6 ms·

The Independent: first victim of a confounding digital future

56 points by nkurz 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- petewailes 11y ago
  As long as there are companies, there'll be competition, and as long as there's competition, there'll be marketers helping one company to out-perform the others.
leereeves 11y ago
> Why should great journalism on screen be free when everything else comes at a price? Much of what once came at a price is now available for free (to users). From sites like YouTube, Coursera, EdX, Skype, open access journals, etc. to content created and shared for free by millions of people on social media. Why would news be different?
- a_humean 11y ago
  Because none of that is really free; it is a matter of determining the funding model. Newspapers haven't quite figured out the model, and during the transition we could end up losing a number of the 'quality' press and the institutional memory of journalistic practice that comes with the territory, which, depending upon your point of view, might be a net loss to society. For example: Open access journals aren't free. They are paid for through predominantly public funding and pubic/private grants to researchers and universities. They are only free in the sense that we are getting rid of the middle-man (private publishers) that in many cases have increasingly dubious value (pretty much all of the labour is actually carried out by uncompensated researchers) and in many are actually parasitic.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - leereeves 11y ago
    A "middle man" isn't of dubious value and parasitic, the role is essential to connect producer and consumer, whether that be artist to listener, scientist to reader, teacher to student, or, in the case of news, witness or spokesperson to the rest of us. But it's a role increasingly performed by technology, and the traditional media may be as obsolete now as other middle men. Of course someone has to pay for that, but the service can be free for many users, paid for by alternative revenue models.
    - shwouchk 11y ago
      I, for one, don't feel that technology is doing a good job in regards to finding music that I like, deciding which (academic) articles are worth reading, or which things are newsworthy and/or important for me to know. That's what publishers are for and that's what they'll stay for, in the near future at least.
    - a_humean 11y ago
      The journal or the editorial board (staffed by publicly funded academics), as a connoisseur, is separate from the distribution mechanism that is the private publisher. My department at my alam mater edits a top 3 journal in my original discipline. My alma mater has to buy a subscription for this journal (including the hardback version that nobody reads) with articles written by uncompensated academics paid for with public funds; edited, copyedited and typeset by my uncompensated university's faculty paid for with public funds; and reviewed anonymously by uncompensated academics paid for with public funds. What do all of these parties get in exchange that costs the university library so much? Prestige for the department, university, and individual CVs for being associated with a top 3 journal in their discipline that happens to be owned by a private company. That seems like a parasitic relationship to me when the universities can just run the open access journal and retain the editorial board for very little by themselves. This is happening, but it just takes too long for a new open access journal to build reputation when careers are at stake with being associated with top journals.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Because none of that is really free; it is a matter of determining the funding model. Even if not "really free" most of them now have marginal profits, whereas the use to command a premium in the past.
  - hessenwolf 11y ago
    Hypothesis: It turned out that a lot of people did not want to pay for news. They wanted to pay for entertainment. Newspapers had a distribution monopoly, and chose what the users wanted to receive. Now that the monopoly is broken, other parties are providing services give for free. It turns out that many users are happy with those services. Some users wanted news enough to pay for it. Those users now pay subscriptions. However, the old news was subsidised by the users who just wanted entertainment. The new news is paid for by a smaller group. They must either pay more, or accept less news. I pay for financial news. There is no other news I would be prepared to pay for. I am not prepared to pay for entertainment, except the cinema and overpriced popcorn.
    - dsr_ 11y ago
      Competing hypothesis: advertisers irrationally spent money on advertising, because they had beliefs about effectiveness and reach. Internet advertising comes with much better feedback mechanisms than ever before possible, destroying those irrational beliefs. Secondarily: advertising quality has generally been correlated to price. Internet advertising reduces the price so far that we don't just get the equivalent of a local used-car dealer in between the national toilet-paper ad and the international fast-food restaurant ad, we get a Nigerian 419 scam and Ed's Fantasy Football League afterwards.
      - hessenwolf 11y ago
        But isn't advertising spending increasing?
  - at-fates-hands 11y ago
    >> we could end up losing a number of the 'quality' press and the institutional memory of journalistic practice that comes with the territory, which, depending upon your point of view. Like most things these days, finding good journalism tends to be exceedingly rare. In a world of over saturation of everything (books, movies, music, news), you really have to dig to find something that is objective, politically unbiased, and fair. Even 5 years ago, it was much easier to find dependable news sources and solid, objective reporting. Nowadays, I find I'm searching a lot longer to find something which isn't outwardly slanted in one political direction or the other.
struct 11y ago
Out of curiosity I just went to the Indy's website (now its only hope of survival). Unfortunately, my first thought was "damn, what the hell did I just click on?" If I want Kanye West, speculation on who'll be the next James Bond, and Duncan Bannatyne doing... something, that's what the Daily Mail's for. I really can't see how it has a chance.
- leereeves 11y ago
  http://independent.co.uk/ http://independent.co.uk/ There is more than fluff there. For example: "Suspected Russian air strikes destroy MSF children's hospital - despite so-called Syria 'ceasefire" and "Anger as boycott of Israeli goods to become a criminal offense" and a lot more.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    It's still purposely designed to (i) look like a tabloid (ii) make the horrible Taboola "promoted content" spam look indistinguishable from the actual journalism and (iii) promote fluff pieces from the blog of its sister tabloid more prominently than substantial content from the actual broadsheet. It's difficult to conclude the people behind their online strategy had any love for the broadsheet newspaper or any desire to position it as editorially weighty.
    - joshvm 11y ago
      It really does look a lot like Taboola. Here's their click-bait trash (I have no other words for it, it's not even good advertising): https://s3.amazonaws.com/external_clips/attachments/43217/original/Screen_Shot_2015-02-04_at_8.10.43_AM.png?1423055474 https://s3.amazonaws.com/external_clips/attachments/43217/or... And now compare to the Indy homepage... for a paper which has historically been pro civil liberties and not afraid of going against journalistic norms, this is a real pity.
      - notahacker 11y ago
        If you read an article page with adblocker off, the similarities are even more mindboggling. The only way you can tell the difference is that the Taboola links are slightly bigger and more prominently positioned than the links to the actual articles...
skoczymroczny 11y ago
In my opinion, Internet can survive without commercial content. It worked in the early stages of the Internet, with people providing free services like BBS etc. for the good of the community. We would just move to more decentralized storage and communications solutions. We might actually end up even better than before.
- onion2k 11y ago
  It worked in the early stages of the Internet, with people providing free services like BBS etc. for the good of the community. People supplied small scale infrastructure for free. Supplying the sort of infrastructure necessary to run the internet at scale is very likely impossible without some sort of commercialisation. You need full time people to keep it going, so you have to pay them because they have rent and food bills. You can't run things on a voluntary basis once they get to a certain scale. Likewise with professionally produced content - you just can't expect it to happen without paying someone to do it because it takes more time to make than you can reasonably expect people to give for free. People need to eat, which means you have to pay them. That, of course, does not automatically mean you have to have a corporation involved. Something like Patreon[1] would work just as well. [1] https://www.patreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    People supplied small scale infrastructure for free Maybe that's the answer, then. Speaking of media and journalism, I see very little of value coming from the large centralized outlets nowadays. There's entirely too much agenda pushing, non-objectivity being paraded around as if that's a positive, "native" advertisements, banality as "breaking news", and all the other nonsense everyone already knows. Think about it - look at how guarded you have to be when consuming news to ensure you're not consuming an advertisement or a propaganda piece. Look how often you have to ask the question "What is this person trying to get me to believe?" This shouldn't be necessary! I think we can do better. And I think the problem isn't with the players per se, but with the game as its rules are currently written. That means we start over, with a new architecture, new everything. Call me an extremist, but I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that things like news shouldn't be profit makers. The desire for more money in that industry perverts just about everything it touches. What good is paying reporters to go source facts if they're going to be distorted and manipulated by the time they're presented to the public?
notahacker 11y ago
The extent to which the Independent was a victim of a digital future is questionable. It launched the "i" a tabloid print newspaper from scratch relatively recently, and the decline in subscribers to the flagship broadsheet was more or less equalled by the increase in subscribers to the (lower cost) tabloid. The total readership stayed around the same (unlike all other major UK print newspapers). In other words, an already low circulation newspaper effectively cannibalised its own readership. It's an open question whether launching the "i" saved some of the Independent's editorial or killed it.
Shivetya 11y ago
well with news aggregators I still lean towards a micro transaction system. you got to rise to the top to be noticed and that may mean covering areas of the news many consider beneath the paper in question.
raddad 11y ago
Why couldn't online news operate like HN, people submit and the news get's upvoted? Here's an example of member written and submitted news. http://www.opednews.com/ http://www.opednews.com/ Woa !! Google search for member submitted news comes up with 246 million results !! http://bit.ly/1WnYOBW http://bit.ly/1WnYOBW Disclaimer: I have no idea of the quality of any of these member submitted news pages. They could all be wack jobs. Opednews does have some good writers.

56 points by nkurz 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

petewailes 11y ago
As long as there are companies, there'll be competition, and as long as there's competition, there'll be marketers helping one company to out-perform the others.

leereeves 11y ago

> Why should great journalism on screen be free when everything else comes at a price? Much of what once came at a price is now available for free (to users). From sites like YouTube, Coursera, EdX, Skype, open access journals, etc. to content created and shared for free by millions of people on social media. Why would news be different?

a_humean 11y ago
Because none of that is really free; it is a matter of determining the funding model. Newspapers haven't quite figured out the model, and during the transition we could end up losing a number of the 'quality' press and the institutional memory of journalistic practice that comes with the territory, which, depending upon your point of view, might be a net loss to society. For example: Open access journals aren't free. They are paid for through predominantly public funding and pubic/private grants to researchers and universities. They are only free in the sense that we are getting rid of the middle-man (private publishers) that in many cases have increasingly dubious value (pretty much all of the labour is actually carried out by uncompensated researchers) and in many are actually parasitic.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 11y ago
  A "middle man" isn't of dubious value and parasitic, the role is essential to connect producer and consumer, whether that be artist to listener, scientist to reader, teacher to student, or, in the case of news, witness or spokesperson to the rest of us. But it's a role increasingly performed by technology, and the traditional media may be as obsolete now as other middle men. Of course someone has to pay for that, but the service can be free for many users, paid for by alternative revenue models.
  - shwouchk 11y ago
    I, for one, don't feel that technology is doing a good job in regards to finding music that I like, deciding which (academic) articles are worth reading, or which things are newsworthy and/or important for me to know. That's what publishers are for and that's what they'll stay for, in the near future at least.
  - a_humean 11y ago
    The journal or the editorial board (staffed by publicly funded academics), as a connoisseur, is separate from the distribution mechanism that is the private publisher. My department at my alam mater edits a top 3 journal in my original discipline. My alma mater has to buy a subscription for this journal (including the hardback version that nobody reads) with articles written by uncompensated academics paid for with public funds; edited, copyedited and typeset by my uncompensated university's faculty paid for with public funds; and reviewed anonymously by uncompensated academics paid for with public funds. What do all of these parties get in exchange that costs the university library so much? Prestige for the department, university, and individual CVs for being associated with a top 3 journal in their discipline that happens to be owned by a private company. That seems like a parasitic relationship to me when the universities can just run the open access journal and retain the editorial board for very little by themselves. This is happening, but it just takes too long for a new open access journal to build reputation when careers are at stake with being associated with top journals.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Because none of that is really free; it is a matter of determining the funding model. Even if not "really free" most of them now have marginal profits, whereas the use to command a premium in the past.
- hessenwolf 11y ago
  Hypothesis: It turned out that a lot of people did not want to pay for news. They wanted to pay for entertainment. Newspapers had a distribution monopoly, and chose what the users wanted to receive. Now that the monopoly is broken, other parties are providing services give for free. It turns out that many users are happy with those services. Some users wanted news enough to pay for it. Those users now pay subscriptions. However, the old news was subsidised by the users who just wanted entertainment. The new news is paid for by a smaller group. They must either pay more, or accept less news. I pay for financial news. There is no other news I would be prepared to pay for. I am not prepared to pay for entertainment, except the cinema and overpriced popcorn.
  - dsr_ 11y ago
    Competing hypothesis: advertisers irrationally spent money on advertising, because they had beliefs about effectiveness and reach. Internet advertising comes with much better feedback mechanisms than ever before possible, destroying those irrational beliefs. Secondarily: advertising quality has generally been correlated to price. Internet advertising reduces the price so far that we don't just get the equivalent of a local used-car dealer in between the national toilet-paper ad and the international fast-food restaurant ad, we get a Nigerian 419 scam and Ed's Fantasy Football League afterwards.
    - hessenwolf 11y ago
      But isn't advertising spending increasing?
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  >> we could end up losing a number of the 'quality' press and the institutional memory of journalistic practice that comes with the territory, which, depending upon your point of view. Like most things these days, finding good journalism tends to be exceedingly rare. In a world of over saturation of everything (books, movies, music, news), you really have to dig to find something that is objective, politically unbiased, and fair. Even 5 years ago, it was much easier to find dependable news sources and solid, objective reporting. Nowadays, I find I'm searching a lot longer to find something which isn't outwardly slanted in one political direction or the other.

struct 11y ago

Out of curiosity I just went to the Indy's website (now its only hope of survival). Unfortunately, my first thought was "damn, what the hell did I just click on?" If I want Kanye West, speculation on who'll be the next James Bond, and Duncan Bannatyne doing... something, that's what the Daily Mail's for. I really can't see how it has a chance.

leereeves 11y ago
http://independent.co.uk/ http://independent.co.uk/ There is more than fluff there. For example: "Suspected Russian air strikes destroy MSF children's hospital - despite so-called Syria 'ceasefire" and "Anger as boycott of Israeli goods to become a criminal offense" and a lot more.
- notahacker 11y ago
  It's still purposely designed to (i) look like a tabloid (ii) make the horrible Taboola "promoted content" spam look indistinguishable from the actual journalism and (iii) promote fluff pieces from the blog of its sister tabloid more prominently than substantial content from the actual broadsheet. It's difficult to conclude the people behind their online strategy had any love for the broadsheet newspaper or any desire to position it as editorially weighty.
  - joshvm 11y ago
    It really does look a lot like Taboola. Here's their click-bait trash (I have no other words for it, it's not even good advertising): https://s3.amazonaws.com/external_clips/attachments/43217/original/Screen_Shot_2015-02-04_at_8.10.43_AM.png?1423055474 https://s3.amazonaws.com/external_clips/attachments/43217/or... And now compare to the Indy homepage... for a paper which has historically been pro civil liberties and not afraid of going against journalistic norms, this is a real pity.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      If you read an article page with adblocker off, the similarities are even more mindboggling. The only way you can tell the difference is that the Taboola links are slightly bigger and more prominently positioned than the links to the actual articles...

skoczymroczny 11y ago

In my opinion, Internet can survive without commercial content. It worked in the early stages of the Internet, with people providing free services like BBS etc. for the good of the community. We would just move to more decentralized storage and communications solutions. We might actually end up even better than before.

onion2k 11y ago
It worked in the early stages of the Internet, with people providing free services like BBS etc. for the good of the community. People supplied small scale infrastructure for free. Supplying the sort of infrastructure necessary to run the internet at scale is very likely impossible without some sort of commercialisation. You need full time people to keep it going, so you have to pay them because they have rent and food bills. You can't run things on a voluntary basis once they get to a certain scale. Likewise with professionally produced content - you just can't expect it to happen without paying someone to do it because it takes more time to make than you can reasonably expect people to give for free. People need to eat, which means you have to pay them. That, of course, does not automatically mean you have to have a corporation involved. Something like Patreon[1] would work just as well. [1] https://www.patreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/
- Karunamon 11y ago
  People supplied small scale infrastructure for free Maybe that's the answer, then. Speaking of media and journalism, I see very little of value coming from the large centralized outlets nowadays. There's entirely too much agenda pushing, non-objectivity being paraded around as if that's a positive, "native" advertisements, banality as "breaking news", and all the other nonsense everyone already knows. Think about it - look at how guarded you have to be when consuming news to ensure you're not consuming an advertisement or a propaganda piece. Look how often you have to ask the question "What is this person trying to get me to believe?" This shouldn't be necessary! I think we can do better. And I think the problem isn't with the players per se, but with the game as its rules are currently written. That means we start over, with a new architecture, new everything. Call me an extremist, but I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that things like news shouldn't be profit makers. The desire for more money in that industry perverts just about everything it touches. What good is paying reporters to go source facts if they're going to be distorted and manipulated by the time they're presented to the public?

notahacker 11y ago

The extent to which the Independent was a victim of a digital future is questionable. It launched the "i" a tabloid print newspaper from scratch relatively recently, and the decline in subscribers to the flagship broadsheet was more or less equalled by the increase in subscribers to the (lower cost) tabloid. The total readership stayed around the same (unlike all other major UK print newspapers). In other words, an already low circulation newspaper effectively cannibalised its own readership. It's an open question whether launching the "i" saved some of the Independent's editorial or killed it.

Shivetya 11y ago

well with news aggregators I still lean towards a micro transaction system. you got to rise to the top to be noticed and that may mean covering areas of the news many consider beneath the paper in question.

raddad 11y ago

Why couldn't online news operate like HN, people submit and the news get's upvoted? Here's an example of member written and submitted news. http://www.opednews.com/ http://www.opednews.com/ Woa !! Google search for member submitted news comes up with 246 million results !! http://bit.ly/1WnYOBW http://bit.ly/1WnYOBW Disclaimer: I have no idea of the quality of any of these member submitted news pages. They could all be wack jobs. Opednews does have some good writers.