5 ms·

It's an artifact of the article-by-article payment/consumption model. It used to be that people would have to buy a whole issue or subscription to a publicatio

by Banthum 10y ago

It's an artifact of the article-by-article payment/consumption model. It used to be that people would have to buy a whole issue or subscription to a publication. So you'd choose based on the overall reputation of the publication. So that's what the media maximized. Now, on the Internet, people consume articles for free from many sites based on links. They don't care (and often don't know) anything about the reputation of the publication they're reading. And sites get paid based on views (through ads served). So now the sites are optimizing for getting people to read this article, without much concern about the overall image of the site, which most people won't know anyway. It's an obvious, huge, and very impactful change in incentives for media people.

cortesoft 10y ago
Are you sure that is true? I mean, we had the whole Yellow Journalism phenomenon at the turn of the last century, and they weren't selling on an article by article basis. The publications had reputations, but they still got people to read their paper by sensationalizing everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
- pillowkusis 10y ago
  >they weren't selling on an article by article basis there were literally newspaper boys on the streets yelling an outrageous headline and making you pay two cents to read the article itself. I don't think subscription papers existed in large amounts during that time.
  - nerfhammer 10y ago
    > newspaper boys on the streets yelling an outrageous headline it's weirdly hilarious to me to think that urban sidewalks used to be analogous to facebook...
- jdietrich 10y ago
  When you paid for a newspaper, you paid for the lurid headlines, the coverage of local politics, the funny pages, the investigative journalism, the sports reporting, the crossword etc etc. Nobody in management was entirely sure what part of that mix actually sold newspapers; editors had a large degree of discretion over what went in the paper and who got paid. Ad-supported online journalism has unbundled news and precisely quantified each part. Management know exactly what each piece of "content" earns. Editors can no longer pretend that the prestige of serious reporting is a worthwhile investment. Ad-supported online journalism is now almost entirely dependent on traffic from social media. As we have learned from the "fake news" imbroglio, reputation means almost nothing in this arena. You're only as good as your next clickbait headline. As I see it, the only future for quality journalism is subscription-based, one way or another. Adsense is killing journalism.
threeseed 10y ago
No it's not an artefact of that monetisation model at all. The fact is that tabloid, clickbait style of journalism has been going on for decades and was popularised by Rupert Murdoch first in the Australia then UK then the US. What we see on many online websites are merely digital versions of The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph etc which were all very popular news publications.
pillowkusis 10y ago
This is the central thesis of Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. The internet ruined media by changing the revenue model to a per-article rather than per-subscription basis. He made this claim in 2012, long before most people recognized how dangerous the changing media ecosystem was going to be. Great book, if you're looking to understand how media in the internet age became such a disaster I recommend it highly.
5thaccount 10y ago
I think there is a LOT in this, as individual pageviews dictate revenue more than reputation, However, I think there is a misnomer about pageviews vs reputation. In Australia, the equivalent of the NYTimes is probably The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald. On both sites, people read a lot of gossip. I haven't seen stats recently, but when a mate worked there they were usually the top stories on any given day outside say Steve Irwin dying. Someone can read gossip anywhere - so why go to a reputable site to do it? I think people still go to reputable sites because they can convince themselves they aren't one of the masses that reads gossip. Oh no. They read The Age / NYTimes etc. The publications that chase pageviews at the expense of reputation threaten to destroy that convenient delusion, and I wonder if, longer term, that will hurt the bottom line. Fake News SHOULD be a huge financial gain for the mainstream media, as reputation is the number one factor people suggest when working out if something is fake news. So more than even reputation is the key - even when the goal is more gossip pageviews.

by Banthum 10y ago

cortesoft 10y ago

Are you sure that is true? I mean, we had the whole Yellow Journalism phenomenon at the turn of the last century, and they weren't selling on an article by article basis. The publications had reputations, but they still got people to read their paper by sensationalizing everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

pillowkusis 10y ago
>they weren't selling on an article by article basis there were literally newspaper boys on the streets yelling an outrageous headline and making you pay two cents to read the article itself. I don't think subscription papers existed in large amounts during that time.
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  > newspaper boys on the streets yelling an outrageous headline it's weirdly hilarious to me to think that urban sidewalks used to be analogous to facebook...
jdietrich 10y ago
When you paid for a newspaper, you paid for the lurid headlines, the coverage of local politics, the funny pages, the investigative journalism, the sports reporting, the crossword etc etc. Nobody in management was entirely sure what part of that mix actually sold newspapers; editors had a large degree of discretion over what went in the paper and who got paid. Ad-supported online journalism has unbundled news and precisely quantified each part. Management know exactly what each piece of "content" earns. Editors can no longer pretend that the prestige of serious reporting is a worthwhile investment. Ad-supported online journalism is now almost entirely dependent on traffic from social media. As we have learned from the "fake news" imbroglio, reputation means almost nothing in this arena. You're only as good as your next clickbait headline. As I see it, the only future for quality journalism is subscription-based, one way or another. Adsense is killing journalism.

threeseed 10y ago

No it's not an artefact of that monetisation model at all. The fact is that tabloid, clickbait style of journalism has been going on for decades and was popularised by Rupert Murdoch first in the Australia then UK then the US. What we see on many online websites are merely digital versions of The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph etc which were all very popular news publications.

pillowkusis 10y ago

This is the central thesis of Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. The internet ruined media by changing the revenue model to a per-article rather than per-subscription basis. He made this claim in 2012, long before most people recognized how dangerous the changing media ecosystem was going to be. Great book, if you're looking to understand how media in the internet age became such a disaster I recommend it highly.

5thaccount 10y ago

I think there is a LOT in this, as individual pageviews dictate revenue more than reputation, However, I think there is a misnomer about pageviews vs reputation. In Australia, the equivalent of the NYTimes is probably The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald. On both sites, people read a lot of gossip. I haven't seen stats recently, but when a mate worked there they were usually the top stories on any given day outside say Steve Irwin dying. Someone can read gossip anywhere - so why go to a reputable site to do it? I think people still go to reputable sites because they can convince themselves they aren't one of the masses that reads gossip. Oh no. They read The Age / NYTimes etc. The publications that chase pageviews at the expense of reputation threaten to destroy that convenient delusion, and I wonder if, longer term, that will hurt the bottom line. Fake News SHOULD be a huge financial gain for the mainstream media, as reputation is the number one factor people suggest when working out if something is fake news. So more than even reputation is the key - even when the goal is more gossip pageviews.