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Article treats online journalism as "the Internet". The Internet is fine, the web is fine, online journalism has problems. What do they expect after a couple of

Article treats online journalism as "the Internet". The Internet is fine, the web is fine, online journalism has problems. What do they expect after a couple of years of the worst journalism the world has seen. Clickbait is not viable, well good riddance. Write something factual that we don't know instead. When journalism reports facts again in a manner that treats us like adults people might read it. They might trust the economic advice along side the article too. But when have newspapers ever taken the stance that advertising should be informational and beneficial for the user. If people don't click it's not just the article that is inappropriate, the advert is too.

afarrell 10y ago
> people might read it But will people pay for it? You cannot pay your rent or student loans with exposure.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  I would assume not everybody who is now in the click bait "journalism" and blog spam business could actually be a journalist. So if those would simply be starved off (which is a big if, bordering on utopia, I admit that), there would be a lot more eyeballs for those who remain; add to that figuring out micro-payments and getting rid of the bloated ad networks (if you must have ads, display a few curated ones for things you actually can endorse), and suddenly the situation is a lot less bleak. If there was "free food" but after a while it was watered down so much and had so many additives that it just made you sick and left you hungry, why wouldn't you go back to normal food? Yes, it's infinitely more expensive than "free", but getting sick from it and still being hungry also has all sorts of hidden costs. So, where's the free market with people operating in their own interest, right?
  - icebraining 10y ago
    add to that figuring out micro-payments That sounds like "the proof is left as an exercise for the reader."
    - PavlovsCat 10y ago
      Sure, but remove any mention of micro-payments from my comment and the point is unchanged. I would consider it a minor and optional detail, at least compared to people caring enough about the quality of journalism that hacks would have no audience. I did call that utopian after all. But just because there is a big distance between here and there doesn't mean there's not a "there" there, and if people cared enough, they would find a way. Yes, it's vague, but this island seems to be sinking, the next one looks better to me; that's all I can say from here. People liking instant gratification over attention spans and smart long-term decisions is not something to adapt to, much less exploit, it's something that we will either deal with, or something that will deal with us. And in regards to micro-payments I think it would also help if anonymity wasn't under attack so much. When people seriously drive towards abolishing cash in the physical world, of course introducing the equivalent of cash on the web can't really work; I'm not saying it would be necessarily trivial otherwise, but there's a really hostile climate towards it on top of it. It's also a political and social problem, not just a technical one.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      The ITU spent a bunch of time figuring out how to make different payment schemes work on the Internet. For the most part we do not want them, but maybe some of the pieces can be used to implement micropayments, carefully so as to avoid the Comcast/Netflix extortion problems the other parts of the ITU proposals could create (AIUI/IIRC).
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  They are. Look at things like patreon or tipee. For online journalism mediapart.fr is a good example of reader supported independent journalism.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Plenty of people pay for the FT, New York Times, Economist, New Yorker, Atlantic, et cetera. One can't complain about click bait/advertising and paywalls.
  - belorn 10y ago
    Of course you can. People are completely free to complain if the car market only support the extreme ends of lemons and Ferraris, a situation that can occur when the market balance between buyer and producer starts to break down.
  - jasode 10y ago
    >Plenty of people pay for the ... It is true that many pay for digital subscriptions but I did not interpret the "will people pay for it?" as just a non-zero number of subscribers. Instead, "will people pay for it?" is often interpreted as shorthand for "would enough people pay enough money to make it economically viable?" (E.g. good salaries for journalists, strong profits for the publisher, etc.) Yes, those websites you mentioned are attracting paying subscribers to avoid paywalls but as far as I can tell, nobody is making significant profits from it. For example, NYT digital subscriptions are growing -- and ad revenue from online is growing -- but the profits (if any) are not replacing the lost profits from traditional print ads. For online subscriptions, many publishers are losing money or barely breaking even. No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought. So far, the answer to "will people pay for it?" appears to be "no". From what I can tell, the kind of publishing that works very well on subscriptions is industry-specific for a specialized audience. For example, the NationalJournal (costs $7000 to $25000) for following blow-by-blow legislation in Washington DC or Gartner Group (~$20k/yr) for business analysis news. On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources. As a result, mainstream publishing will always depend more on heavy-handed advertising rather than subscriptions for the majority of revenue.
    - devishard 10y ago
      > No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought. Now we're really getting to the heart of it: in an economic environment where growth is valued above all else, including actual value, publishers can't accept that they might have to make less money. Honestly, though, I am highly skeptical that for-profit businesses controlling our media is even a good thing. Look at NPR, which is supported entirely by donations and grants: they don't make much money, and incidentally they do some of the best reporting I've come across. Ultimately, I think the NYT and its ilk aren't "failing" at subscription models, they're failing because they can't compete with a myriad of more local news sources. It's hard to maintain a business when you have to send reporters to Cairo to report on Arab spring or to Tokyo to report on the Fukushima reactors, and local readers can get eyewitness reports from Redditors and Twitterers. It doesn't help that major news sources are increasingly untrustworthy and sensationalized. Ads are allowing them to delay the inevitable, but I think the end result will be decentralization. There's no reason for me to get my news about the Arab spring from the NYT when Al Jazeera has reporters who have been on the ground there for decades and have far more context; there's no reason for me to get my news about Fukushima from the NYT when I can read the English version of the Japan Times. News Aggregators make this easier. And incidentally, there are plenty of small news sources operating on subscription, pay-per-article, PWYW, donation, or other business models.
ragebol 10y ago
Thats the nice thing with Blendle: if you don't like an article, you can get your money back easily. Useless articles with clickbait titles apparently as a lot of refunds.
ThomPete 10y ago
Thats not really the solution either. People don't want to pay for quality journalism despite what journalists and media like to tell themselves. The problem is that most information finds it's way to the internet for free. We are no longer depending on the distribution channels that the newspapers used to had, to bring information to us. That leaves us with investigative journalism but even that is slowly taking the backseat and it's not enough for people to want to pay for it.
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  >People don't want to pay for quality journalism despite what journalists and media like to tell themselves. I'm not sure that's really true. We simply have no option. There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality".
  - noxToken 10y ago
    > There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality". I don't know if I'd quite go that far. I don't remember when the phenomenon started, but a lot of online platform shifted from news organizations to news orgs with blogs. The first instance I noticed was some years ago when the WSJ, Bloomberg, or some similar organization had a noticeable decline in the quality or articles that had been shared in my circles. It wasn't that the quality was down. They had integrated user blogs that required no clout to contribute. The only way to distinguish between an actual article and the no-name blog contributor was a /pages (or something similar) in the URL. At that point, you may as well have been reading a Medium post. I do think there is plenty of quality journalism online. I think one of the main issues is that the blog side of organizations has been deeply intertwined with the actual news content. We are so used to blog spam being passed as an official news story from the companies we trusted.
    - 10y ago
MustardTiger 10y ago
>Article treats online journalism as "the Internet". Indeed, if online "journalism" crashes and burns, it will improve the web not endanger it.
jackcosgrove 10y ago
The difference between online advertising and print advertising is that the effectiveness of online advertising is more measurable. For decades the newspapers and TV networks overstated to companies the effectiveness of their ads. I'm not saying that was intentional, and maybe traditional media were the best advertising platform. But now that we can measure views and clicks, companies are learning that the news itself is not a great vehicle for selling ads, especially compared to web searches.

afarrell 10y ago

> people might read it But will people pay for it? You cannot pay your rent or student loans with exposure.

PavlovsCat 10y ago
I would assume not everybody who is now in the click bait "journalism" and blog spam business could actually be a journalist. So if those would simply be starved off (which is a big if, bordering on utopia, I admit that), there would be a lot more eyeballs for those who remain; add to that figuring out micro-payments and getting rid of the bloated ad networks (if you must have ads, display a few curated ones for things you actually can endorse), and suddenly the situation is a lot less bleak. If there was "free food" but after a while it was watered down so much and had so many additives that it just made you sick and left you hungry, why wouldn't you go back to normal food? Yes, it's infinitely more expensive than "free", but getting sick from it and still being hungry also has all sorts of hidden costs. So, where's the free market with people operating in their own interest, right?
- icebraining 10y ago
  add to that figuring out micro-payments That sounds like "the proof is left as an exercise for the reader."
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    Sure, but remove any mention of micro-payments from my comment and the point is unchanged. I would consider it a minor and optional detail, at least compared to people caring enough about the quality of journalism that hacks would have no audience. I did call that utopian after all. But just because there is a big distance between here and there doesn't mean there's not a "there" there, and if people cared enough, they would find a way. Yes, it's vague, but this island seems to be sinking, the next one looks better to me; that's all I can say from here. People liking instant gratification over attention spans and smart long-term decisions is not something to adapt to, much less exploit, it's something that we will either deal with, or something that will deal with us. And in regards to micro-payments I think it would also help if anonymity wasn't under attack so much. When people seriously drive towards abolishing cash in the physical world, of course introducing the equivalent of cash on the web can't really work; I'm not saying it would be necessarily trivial otherwise, but there's a really hostile climate towards it on top of it. It's also a political and social problem, not just a technical one.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    The ITU spent a bunch of time figuring out how to make different payment schemes work on the Internet. For the most part we do not want them, but maybe some of the pieces can be used to implement micropayments, carefully so as to avoid the Comcast/Netflix extortion problems the other parts of the ITU proposals could create (AIUI/IIRC).
bigbugbag 10y ago
They are. Look at things like patreon or tipee. For online journalism mediapart.fr is a good example of reader supported independent journalism.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Plenty of people pay for the FT, New York Times, Economist, New Yorker, Atlantic, et cetera. One can't complain about click bait/advertising and paywalls.
- belorn 10y ago
  Of course you can. People are completely free to complain if the car market only support the extreme ends of lemons and Ferraris, a situation that can occur when the market balance between buyer and producer starts to break down.
- jasode 10y ago
  >Plenty of people pay for the ... It is true that many pay for digital subscriptions but I did not interpret the "will people pay for it?" as just a non-zero number of subscribers. Instead, "will people pay for it?" is often interpreted as shorthand for "would enough people pay enough money to make it economically viable?" (E.g. good salaries for journalists, strong profits for the publisher, etc.) Yes, those websites you mentioned are attracting paying subscribers to avoid paywalls but as far as I can tell, nobody is making significant profits from it. For example, NYT digital subscriptions are growing -- and ad revenue from online is growing -- but the profits (if any) are not replacing the lost profits from traditional print ads. For online subscriptions, many publishers are losing money or barely breaking even. No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought. So far, the answer to "will people pay for it?" appears to be "no". From what I can tell, the kind of publishing that works very well on subscriptions is industry-specific for a specialized audience. For example, the NationalJournal (costs $7000 to $25000) for following blow-by-blow legislation in Washington DC or Gartner Group (~$20k/yr) for business analysis news. On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources. As a result, mainstream publishing will always depend more on heavy-handed advertising rather than subscriptions for the majority of revenue.
  - devishard 10y ago
    > No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought. Now we're really getting to the heart of it: in an economic environment where growth is valued above all else, including actual value, publishers can't accept that they might have to make less money. Honestly, though, I am highly skeptical that for-profit businesses controlling our media is even a good thing. Look at NPR, which is supported entirely by donations and grants: they don't make much money, and incidentally they do some of the best reporting I've come across. Ultimately, I think the NYT and its ilk aren't "failing" at subscription models, they're failing because they can't compete with a myriad of more local news sources. It's hard to maintain a business when you have to send reporters to Cairo to report on Arab spring or to Tokyo to report on the Fukushima reactors, and local readers can get eyewitness reports from Redditors and Twitterers. It doesn't help that major news sources are increasingly untrustworthy and sensationalized. Ads are allowing them to delay the inevitable, but I think the end result will be decentralization. There's no reason for me to get my news about the Arab spring from the NYT when Al Jazeera has reporters who have been on the ground there for decades and have far more context; there's no reason for me to get my news about Fukushima from the NYT when I can read the English version of the Japan Times. News Aggregators make this easier. And incidentally, there are plenty of small news sources operating on subscription, pay-per-article, PWYW, donation, or other business models.

ragebol 10y ago

Thats the nice thing with Blendle: if you don't like an article, you can get your money back easily. Useless articles with clickbait titles apparently as a lot of refunds.

ThomPete 10y ago

Thats not really the solution either. People don't want to pay for quality journalism despite what journalists and media like to tell themselves. The problem is that most information finds it's way to the internet for free. We are no longer depending on the distribution channels that the newspapers used to had, to bring information to us. That leaves us with investigative journalism but even that is slowly taking the backseat and it's not enough for people to want to pay for it.

MustardTiger 10y ago
>People don't want to pay for quality journalism despite what journalists and media like to tell themselves. I'm not sure that's really true. We simply have no option. There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality".
- noxToken 10y ago
  > There is no quality journalism online, there are a bunch of crooked people trying to push different agendas, and an unfortunately large group of people willing to pretend whichever trash rags are pushing the agendas they like are "quality". I don't know if I'd quite go that far. I don't remember when the phenomenon started, but a lot of online platform shifted from news organizations to news orgs with blogs. The first instance I noticed was some years ago when the WSJ, Bloomberg, or some similar organization had a noticeable decline in the quality or articles that had been shared in my circles. It wasn't that the quality was down. They had integrated user blogs that required no clout to contribute. The only way to distinguish between an actual article and the no-name blog contributor was a /pages (or something similar) in the URL. At that point, you may as well have been reading a Medium post. I do think there is plenty of quality journalism online. I think one of the main issues is that the blog side of organizations has been deeply intertwined with the actual news content. We are so used to blog spam being passed as an official news story from the companies we trusted.
  - 10y ago

MustardTiger 10y ago

>Article treats online journalism as "the Internet". Indeed, if online "journalism" crashes and burns, it will improve the web not endanger it.

jackcosgrove 10y ago

The difference between online advertising and print advertising is that the effectiveness of online advertising is more measurable. For decades the newspapers and TV networks overstated to companies the effectiveness of their ads. I'm not saying that was intentional, and maybe traditional media were the best advertising platform. But now that we can measure views and clicks, companies are learning that the news itself is not a great vehicle for selling ads, especially compared to web searches.