10 ms·

The Rest Is Advertising – Confessions of a Sponsored Content Writer

154 points by JackPoach 11y ago

api 11y ago
This is the future if everything has to be free. Since you can't make money by creating content for readers, you have to instead create content for advertisers and propagandists.
- williamcotton 11y ago
  The future is already here: http://shonduras.com/ http://shonduras.com/ If you want to experience the magic of Disney from your phone following Shonduras is a must! He has teamed up with Disney multiple times to make interactive snapchat stories throughout their parks. Shonduras and AT&T are joining forces to bring you the AT&T Hello Lab! Over the course of the year Shonduras is leading an innovative series, live experiences, albums, giveaways, podcasts and more. Follow along and see what he’s creating in the AT&T Hello Lab.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  There is plenty of content that will always be free and free of advertising. That's content made by people who either care about a subject or that are otherwise given the feeling that they contribute to something larger than themselves (wikipedia for instance, plenty of blogs, courses and so on). The problem is that newspapers evolved in lock-step with the advertising industry and that they had carved out an - in retrospect - extremely fragile position based on a balance that they thought was stable. Unfortunately for many quality news publications it turned out that wasn't the only stable state, the other one is the state in which they are simply gone, maybe a few with hopefully benevolent wealthy sponsors would endure. This was an unforeseen consequence of reducing the value of printing presses to near zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital Pretty much predicted this, the only thing it got wrong was the timetable, it took a little bit longer. So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak.
  - scholia 11y ago
    The problem is that the content that's "free and free of advertising" probably won't be very good, or very well researched, or independent. High quality content often depends on access (which can be hard or impossible to get even if you're a real journalist), a lot of time, and quite a lot of input from support staff (editors, subeditors, researchers, picture editors etc). > So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak. Agreed.
    - Godel_unicode 11y ago
      If by content you mean specifically news and product reviews, that's certainly possible. If by content you mean "long-form writing on a specific subject", then you're quite wrong and the parent is right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ High quality content comes from two sources, similar to high quality software. It either comes from an organization which makes and sells high quality content to make money (the new York times::Microsoft) or it comes from individual contributors who create it out of passion for the subject (wikipedia::FSF)
      - scholia 11y ago
        People will produce "long-form writing on a specific subject" but usually only if they have an axe to grind. They are not necessarily independent and their work is not necessarily subject to the editorial checks and balances that you get from a properly set up news organisation like, for example, the New York Times. You're moving from a situation where stuff is mostly trustworthy to mostly untrustworthy. Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. I don't think it would have as many users if this were not the case ;-)
        pjc50 11y ago
        Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. This is completely false: every act of writing or releasing Free software is a political act. That's the point of doing it, of giving your labour away. Free software only exists because of the social and political opinions of its authors.
hayksaakian 11y ago
This is the future. At this point it's impossible to un-do disruptiveness of banner ads. One reason that People block banners is due to how disruptive and gaudy they are. Native ads camouflage among real content for a few reasons. 1) people like the how articles are presented on the rest of the website, so these ads are not disruptive 2) Many people don't notice the 'advertorial' or 'sponsored content' disclaimers. This reduced the 'bounce rate' of people that view this advertising there fore higher engagement
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Bah. I hardly read sponsored content. It's often marked and I find myself enjoying the piece less and instead hunting like an eagle for every clear indication of propaganda and attempted influence. The author's main point I believe is correct: money in journalism is wildly misallocated, from overpaid mega-writers and editors, to inconsequential coverage. Things that can't hold forever won't, and that will allow new and necessary questions to be asked about journalism in this new era. Every market goes through a rough patch and a transformation. If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history. Okay, but how can it change? Where will the money come from? I'm on the side of the dystopians (is that a word?) until someone can answer those questions for me. But I'm a techie, not a student of history, and I honestly don't know.
  - philovivero 11y ago
    The silence... is deafening.
  - fweespee_ch 11y ago
    > Okay, but how can it change? I'm pretty sure this is a "yellow journalism period" on the internet but it will get worse before it gets better since the common man needs to completely lose faith in these rags like they did with tabloids. Clickbait is alot like the tabloids and yellow journalism of print media, honestly. > Where will the money come from? Subscriptions most likely. It'll be newspapers written to favor the desires/biases of the upper middle class who would consider dropping $100/year for such a thing.
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
FussyZeus 11y ago
I've said it before: There is no value in proper journalism because there's too damn much of it in the market. I think the subscriber model will work much better once 70% of these companies have died off and the remainder can get back to real journalism. If the better ones have to survive the storm by taking on sponsored content, that's what has to happen. At one time we had tons of newspapers for every moderately large city, and now all of those papers are now online and expect to make money covering all the world's news like they did before. The problem with that is none of them are geographically limited anymore, they distribute everywhere, which probably sounded awesome to them until they realized all their old competitors and a couple million more they had never heard of were all doing the same thing and eating their lunch. The problem with news online right now is there is just way too much of it, there is demand, but when you can get more or less the same information on 5,000 different sites, who the hell cares what your particular site has to offer? Add to it some blocking users of adblock or switching to a subscriber only model, and you have a clear reason why these companies can't make money.
- rthomas6 11y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. It follows, then, that the way forward is to hyperlocalize, either geographically or in a particular subject matter. And come to think of it, I would find much greater value in a detailed news site about my city, or even my particular section of my city.
  - hobs 11y ago
    It has been tried (though you could argue not well.) I feel like it was either Yahoo or AOL who tried hyperlocal news and it did not gain traction. However, you could argue that this lack of traction was due to the climate of the users and what they were interested in at the time, they also (if I remember correctly) were actively paying local "reporters" who had a specific local beat.
    - rthomas6 11y ago
      That's not authentic and not really what I want. There is zero chance that a single reporter reporting to a mothership in another city could generate better content than a local paper. After thinking about it, what I want already exists in limited ways. Some examples for my city: clatl.com atlanta.eater.com atlanta.curbed.com In addition to these, I think a small monthly paper devoted solely to investigative journalism in a particular city or town would generate enough paying subscribers to be viable, but I could be wrong.
rthomas6 11y ago
I went to the Atlantic to read some sponsored content, only to discover that uBlock Origin filters it out for me.
dunkelheit 11y ago
I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring. It just seems that PR-media-marketing juggernaut is always on the look for things that are perceived as trustworthy and trying its best to simulate them. Hope that at least HN will remain unpopular enough so that we will still be able to have real discussions here in the future ;)
- tariqali34 11y ago
  I hope that wink is a realization that sponsored content (in the form of "Show HN" and the linkbait submitted by heavily interested parties) has already arrived.
  - dunkelheit 11y ago
    At least there is a tradition of stating your affiliations and monetary interests up front. But still, good point. Recent bitcoin debacle is a good example - with both parties accusing each other of staging a FUD-spreading campaign in social media and on discussion sites.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  > I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring. To be fair, magazines and newspapers have always had "sponsored content" or "native advertisement" (whatever you wanna call it) and we managed.
  - dunkelheit 11y ago
    Yes, but suspecting that every article has an unstated source of influence other than author's own opinion is the whole new level of paranoia. Articles throwing lavish praise at some particular corporation are the easiest - just dismiss them. But when there is no evident source of influence, my mind races to build a mini-conspiracy theory - who is trying to tell me this and why? As I've said, tiring.
slackstation 11y ago
This is just another of the long list of things that you can only trust if you pay for it. You are the product not the client of most media you consume. If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust. Nothing it trust-worthy any more. Newspapers are selling their reputations in a fire sale. Buzzfeed actually makes money by ignoring any idea of objectiveness or the separation between editorial and advertising.
- daniel-cussen 11y ago
  > Newspapers are selling their reputations in a fire sale. This is the logical business outcome because most newspapers are running out of money faster than they're running out of reputation.
- smcnally 11y ago
  > If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust. General skepticism, independent vetting, and referencing multiple sources are good ideas. Among the problems with sponsored content/native ads/advertorial is that people rail against it as if all the other editorial is completely devoid of any bias, point of view or financial consideration. It's sleight of hand and misdirection, in part.
hagbardgroup 11y ago
Ad blockers block most native ads because they get loaded dynamically and have trackers associated with them to provide accurate billing and accountability to advertisers. So that part of the article is at least wrong. Every native ad that I'm aware of loads almost exactly like a banner ad. Most people don't particularly want or need objective news. If they want it straight, they can pay premium prices for it through outlets like Consumer Reports or from specialty newsletters. When they don't want it, they pay by renting part of their attention to advertisers, marketers, and salespeople.
JacobAldridge 11y ago
I studied Journalism and trained as a Journalist a lifetime ago (1999-2002), before the internet really (technical term looming) fucked everything up. Thing is, even back then we were studying the impact of the 'Janus view of the Press' - this concept that any and every news publication was a two-headed beast, seeking to find the balance between great, objective journalism ... and money to keep the lights on. Back then is was more philosophical than existential - we debated whether it was morally acceptable for a writer to take into consideration the size of a company's ad account when covering them in a story; now that the focused channel of broadcast media has been fragmented, so advertisers no longer pay a premium for access to readers and viewers of the nightly news, every journalist has to be mindful of their commercial impact (though this still needn't impact their writing choices) because they may be out of a job next week. Plus ça change and all that. I'd like to see more debates around how to fund the new model (now that we've discovered it was the channel, not the content, that people actually valued for a couple of hundred years), not all this hand-wringing about the impact of money on objectivity because that's an old, boring conversation. Ultimately, advertising has been funding journalism for a long, long time. I wish it wasn't so, but I also wish it rained doughnuts.
- qznc 11y ago
  Is it necessary to debate about funding models for journalism? Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this. You can debate about government intervention, if capitalism does not incentivize as people want. Maybe the government should pay for some of the journalism? Maybe we need more control and oversight for "high-quality" journalism?
  - marklgr 11y ago
    > Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this. Depends on what you call 'working well': we currently witness the direct consequences of the commoditization of what could arguably be considered as a public service--namely, access to trustworthy information for all--, but somehow some still have faith in that model. You are perfectly right that money will find its way, but the question is: whose money, and for what goal? Big corporation or mogul's money, who want to buy mindshare in public opinion and trade it for influence in the political sphere, like, say, the good media networks of M.Berlusconi, Bouygues and tons of others?
melvinmt 11y ago
Can't wait 'til adblockers start blocking sponsored content.
- Terr_ 11y ago
  New plan: Block any article that mentions a company or trademark. :p
  - scholia 11y ago
    So that eliminates almost all the financial stories, all the hardware and software reviews, and all the sports coverage, just for starters ;-)
    - DavidHm 11y ago
      If you think about it, this is not a gigantic loss, if you are interested in insights and not news.
      - scholia 11y ago
        Where do you think insights come from? Are they generated spontaneously out of thin air in the absence of facts?
        DavidHm 11y ago
        Of course insights are generated by facts. But what I am interested in is the insights, not necessary the facts that led to them being created (as long as I trust the author who converted facts into insights). So I am happy to read an article about the evolution of (random example) people's savings and investing behaviour. I don't necessarily need name dropping of the fintech unicorns who are involved with making it happen.
        scholia 11y ago
        This is like wanting a history of movies that doesn't mention any movies. You're welcome to try it (1). That's a good way to prove yourself wrong ;-) (1) I've done quite a bit of it myself.
jcr 11y ago
Since the spamvertorials mentioned were published in The Atlantic, it reminded me of something in one of PG's essays earlier this year: http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html "The Refragmentation" January 2016 >"But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college."
amelius 11y ago
I wonder what will happen to journalism when AI becomes so strong that it can recognize ads and remove or mask them, even when the advertisements are placed inline in the running text.
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Why stop there? What'll happen to journalism when AI is so strong it can write articles entirely, eliminating the need for any writers at all?
- undersuit 11y ago
  I would then declare AI to have passed a turing test. To be able to understand the nuance and have an opinion on what is an advertisement? That's smarts.

154 points by JackPoach 11y ago

api 11y ago

This is the future if everything has to be free. Since you can't make money by creating content for readers, you have to instead create content for advertisers and propagandists.

williamcotton 11y ago
The future is already here: http://shonduras.com/ http://shonduras.com/ If you want to experience the magic of Disney from your phone following Shonduras is a must! He has teamed up with Disney multiple times to make interactive snapchat stories throughout their parks. Shonduras and AT&T are joining forces to bring you the AT&T Hello Lab! Over the course of the year Shonduras is leading an innovative series, live experiences, albums, giveaways, podcasts and more. Follow along and see what he’s creating in the AT&T Hello Lab.
jacquesm 11y ago
There is plenty of content that will always be free and free of advertising. That's content made by people who either care about a subject or that are otherwise given the feeling that they contribute to something larger than themselves (wikipedia for instance, plenty of blogs, courses and so on). The problem is that newspapers evolved in lock-step with the advertising industry and that they had carved out an - in retrospect - extremely fragile position based on a balance that they thought was stable. Unfortunately for many quality news publications it turned out that wasn't the only stable state, the other one is the state in which they are simply gone, maybe a few with hopefully benevolent wealthy sponsors would endure. This was an unforeseen consequence of reducing the value of printing presses to near zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital Pretty much predicted this, the only thing it got wrong was the timetable, it took a little bit longer. So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak.
- scholia 11y ago
  The problem is that the content that's "free and free of advertising" probably won't be very good, or very well researched, or independent. High quality content often depends on access (which can be hard or impossible to get even if you're a real journalist), a lot of time, and quite a lot of input from support staff (editors, subeditors, researchers, picture editors etc). > So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak. Agreed.
  - Godel_unicode 11y ago
    If by content you mean specifically news and product reviews, that's certainly possible. If by content you mean "long-form writing on a specific subject", then you're quite wrong and the parent is right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ High quality content comes from two sources, similar to high quality software. It either comes from an organization which makes and sells high quality content to make money (the new York times::Microsoft) or it comes from individual contributors who create it out of passion for the subject (wikipedia::FSF)
    - scholia 11y ago
      People will produce "long-form writing on a specific subject" but usually only if they have an axe to grind. They are not necessarily independent and their work is not necessarily subject to the editorial checks and balances that you get from a properly set up news organisation like, for example, the New York Times. You're moving from a situation where stuff is mostly trustworthy to mostly untrustworthy. Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. I don't think it would have as many users if this were not the case ;-)
      - pjc50 11y ago
        Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. This is completely false: every act of writing or releasing Free software is a political act. That's the point of doing it, of giving your labour away. Free software only exists because of the social and political opinions of its authors.

hayksaakian 11y ago

This is the future. At this point it's impossible to un-do disruptiveness of banner ads. One reason that People block banners is due to how disruptive and gaudy they are. Native ads camouflage among real content for a few reasons. 1) people like the how articles are presented on the rest of the website, so these ads are not disruptive 2) Many people don't notice the 'advertorial' or 'sponsored content' disclaimers. This reduced the 'bounce rate' of people that view this advertising there fore higher engagement

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

Bah. I hardly read sponsored content. It's often marked and I find myself enjoying the piece less and instead hunting like an eagle for every clear indication of propaganda and attempted influence. The author's main point I believe is correct: money in journalism is wildly misallocated, from overpaid mega-writers and editors, to inconsequential coverage. Things that can't hold forever won't, and that will allow new and necessary questions to be asked about journalism in this new era. Every market goes through a rough patch and a transformation. If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history. Okay, but how can it change? Where will the money come from? I'm on the side of the dystopians (is that a word?) until someone can answer those questions for me. But I'm a techie, not a student of history, and I honestly don't know.
- philovivero 11y ago
  The silence... is deafening.
- fweespee_ch 11y ago
  > Okay, but how can it change? I'm pretty sure this is a "yellow journalism period" on the internet but it will get worse before it gets better since the common man needs to completely lose faith in these rags like they did with tabloids. Clickbait is alot like the tabloids and yellow journalism of print media, honestly. > Where will the money come from? Subscriptions most likely. It'll be newspapers written to favor the desires/biases of the upper middle class who would consider dropping $100/year for such a thing.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago

FussyZeus 11y ago

I've said it before: There is no value in proper journalism because there's too damn much of it in the market. I think the subscriber model will work much better once 70% of these companies have died off and the remainder can get back to real journalism. If the better ones have to survive the storm by taking on sponsored content, that's what has to happen. At one time we had tons of newspapers for every moderately large city, and now all of those papers are now online and expect to make money covering all the world's news like they did before. The problem with that is none of them are geographically limited anymore, they distribute everywhere, which probably sounded awesome to them until they realized all their old competitors and a couple million more they had never heard of were all doing the same thing and eating their lunch. The problem with news online right now is there is just way too much of it, there is demand, but when you can get more or less the same information on 5,000 different sites, who the hell cares what your particular site has to offer? Add to it some blocking users of adblock or switching to a subscriber only model, and you have a clear reason why these companies can't make money.

rthomas6 11y ago
That makes a lot of sense. It follows, then, that the way forward is to hyperlocalize, either geographically or in a particular subject matter. And come to think of it, I would find much greater value in a detailed news site about my city, or even my particular section of my city.
- hobs 11y ago
  It has been tried (though you could argue not well.) I feel like it was either Yahoo or AOL who tried hyperlocal news and it did not gain traction. However, you could argue that this lack of traction was due to the climate of the users and what they were interested in at the time, they also (if I remember correctly) were actively paying local "reporters" who had a specific local beat.
  - rthomas6 11y ago
    That's not authentic and not really what I want. There is zero chance that a single reporter reporting to a mothership in another city could generate better content than a local paper. After thinking about it, what I want already exists in limited ways. Some examples for my city: clatl.com atlanta.eater.com atlanta.curbed.com In addition to these, I think a small monthly paper devoted solely to investigative journalism in a particular city or town would generate enough paying subscribers to be viable, but I could be wrong.

rthomas6 11y ago

I went to the Atlantic to read some sponsored content, only to discover that uBlock Origin filters it out for me.

dunkelheit 11y ago

I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring. It just seems that PR-media-marketing juggernaut is always on the look for things that are perceived as trustworthy and trying its best to simulate them. Hope that at least HN will remain unpopular enough so that we will still be able to have real discussions here in the future ;)

tariqali34 11y ago
I hope that wink is a realization that sponsored content (in the form of "Show HN" and the linkbait submitted by heavily interested parties) has already arrived.
- dunkelheit 11y ago
  At least there is a tradition of stating your affiliations and monetary interests up front. But still, good point. Recent bitcoin debacle is a good example - with both parties accusing each other of staging a FUD-spreading campaign in social media and on discussion sites.
rpgmaker 11y ago
> I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring. To be fair, magazines and newspapers have always had "sponsored content" or "native advertisement" (whatever you wanna call it) and we managed.
- dunkelheit 11y ago
  Yes, but suspecting that every article has an unstated source of influence other than author's own opinion is the whole new level of paranoia. Articles throwing lavish praise at some particular corporation are the easiest - just dismiss them. But when there is no evident source of influence, my mind races to build a mini-conspiracy theory - who is trying to tell me this and why? As I've said, tiring.

slackstation 11y ago

This is just another of the long list of things that you can only trust if you pay for it. You are the product not the client of most media you consume. If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust. Nothing it trust-worthy any more. Newspapers are selling their reputations in a fire sale. Buzzfeed actually makes money by ignoring any idea of objectiveness or the separation between editorial and advertising.

daniel-cussen 11y ago
> Newspapers are selling their reputations in a fire sale. This is the logical business outcome because most newspapers are running out of money faster than they're running out of reputation.
smcnally 11y ago
> If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust. General skepticism, independent vetting, and referencing multiple sources are good ideas. Among the problems with sponsored content/native ads/advertorial is that people rail against it as if all the other editorial is completely devoid of any bias, point of view or financial consideration. It's sleight of hand and misdirection, in part.

hagbardgroup 11y ago

Ad blockers block most native ads because they get loaded dynamically and have trackers associated with them to provide accurate billing and accountability to advertisers. So that part of the article is at least wrong. Every native ad that I'm aware of loads almost exactly like a banner ad. Most people don't particularly want or need objective news. If they want it straight, they can pay premium prices for it through outlets like Consumer Reports or from specialty newsletters. When they don't want it, they pay by renting part of their attention to advertisers, marketers, and salespeople.

JacobAldridge 11y ago

I studied Journalism and trained as a Journalist a lifetime ago (1999-2002), before the internet really (technical term looming) fucked everything up. Thing is, even back then we were studying the impact of the 'Janus view of the Press' - this concept that any and every news publication was a two-headed beast, seeking to find the balance between great, objective journalism ... and money to keep the lights on. Back then is was more philosophical than existential - we debated whether it was morally acceptable for a writer to take into consideration the size of a company's ad account when covering them in a story; now that the focused channel of broadcast media has been fragmented, so advertisers no longer pay a premium for access to readers and viewers of the nightly news, every journalist has to be mindful of their commercial impact (though this still needn't impact their writing choices) because they may be out of a job next week. Plus ça change and all that. I'd like to see more debates around how to fund the new model (now that we've discovered it was the channel, not the content, that people actually valued for a couple of hundred years), not all this hand-wringing about the impact of money on objectivity because that's an old, boring conversation. Ultimately, advertising has been funding journalism for a long, long time. I wish it wasn't so, but I also wish it rained doughnuts.

qznc 11y ago
Is it necessary to debate about funding models for journalism? Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this. You can debate about government intervention, if capitalism does not incentivize as people want. Maybe the government should pay for some of the journalism? Maybe we need more control and oversight for "high-quality" journalism?
- marklgr 11y ago
  > Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this. Depends on what you call 'working well': we currently witness the direct consequences of the commoditization of what could arguably be considered as a public service--namely, access to trustworthy information for all--, but somehow some still have faith in that model. You are perfectly right that money will find its way, but the question is: whose money, and for what goal? Big corporation or mogul's money, who want to buy mindshare in public opinion and trade it for influence in the political sphere, like, say, the good media networks of M.Berlusconi, Bouygues and tons of others?

melvinmt 11y ago

Can't wait 'til adblockers start blocking sponsored content.

Terr_ 11y ago
New plan: Block any article that mentions a company or trademark. :p
- scholia 11y ago
  So that eliminates almost all the financial stories, all the hardware and software reviews, and all the sports coverage, just for starters ;-)
  - DavidHm 11y ago
    If you think about it, this is not a gigantic loss, if you are interested in insights and not news.
    - scholia 11y ago
      Where do you think insights come from? Are they generated spontaneously out of thin air in the absence of facts?
      - DavidHm 11y ago
        Of course insights are generated by facts. But what I am interested in is the insights, not necessary the facts that led to them being created (as long as I trust the author who converted facts into insights). So I am happy to read an article about the evolution of (random example) people's savings and investing behaviour. I don't necessarily need name dropping of the fintech unicorns who are involved with making it happen.
        scholia 11y ago
        This is like wanting a history of movies that doesn't mention any movies. You're welcome to try it (1). That's a good way to prove yourself wrong ;-) (1) I've done quite a bit of it myself.

jcr 11y ago

Since the spamvertorials mentioned were published in The Atlantic, it reminded me of something in one of PG's essays earlier this year: http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html "The Refragmentation" January 2016 >"But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college."

amelius 11y ago

I wonder what will happen to journalism when AI becomes so strong that it can recognize ads and remove or mask them, even when the advertisements are placed inline in the running text.

cableshaft 11y ago
Why stop there? What'll happen to journalism when AI is so strong it can write articles entirely, eliminating the need for any writers at all?
undersuit 11y ago
I would then declare AI to have passed a turing test. To be able to understand the nuance and have an opinion on what is an advertisement? That's smarts.