotry? Nobody sued NPR over this (perhaps if this happened today and not 30 years ago, somebody would have), but what would their defense have been? That people shouldn't take things said by a show host so literally?
I used to listen and donate to NPR, but no longer do, because I don't share your confidence that they do in fact "do their best to tell the truth". I might actually feel better about it if, like Fox, they came out and admitted that they are, at least in the year 2024, in many ways a nakedly partisan organization, instead of the taxpayer-funded neutral bringer of facts that they pretend to be.
I wouldn't say NPR "leans left", rather that they "lean establishment". NPR has no sympathy at all for socialists, third party candidates, most protest movements, etc. Republicans just have too much political diversity and churn in their base in the last few decades to be anywhere near as uniform and cohesive a bloc and so the establishment usually appears at least superficially Democrat-biased.
Note: Local NPR programs are a lot better than national programs, IMO. There are two available NPR stations in my area, and they're really not similar at all except for a small overlap in programming.
Perhaps not everyone will accept the judgment of Media Bias Fact Check, but I find their ratings mostly fair and based more on verifiably failed fact checks and the like than editorial opinion.
They rate NPR as having a left-center bias and high factual reporting. The bias is based on story selection rather than the reporting itself containing substantial bias.
They rate Fox News as having a right bias and mixed factual reporting. The bias based is on editorial positions and they note that news reports are generally accurate, but commentary often isn't.
If that seems unfair, consider that they rate MSNBC comparably to Fox with left bias and mixed factual reporting, though they do give it a slightly higher overall credibility rating.
> Is there no chance that instead of NPR all of a sudden being exposed as biased, it was your own biases that were exposed?
There is a fairly simple heuristic to determine if a media outlet has a partisan bias. Does their coverage disproportionately portray one party in a positive light and the other party in a negative light?
The US has two major political parties that are each supported by approximately the same number of people. It would be mighty shocking if it turned out that one of them was right about everything and the other was wrong about everything. So if that's the impression that a media outlet leaves you with, that is a biased media outlet.
This is different than their coverage of an individual story. For any given issue, one of the parties might legitimately be right and the other one wrong. But that's not going to be true for every issue in the same direction.
That statement is unintentionally factually accurate and clearly an attempt to make someone try to defend the despised enemy, which really proves my point. The Confederacy were obviously wrong on slavery but if they were right on something else then "Union media" would be the last place you'd find an objective account of it.
Republicans support a known liar, who lied and lies about almost everything. How could someone honest not portray them in a negative light? There is nothing redeemable about the whole Trump cult.
Politicians lying is so common it's a cliche. Trump does it in an unusual way, because they typically lie about what they're going to do and then you don't find out until after they're in office, whereas Trump will say inaccurate things you can contemporaneously validate.
He'll do things like call Kamala Harris the "border czar", which she never had as an official title, but she was actually tasked with handling some aspects of the migrant issue. So then it's not exactly accurate, but to write a story about it, now you're writing a story about immigration (which Trump wants) and explaining the issue by telling people that Harris really was tasked with doing something about it, with the implication that it's not solved. He's clearly doing it on purpose. It's one of the reasons the news media hates him so much. He's effectively manipulating them and they don't like it.
But then, for example, in the Trump interview with Elon Musk, Musk proposed a government efficiency commission and Trump was receptive to the idea. Which isn't a bad idea at all, but that was not the focus of any of the interview coverage I observed.
> He'll do things like call Kamala Harris the "border czar", which she never had as an official title
Trump's strategy (whether one exists or not) around this aside, heaps of people have been called the "X czar" by the media for decades. As you point out, it's a shorthand for someone in the presiding administration who is tasked with some singular objective. Rarely did their official title ever contain the word "czar".
The current media "fact check" circus around Harris never having been the border czar is yet another clearly identifiable example of a class of people who were so dismayed by Trump's presidency that they would go to any length, however distasteful, to prevent a second term.
Not really. I think the change from Diane Rehm to JJ Johnson and now the new “1A” host is precisely emblematic of the decline of NPR/APM (I do not care about the difference) in that era.
Agreed. I was a longtime listener since I had fond memories of my dad listening in the car growing up, but it’s borderline unlistenable now. Emblematic of the drastic change this generation in the aims of journalism, where everything in public life has become politicized, and the goal is no longer to inform and engage listeners, but to persuade and influence.
Yup. I used to listen to it while working summer jobs, something new every day to pass the time (not just politics either, Diane was almost a variety show in a sense, sometimes it’d be literature or authors or whatever too) and her retiring/her slot switching to 1A was really the catalyst for me to stop listening to npr altogether. I lasted a few months and realized it wasn’t going to get better and this was just the angle they wanted now.
I adore Terri Gross tho, I should put fresh air on my podcast app.
NPR does an excellent job of manufacturing a facade of being fair and disinterested, but in recent years, they've become more brazen about being a PR campaign for wealthy elites, their enterprises, and their politics, a la the Pareto principle. If you're against that, then NPR has been pretty intolerable for the past decade.
NPR member stations are on the whole decent, but the way NPR came out in force against Sanders showed both how out of touch and unabashedly unreasonable they could be when called to toe their betters' line. I'd been a regular supporter through the early Car Talk and Science Friday days, ending with their disgusting behavior during the primaries.
Pulling off making everyone look biased but you is quite a feat, and I'm impressed how many still consent rather than admit their emperor's indecency.
What annoys me the most about NPR is the relentless gaslighting. They act / speak as if they don't have an agenda (i.e., bias) and the rest of us are too stupid to see it. There's a smug "we didn't say X or Y" attitude but the problem is the questions they don't ask, the subtle ins and outs they pretend don't exist. Their news feels redacted to the point it looks like Swiss cheese.
I enjoy the speciality shows (e.g., Hidden Brain) but the sociopolitical current events on the local NYC and PHL stations is gringe-tastic too often.
Also lot of journalists. Though it is questionable are they part of elite. But they act like they are and follow same talking points. While not making much money.
Elites as defined by having an agenda, and perhaps a station to enact it from. Bureaucrats, politicians, academics, etc generally have different domains of influence and aren't all wealthy.
NPR are proud of their sponsors, and prouder yet of how very little all of the public's dollars make up of their revenue in comparison.
The Rasmussen poll on elites[0] has a nice working definition of "those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile" as well as a fascinating material difference in the beliefs of that 1% of the population as compared to the rest.
If I may editorialize, perhaps we can also posit that if someone does not meet these criteria but nevertheless shares the same opinions as the elite, then they are desiring to join the elite.
Unbiased news is literally impossible now that "alternative facts" are in the mainstream. Take climate change for example:
Party A: "As greenhouse gasses increase, so too does the temperature according to historical measurements. We should do something about this."
Party B: "There is no way to measure the global temperature, and anyone claiming to have done so is working for Party A. We shouldn't address this at all."
Whether or not you as a journalist, were to include a factoid about it being the hottest summer on record, you're now doing biased reporting. Sure, if you include the fact you're siding with Party A and saying the fact is wrong is siding with Party B. However, not talking about it all is still siding with Party B, since that's their end goal. Factually accurate, inaccurate, and ambiguous are therefore all a form of bias.
The trick it to be biased towards truth and humility. If they choose which party to align with based on considerations other than considering which party believes what that would be an excellent start.
For example, in this case a publication could run an article saying that the hottest summer on record just happened, and present cases on how big a problem it is and how much in the way of resources should be dedicated to solving it - including the case for the whole thing being a non-issue. That'd be pretty good journalism. They'd probably manage to upset both parties or make both of them happy if they did that IMO.
Neither of those are factually accurate statements; they pair a claim to fact in the first half with a policy proposal in the second half. "We should/should not do something about this" is not a statement of fact, it's a value proposition. So if a media outlet is consistently pushing the same value proposition (namely, that we should expend considerable effort to counteract climate change), then it's biased, regardless of the factual accuracy of what they report.
I think that's an overly simplistic reading. The rate them as leaning left with high factualness. While that's not perfect, calling that clear left leaning is likely to give the wrong impression.
> rate them as leaning left with high factualness.
that seems to be the trend with left leaning news sources. They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.
The right leaning news sources tend to tell a mix of truth and complete fabrications, while also refusing talk about truths inconvenient to the narrative they're telling so sure NPR is the clear winner in that sense, but the bar is set so low that it can't really be counted as a victory.
> They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.
It's not just the omissions though, it's the implications.
For example, they were covering the Republicans saying they want to do something about the immigrants and Fentanyl illegally coming over the border. NPR's coverage made a point of telling you that most of the Fentanyl comes over at marked border crossings rather than through the desert, strongly implying this was meant to be refuting some lie the Republicans were telling. But the clip they aired didn't have the Republicans claiming otherwise. They were plausibly talking about the desert in the context of the people crossing there. And installing a border fence there could arguably free up some customs resources to use to inspect more trucks. But they're so desperate for a "gotcha" that they make one up.
Most (not all) of the seized fentanyl is not being smuggled by immigrants coming over the border. The arguments Republicans make are that the migrants are exacerbating the situation by diverting customs resources and that those numbers could be skewed because there is equipment to detect drugs at ports of entry but not between border crossings, so the seizure rates could be higher at ports of entry out of proportion to the trafficking rates.
Obviously this is politics and people can disagree with their arguments, but this is one of the other favorite "don't lie but kind of do" games. The claim that detection rates could be higher at ports of entry isn't outrageous, there is some logic to it, but since by definition we don't know what the rate of undetected trafficking is in each location, there is "no evidence" for their claim. This is not equivalent to it being proven false, but that will often be implied.
Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the fentanyl problem.
To believe this, you have to assume that the reporting on fentanyl smuggling by the DEA and CBP and the fentanyl convictions data from the USSC that all point to US citizen being responsible for bringing in fentanyl in to the US is insufficient because "we don't know the undetected trafficking rate is in each location". It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.
> Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the fentanyl problem.
Again, they're making two parallel arguments. One is, some of the migrants have fentanyl (true; not established that the number is very large), but the number could be large and isn't known. The other is, customs is spread thin because of migrants and is not catching the smugglers as a result. In both cases they propose the same solution, i.e. stem the flow of migrants.
> It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.
The claim is presumably that they could be missing a lot because there are a lot of migrants and more than one of them could have brought fentanyl.
Not to be overly pedantic, but Ground lists them on average as "Lean Left", with that rating coming from two "Lean Left" and one "Center" rating from three 3rd party media bias rating orgs. Their factuality is also High, so while there may be editorial subjectivity in what they choose to publish, the stuff they do publish is generally high quality and truthful.
For some other examples, Pink News is listed as Left with Mixed factuality. Fox News holds Right and also Mixed.
--
There are nearly no reputable media outlets with no amount of bias at all. I certainly wouldn't stop consuming NPR for having a slight lean to the left.
in this episode we're going to investigate the relationship between consensual undocumented migrant men and underage boys who want to seem older, on this hour of the Latino story hour
I'm just wondering, is this a true episode that happened to you or are you being hyperbolic and fabricating this so-called experience, because frankly I don't think this story is based in reality, where I like to operate. Sources, if you have them though.
I'm sure GP is being facetious, though perhaps with an allusion to stories like "How climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers"[0]. It's neither from NPR nor about Latinos as in GP's (unlikely to be real) example, but nevertheless emblematic of what one may come across frequently in left-leaning media sources: combine as many subject matters as possible that are currently in vogue in the progressive thought landscape, without much relevance to the broader public.
NPR does a fabulous job not sounding like CNN or Fox News with their breathlessness. Sure like 1 in 100 stories from them would be meh, but I use them and APNews as my primary source and it doesn’t feel like a panic attack when I go to their pages as compared to most mainstream news.
They lack the alarmism of CNN, but the way that outlets like NPR were so comfortable to tow obvious political lines during the pandemic (such as even entertaining the possibility of a “lab leak” hypothesis, painting it to be insanely conspiratorial and/or racist, despite the Wuhan lab being supported by NIH grants) — the most clear and dangerous version of manufactured consent I’ve seen in American media this generation.
Most media outlets (including NPR) begrudgingly accepted this as a strong likelihood for the initial source of the virus only a year or two later, once they had political approval.
Journalists and editors in these larger institutions no longer have any courage to actually be a “fourth estate” or think independently of government.
They didn't write that it was likely, just that NPR willingly participated in the Establishment campaign to suppress and distort the lab leak hypothesis.
My understanding is that expert opinion in recent months have been converging towards the lab leak theory. Consider this opinion piece[0], which points out some notable differences between the previous outbreaks of coronaviruses that had natural origins to Covid.
I'm not sure whether GP really wants to believe that Covid has man-made origins like you claim, but I think by now with all the evidence that has been released into the behind-the-scenes workings of Dr. Fauci et al[1] we can all agree that in the early days, a consensus was deliberately manufactured away from the lab leak theory. Moreover, there is clear public interest in discovering the true origin as well as preventing this type of politicization of the scientific process in the future.
I think people forget that initially the lab leak was being pushed -hard- by the far right with zero evidence other than speculation and rather than stir up the masses lots of new orgs abstained from it with no clear evidence. After more data came out and more analysis then it became much more credible theory with experts having looked over it rather than the bot armies on twitter/Facebook/etc.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was a giant nothing-burger and no one had any real information about it before the election. It took time to responsibly analyze the contents are accurately report on it, and none of that happened until well after the election. Reporting on it at all before the facts were available would have clearly been inflammatory for no good reason.
> no one had any real information about it before the election
The information was out there and the 50+ "former intelligence experts" have admitted that they had no idea what they were talking about, and what's more, they're still proud of it.
The media just didn't do their jobs. A real reporter would have said, "This is fishy. I wonder what the facts are." A real reporter would have called the Post and said, "Show me what you've got."
As someone who grew up quite a while ago with the BBC, there's some serious delusion going on here about the historical and present day nature of that institution.
Whether or not it is true that the BBC has (or has not) been "captured by wokeness", the objections to this tend to hinge on its reputation for objectivity and dispassion in the past.
But the BBC has never been objective or dispassionate. It has been a steadfast supporter of the status quo. If it didn't treat socialism and communism with the idiocy that modern day Fox News does, it certainly offered them no serious coverage outside of a few intellectual "talk shows", even then only as a curiosity set against "what we all know is the truth".
The fact that someone might be upset that the BBC or other similar organizations choose not to give "full coverage" to conservatism should not obscure that the same organizations have never provided much to any "radical" cultural or political phenomenon.
The cherry-picking was always real, and it is generally only Americans who live under the ridiculous idea that there can be "objective" journalism. There isn't, and there never has been, and there never will be (in the context of broadcast or daily media, anyway).
"It was never objective" is similar to Scientific American apologists who say "science was always political."
> It has been a steadfast supporter of the status quo
Yes, but at one time, "status quo" didn't mean one party. It meant two, either of which might happen to be in power. You're correct that they didn't give much coverage to groups outside of that "mainstream."
> the ridiculous idea that there can be "objective" journalism.
There are degrees of seriousness in the approach to that ideal. You can go into the New York Times archives for the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to see what it looked like when it was taken seriously.
> Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure.
I think it would be very difficult to set rigor (truth?) standards. There's a long history of truths that directly conflict with the "facts" provided, especially those from governments, which could probably not be reported under such scrutiny. I'm also curious how lying by omissions, which is the biggest problem I perceive, would be handled.
What if we start prosecuting for knowingly spreading misinformation? It already works, but only in licensed areas like healthcare and legal advice (although I think we could do more on health advice side). We could make more areas like that.
And fines to be small, similar to copyrighted media content sharing -- those who did initial leak would get large fines, those who just re-shared -- slap on the hand.
Medical history, even recent, is full of cases where the accepted truth turned out to be false and those who spoke out against it to have the truth be known would have been persecuted by the believers in the incumbent truth.
My favorite example being germ theory [1]. Granted, he went over the top (claiming all infant mortality was from cadaverous particles) a bit like some who claim Covid was a lab-leak from a Chinese bio-weapon; if you just stop at the lab-leak part you have a decent claim, the bio-weapon is what tanks your argument.
But it's not like doctors started washing their hands despite his evidence of mortality dropping from 18% to 2%.
Meh. Based on the way the CIA and the intelligence apparatus of the country reacted, they probably though it was a bioweapon bubonic plague level event. Of course, it wasn't, and it became quite apparent very fast, but it was an election year, so a lot of Democrats went on to ignore basic facts as misinformation.
Sorry but your agument is a perfect example of Asimov's "spherical earth fallacy" [1]:
> My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
I.e. there's no medical protocol that tells doctor to prescribe unproven "accepted truth", at least not in important areas. It's way different to tell someone to ingest dangerous chemical compounds that were not even designed for medical purposes.
Fox News paid $800 million for telling their lies about the 2020 election and the Newsmax trial for the same starts next month. Alex Jones is going through bankruptcy. When it gets egregious enough, there are consequences.
Fox News only had to pay Dominion because Dominion lost customers. I think the proposed fines are for the societal harm of deceptive "news," not just provable financial harm.
>Alex Jones is going through bankruptcy. When it gets egregious enough, there are consequences.
Yeah, that was really egregious and caused real harm to a lot of people. But again, that lawsuit only succeeded because a group of victims claimed harm. I imagine the previous poster intended for the "deceptive news" laws to be like pollution laws, where prosecutors just need to prove the act but don't need victims.
Don't I know this. I've been stuck around a TV with fox news for 2 weeks now(even had the great displeasure of being present the whole time while the former guy gave a presser yesterday), and it's like watching bizzaro world where they try to blatantly push your emotional buttons, it is exhausting, deeply sad, and yet funny at the same time because to me, it exposed the utter inanity of running a superpower nation like this. There is no way a major party should find themselves in thrall to a single liar, yet here we are.
"Knowingly" is the tricky part. I could only see this as allowing a government approved set of authorities to push mis/dis/mal-information while suppressing any opposition: "Government/Coorporation/Industry says this is true, so it is all that can be reported, without question.", as has happened again and again within the big 6 [1]. How could opposition of the accepted be reported?
I think it would advance the death of the freedom of the press [2], disallowing truths that go agains the governing bodies, more than anything.
> What if we start prosecuting for knowingly spreading misinformation?
What’s concerning about this approach is who gets to determine what is and is not misinformation. Having that power is a great way to silence those who don’t agree with you.
Good idea, I nominate you to decide what is truth and what are lies in this world, and severely punish those who spread harmful ideas.
But instead of fining them, I think it would be more productive as a punishment to send these people to into rehabilitation camps in more remote regions of the country, where they could pay their fine by working community service for a few years.
I always propose the: “Technically, your honor…” standard. If you make a commercial statement and in court your defense is “Technically, your honor, it means something completely different than what anybody hearing it would think and I spent a bunch of time in focus groups crafting the message to be deceptive”, then you lose.
It should be your duty to be intentionally honest and only accidentally confusing in proportion to your time and experience in crafting messages. A carefully curated message should be required to be entirely honest, a quick retort can be less rigorous (but still not intentionally deceptive; much harder to prove, but also less likely to be perfectly deceptive).
I'd especially point out Hamilton Holt's excellent, fact-filled, and highly readable Commercialism and Journalism (1909), 124 large-print pages. Yes, it's dated, but precisely for that reason it both pressages virtually all present discussion and gives an excellent and valuable view of how things stood and had evolved just as the phenomenon of advertising-supported media was emerging.
Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were explicitly partisan, often organs of various political parties, e.g., the Arizona Republican (GOP) or American Federationist (labour / AFL/CIO).
Emergence of a (nominally) unbiased, nonpartisan press largely followed publication of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (1922), and probably came to a fore during WWII, which in many ways was the high-water mark of American journalism as a near-universally-purchased service.
I.F. Stone's 1974? interview on public broadcasting's Day at Night is an excellent insight into the state of US media at that time. It had reached another high-water mark with the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters ultimately brought down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown since then:
Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere: Television and the News (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of the fundamental issues, particularly around audience development and narrative-fitting, remain:
I really do believe there should be negative repercussions for bullshitting. I would pay for a news source that fact checked anything said by a politician and stated it in the news article. And also, during interviews, called out obvious bullshittery to their face.
>And also, during interviews, called out obvious bullshittery to their face.
The problem here is that politicians simply won't do interviews with these journalists. I think we saw exactly this during the Trump administration. This idea would probably only work if all the journalists adopted this policy (prisoner's dilemma).
And even the times that Trump or his people did do interviews with actually combative people, did anyone remember or care? Did anything change? Did it cause anyone to re-evaluate their views? I remember multiple times people interviewing the then-president literally handed him transcripts of his own speeches that contradicted his denials about saying things and he just refused to acknowledge anything was wrong and kept going.
It's not to say there's not ways the media can be better, but people have this "why, if I was a journalist, I'd fix everything with this one weird trick" and that's just not how any of it actually works in reality.
>And even the times that Trump or his people did do interviews with actually combative people, did anyone remember or care? Did anything change? Did it cause anyone to re-evaluate their views?
Well, to be fair, Trump did lose his re-election campaign. It's impossible to say how much effect combative journalists had on this, but for whatever reasons, the American voters did turn out in higher numbers in 2020 and voted for Biden.
Sure, but in my mind, the onus is on the person claiming the single-digit number of interviews where someone was bold with Trump mattered, as opposed to 4 years of his policies causing people to dislike how he effected their life. I highly doubt "wait, but he just lied" is something someone realized years into him being a candidate with nearly 100% name recognition in the US. As you say, it ended up being about turnout, and I find it very unlikely that more people decided to vote because of a couple interviews with someone they likely already disagreed with.
If "news" was highly regulated then likely nobody would produce it. Everything would simply become "opinion" or discussion of topics. Honestly you already see that at all the host-personality shows on CNN/Fox/MSNBC, every hour starts with a monologue then 50 minutes of panel discussions.
Yes, because it's cheaper and easier and has a longer tail (the press conference may be 20 minutes, the discussion about it can last all day) and is likely more entertaining (because the host can inject some personality) - so if you added more regulation to the "news" side, it would tip the balance to "opinion"/entertainment even further.
It's ridiculous how much they want to charge for an article. Some won't even sell single articles and want a monthly or annual subscription to see everything they produce. I don't want to see everything. I'm not your sheeple. I can't afford to buy 5 or 20 annual subscriptions. I want to read articles from a variety of news sources.
I want to pay $20 for 10 articles and be debited for the ones I view. If that takes me 3 days or 3 years to view 10 articles, that's what I want. They will make more money selling articles at a reasonable price than they will selling annual subscriptions full of crap people don't want.
Right? I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75 and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days, though it was probably a huge waste of paper and water. Although the industry actually provided jobs back then.
If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5 or 10 times a month. But I guess capitalism says that they would rather have 1 person pay $100 a year than 2500 people pay fifty cents once a month.
The daily edition of the New York Times now runs $2 at a news stand, best I can make out.[1]
Sunday costs $5 in NYC, $6 elsewhere.
Note that the print Sunday edition was (and is) massively underwritten by advertising, which comprises the bulk of the issue, 60--90% by column inch or weight.
________________________________
Notes:
1. <https://www.travelizta.com/how-much-is-a-copy-of-the-new-yor...> isn't a particularly impressive source, but it's the best I can find. I cannot find a newsstand price for the Times anywhere on the paper's actual website. Which is another gripe I've got generally: for a commercial product, pricing data are exceedingly difficult to come by.
No it doesn't. He could subscribe to the online NY Times and get ALL the articles for every day (including Sundays) for less than the cost of printed Sundays alone. So what's the missing element? Taking a fun article to work on Monday?
"I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75 and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days..."
I do have fond memories of reading the Sunday Times all day, and for much of the next week. On that I'm in agreement.
I'll add another useful feature of both newspapers and more especially magazines. When you were done with the damned thing, you could pick it up and dispose of it ... trash, recycling, reuse as fishwrap or firestarter, take your pick. Rather than leaving a litter of individual browser tabs which are painful to collect and discard (even using tools such as Tree Style Tabs), the format was an aggregation itself.
What was harder of course was to maintain an archive of items of interest. That's not a primary role of publishers however, and many news sites have paywalled their archives (this strikes me as ... shortsighted), broken links, or both, which should be familiar frustrations to many.
I'm not sure how OP is really responding to the questions of how to fund and provide access to news and journalistic content, however.
I don't buy the NYT, but the Sunday print edition of the local paper is not the same product as the Sunday print edition of the local paper back when people paid for news.
Back when people paid for news, the Sunday edition was three inches thick and weighed around 5 pounds. I know because I used to deliver them on my bike.
Sunday mornings sucked as a paperboy, but you really could spend all morning reading the thing.
I liked the news better in America before the Fairness Doctrine was revoked by an extreme right wing administration.
I also spent a huge chunk of my adulthood in Canada, and I never really minded the CBC, until the last ~10 or so years when (like most institutions and companies) they have lacked any sort of reasonable, competent or rational leadership and now they're combining staff layoffs and massive executive bonuses, which is the ridiculous reality of the world we live in.
For what its worth, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because - and full disclosure -- I've been working on a startup for news. (More on that below.)
But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably did pay for news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc.
The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it online and advertise against it?
That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators.
These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great! Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit.
There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news homepages -- because the links go to articles.
Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw the same number of ads, and they had value.
Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize. They cannot monetize if you don't click.
If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes the story -- you give the user little reason to click through. There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most newsworthy.
Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard. They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the shoeleather reporting, they just type.
--
As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people doing the reporting.
It's an interesting problem, but I would say that a single feed of the "latest" news isn't really what I want as a reader. I already have twitter for that. None of your writers are known to me so I'm not going to implicitly trust them more than John Doe on Twitter.
I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding. Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with... but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if they want what everyone else is reading
You're actually addressing a few points I'd not covered in my piece, key being how people access news.
I actually do go to the homepages of several news organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+ at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story, largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I'll also listen to podcasts (largely not news-related, though some are included). I've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back markedly on radio as well.[1]
That said, my practice is probably not typical.
I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though that's not especially user-friendly. Adding in sections that are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples, though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at ProPublica and the WSJ (speaking to layout rather than content/editorial slant) are better than most.
It would be really interesting to find a publication which dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've found, but managing content on it is an absolute nightmare, and there's nothing about it which would make a regular subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't "pick it up and throw it away". I do append items of interest to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some benefits.
I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times, possibly also earlier at Vox.)
I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole / desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course: how are you (and they) getting paid?
What's success look like? Failure?
________________________________
Notes:
1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's The World much more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s or early aughts.
My co-founder and I are both former journalists; we met years ago at ABC News. Getting this right is personal to us -- there's a definite gap in between how important we think news is with how much it seems to be worth in the market -- a big problem considering how expensive it is to do correctly.
Our aspirational goal is to be THE place for news updates, regardless of what you're into. Before we started, I asked my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent? She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly through the headlines." We want to that, better.
It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of the things we learned pretty early on is that while people say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the street AND Gaza/Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between. It's a tall order.
We have local in many places, though its uneven across the country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons, we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.)
We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly know their beats like they do -- and they're already out there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are, and ask them too abide by an editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc.
Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or actually crack the subscription business model once and for all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist reading this, we'd love to chat - https://journalists.forth.news)
Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.
On local: speaking with a friend who finally ditched their own long-standing subscription to a clearly-walking-dead local paper, the one element most missed was coverage of local arts and culture events. Even a national publication might be able to address that with a few regional editions which focus on events in major cities. For, say, the NYT, covering LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington, and perhaps Houston or Dallas, might at least give a proxy of regional coverage, and I'm aware that at least some papers do offer a regionalised edition for at least some places.
Sounds as if you're doing more news aggregation than news production, which ... doesn't seem to get at the question of how to actually get local news produced in the first place. That's a long-standing challenge. From what I've read of news history local newspapers pretty much always did function as both a local challenge on national/international reporting (usually through wire services) with a gloss of local coverage and advertising. This also meant that by subscribing to the local paper, readers were getting national stories and features. Often stories would run in multiple papers nationally with small elements changed to fit or feature locations or features specific to a local paper's readership.
With Internet-based distribution, much of that's disintermediated, as you note.
Glancing over your homepage: what I'd like to see is an arrangement that groups similar topics together, rather than a random sequence of stories. See Postman's description of the contextless news wire (I think that's in Amusing Ourselves to Death).
And I've dropped you an email, check your spam folder ;-)
I think the author is in the right ballpark, but frames it in a way that makes me wonder if they're right for the wrong reason.
News has always been partisan and flawed. The internet just makes the flaws more obvious, because no single source gets nearly the same control over the narrative as pre-internet. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way about things, news will have this problem.
Which is also why no one will pay for it. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way, they'll happily give you that content for free. How can a subscription service compete with that?
The article does cite these reasons, but in a way that makes me think they see these as bugs in the system and not endemic to the newscycle. When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product.
> When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product.
Sometimes, even when you are paying for the product, you are the product. Nothing prevents companies from taking money from you and then making more money e.g. by selling your personal data.
Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics.
On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise).
On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all.
At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere).
One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated.
There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.
I have trouble believing any of these reasons. You don't pay for news because you can get it for free elsewhere. You don't have to be all high and mighty about it.
This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want.
I can vouch for H: The incessant upselling. I'd like to pay for the Economist, but last time I unsubscribed, they forced me to wait on phone hold for a half hour, then go through another half hour of verbal upselling spiel, like "have you considered changing to a biannual subscription?". Never again.
I'd pay for news, even bad ones. I see it like a donation to the Red Cross or something.
My experience and reasons for not paying anymore are similar. Used to pay for The Guardian for some time, but when they started pestering me about a subscription renewal the whole thing felt a lot less classy. Now it suddenly was about me and not news anymore.
Me too: never again. I would pay for anonymous vouchers or similar where I'm not identifiable to the newspaper, though.
> This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want.
> You don't pay for news because you can get it for free elsewhere.
There's also just too much news these days and most of it isn't important. It's saturated. Maybe if we cut down on the number of media outlets. You used to just buy 1-2 newspapers at most but the equivalent now is likely 5-10. And each 1 would be 2x as thick.
Allow me to offer my opinion without reading the article:
I can and do pay for news, I just dislike the bait and switch with modals/popovers that much.
Now that I can no longer block domains in my Google search results, I can't remove those paywalled sites from relevancy and it's hard to keep track of everyone who only lets you read the first paragraph and a half before sticking their hand out asking for $10.
ETA: I have now read the article and have no revisions to my statements.
most news is really just entertainment disguised as life-changing information. deep down everyone knows it. so, now it competes with all other forms of entertainment
BBC and CBC are already public agencies, as the author suggested as a solution. arguably, given who pays them, the party of the official opposition should appoint the heads of them both.
imo non-partisanship was the artifact of another time. in another life i wrote occasionally for establishment media and met many players, and i don't bother with any mainstream news anymore. these days i prefer to read the writing on the wall.
That doesn't seem like a solid strategy - for example, here in Australia the current opposition are the ones who did appoint the heads of our national broadcaster (when in Government) and were widely condemned for the political nature of the appointments (actually bypassing an independent selection board to make ideologically motivated appointments) and also for their political interference (or attempts at it) both while in Government and while in opposition (as they are currently).
Their attempts at political manipulation is arguably even stronger while in opposition, so if anything they would be even more likely to make politically and ideologically motivated appointments!
my argument is that media is the only real loyal opposition, and so being appointed for the term would have them do their actual job instead of the influence peddling they're reduced to now.
This is ignoring the question of "what is the value of news for most people?"
It is clearly of high value for people that can to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, most decisions people are making are not informed by the news. Such that any attempt to get people to pay for it will be difficult.
That's a good insight, and suggests another: for whom is the news of significant value?
What I've noticed both through my own experience and research of the history of journalism is that business news has, in general tended to be far more reliable then general-consumption news, if also strongly self-serving to the interests of business and fiance.
Amongst the best quality news sources that I find presently are the Economist and Financial Times, with Foreign Policy also standing high. The Wall Street Journal had a very strong (if of course pro-business) reputation when it was still owned by the Dow Jones corporation, somewhat less so of late. Newswires such as AP, Reuters, and AFP are also generally quite good. You can also find regional business news publications of high quality and relevance, especially as compared with their non-business local counterparts.
In debunking a century-plus old hoax (the "Banker's Manifesto") a few years back, one of the more amusing bits I'd found was that of all the claims it made, one which was more easily addressed was a mention-in-passing of the failures of several banks. It turns out that of all the things that a bank-centric publication is interested in, it's the solvency of financial institutions, and the bulk of any given issue addressed insolvencies and failures, of which those mentioned in the (bogus) manifesto made no appearance...
I suspect that a large reason for greater relevance and accuracy is that business news tends to be actionable to businesses, executives, and managers. I also suspect that misquotations and misrepresentations of interviews tend to get sharp responses. By contrast, the principle operating principle of a mass-market paper is to maximise circulation and eyeballs. At the worst of the Penny Papers this lead to outright hoaxes (e.g., the Great Moon Hoax: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax>). And of course, with large circulations it was also possible to steer public opinion (e.g., exploiting the explosion of the USS Maine to incite the Spanish-American war by Hearst and Pulitzer: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yellow_journa...>).
But I'd suggest that the population for whom quality, relevant news is of high interest is relatively small.
That last line is one I was aiming at, but I do not have any way to quantify it.
I used to want to try and make the news valuable to myself. I have yet to find a way to do that, though. Such that I am unlikely to want to pay for it anytime soon. Would be neat to consider ways I could start making the news of more personal value.
You could probably get a fair way to quantifying that by looking at premium news-publication subscription rates, and making allowances for domestic vs. international readership.
There's also the 15% subscribership rate amongst NPR listeners, which suggests to me a hard-core media consumer segment. That percentage has been steady for decades, and if anything has fallen somewhat as NPR's overall listenership has expanded.
The hard-core news segment is probably on the order of 1--5% of the population.
Circulation of WSJ and NYT, print and online, is roughly 3m and 7m respectively. That's from a total US adult population of ~300m, or about 1--2% of population for each. I suspect a fair bit of overlap in subscriptions.
How much of this is a matter of interest, willingness to pay, ability to pay, or ability to access news through other means/channels, I don't know.
You’re wrong to suggest the Journal is no longer owned by Dow Jones. Maybe you’re referring to the fact that until about 16 years ago Dow Jones was owned by the Bancroft family, then it was acquired by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch).
I think the quality has remained quite high, and the rather robust subscription numbers bear that out (millions of people paying $40/month is impressive). It helps that the WSJ news staff resisted the temptation to abandon objectivity as at NYT.
The FT and Economist are nice but FT newsroom is an order of magnitude smaller than WSJ and the Economist an order of magnitude smaller than that (if you’re subscriber who checks daily you’ll know this).
Of the three I’d keep WSJ if I had to choose. FT is very nice for an international perspective though. Economist for high level summary.
Good luck looking for data and ignoring news when you country and worse, the region where you live is being invaded by the neighbor and you need to make an informed decision to stay or to leave.
This is all kind of my point? There is some data in most newspapers that is of interest to folks and could be used. Sports scores, basic weather, fashion trends, etc. However, if that is actually something you are using to make a decision, you are almost certainly able to get the data in a more rapid and actionable way. You won't be waiting for it to show up in the general news.
Similarly, at a state level, you know they are the same. They have data feeds that are not released to the public.
Which brings us back to my point, what is there of value in the news for most people? I can think of very little personal value there.
Now, I can see great political and public value in making sure you have an informed population. Such that I am not claiming there is no value in it. Hard to show a direct bottom line value to individuals, though. And we are discussing why individuals won't pay.
You'd trust the news over a government evacuation order though? I certainly wouldn't. The news does a terrible job of covering war, especially now a days where it seems there are fewer embedded journalists actually on the front lines versus just covering a generals press conference dozens of miles away from any action.
I think it's because people don't find news through news sites anymore. They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and then want to read a single article. Then you're prompted with a paywall that requires you to dedicate yourself to a single news company (or have multiple companies) and pay them $4 to $40 / mo - usually on the cheap-but-then-expensive-in-6-months-when-you-forget model).
I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate subscription that covers all the major players *OR* if I could pay per-article from a centralized grab-bag.
I don't want to see an interesting topic and then need to go to the NYT to see their take on it. I just want to see an interesting topic and read that view of it - maybe read several views of it (and happily pay for each one).
> They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and then want to read a single article.
or HN :)
No, I won't pay a subscription for each random site that gets posted on here. I might pay a few cents, if it's a unified service as you say, but micropayments are 10 years away every year.
>I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate subscription that covers all the major players....
Isn't this what the Apple News+ service offers? I haven't used it, but for US $13 per month Apple says it offers content from over 400 publications. Of course it necessitates using one of the Apple OS platforms, and I've heard both good and bad about the overall design and presentation of the content, but it seems like this kind of service is akin to what you describe.
I'd think this kind of broad offering would appeal to readers more than a single-site subscription. The Apple cost of $13 per month sounds much better than, say, the NY Times cost of $25 every four weeks, but maybe the Apple access to publications is limited or has other problematic attributes.
It should, but like you said, Apple’s access is somewhat limited.
I don’t think that’s the main problem though. The main reason I unsubscribed is that Apple News+ still has ads and prompts to sign up for newsletters! It’s a usability issue; the newspaper equivalent of torrenting music, archive.is offers a far superior reading experience and just so happens to be free. The industry needs something like Spotify or Steam to fix it.
With print subscriptions, the publisher was one clear tollbooth, as unless subscribers paid for delivery, the paper wasn't delivered. That was a leaky model --- there were copies circulated at offices, people would bring and leave papers at cafes, they could be read at libraries or private clubs. But generally, a copy of the paper or magazine had to be bought.
The other tollbooth was the newsstand, where individual copies could be bought from either a manned or unmanned site.
With the Internet and Web, the notion of such tollbooths is largely eliminated. As I've suggested several times in this discussion, the two highly obvious tollbooths are either the ISP (with whom the reader has an existing relationship, though less so in the case of, say, public WiFi), or a taxing authority who could assess a payment on all residents of a region (on the basis that media and an informed public contribute to the common weal). Or perhaps other indirect assessments, as with old legal notice requirements (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>).
Of course there is the small detail of removing agency from the internet user at that point. Maybe I don't want to support local/regional news or maybe that extra fee is going to make the access untenable for me.
Beyond that it would devolve into a scenario where entities would begin trying to game whatever system is created to get a cut of the pie.
An additional element of my user fee / tax-based support, and one that strongly distinguishes it from a flat-fee assessment as with the BBC or German public broadcasting is that it should be strongly progressive.
For a tax assessment this would be based on wealth (e.g., property tax) and/or income. For an ISP-based assessment, the allocation might be more challenging, but a differentiation between business and residential usage (with a higher assessment for businesses, again on a progressive scale), and differentiated rates probably on a neighbourhood / metro region basis (so that a household on the Upper West Side and one in Julesburg, CO, would pay widely differing rates), is what I have in mind.
Rationale is that the wealthy have already benefitted mightily from such access, and the poor should not be denied access to media: news, entertainment, books, music, video, whatever.
> the poor should not be denied access to media: news, entertainment, books, music, video, whatever.
The poor are not denied access this currently. Everything in your argument hinges on the claim that government funded and directed media will be superior to the status quo. Why?
Local newspapers should not be used as a point of comparison. When we subscribed to the city newspaper, it easily paid for itself in coupons and awareness of sales. There would also be notice of civic affairs that directly affected our lives. National and world news was essentially added entertainment.
Before complaining that people aren't willing to pay for online news, recall that they didn't pay for national broadcast news either.
My parents still pay for the local newspaper to be delivered at home but it went from every day to I think now twice a week - Sunday and Wednesday or something like that. Same price, they get a "free" online subscription in addition to paper, but its still disappointing to not be able to have a paper with morning coffee anymore.
A few months back I was looking through the local paper, when I visited my parents. My dad note: "I don't think we'll be resubscribing this year. There's almost no articles left at the price went up again".
The paper covers an area of around 1 million people. They have no correspondents, with the exception of a small team at the Danish parliament. All their "journalists" are centralised in the regional "capital". I'm sure that their reporters are actual journalists, just not very good writers. All foreign news are provide by Reuters or some other news service, with a little rewrite and no adding of information from other sources. There simply isn't enough news in the area, to make a daily newspaper necessary and they don't have the staff to add much value to the national and international coverage. For this newspaper, which is mostly ads and very poorly written articles they charge the equivalent of $1250 per year. That is absolutely insane, you can get a legitimate good paper for $890 per year, but that will not have the local angle and there are very few other sources for local news.
I don't agree that you shouldn't follow the news, but I'd argue that you don't need daily coverage, that's pointless as well. Daily provides no time for details to emerge, no time for investigation or second sources. Weekly is absolutely fine, anymore frequent and the news degenerate and the media becomes an ad hellscape to cover the cost of publishing.
Because I don't want to pay monthly for a bunch of content I probably won't read. I want to pay a small amount of money, with as little friction as possible, for the specific content I want to read now.
That's been a dream for nearly as long as the web has been around. I'm pretty sure there are mailing list threads from the '90s about turning micropayments into a standardized web API. As far as I can tell, this never caught on because it's almost always more profitable to operate your own paywall scheme or payment network than to participate in someone else's (provided that you're powerful enough to get away with it).
The point is you should be able to operate you own paywall. The tech is mature enough in 2024 to make it work.
Make the browser store you credit/debit card info, make the browser handle the payment UI, make the browser expose JS apis to invoke payments and receipt fetching against pluggable payment providers.
My ideal world looks like this. New html button element:
`<pay amount="1.00" currency="USD" reference="my-article-123" checkoutUrl="https://...">Unlock for $1.00</pay>`
Clicking it opens browser checkout flow. The url you get from stripe/paypal or another whitelisted payment provider that has implemented the spec, some flow similar to OAuth. On a successful tx, a signed receipt (something like a jwt) is returned from the provider and saved by the browser, on disk on your computer.
The webpage can then load signed receipt references from the browser api, sends it to the backend which can return the article content if the receipt jwt is valid.
It can be fixed if the right people from Chrome and Stripe got together in a room and brainstormed for a bit. Then everyone else would follow.
I sometimes pay for news, and when I do, I do it by buying print versions for the reasons (H) and (I) in the article, "The incessent upselling" and "Privacy".
He writes "Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire life history wasn’t sea-lioning into every possible situation trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket".
I can still buy the print version of the Economist at the newsstand (OK, Barnes & Noble) and I can still buy a print copy of the WSJ at the grocery store or convenience store.
I paid, hmm, looks like $11.49 plus tax for the last print version of the Economist I bought. Will I consider paying $6 or so an issue for a subscription to the online version? No, I will not.
I paid, I think, $5 plus tax for the last print WSJ weekend edition I bought. Will I consider paying $40 a month for a digital subscription? No, I will not.
Here are my requirements: I can pay in cash per issue with no way for the publisher to tell I bought it or to track my reading in any way.
Don't meet my requirements? Totally fine. But if you don't, I'm not paying for your product. Go complain to someone else.
Yes and: Most of what we now label "news" is actually infotainment. aka USA Today. Which is distinct from previous incarnations of tabloids, yellow journalism, phamphleteering, etc.
Ad supported media (structurally) cannot sustainably create real news. It just doesn't pencil out.
FWIW I happily pay for quality media creating real news, opinion, and analysis. (starting with Propublica, Five to Four, Volts, Know Your Enemy.) More so over time, as I discover more good stuff.
(Started writing this as a response to mhb[1], but posting at the top-level because I think it's generally relevant.)
Most newspapers have deliberately promoted the online editions in preference to their traditional print editions, which is compromising the economies of scale in printing. The online edition of the New York Times is half the price of the print edition because they want it to be, not because that would be its natural market price.
A specific newspaper is not a free market resource; the editorial stance and quality is exclusive. But assume for sake of argument that it is: that there are dozens of different companies that can produce the New York Times. As long as the physical quality (of the ink, paper etc.) is adequate, consumers will purchase the paper which is cheapest. Eventually, a monopoly would emerge due the economies of scale - the producer which sells the most papers would also be able to provide the lowest prices. Yet, this hypothetical printer would still be kept honest because, with no exclusivity over printing, they couldn't raise their prices above the basic printing cost of a single copy (which does not benefit from economies of scale).
Here's the key part of the argument: the difference between the online and print edition is $3. For less than $3, I can print the entire Sunday edition at home, probably on higher quality paper too. That means that the New York Times are deliberately over-pricing the print edition relative to their online edition. They can do this because they hold copyright over the text. They want to do this because they can target advertising to individuals, lock customers into subscriptions more easily online, show attention-grabbing multimedia and a do whole litany of other profitable things.
I should note that abolishing copyright wouldn't fix the problem, because that would drive prices down below even the true market value of journalism. This is because nobody would want be the first to purchase a copy of the article; wait a little longer and someone else will sell you theirs at a discount. I personally believe it would be closer to the real value than the status quo, but it is still below it, and that isn't a sustainable income for journalists. It would harm professional journalism eventually.
Ensuring that anyone is allowed to republish an article verbatim at a fixed royalty - a royalty no higher than the price of the online edition - would, I think, go a long way to making print editions reflect their actual relative value compared to electronic publishing. Legislation permitting format-shifting, and resale of the format-shifted work, would facilitate this.
576 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadI'd add to my 2022 comments the following:
- When the NY Times hardened its paywall notably in mid-2019, front-page appearances on Hacker News fell to a quarter of their previous trend. There was no policy change at HN, just voting behaviour on submissions. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (Own data based on a 2023 scrape of all HN front-page activity.)
- Broadcast / programmed television seems to be undergoing a similar transition as occurred to newspapers in the past decade. See: "Traditional TV is Dying" <https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/08/traditi...>.
- My "short reading list" is available via archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi...> (The subreddit it was posted to is now private protesting Reddit's enshittification.)
- Most successful media have had either government support (e.g., the BBC, Deutschlandfunk) or a strong multi-tier financing model.
Of the last, the Economist suggests a commercial basis being roughly by thirds subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Public broadcasting in the US (NPR, PBS) benefit by member support, commercial underwriting (now little different from ads), and some government support (mostly to local stations). Traditionally within the US commercial publication revenue was based on banner ads, classifieds, legal notices (effectively an obligate support of newspapers by law imposed on private citizens and firms), subscriptions, and news-stand sales.
Currently, the ISP as at least a major payment gateway seems a highly underutilised opportunity. What translates to an Internet age is clearly still being worked out, though at the cost of many established institutions, large and small, failing entirely.
I'd first noticed this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which was a huge, complex, long-evolving story covering a huge area. Trying to get useful information from news media was ... maddening. Even good sources were at best useful for 1) initial reports and 2) a long dribble of additional developments, but after the first day or so reading, listening, or watching news items gave very little clear overview of the story.
There've been many, many, many such cases since. The Oroville Dam crisis (a notable press exception was Brad Plumer, then at Vox, whose single-author reportage largely equaled Wikipedia). Covid-19. Various major court cases.
Most recently, after hitting several outlets (BBC, CBC, NPR, NY Times, Guardian) over the outbreak of riots in the UK, and trying to relate the news and answer questions to an older relative, I remembered my Wikipedia trick and turned to their coverage. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gave all the relevant context far more clearly than any of five or so mainstream media sources I'd turned to.
Moreover, the Wikipedia article had on the order of 175 footnotes and references, linked in the article but separated from the text, as footnotes are, meaning that one could read the text as a narrative and NOT be constantly interrupted by attributions as one so often is in current reporting. Yes, it's useful to have sources cited, but doing so as part of the narrative is itself, in my experience, mind-numbing in its own way.
And if you're not happy with the Wikipedia coverage, there's the article's "Talk" page, which discusses issues and conflicts amongst editors, at length. At the time I'd checked, the article ran about 18 screens (on my A4 e-ink tablet), only half of which were the actual article, the remainder being references and other Wikipedia "furniture". The Talk page ran 38 screens, which is to say, twice the length of the article and four times the length of the actual text, such that virtually all major conflicts and concerns were voiced there. And of course there's edit history so the reader can see what's changed, when, and by whom.
I'd really like to see media organisations adopt a Wikipedia-like format for long, complex, and evolving stories such that it's easy to turn to such a page and get the best, concise, current state of understanding, again with sources and discussion if wanted.
Most media organisations, even those which are now fully digital, seem still to embrace the notion of a static printed product, and haven't fully embraced the capabilities of digital production, dissemination, change-control, and disclosure. It's ... disappointing.
But we do have Wikipedia, and I'd strongly suggest using it.
(A more permissive edit capability on HN, and for that matter, Diaspora*, would also be nifty. Perhaps an earned privilege, probably with strong penalties for abuse, as in "you lose privs". But SRSLY...)
About 15 years ago I heard the concept of the information-action ratio[1] and it totally changed the way I consumed news. As you note, most things in the news are irrelevant to me in the sense that I can’t take any meaningful action based on them.
I still read some news—and pay for $1/week subscriptions to multiple newspapers, which they have so far let me renew indefinitely if I threaten to cancel every six months—but I spend much less time following national and global news than I used to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information%E2%80%93action_rat...
So your bar for "authoritarian state" is not wanting people with a highly infectious, airborne disease to vacation on a remote island where every single hospital was overcapacity?
You understand that there were no ICU beds available, emergency services were overwhelmed, nurses and doctors were working perpetual overtime with insufficient resources, etc, right?
"Take a test to show you don't have covid before flying to an island with zero capacity to handle more sick people" seems like an incredibly basic, common-sense measure.
If your answer is that emergency situations warrant such "basic, common-sense" restrictions, then my rebuttal is that a) governments will manufacture as many emergency situations as needed, and b) what is basic and common-sense to one may not be to another and in either case, that ratchet will only go one way; in the direction of authoritarianism.
[0]: This liberty has most recently been under controversy again in the context of states wanting to ban travel to other states for the purposes of obtaining an abortion.
That not only provides multiple funding legs, but also strongly incentivises robust journalism as the publication is effectively an advertisement for the EIU's reports (many of which contribute to substantive reports in print).
And that news can be useful, even vital at times. And performs a critical role in a democratic polity. One which is increasingly not being performed, most especially at the local and regional level.
And that the proposals I'm making in TFA might be worth discussion in that light.
Thanks.
There are of course many instances of media organisations directly funded through governments, most especially in broadcasting: the BBC, ABC (Australia), CBC, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandfunk, and more, partial list here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41262025>.
Print media has more often been at least nominally privately-held, but often with major indirect public support. In the US that takes the form of discounted postal rates, legal notices, tax breaks, and direct advertising expenditures by governments. See:
"A Reminder of Precedents in Subsidizing Newspapers" Jan. 27, 2010, <https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/business/media/28subsidy....>.
Many of those subsidies have decreased, been eliminated, or no longer apply (e.g., postal discounts given Internet-based distribution) in today's world, and along with other business challenges have made commercial newspaper (or online news-media) operation all the more challenging.
A key challenge is that information is a public good, in the economic sense:
- It is (mostly) nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. That is, one person's consumption doesn't preclude others doing so (unlike, say, food or land), and it's difficult (though not impossible) to restrict access.
- Marginal costs of production, that is, the additional cost for an additional unit produced or consumed, is near nil. This has implications on how market prices fall, which is (absent other manipulation) also near nil.
- News and information have high positive externalities. That is, there are benefits to consumption which the producer cannot readily capture through market mechanisms.
I've addressed this in more length here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20170611065351/https://www.reddi...>
A lot of this boils down to "there's no easy way to erect tollbooths on the consumption or distribution of information, and high costs in the form of deadweight losses (people excluded from access) from doing so."
But there are at least two remaining tollbooths:
- The ISP, with whom the reader has an existing financial relationship.
- Tax authorities: local (city/county), state, and national.
Each of these can charge audiences, and pay publishers, for media accessed online. My proposal is that payments be relatively nominal (on the order of $100 to $400/year for a household), and be made with minimal prejudice to qualifying publishers and authors. (Some independent arbitrator of which publishers qualify, and a mechanism, perhaps itself market based, for payment rates based on media category would probably be part of such a scheme.) Indirect supports analogous to postal-rate subsidies, legal notices, and direct government advertising might also apply.
A tax / universal content fee approach directly addresses the many issues...
> Governments exist, amongst other roles, to provide for the common weal,
Yes, but governments also exist - looking at governments in general, around the world - to further the interests of officials and their families, and provide them with money, status, disproportionate rights, and ideologically agreeable laws. And then there are organisations, which may be related to governments or effectively similar to governments or agents of governments, with a mission or interest in distorting news so that the money, status, etc., gets delivered.
So in theory, under good governance, that wouldn't happen. Additionally, the government would be all-knowing with a good grip on salience, so it wouldn't do anything biased, even by accident. And then we might as well have news distributed by a central ministry of information, which would reliably arbitrate the truth in a good way.
Since actual governments are at best kinda corrupt and somewhat stupid, it would be better for taxpayers to fund a diversity of editorially independent news media sources, right?
But that's kind of passing the buck to the grass roots. In theory, the natural power of the grass roots can cause information to be critiqued and filtered by by many independent and informed individuals so that a consensus on the facts of what is actually going on bubbles to the top. In reality, it's social media, and its accuracy depends on the power of good moderation and a good culture, which, like good governance, is brought into being and sustained by voodoo.
I think the answer is: if you've found a good, trustworthy source of information, whether a public broadcaster, a commercial media entity, or a non-commercial forum, treasure it while it lasts, and by all means bring more of these into being. Except I don't think anybody knows what those means are and it seems to happen more or less by accident. Something about open society.
<https://www.etymonline.com/word/weal>
As in common weal, commonweal, commonwealth.
But of course. And there's nothing in public funding of media that says that multiple media sources cannot be funded.
As for the rest of your ... comment: all human institutions tend toward corruption. Government, Church, Business, Family, Academy. We recognise this, are aware of it, fight it, accept what we must, and try to pit the various factions against one another in a a balance of power. Multiple sources, as you say.
The issue with present media isn't the lack of many sources, it's the financial investments required for them to be both effective and sustaining. Which as my earlier comment (and many others on that topic) makes clear simply will not and cannot happen in a pure-play market approach. And for the most part never has.
Whether we need 3 depends on 1 and 2. Hell, if 1 is bad enough and 2 is good enough, it could justify anything, including conscription to a literal media war. But even assuming I grant you 1 is true, nothing in TFA or your comments convinces me that 2 is true.
Most examples of state and media unification I can think of are not free, not useful except as explicit propaganda arms.
Rather, it's creating a public fund for numerous news and informational sources. How many, what qualifications they should have, and how they are individually compensated is a further element of this discussion, but all of that's secondary to the point that what I'm calling for is not a single unitary Ministry of News, but for a many entities, preferably with multiple funding streams whether governmental (at local / regional / state / federal levels), ISP / connectivity provider fees, or other indirect funding sources (subscriptions, memberships, sponsorships, foundations, philanthropy, advertising, legal notices, distribution and/or production subsidies).
So, 1: yes. 2: no. 3: in part.
This is broad enough to include every funding source, and you're back to describing the status quo. All of these funding sources are available currently, and they're evidently not enough. The thesis just morphs from "why won't people pay for news?" to "why won't people politically organize to create quasi-public well funded media apparatuses?"
The reframing question is fair, but asking why people won't pay directly for subscriptions under the present model remains a useful excercise, and is what I've attempted here.
To a first approximation, varying fee by average neigbbourhood income might accomplish much of this. An assessment baked into income taxes (state or federal) could of course accomplish this directly.
Offering different pricing tiers is another option, with a "basic" package that includes most sources, and one or more premium tiers which includes either greater availablity, or more immediate / current access to, entertainment and sport content, for example.
Basic informational content, including news and cultural lore (classic books, movies, music, etc.) would be in the basic tier.
> news and cultural lore (classic books, movies, music, etc.)
Is the aim to recreate a state directed facsimile of the entire media ecosystem? All of this seems totally redundant to the market offerings, just now with bureaucratic overhead and the removal of personal choice, but it's tax funded so it's somehow better?
It'd be simpler just to collect progressive taxes and give cash to the poor, who can pay for news and media (or food) according to their own preferences.
Plus I think over the decades, broadcast news morphed into a form of entertainment. And seems well over half the news I have access to is about Sports, Hollywood and who is having sex, which I do not care about.
I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling? Even setting aside concerns about the quality of the product, news subscriptions are priced way too high given the amount of competition for those dollars. Then they'll monitor everything you do and sell your information to the highest bidder. Then when you realize it's not worth it, they'll put you through hell and back to cancel.
In most cases the news was balanced back then. Go to a Library and see for yourself by viewing archives.
AP will give me 90% of that for free and unedited. The other 10% I can find through other channels or is of no interest to me.
uHH...yes?? Hello? We used to pay $1 every day to buy newsPAPERs? Remember? Does this stuff being on the internet suddenly makes journalism a free labor or something?
Newspapers was the only the way I could get any insights on the outer world. This was in 2000s and early 2010s. There were TVs but newspapers were the only method where I could stare at pictures from all over the world and read random people's opinion.
No I didn't have internet back then.
I don't remember it being anywhere near that much.
Even today the local paper is a good chunk under that price, and if I forgo the actual printing then it's about a hundred dollars per year.
You can also look at other french journals like mediapart who do investigative journalism. Even they only charge 120 a year (https://abo.mediapart.fr).
The currency that is limited is not money, it is time. When news is presented digitally, it's just one more thing on your always-connected screen competing for your attention with every other website, app, video, etc. With a physical newspaper, you actually (most days) carve out the time to peruse it front page to back. Of course some days its a quick glance while other days you read every article. But the physical-ness of a newspaper somehow elevates it's priority and commands your time, in a way a digital version simply cannot.
Not that, the only news I can find on-line is about National Items. I cannot find any information about what my City Council is doing, what is being built in the City. I can find only scrubbed items released by just the Council.
In the old days, the local news paper would investigate the local politicians and report if they are doing anything illegal. Now, we have no idea, so graft could be rampant in local politics and no one would know.
But it's a good point. Classified ads were purchased by individuals or small companies usually. Now, the people things did with those, they do for free, or use some other paid service that's not affiliated with a news organization. Instead of paying for an ad in the "personals", people use dating apps (either for free, or they pay for a premium membership to get extra benefits). Instead of paying for a classified ad to sell their old car or appliance, they post it for free on Ebay or Craigslist or FB Marketplace, and in most cases pay a commission when they receive payment through the site. So basically, other services took this revenue stream away from the newspapers.
It wasn't just about "the truth", it was about how people could participate in mass communications: the newspapers had a lock on one of the main ways to do this. The internet gave us a new communications medium.
Many newspapers gave away most of the value in their advertising power to Google and Facebook, for free, because they just didn't understand how internet advertising was going to work.
Now they've decided to blame and shame their own readers rather than actually try to compete against other media for people's dollars.
Online, there's very other options that don't include a perpetual agreement.
What could possibly work is mega syndication, where you pay a monthly subscription and get access to a large amount of newspapers, á la Spotify or YouTube. But for that to happen, newspapers need to change their attitude and start seeing themselves not as arbiters of truth, but producers of news as a commodity. Then you could even have "enemy" newspapers on the same subscription. Just as you have rock, classical and rap on the same subscription.
The question is, does the population actually want news or do they want to read something that confirms their world view and snugly fits with their chosen political tribe?
The term I've used in the past is "universal content syndication".
Because it's split up. You no longer pay "for the news", you pay a specific company for their take.
Do you want leftist? Rightist? Something central? You want multiple opinions, will you pay multiple subscriptions?
Happily pay $10/mo for a selection of specifics news items.
Thoughts?
Superbundling (e.g., a single fee providing universal access), a universal content tax, and/or a fee assessed by ISPs (if at all possible indexed to typical household wealth within an area) strike me as far more tractable options.
Among the elements of a tax-based system is that there are in fact multiple taxing jurisdictions, and access might be spread amongst them, and through multiple mechanisms. Public libraries already exhibit some of this, with funding being provided at the local (city/county), state, and federal levels, as well as other aggregations such as regional library coalitions, academic institutions and districts (particularly community and state postsecondary institutions), and others.[2] There's also the option of indirect support, which is what mechanisms such as mandatory legal notices entailed: a jurisdiction could require public posting of various sorts (fictitious names, legal settlements and actions, etc.) which effectively require private parties to pay for the upkeep of a newspaper. Similarly, discount "book rate" postage was a distribution subsidy offered to publishers of not only books but newspapers and magazines within the U.S. That's less an issue given the Internet, but the spirit of that idea might be adopted.
The idea of local papers which can rely on some level of multi-jurisdictional tax funding, perhaps some charitable or foundational support, advertising, subscriptions, obligatory notices, bespoke research, and other funding sources would give multiple independent funding channels which would be difficult to choke off entirely. That seems far healthier than the present system.
________________________________
Notes:
1. My own argument, and numerous citations to both pro and con views, is "Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not)" <https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004820/https://old.reddi...>, based on a six-year-old proposal from David Brin which has gone ... precisely nowhere.
2. Yes, I'm aware of certain issues concerning library texts in recent years within the U.S. I'd suggest that the fact that those debates are ongoing rather than settled either way means that overt control isn't completely straightforward.
You fill a bucket. It's drained, based on what you read/view/listen. Or otherwise equitably shared based on some global allocation basis if access nothing --- you're still benefiting by the positive externality of the informed polity which journalism creates --- if you read nothing.
This ensures a stable funding basis, you have a predictable cost basis, you can direct the allocation based on your own access patterns, the common weal benefits even if you don't utilise the resource.
Note that much of this is the same as an ad-funded media, excepting that you can't direct spending, the allocations are far less public-benefit oriented, and the costs per household are far higher: roughly $700 per person for advanced countries (North America, Europe, Japan, Australia/NZ), based on a $700 billion spend and roughly 1 billion population. What we have now costs an immense amount and is failing media and journalism badly.
Do I need to subscrible to all of them?
Just not practical...
I'd made this point a bit over a year ago with regards to Hacker News, based on my own work scraping a full history of Front Page views from the "past" archive.
Note that there are only 30 stories which make the front page per day, total submissions run somewhat higher, typically a bit over 100, and about 400,000 per year per research by Whaly.[1]
As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the front page.
Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149.
Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.
Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources.
Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day.
Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354>
________________________________
Notes:
1. "A Year on Hacker News" (2022) <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>
For me I find skipping the daily hystronic news cycle is better for my health. Anything of significant enough import would get to me via social channels, at which point I can go find enough sources about a subject to get a proper nuanced view
In the olden days papers would target people like me who only occasionally read news with good headlines on the front and a low price for that day's print run. Now they are asking for a subscription (which is too much to pay for a single article) and acting like the archival value add is worth it to me (it isnt).
Clearly people won’t pay for news because it’s flawed, the product stinks, and the information is biased. So here’s a great idea, let’s steal from everyone via taxes and force them to pay for it! Then it will be good somehow.
- ABC (Australia)
- BBC (UK)
- CBC (Canada)
- CPB, NPR, and PBS (US, though with very limited public funding)
- Canal Once, Canal 22, Canal Catorce (Mexico)
- DR (Denmark)
- Deutshlandfunk, DeutscheWelle and regional broadcasters (NDR, RBB, SWR, MDR, WDR, BR, HR, SR, RB), the last for somewhat interesting denazification reasons.
- EBC (Brazil)
- ERT (Greece)
- NRK (Norway)
- Polskie Radio (Poland)
- RNZ/TVNZ (New Zealand)
- Sveriges Radio/Television (Sweden)
- TVN (Chile)
- VOA, AFN (US, not broadcast domestically)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting>
It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it might solve some.
The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather there not be an official merger of the government and media that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty picture of the government.
The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as the alternative.
Show us some stories, oh, the Rotherham grooming scandal, for instance, before it became a national story.
Here's one afterward:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863
> Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town for more than 15 years, according to a new report.
"not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I thought that was what police were supposed to do.
In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. C-Span is just limited to its cut from cable subscriptions but even that has made it far less sensationalist. C-Span isn't entertainment, it's pure news.
To further the analogy, everyone's pooling money in the same bank account, but there's still someone in charge of signing the checks. That someone is as capable of anybody else of holding biases, which has the strong potential to be reflected in the media program that the money is funding.
"Today nothing happened, the end" would not work. So you would have to lower your standards for that day. On that day you would conflate what happened with entertainment and low and behold that day nothing actually happened is more popular than reality.
Loop this process over and over and we get what we have now.
I suspect we end up at the point we are at now no matter what the initial starting conditions or how you design the system.
"News" is a form of entertainment and to pretend it is not seems completely delusional to me.
I think it is like asking how do you get people to watch a movie of a professor giving a statistics lecture. You have to publicly fund it because no one is going to really watch or pay for that movie.
Last year I paid for a subscription to one of the independent sources of news here [1], but haven't made use of it because, honestly, news is pointless. I find it mostly makes me upset about things that are completely out of my control. It doesn't change my behaviour in any positive way.
I did consider continuing my subscription, just because "independent journalism" is a societal good, even if I don't consume it. But then it is in direct competition with other charities that I could donate to.
0: https://www.abc.net.au/news 1: https://crikey.com.au
News companies are mostly collapsing. The only viable way to keep in private hands might be the Guardian model, of a trust established in it's name.
Bozo could certainly afford to do that for the Wash Post, instead they're leading the race to the bottom with firings and more for-profit articles.
The following would address specifically how (or if) journalistic business / financing models need reform.
As for journalistic business / financing models: public financing will never be anything but a tool of the power structure (whether or not they happen to be in formal power at the moment).
Private financing sometimes works, but doesn't at the moment.
You're welcome to share or not.
What isn't a tool of the power structure? What of advertising (see the I.F. Stone interview I've posted elsewhere in this thread), or of philanthropy (take your pick of benefactors)?
- is it important that voting citizens are informed about various issues?
- is the market (or some other mechanism) currently meeting this need?
I don't think we can assume it would.
Are there specific parts of my diagnosis or etiology you specifically disagree with? Which?
Provide a low friction subscribe and unsubscribe flow, and I will gladly pay for your product, Reuters.
It costs a business half or more of all revenue simply to make a sale in many cases. High-friction subscription services and all the support involved is a large piece of this.
Many products and services suffer from the fact that they are too cheap to produce to make meaningful individual revenue recovery sensible.
Raise the question with your hometown or city. What would it take for Reuters to licence gratis access to all residents through a city-paid arrangement? That's one sales contact for Reuters, and thousands to millions of readers onboarded. Vastly more efficient than one-at-a-time relations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godi_media
This is nothing new and in fact is a feature of having a for-profit 24 hour news media industry that thrives on advertising revenue and flourishes under emaciated regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
the repeal of the fairness doctrine in the United States means your television radio and internet news feeds are free to outright fabricate stories with impunity. commercial news means the product is tailored to the consumer, not congruent with the facts.
Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure. You can still have private news agencies, they just cannot market or sell "snake oil" in the service of the dollar. Another alternative is turning all news into something akin to NPR, or having news "co-ops" that provide the service to their listeners for a fee.
Why do you see NPR as such a positive example of journalism? It seems to me that it's been skating on its previous good reputation for quite some time now.
I grew up on NPR. It was always on in the background. On the way to and from daycare, in the car on Sunday mornings on the way to the uu church, playing out of a small boom box on the back porch, or winding up the miles of a long road trip. Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Schickelie mix, etc, all were the background music to my childhood. When I entered adult life, I tried to continue listening, but leading to, during, and after the 2016 election, the biases became too base, too visible to ignore
NPR in particular avoided the word "lie" as late as 2017, see:
"NPR And The Word 'Liar': Intent Is Key", January 25, 20175:00 AM ET <https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511503605...>
Contrast 2024 where this is no longer a problem:
"162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump", August 11, 20247:00 AM ET <https://www.npr.org/2024/08/11/nx-s1-5070566/trump-news-conf...>
NPR also pressed the former president on lies in an interview in 2022. It didn't go well:
"Pressed on his election lies, former President Trump cuts NPR interview short", January 12, 20225:01 AM ET <https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072204478/donald-trump-npr-i...>
My view is that NPR's stance change is a positive development.
First, the insinuation that they make an effort to remain unbiased is kinda wild. As an NPR listener and donator, that isn't at all the impression I get. They seem to overwhelmingly cater their coverage and their slant towards people a lot like me. That's why I listen and why I pay and what paying customers actually expect (whether they are consciously aware of how they are supporting and consuming their own preferred bias in media is maybe 50/50 but whatever).
NPR is undoubtedly a "leans left" shop in the same way Fox is undoubtedly "leans right".
Of course, even if we were talking about the WSJ or Economist or something...that's still biased. Being dead center between the current interpretation of left or right is still a kind of bias.
So the alternative is to not even try? To double-down or triple-down on bias and shamelessly continue to self-label as journalism? To whine & cry about "the threat to democracy" while neglecting their duties as The Fourth Estate?
I think not.
The problem is simple: stop lowering the bar. Stop calling things journalism that don't qualify. If your pet barks, would you call it a cat?
You've got Jim Leher is turning in his grave.
https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for...
Objectivity meant that journalist had to identify two sides and report on both equally - even if the acts in question were not equal in any objective way. If I obviously lied and you obviously did not, articles did not reflected that at all. What was called objectivity enabled and facilitated bad actors. Consistently.
Second issue was that just a selection of topics and selection of who will be allowed to express things itself creates bias. And the rules about that consistently disadvantaged certain groups and advantaged other groups.
As threats to democracy go, there's nothing worse than a self-proclaimed journalist (read: a hack) fronting like they're fulfilling their duties as a member of The Fourth Estate. Frankly, most of them don't know the difference between cause and correlation (which is an essential / foundational concept in truth and being objective), let alone what The Fourth Estate is (and why it matters).
The problem is, the publishing industry doesn't even realize it's wrong. It's blind to its own blind spot.
What could go wrong?
And some of them in fact do cause own bias - they presume how the result should look like. Lehrer rules will facilitate both side journalism where you blame both sides equally regardless of facts on the ground. As I said, it is biased toward bad actors. And against those who says the truth.
Note how they contain nothing about real fact checking. They are super easy to "be followed" while being manipulative. Stuff like "I am just reporting on what X said" whereas X said unfounded accusation that is just getting traction because you refuse to fact check it.
As a general principle, and I know it's not a very wise thing to say, left-leaning sources are on a different dimension of factuality than right-leaning ones.
Most left leaning people can't even tell when they're watching something biased towards their beliefs because to them it's just like a fish swimming in water.
Oh c'mon, it's ridiculous that I need to call out a false equivalence like that.
Fox News isn't even news; they've admitted in court that they're an entertainment program. NPR is... not even remotely that. Certainly NPR has a bias, but they at least do their best to tell the truth. Fox News makes a business out of lying for outrage engagement.
The admission they made was about one show, the one that Tucker Carlson ran before his departure from Fox[0]. Taking that and eliding it to the rest of Fox News sounds either lazy or dishonest.
An NPR host said in 1995 that if millions of people who believed in the religious concept of "rapture" actually did evaporate from this earth, the world would be a better place. After public outrage, they issued an apology but continued their relationship with the host. Does that make them tacitly support such bigotry? Nobody sued NPR over this (perhaps if this happened today and not 30 years ago, somebody would have), but what would their defense have been? That people shouldn't take things said by a show host so literally?
I used to listen and donate to NPR, but no longer do, because I don't share your confidence that they do in fact "do their best to tell the truth". I might actually feel better about it if, like Fox, they came out and admitted that they are, at least in the year 2024, in many ways a nakedly partisan organization, instead of the taxpayer-funded neutral bringer of facts that they pretend to be.
[0]: The judge ended up dismissing the case in favor of Fox: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
Note: Local NPR programs are a lot better than national programs, IMO. There are two available NPR stations in my area, and they're really not similar at all except for a small overlap in programming.
They rate NPR as having a left-center bias and high factual reporting. The bias is based on story selection rather than the reporting itself containing substantial bias.
They rate Fox News as having a right bias and mixed factual reporting. The bias based is on editorial positions and they note that news reports are generally accurate, but commentary often isn't.
If that seems unfair, consider that they rate MSNBC comparably to Fox with left bias and mixed factual reporting, though they do give it a slightly higher overall credibility rating.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/npr
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/msnbc/
There is a fairly simple heuristic to determine if a media outlet has a partisan bias. Does their coverage disproportionately portray one party in a positive light and the other party in a negative light?
The US has two major political parties that are each supported by approximately the same number of people. It would be mighty shocking if it turned out that one of them was right about everything and the other was wrong about everything. So if that's the impression that a media outlet leaves you with, that is a biased media outlet.
This is different than their coverage of an individual story. For any given issue, one of the parties might legitimately be right and the other one wrong. But that's not going to be true for every issue in the same direction.
He'll do things like call Kamala Harris the "border czar", which she never had as an official title, but she was actually tasked with handling some aspects of the migrant issue. So then it's not exactly accurate, but to write a story about it, now you're writing a story about immigration (which Trump wants) and explaining the issue by telling people that Harris really was tasked with doing something about it, with the implication that it's not solved. He's clearly doing it on purpose. It's one of the reasons the news media hates him so much. He's effectively manipulating them and they don't like it.
But then, for example, in the Trump interview with Elon Musk, Musk proposed a government efficiency commission and Trump was receptive to the idea. Which isn't a bad idea at all, but that was not the focus of any of the interview coverage I observed.
Trump's strategy (whether one exists or not) around this aside, heaps of people have been called the "X czar" by the media for decades. As you point out, it's a shorthand for someone in the presiding administration who is tasked with some singular objective. Rarely did their official title ever contain the word "czar".
The current media "fact check" circus around Harris never having been the border czar is yet another clearly identifiable example of a class of people who were so dismayed by Trump's presidency that they would go to any length, however distasteful, to prevent a second term.
I adore Terri Gross tho, I should put fresh air on my podcast app.
NPR member stations are on the whole decent, but the way NPR came out in force against Sanders showed both how out of touch and unabashedly unreasonable they could be when called to toe their betters' line. I'd been a regular supporter through the early Car Talk and Science Friday days, ending with their disgusting behavior during the primaries.
Pulling off making everyone look biased but you is quite a feat, and I'm impressed how many still consent rather than admit their emperor's indecency.
What annoys me the most about NPR is the relentless gaslighting. They act / speak as if they don't have an agenda (i.e., bias) and the rest of us are too stupid to see it. There's a smug "we didn't say X or Y" attitude but the problem is the questions they don't ask, the subtle ins and outs they pretend don't exist. Their news feels redacted to the point it looks like Swiss cheese.
I enjoy the speciality shows (e.g., Hidden Brain) but the sociopolitical current events on the local NYC and PHL stations is gringe-tastic too often.
NPR are proud of their sponsors, and prouder yet of how very little all of the public's dollars make up of their revenue in comparison.
If I may editorialize, perhaps we can also posit that if someone does not meet these criteria but nevertheless shares the same opinions as the elite, then they are desiring to join the elite.
[0]: https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/wp-content/uploads/...
Party A: "As greenhouse gasses increase, so too does the temperature according to historical measurements. We should do something about this."
Party B: "There is no way to measure the global temperature, and anyone claiming to have done so is working for Party A. We shouldn't address this at all."
Whether or not you as a journalist, were to include a factoid about it being the hottest summer on record, you're now doing biased reporting. Sure, if you include the fact you're siding with Party A and saying the fact is wrong is siding with Party B. However, not talking about it all is still siding with Party B, since that's their end goal. Factually accurate, inaccurate, and ambiguous are therefore all a form of bias.
For example, in this case a publication could run an article saying that the hottest summer on record just happened, and present cases on how big a problem it is and how much in the way of resources should be dedicated to solving it - including the case for the whole thing being a non-issue. That'd be pretty good journalism. They'd probably manage to upset both parties or make both of them happy if they did that IMO.
https://ground.news/interest/npr
that seems to be the trend with left leaning news sources. They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.
The right leaning news sources tend to tell a mix of truth and complete fabrications, while also refusing talk about truths inconvenient to the narrative they're telling so sure NPR is the clear winner in that sense, but the bar is set so low that it can't really be counted as a victory.
It's not just the omissions though, it's the implications.
For example, they were covering the Republicans saying they want to do something about the immigrants and Fentanyl illegally coming over the border. NPR's coverage made a point of telling you that most of the Fentanyl comes over at marked border crossings rather than through the desert, strongly implying this was meant to be refuting some lie the Republicans were telling. But the clip they aired didn't have the Republicans claiming otherwise. They were plausibly talking about the desert in the context of the people crossing there. And installing a border fence there could arguably free up some customs resources to use to inspect more trucks. But they're so desperate for a "gotcha" that they make one up.
Fentanyl is not being smuggled by immigrants coming over the border. Stopping immigration will not stop the fentanyl.
Obviously this is politics and people can disagree with their arguments, but this is one of the other favorite "don't lie but kind of do" games. The claim that detection rates could be higher at ports of entry isn't outrageous, there is some logic to it, but since by definition we don't know what the rate of undetected trafficking is in each location, there is "no evidence" for their claim. This is not equivalent to it being proven false, but that will often be implied.
To believe this, you have to assume that the reporting on fentanyl smuggling by the DEA and CBP and the fentanyl convictions data from the USSC that all point to US citizen being responsible for bringing in fentanyl in to the US is insufficient because "we don't know the undetected trafficking rate is in each location". It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.
Again, they're making two parallel arguments. One is, some of the migrants have fentanyl (true; not established that the number is very large), but the number could be large and isn't known. The other is, customs is spread thin because of migrants and is not catching the smugglers as a result. In both cases they propose the same solution, i.e. stem the flow of migrants.
> It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.
The claim is presumably that they could be missing a lot because there are a lot of migrants and more than one of them could have brought fentanyl.
For some other examples, Pink News is listed as Left with Mixed factuality. Fox News holds Right and also Mixed.
--
There are nearly no reputable media outlets with no amount of bias at all. I certainly wouldn't stop consuming NPR for having a slight lean to the left.
get bored
remember I have a radio
turn on NPR
in this episode we're going to investigate the relationship between consensual undocumented migrant men and underage boys who want to seem older, on this hour of the Latino story hour
click
repeat every 4-6 months
[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/indonesian...
Most media outlets (including NPR) begrudgingly accepted this as a strong likelihood for the initial source of the virus only a year or two later, once they had political approval.
Journalists and editors in these larger institutions no longer have any courage to actually be a “fourth estate” or think independently of government.
I'm not sure whether GP really wants to believe that Covid has man-made origins like you claim, but I think by now with all the evidence that has been released into the behind-the-scenes workings of Dr. Fauci et al[1] we can all agree that in the early days, a consensus was deliberately manufactured away from the lab leak theory. Moreover, there is clear public interest in discovering the true origin as well as preventing this type of politicization of the scientific process in the future.
What is your theory as to the most likely source?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...
[1]: https://www.public.news/p/fauci-diverted-us-government-away
The information was out there and the 50+ "former intelligence experts" have admitted that they had no idea what they were talking about, and what's more, they're still proud of it.
https://archive.ph/uvS8v
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/3058708/ex-int...
The media just didn't do their jobs. A real reporter would have said, "This is fishy. I wonder what the facts are." A real reporter would have called the Post and said, "Show me what you've got."
Whether or not it is true that the BBC has (or has not) been "captured by wokeness", the objections to this tend to hinge on its reputation for objectivity and dispassion in the past.
But the BBC has never been objective or dispassionate. It has been a steadfast supporter of the status quo. If it didn't treat socialism and communism with the idiocy that modern day Fox News does, it certainly offered them no serious coverage outside of a few intellectual "talk shows", even then only as a curiosity set against "what we all know is the truth".
The fact that someone might be upset that the BBC or other similar organizations choose not to give "full coverage" to conservatism should not obscure that the same organizations have never provided much to any "radical" cultural or political phenomenon.
The cherry-picking was always real, and it is generally only Americans who live under the ridiculous idea that there can be "objective" journalism. There isn't, and there never has been, and there never will be (in the context of broadcast or daily media, anyway).
Exactly.
Ditto NY Times (and maybe Wash Post). They aren't left or right; they're establishment. They defend the status quo (as they see it).
> It has been a steadfast supporter of the status quo
Yes, but at one time, "status quo" didn't mean one party. It meant two, either of which might happen to be in power. You're correct that they didn't give much coverage to groups outside of that "mainstream."
> the ridiculous idea that there can be "objective" journalism.
There are degrees of seriousness in the approach to that ideal. You can go into the New York Times archives for the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to see what it looked like when it was taken seriously.
I think it would be very difficult to set rigor (truth?) standards. There's a long history of truths that directly conflict with the "facts" provided, especially those from governments, which could probably not be reported under such scrutiny. I'm also curious how lying by omissions, which is the biggest problem I perceive, would be handled.
And fines to be small, similar to copyrighted media content sharing -- those who did initial leak would get large fines, those who just re-shared -- slap on the hand.
But it's not like doctors started washing their hands despite his evidence of mortality dropping from 18% to 2%.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease#Ignaz_S...
> My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
I.e. there's no medical protocol that tells doctor to prescribe unproven "accepted truth", at least not in important areas. It's way different to tell someone to ingest dangerous chemical compounds that were not even designed for medical purposes.
[1] https://mvellend.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/Asimov_anglosabote...
>Alex Jones is going through bankruptcy. When it gets egregious enough, there are consequences.
Yeah, that was really egregious and caused real harm to a lot of people. But again, that lawsuit only succeeded because a group of victims claimed harm. I imagine the previous poster intended for the "deceptive news" laws to be like pollution laws, where prosecutors just need to prove the act but don't need victims.
I think it would advance the death of the freedom of the press [2], disallowing truths that go agains the governing bodies, more than anything.
[1] https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own...
[2] https://www.cima.ned.org/publication/chilling-legislation/
What’s concerning about this approach is who gets to determine what is and is not misinformation. Having that power is a great way to silence those who don’t agree with you.
But instead of fining them, I think it would be more productive as a punishment to send these people to into rehabilitation camps in more remote regions of the country, where they could pay their fine by working community service for a few years.
It should be your duty to be intentionally honest and only accidentally confusing in proportion to your time and experience in crafting messages. A carefully curated message should be required to be entirely honest, a quick retort can be less rigorous (but still not intentionally deceptive; much harder to prove, but also less likely to be perfectly deceptive).
https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for...
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi...>
I'd especially point out Hamilton Holt's excellent, fact-filled, and highly readable Commercialism and Journalism (1909), 124 large-print pages. Yes, it's dated, but precisely for that reason it both pressages virtually all present discussion and gives an excellent and valuable view of how things stood and had evolved just as the phenomenon of advertising-supported media was emerging.
<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n7/m...>
There are far more academic, recent, detailed, and lengthy works. But if you want the maximum bang for your reading buck, start with this one.
Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were explicitly partisan, often organs of various political parties, e.g., the Arizona Republican (GOP) or American Federationist (labour / AFL/CIO).
Emergence of a (nominally) unbiased, nonpartisan press largely followed publication of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (1922), and probably came to a fore during WWII, which in many ways was the high-water mark of American journalism as a near-universally-purchased service.
I.F. Stone's 1974? interview on public broadcasting's Day at Night is an excellent insight into the state of US media at that time. It had reached another high-water mark with the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters ultimately brought down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown since then:
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>
Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere: Television and the News (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of the fundamental issues, particularly around audience development and narrative-fitting, remain:
<https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst>
The problem here is that politicians simply won't do interviews with these journalists. I think we saw exactly this during the Trump administration. This idea would probably only work if all the journalists adopted this policy (prisoner's dilemma).
It's not to say there's not ways the media can be better, but people have this "why, if I was a journalist, I'd fix everything with this one weird trick" and that's just not how any of it actually works in reality.
Well, to be fair, Trump did lose his re-election campaign. It's impossible to say how much effect combative journalists had on this, but for whatever reasons, the American voters did turn out in higher numbers in 2020 and voted for Biden.
That doesn't really seem much different from what we have now though. It seems like there's more commentary than content.
Politicians and parties with a majority can change. How can we trust that those regulating the news and determining what is truth or misinformation?
>Truth is less important
>Truth gets on the way of consensus and getting big things done.
NPR CEO https://x.com/realCarola2Hope/status/1823746926279582115
I want to pay $20 for 10 articles and be debited for the ones I view. If that takes me 3 days or 3 years to view 10 articles, that's what I want. They will make more money selling articles at a reasonable price than they will selling annual subscriptions full of crap people don't want.
If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5 or 10 times a month. But I guess capitalism says that they would rather have 1 person pay $100 a year than 2500 people pay fifty cents once a month.
The daily edition of the New York Times now runs $2 at a news stand, best I can make out.[1]
Sunday costs $5 in NYC, $6 elsewhere.
Note that the print Sunday edition was (and is) massively underwritten by advertising, which comprises the bulk of the issue, 60--90% by column inch or weight.
________________________________
Notes:
1. <https://www.travelizta.com/how-much-is-a-copy-of-the-new-yor...> isn't a particularly impressive source, but it's the best I can find. I cannot find a newsstand price for the Times anywhere on the paper's actual website. Which is another gripe I've got generally: for a commercial product, pricing data are exceedingly difficult to come by.
> If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5 or 10 times a month.
The subscription is a major contributor to the problem. Also, NYT does the tricky "change the price to $25/mo after 6 months" game.
"I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75 and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days..."
I do have fond memories of reading the Sunday Times all day, and for much of the next week. On that I'm in agreement.
I'll add another useful feature of both newspapers and more especially magazines. When you were done with the damned thing, you could pick it up and dispose of it ... trash, recycling, reuse as fishwrap or firestarter, take your pick. Rather than leaving a litter of individual browser tabs which are painful to collect and discard (even using tools such as Tree Style Tabs), the format was an aggregation itself.
What was harder of course was to maintain an archive of items of interest. That's not a primary role of publishers however, and many news sites have paywalled their archives (this strikes me as ... shortsighted), broken links, or both, which should be familiar frustrations to many.
I'm not sure how OP is really responding to the questions of how to fund and provide access to news and journalistic content, however.
Back when people paid for news, the Sunday edition was three inches thick and weighed around 5 pounds. I know because I used to deliver them on my bike.
Sunday mornings sucked as a paperboy, but you really could spend all morning reading the thing.
I also spent a huge chunk of my adulthood in Canada, and I never really minded the CBC, until the last ~10 or so years when (like most institutions and companies) they have lacked any sort of reasonable, competent or rational leadership and now they're combining staff layoffs and massive executive bonuses, which is the ridiculous reality of the world we live in.
But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably did pay for news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc.
The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it online and advertise against it?
That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators.
These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great! Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit.
There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news homepages -- because the links go to articles.
Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw the same number of ads, and they had value.
Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize. They cannot monetize if you don't click.
If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes the story -- you give the user little reason to click through. There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most newsworthy.
Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard. They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the shoeleather reporting, they just type.
--
As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people doing the reporting.
I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding. Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with... but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if they want what everyone else is reading
Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!
I actually do go to the homepages of several news organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+ at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story, largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I'll also listen to podcasts (largely not news-related, though some are included). I've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back markedly on radio as well.[1]
That said, my practice is probably not typical.
I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though that's not especially user-friendly. Adding in sections that are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples, though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at ProPublica and the WSJ (speaking to layout rather than content/editorial slant) are better than most.
It would be really interesting to find a publication which dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've found, but managing content on it is an absolute nightmare, and there's nothing about it which would make a regular subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't "pick it up and throw it away". I do append items of interest to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some benefits.
I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times, possibly also earlier at Vox.)
I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole / desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course: how are you (and they) getting paid?
What's success look like? Failure?
________________________________
Notes:
1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's The World much more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s or early aughts.
Our aspirational goal is to be THE place for news updates, regardless of what you're into. Before we started, I asked my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent? She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly through the headlines." We want to that, better.
It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of the things we learned pretty early on is that while people say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the street AND Gaza/Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between. It's a tall order.
We have local in many places, though its uneven across the country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons, we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.)
We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly know their beats like they do -- and they're already out there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are, and ask them too abide by an editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc.
Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or actually crack the subscription business model once and for all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist reading this, we'd love to chat - https://journalists.forth.news)
Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.
Sounds as if you're doing more news aggregation than news production, which ... doesn't seem to get at the question of how to actually get local news produced in the first place. That's a long-standing challenge. From what I've read of news history local newspapers pretty much always did function as both a local challenge on national/international reporting (usually through wire services) with a gloss of local coverage and advertising. This also meant that by subscribing to the local paper, readers were getting national stories and features. Often stories would run in multiple papers nationally with small elements changed to fit or feature locations or features specific to a local paper's readership.
With Internet-based distribution, much of that's disintermediated, as you note.
Glancing over your homepage: what I'd like to see is an arrangement that groups similar topics together, rather than a random sequence of stories. See Postman's description of the contextless news wire (I think that's in Amusing Ourselves to Death).
And I've dropped you an email, check your spam folder ;-)
News has always been partisan and flawed. The internet just makes the flaws more obvious, because no single source gets nearly the same control over the narrative as pre-internet. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way about things, news will have this problem.
Which is also why no one will pay for it. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way, they'll happily give you that content for free. How can a subscription service compete with that?
The article does cite these reasons, but in a way that makes me think they see these as bugs in the system and not endemic to the newscycle. When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product.
Sometimes, even when you are paying for the product, you are the product. Nothing prevents companies from taking money from you and then making more money e.g. by selling your personal data.
Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics.
On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise).
On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all.
At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere).
One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated.
There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.
This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want.
My experience and reasons for not paying anymore are similar. Used to pay for The Guardian for some time, but when they started pestering me about a subscription renewal the whole thing felt a lot less classy. Now it suddenly was about me and not news anymore.
Me too: never again. I would pay for anonymous vouchers or similar where I'm not identifiable to the newspaper, though.
Don't write code, don't talk to users?
There's also just too much news these days and most of it isn't important. It's saturated. Maybe if we cut down on the number of media outlets. You used to just buy 1-2 newspapers at most but the equivalent now is likely 5-10. And each 1 would be 2x as thick.
I can and do pay for news, I just dislike the bait and switch with modals/popovers that much. Now that I can no longer block domains in my Google search results, I can't remove those paywalled sites from relevancy and it's hard to keep track of everyone who only lets you read the first paragraph and a half before sticking their hand out asking for $10.
ETA: I have now read the article and have no revisions to my statements.
imo non-partisanship was the artifact of another time. in another life i wrote occasionally for establishment media and met many players, and i don't bother with any mainstream news anymore. these days i prefer to read the writing on the wall.
Their attempts at political manipulation is arguably even stronger while in opposition, so if anything they would be even more likely to make politically and ideologically motivated appointments!
It is clearly of high value for people that can to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, most decisions people are making are not informed by the news. Such that any attempt to get people to pay for it will be difficult.
What I've noticed both through my own experience and research of the history of journalism is that business news has, in general tended to be far more reliable then general-consumption news, if also strongly self-serving to the interests of business and fiance.
Amongst the best quality news sources that I find presently are the Economist and Financial Times, with Foreign Policy also standing high. The Wall Street Journal had a very strong (if of course pro-business) reputation when it was still owned by the Dow Jones corporation, somewhat less so of late. Newswires such as AP, Reuters, and AFP are also generally quite good. You can also find regional business news publications of high quality and relevance, especially as compared with their non-business local counterparts.
In debunking a century-plus old hoax (the "Banker's Manifesto") a few years back, one of the more amusing bits I'd found was that of all the claims it made, one which was more easily addressed was a mention-in-passing of the failures of several banks. It turns out that of all the things that a bank-centric publication is interested in, it's the solvency of financial institutions, and the bulk of any given issue addressed insolvencies and failures, of which those mentioned in the (bogus) manifesto made no appearance...
I suspect that a large reason for greater relevance and accuracy is that business news tends to be actionable to businesses, executives, and managers. I also suspect that misquotations and misrepresentations of interviews tend to get sharp responses. By contrast, the principle operating principle of a mass-market paper is to maximise circulation and eyeballs. At the worst of the Penny Papers this lead to outright hoaxes (e.g., the Great Moon Hoax: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax>). And of course, with large circulations it was also possible to steer public opinion (e.g., exploiting the explosion of the USS Maine to incite the Spanish-American war by Hearst and Pulitzer: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yellow_journa...>).
But I'd suggest that the population for whom quality, relevant news is of high interest is relatively small.
I used to want to try and make the news valuable to myself. I have yet to find a way to do that, though. Such that I am unlikely to want to pay for it anytime soon. Would be neat to consider ways I could start making the news of more personal value.
There's also the 15% subscribership rate amongst NPR listeners, which suggests to me a hard-core media consumer segment. That percentage has been steady for decades, and if anything has fallen somewhat as NPR's overall listenership has expanded.
The hard-core news segment is probably on the order of 1--5% of the population.
Circulation of WSJ and NYT, print and online, is roughly 3m and 7m respectively. That's from a total US adult population of ~300m, or about 1--2% of population for each. I suspect a fair bit of overlap in subscriptions.
How much of this is a matter of interest, willingness to pay, ability to pay, or ability to access news through other means/channels, I don't know.
I think the quality has remained quite high, and the rather robust subscription numbers bear that out (millions of people paying $40/month is impressive). It helps that the WSJ news staff resisted the temptation to abandon objectivity as at NYT.
The FT and Economist are nice but FT newsroom is an order of magnitude smaller than WSJ and the Economist an order of magnitude smaller than that (if you’re subscriber who checks daily you’ll know this).
Of the three I’d keep WSJ if I had to choose. FT is very nice for an international perspective though. Economist for high level summary.
Similarly, at a state level, you know they are the same. They have data feeds that are not released to the public.
Which brings us back to my point, what is there of value in the news for most people? I can think of very little personal value there.
Now, I can see great political and public value in making sure you have an informed population. Such that I am not claiming there is no value in it. Hard to show a direct bottom line value to individuals, though. And we are discussing why individuals won't pay.
I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate subscription that covers all the major players *OR* if I could pay per-article from a centralized grab-bag.
I don't want to see an interesting topic and then need to go to the NYT to see their take on it. I just want to see an interesting topic and read that view of it - maybe read several views of it (and happily pay for each one).
or HN :)
No, I won't pay a subscription for each random site that gets posted on here. I might pay a few cents, if it's a unified service as you say, but micropayments are 10 years away every year.
Isn't this what the Apple News+ service offers? I haven't used it, but for US $13 per month Apple says it offers content from over 400 publications. Of course it necessitates using one of the Apple OS platforms, and I've heard both good and bad about the overall design and presentation of the content, but it seems like this kind of service is akin to what you describe.
I'd think this kind of broad offering would appeal to readers more than a single-site subscription. The Apple cost of $13 per month sounds much better than, say, the NY Times cost of $25 every four weeks, but maybe the Apple access to publications is limited or has other problematic attributes.
I don’t think that’s the main problem though. The main reason I unsubscribed is that Apple News+ still has ads and prompts to sign up for newsletters! It’s a usability issue; the newspaper equivalent of torrenting music, archive.is offers a far superior reading experience and just so happens to be free. The industry needs something like Spotify or Steam to fix it.
With print subscriptions, the publisher was one clear tollbooth, as unless subscribers paid for delivery, the paper wasn't delivered. That was a leaky model --- there were copies circulated at offices, people would bring and leave papers at cafes, they could be read at libraries or private clubs. But generally, a copy of the paper or magazine had to be bought.
The other tollbooth was the newsstand, where individual copies could be bought from either a manned or unmanned site.
With the Internet and Web, the notion of such tollbooths is largely eliminated. As I've suggested several times in this discussion, the two highly obvious tollbooths are either the ISP (with whom the reader has an existing relationship, though less so in the case of, say, public WiFi), or a taxing authority who could assess a payment on all residents of a region (on the basis that media and an informed public contribute to the common weal). Or perhaps other indirect assessments, as with old legal notice requirements (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>).
Beyond that it would devolve into a scenario where entities would begin trying to game whatever system is created to get a cut of the pie.
Forced support is not the answer.
For a tax assessment this would be based on wealth (e.g., property tax) and/or income. For an ISP-based assessment, the allocation might be more challenging, but a differentiation between business and residential usage (with a higher assessment for businesses, again on a progressive scale), and differentiated rates probably on a neighbourhood / metro region basis (so that a household on the Upper West Side and one in Julesburg, CO, would pay widely differing rates), is what I have in mind.
Rationale is that the wealthy have already benefitted mightily from such access, and the poor should not be denied access to media: news, entertainment, books, music, video, whatever.
You say "forced". I say enlighted common weal.
The poor are not denied access this currently. Everything in your argument hinges on the claim that government funded and directed media will be superior to the status quo. Why?
Before complaining that people aren't willing to pay for online news, recall that they didn't pay for national broadcast news either.
The paper covers an area of around 1 million people. They have no correspondents, with the exception of a small team at the Danish parliament. All their "journalists" are centralised in the regional "capital". I'm sure that their reporters are actual journalists, just not very good writers. All foreign news are provide by Reuters or some other news service, with a little rewrite and no adding of information from other sources. There simply isn't enough news in the area, to make a daily newspaper necessary and they don't have the staff to add much value to the national and international coverage. For this newspaper, which is mostly ads and very poorly written articles they charge the equivalent of $1250 per year. That is absolutely insane, you can get a legitimate good paper for $890 per year, but that will not have the local angle and there are very few other sources for local news.
I don't agree that you shouldn't follow the news, but I'd argue that you don't need daily coverage, that's pointless as well. Daily provides no time for details to emerge, no time for investigation or second sources. Weekly is absolutely fine, anymore frequent and the news degenerate and the media becomes an ad hellscape to cover the cost of publishing.
That said, the situation you ... report ... is all too common in far too many places.
Maybe once payments are bundled into the browser coupled with some W3 standard…
Make the browser store you credit/debit card info, make the browser handle the payment UI, make the browser expose JS apis to invoke payments and receipt fetching against pluggable payment providers.
My ideal world looks like this. New html button element:
`<pay amount="1.00" currency="USD" reference="my-article-123" checkoutUrl="https://...">Unlock for $1.00</pay>`
Clicking it opens browser checkout flow. The url you get from stripe/paypal or another whitelisted payment provider that has implemented the spec, some flow similar to OAuth. On a successful tx, a signed receipt (something like a jwt) is returned from the provider and saved by the browser, on disk on your computer.
The webpage can then load signed receipt references from the browser api, sends it to the backend which can return the article content if the receipt jwt is valid.
It can be fixed if the right people from Chrome and Stripe got together in a room and brainstormed for a bit. Then everyone else would follow.
"Problem of privacy" which incidentally made me very relieved to find in your article: it is nice not to be alone
> I don’t want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the paragraph what I’m reading
He writes "Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire life history wasn’t sea-lioning into every possible situation trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket".
I can still buy the print version of the Economist at the newsstand (OK, Barnes & Noble) and I can still buy a print copy of the WSJ at the grocery store or convenience store.
I paid, hmm, looks like $11.49 plus tax for the last print version of the Economist I bought. Will I consider paying $6 or so an issue for a subscription to the online version? No, I will not.
I paid, I think, $5 plus tax for the last print WSJ weekend edition I bought. Will I consider paying $40 a month for a digital subscription? No, I will not.
Here are my requirements: I can pay in cash per issue with no way for the publisher to tell I bought it or to track my reading in any way.
Don't meet my requirements? Totally fine. But if you don't, I'm not paying for your product. Go complain to someone else.
Yes and: Most of what we now label "news" is actually infotainment. aka USA Today. Which is distinct from previous incarnations of tabloids, yellow journalism, phamphleteering, etc.
Ad supported media (structurally) cannot sustainably create real news. It just doesn't pencil out.
FWIW I happily pay for quality media creating real news, opinion, and analysis. (starting with Propublica, Five to Four, Volts, Know Your Enemy.) More so over time, as I discover more good stuff.
Most newspapers have deliberately promoted the online editions in preference to their traditional print editions, which is compromising the economies of scale in printing. The online edition of the New York Times is half the price of the print edition because they want it to be, not because that would be its natural market price.
A specific newspaper is not a free market resource; the editorial stance and quality is exclusive. But assume for sake of argument that it is: that there are dozens of different companies that can produce the New York Times. As long as the physical quality (of the ink, paper etc.) is adequate, consumers will purchase the paper which is cheapest. Eventually, a monopoly would emerge due the economies of scale - the producer which sells the most papers would also be able to provide the lowest prices. Yet, this hypothetical printer would still be kept honest because, with no exclusivity over printing, they couldn't raise their prices above the basic printing cost of a single copy (which does not benefit from economies of scale).
Here's the key part of the argument: the difference between the online and print edition is $3. For less than $3, I can print the entire Sunday edition at home, probably on higher quality paper too. That means that the New York Times are deliberately over-pricing the print edition relative to their online edition. They can do this because they hold copyright over the text. They want to do this because they can target advertising to individuals, lock customers into subscriptions more easily online, show attention-grabbing multimedia and a do whole litany of other profitable things.
I should note that abolishing copyright wouldn't fix the problem, because that would drive prices down below even the true market value of journalism. This is because nobody would want be the first to purchase a copy of the article; wait a little longer and someone else will sell you theirs at a discount. I personally believe it would be closer to the real value than the status quo, but it is still below it, and that isn't a sustainable income for journalists. It would harm professional journalism eventually.
Ensuring that anyone is allowed to republish an article verbatim at a fixed royalty - a royalty no higher than the price of the online edition - would, I think, go a long way to making print editions reflect their actual relative value compared to electronic publishing. Legislation permitting format-shifting, and resale of the format-shifted work, would facilitate this.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261282