10 ms·
The conclusion that a drop in readership is proof that moving to the web was a mistake is extraordinarily shallow. "Readers continue to leave print newspapers,
by nkozyra 10y ago
The conclusion that a drop in readership is proof that moving to the web was a mistake is extraordinarily shallow.
"Readers continue to leave print newspapers, but they’re not migrating to the online editions."
Because they have more options.
Print products were often monopolies, especially in the early to mid 90s, a hey day for newspapers. There was often a single publication per DMA.
What happened then is newspaper readers increasingly became web users throughout the 90s and 00s and left the print product. In 2000, if you wanted semi-local or regional news on the web, you went to ... your newspaper web site! In 2016, you have a plethora of choices, many of them unsaddled by the constraints of a typical newspaper organizational structure (for better or worse). So you have web sites and publications producing/sharing/clickbaiting 10x the content than your local newspaper does. This leads to a spreading of readership.
What's happened is a diaspora. Sticking with the print product over the web would not have prevented this. It may have slowed the decline of print circulation, but I have serious doubts about that. The challenge newspapers have is competing with decidedly non-journalistic approaches to news; ones that give readers what they want even if it isn't done "right." Competing with platforms and sites that can churn out "content" at an unfettered rate means fundamentally changing what a newspaper does.
There's no easy answer - newspapers can accept that people will largely go to other sites to get less reliable information faster, or that their content will be repurposed on other platforms without any compensation. That will likely mean a slow constriction or demise. Alternately, they can compete in that space, which a lot are doing now. That means sacrificing the ideals of journalism.
- goatlover 10y agoSacrificing the ideals of journalism sounds like a bad deal for democracy. But then again, if people would rather be entertained by whatever is in their filter bubble for five minutes, than be challenged, I guess that's the kind of news world we get.
- Fricken 10y agoI remember my print edition, it was mostly schlock, but every now and then they would do some real investigative local reporting, and that was invaluable. No local source has broken a major, deep, sprawling complex story in years, they're basically just bloggers now, they've got a handful of daily beats they cover, and they don't go much deeper than that. Powerful local organizations operate unchecked.
- gozur88 10y agoThis. Local (non-sports) news in my paper is mostly city council stuff and the police blotter. A particularly salacious crime gets a few extra column inches. Other than that, the paper is wire stories and advertisements.
- tcbawo 10y agoI've noticed neighborhood groups on Facebook starting to fill this vacuum. It would be interesting if online journalism could embrace the model of geographic news.
- UweSchmidt 10y agoI feel that the local newspaper, or even the common worldview of the major newspapers were/are quite the bubble themselves. Imagine HN without a comment section! Content algorithms seem to be putting the occasional annoying thing into my feed to keep it fresh, and I keep finding gems of brilliance out of the scope of traditional journalism.
- EGreg 10y agoThis may not be the news world we need But this is the news world we deserve :)
- orbitingpluto 10y agoI think your comment is very apt. If you don't pay for the news, you being manipulated is the product. You have to support people who inform for our actual benefit. I subscribe to a couple digital periodicals. My last paper subscription lapsed about four months ago.
- mark-r 10y agoPaying doesn't help. It always galled me that I was paying for the privilege of getting ads. My paper subscription lapsed years ago. The local paper is actually pretty good, but I find I don't miss it much anymore.
- orbitingpluto 10y agoPerhaps you should find some news sites that don't have ads then? Something that only exists on readership support? Some stories only eventually break into 'mainstream media' (ugh, I used that phrase, I'm sorry) through these sites.
- nathanaldensr 10y agoThis is a false dichotomy. Please present evidence that shows that paying for news means you are not being manipulated. I counter your lack of evidence with an opinion that states the opposite: News being written by people, almost all news has some form of bias. Sometimes it's barely there, sometimes it's in-your-face.
- orbitingpluto 10y agoSpurting out 'false dichotomy' and stating that I haven't provided the necessary treatise of evidence is kind of ridiculous. I hope you can see how pretentious that sounds. If a news organization only exists because the Koch brothers own it and it operates at a loss, its primary purpose isn't to serve unbiased news, but propaganda. Contrast that to a news agency or journalist whose existence is funded only through subscriptions, with zero advertising. These type of agencies are not subservient to a Murdoch, a pharma company, or anybody. They only have to interest their readership sufficiently. Of course there is still bias. But now you have multiple viewpoints. If the only news you're getting is from papers owned by billionaires or heavily moderated forums owned by billionaires, then good luck. I would agree with you that sending money to Fox News isn't going to help with the bias much.
- olalonde 10y ago> Sacrificing the ideals of journalism sounds like a bad deal for democracy We should not romanticize journalism of the past too much either. The "old news" subreddit gives some perspective (obviously, it's biased towards funny or unusual stories) https://www.reddit.com/r/OldNews https://www.reddit.com/r/OldNews
- rustynails 10y agoI have recorded one year of imagery in a 1970 newspaper (as a start). Speaking from firsthand experience with comparisons from the last few years, media has taken a huge leap backwards and prejudice and nastiness has increased considerably. This is in spite of most people who haven't compared saying the opposite of what I have observed ("oh, you want to go back to how it was 50 years ago when men were all sexist?"). I could write a novel on that fallacious mindset alone! This may not be what you meant about romanticising, but modern newspapers have deteriorated significantly. Part of this deterioration is because of competition in journalism (click bait, a race to the bottom). Part of it is a perverse sense of and fundamental abuse of the term Equality. The abuse of the term equality has then lead to unprecedented gender bullying and some extreme revisionist history that largely remains unchallenged. If you pick up a reasonable paper from 1970, you will realise how sexist we have become! The issue today is that you won't find a reasonable (eg. non sexist) newspaper - there is no choice! Sexism and gender bullying ARE the norm. Newspapers needed to compete with the Internet. In this respect, the article was fundamentally wrong. Failure to embrace the Internet would have allowed others to fill the void (even if you went online but charged money). More people are now used to digesting news electronically and the Internet makes the content dynamic and interactive. People will pay good money for good news, but it needs to be good quality. That eliminates most of the market. Think of games. You can still sell the occasional blockbuster (GTA 5 made a billion dollars worth of sales!!). However, most games on iTunes hover below a few $ and many end up free. Compare this to games 30 years ago where there was a small cheap-end market. Or, CDs. Sales have fallen through the floor, but, a 99c track sells well on iTunes. News isn't quite the same, but you can see that a paradigm shift was inevitable for newspapers with the advent of the Internet. If there was one thing the papers got wrong, it was the increase in nastiness and prejudice. I believe society is much worse today than it has been in a long time. The caring element is what we've lost. We need a new generation of pioneers to undo the carnage.
- amelius 10y agoNow I'm curious. Are we actually measuring how well people are informed in general? Is informedness declining? That would be interesting, since the web is supposed to bring us information, not take it away.
- rustynails 10y agoThe media has always had a vested interest in what it tells you. Look up William Randolph Hearst as an example. However, today, you see a lot more blatant manipulation in the media. People are conditioned to it, which is scary. Take a subtle example, Ars Technica almost never says Chairman, it says Chairperson, but it will say Chairwoman (which also shows their ignorance of the origin of Chairman). Ars has played all sorts of games like this. It started around the time of Casey Johnson and the introduction of strong gender stereotyping. This was from a once brilliant (and well balanced) site that has never recovered. Today, very few people will tell you how to think, they will tell you what to think, who to vote for, etc. True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s." The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s (when FEW men had the right to vote, let alone women - which is always overlooked for the sake of propaganda). This is an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years, without challenge. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Women-voted-75-years-before-they-were-legally-allowed-to-in-1918.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Wom... There are many areas today where people don't bother to do any fact checking. What's worse are those that purposely manipulate history. They insult and disgrace our grandmothers and grandfathers. Yet, most of us would say that our grandmothers were not wallflowers and our grandfathers not anything like modern media portrays!!! So, in short, yes. The Internet goes a long way to hiding and misrepresenting information. The signal to noise ratio is a big part of the problem, but special interest groups and political correctness have also contributed significantly.
- quirkafleeg 10y ago> Take a subtle example, Ars Technica almost never says Chairman, it says Chairperson, but it will say Chairwoman (which also shows their ignorance of the origin of Chairman). Where is your evidence for that claim? Chairwoman - About 272 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairwoman+site%3Aarstechnica.com https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairwoman+site%3Aar... Chairperson - About 179 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairperson+site%3Aarstechnica.com https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairperson+site%3Aa... Chairman - About 2,960 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairman+site%3Aarstechnica.com https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairman+site%3Aarst... > True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s." > The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s How does that make it false? It doesn't state that no woman voted in the 1830s, it states that some women gained voting rights in the 1860s. The only way it's false is if no women received voting rights in the 1860s. It's not "an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years", it's simply an example of nobody who edited that page being aware that some women voted in the 1830s. If you have legitimate sources demonstrating they did (your link states 1843, BTW, not 1830s) then edit the Wikipedia page and add/correct that info. That's how Wikipedia works.
- betenoire 10y agoMy plumber isn't allowed to call himself a plumber unless he follows the rules for plumbing. Same for my accountant, doctor, electrician, and lock pick. I get the "free speech" argument, but I still cannot understand why we don't have rules about who can and cannot call themselves a journalist. Coming up with these rules might be tricky, but shouldn't we try? Or have we and I'm just uninformed?
- lifeisstillgood 10y agoFantastic idea. It's a profession, and actually there are rules on who can write for newspapers - it's just that the owners of newspapers piss in the soup so much with their biases that it loses any value. So maybe fewer journalists and fewer newspapers - some form of public service guarantee otherwise you canny t be a newspaper just an entertainment magazine
- flukus 10y agoI agree, but change journalist to "software developer" and see what kind of reaction you get around here.
- return0 10y agoAlso , ease of access. If newspapers did not publish online, people would OCR and pirate their articles.