4 ms·

I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I'm happy to pay for my news, b

I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda. Maybe the moral of the story is that Google News isn't the best source of news -- just the cheapest. Though I do think it would make sense for historical articles (i.e. articles older than some arbitrary time period) should be removed from the paywall so as to be searchable and able to be referenced.

ng12 9y ago
> I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda I don't think there's a significant correlation there at all. The NYTimes hawks subscriptions almost as heavily as the WSJ.
- exelius 9y ago
  While the conservative media pundits like to rail against the NYT, it's actually a very reputable news source that fact-checks articles and issues retractions when it is wrong. Sure it's a bit left-leaning in the topics they report on, but they're usually not wrong.
  - actuallyalys 9y ago
    Agreed. I tend to think of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as being mirror images of each other: they're both reputable and based in NYC [0], but the NYT has a liberal bent and the WSJ has a conservative one. [0]: Being based in the largest city of the east coast gives them a different set of biases, which aren't entirely political.
workerIbe 9y ago
The irony may be that the best way to get paid is to be biased.
- fgonzag 9y ago
  I totally agree. People are more likely to pay to read the news they are biased to. So all forms of media have a high incentive to bias their content towards their consumer's point of view.
- exelius 9y ago
  There will always be a market segment that values the unbiased truth.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    Given the human bias for sources that confirm rather than challenge preconceived notions, I'd imagine that market segment is quite small. Even among people that say they want such a service! And on top of that, there's a difference between news and data. "xx people were run over by a truck in an attack group Y has claimed responsibility for" is a (poor) headline, not an article. Once you expand out beyond a reading of simple facts, bias creeps in everywhere from choice of sources to choice of words to quantity of coverage. Worse, simple facts are rarely interesting or actionable. People want analysis.
DougWebb 9y ago
I agree, and earlier this year I decided to subscribe to a newspaper for the first time in many, many years. I'm worried that subscribers can't stop the propaganda though. There are so many 'news' sources nowadays, with broad national and international reach, that individuals can't possibly support all of the 'good' ones. At best they can subscribe to one or two. So all of the good sources have to compete for limited subscribers, while the bad ones are happy to give their propaganda away for free. That lets the propaganda sources flourish and multiply, until there are far more of them. They're also better at playing the attention-grabbing game, because they have none of the self-imposed limitations that the good news sources have.
- exelius 9y ago
  If you change the way that you consume news, this is less of a problem. Stop visiting the aggregators like Google News. Stop believing anything you read on Facebook that is not from a publication that you consider reputable. There will always be people who are easily influenced because they refuse to take the time to understand the provenance of the information they consume. This has always been true. But if you truly consider yourself "an independent thinker" (which is why so many Americans claim to be "independents") you have to consider the trustworthiness of the outlets feeding you information. You can't outsource that decision making to anyone else like Google or Facebook.
- comex 9y ago
  The problem with a subscription model, at least the straightforward one that newspapers use today, is that it encourages political echo chambers. If someone mainly reads, say, the New York Times (which I do), and tends to agree with Times editorials, they'd probably benefit from also reading the WSJ on occasion (both the news and the opinion section), if only to understand the "other side"'s point of view. But people already have a strong cognitive bias towards consuming media they agree with, rather than media that challenges their beliefs and makes them uncomfortable. So it'd be hard enough to attract such a person to the WSJ if it were free. Ask them to fork over hundreds of dollars, and only those with the greatest desire for neutrality (or just a ton of money to spare) will accept. In my ideal world, I'd be able to pay for one subscription that gives me access to all the professional news outlets, and they'd split the fee based on how much time I spent reading articles on each site. (Time, not clicks, to avoid creating an incentive for clickbait headlines.) Or maybe some sort of micropayments system that's a similar idea but for the whole Web. But I don't see either happening anytime soon...
JCzynski 9y ago
When this happened with radio we created NPR. Now we need NPN. It's a public good, not a private one, and so should be funded publicly.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  NPR gets very little money, and that indirectly, from public funds. It's mostly patronage.
Cakez0r 9y ago
I have to disagree. People who are passionate about a subject will report on it whether they're paid to or not. I would argue that being motivated by profit only makes you more susceptible to bias.
- exelius 9y ago
  There is a difference between news and opinion. Something like Stratechery is pure opinion; but it's opinion that I value because I feel it provides a lot of good insights. It's fine to crowdsource opinion. It's not ok to crowdsource news -- trust is a fundamental part of the equation.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > People who are passionate about a subject will report on it whether they're paid to or not The Theranos story is an example of why we need institutions like the Wall Street Journal. You had a passionate reporter. But there was so much more needed to bring the story to light. "When the Journal confronted [Theranos] with its findings based on the reporting thus far and sought its input, Theranos waged an aggressive campaign to discredit Mr. Carreyrou and his sources. Sunny Balwani, Theranos’s president, flew to the Phoenix area, where Theranos was offering its blood tests in Walgreens stores. There, some doctors who had talked with Carreyrou said Mr. Balwani pressured them to recant their statements. The famed litigator David Boies came twice to the Journal’s newsroom in midtown Manhattan to discuss the issues and tried to get the story killed. The Journal’s top editors and lawyers, who had closely monitored Mr. Carreyrou’s reporting from an early stage, unflinchingly stood by him" [1]. Switching to a model where news is done philanthropically means turning off public oversight on anyone who can file a federal lawsuit. [1] http://businessjournalism.org/2016/11/testing-theranos-how-they-did-it/ http://businessjournalism.org/2016/11/testing-theranos-how-t...
- arjie 9y ago
  Now you optimize for getting your information from the guy who cares the most about it. How is this supposed to free you of bias?
  - 9y ago
Nadya 9y ago
>I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I find that having people pay for operations does not inherently mean that it becomes unbiased - and from American and British media (read: English media that I can read and judge) I do not find this to be the case.
roguecoder 9y ago
Being paid doesn't make journalists free of incentives: it just changes where those incentives lie. The New York Times, for example, is busy blowing up a hundred years of reputation to try to pretend the Republican and Democratic parties are equally deserving of criticism because its readers want to feel intellectually superior to "partisans". Paid news will deliver what its users want, and it is dangerous to pretend that that is "objective" or "true" just because that's what the PR says.

ng12 9y ago

> I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda I don't think there's a significant correlation there at all. The NYTimes hawks subscriptions almost as heavily as the WSJ.

exelius 9y ago
While the conservative media pundits like to rail against the NYT, it's actually a very reputable news source that fact-checks articles and issues retractions when it is wrong. Sure it's a bit left-leaning in the topics they report on, but they're usually not wrong.
- actuallyalys 9y ago
  Agreed. I tend to think of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as being mirror images of each other: they're both reputable and based in NYC [0], but the NYT has a liberal bent and the WSJ has a conservative one. [0]: Being based in the largest city of the east coast gives them a different set of biases, which aren't entirely political.

workerIbe 9y ago

The irony may be that the best way to get paid is to be biased.

fgonzag 9y ago
I totally agree. People are more likely to pay to read the news they are biased to. So all forms of media have a high incentive to bias their content towards their consumer's point of view.
exelius 9y ago
There will always be a market segment that values the unbiased truth.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Given the human bias for sources that confirm rather than challenge preconceived notions, I'd imagine that market segment is quite small. Even among people that say they want such a service! And on top of that, there's a difference between news and data. "xx people were run over by a truck in an attack group Y has claimed responsibility for" is a (poor) headline, not an article. Once you expand out beyond a reading of simple facts, bias creeps in everywhere from choice of sources to choice of words to quantity of coverage. Worse, simple facts are rarely interesting or actionable. People want analysis.

DougWebb 9y ago

I agree, and earlier this year I decided to subscribe to a newspaper for the first time in many, many years. I'm worried that subscribers can't stop the propaganda though. There are so many 'news' sources nowadays, with broad national and international reach, that individuals can't possibly support all of the 'good' ones. At best they can subscribe to one or two. So all of the good sources have to compete for limited subscribers, while the bad ones are happy to give their propaganda away for free. That lets the propaganda sources flourish and multiply, until there are far more of them. They're also better at playing the attention-grabbing game, because they have none of the self-imposed limitations that the good news sources have.

exelius 9y ago
If you change the way that you consume news, this is less of a problem. Stop visiting the aggregators like Google News. Stop believing anything you read on Facebook that is not from a publication that you consider reputable. There will always be people who are easily influenced because they refuse to take the time to understand the provenance of the information they consume. This has always been true. But if you truly consider yourself "an independent thinker" (which is why so many Americans claim to be "independents") you have to consider the trustworthiness of the outlets feeding you information. You can't outsource that decision making to anyone else like Google or Facebook.
comex 9y ago
The problem with a subscription model, at least the straightforward one that newspapers use today, is that it encourages political echo chambers. If someone mainly reads, say, the New York Times (which I do), and tends to agree with Times editorials, they'd probably benefit from also reading the WSJ on occasion (both the news and the opinion section), if only to understand the "other side"'s point of view. But people already have a strong cognitive bias towards consuming media they agree with, rather than media that challenges their beliefs and makes them uncomfortable. So it'd be hard enough to attract such a person to the WSJ if it were free. Ask them to fork over hundreds of dollars, and only those with the greatest desire for neutrality (or just a ton of money to spare) will accept. In my ideal world, I'd be able to pay for one subscription that gives me access to all the professional news outlets, and they'd split the fee based on how much time I spent reading articles on each site. (Time, not clicks, to avoid creating an incentive for clickbait headlines.) Or maybe some sort of micropayments system that's a similar idea but for the whole Web. But I don't see either happening anytime soon...

JCzynski 9y ago

When this happened with radio we created NPR. Now we need NPN. It's a public good, not a private one, and so should be funded publicly.

dragonwriter 9y ago
NPR gets very little money, and that indirectly, from public funds. It's mostly patronage.

Cakez0r 9y ago

I have to disagree. People who are passionate about a subject will report on it whether they're paid to or not. I would argue that being motivated by profit only makes you more susceptible to bias.

exelius 9y ago
There is a difference between news and opinion. Something like Stratechery is pure opinion; but it's opinion that I value because I feel it provides a lot of good insights. It's fine to crowdsource opinion. It's not ok to crowdsource news -- trust is a fundamental part of the equation.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> People who are passionate about a subject will report on it whether they're paid to or not The Theranos story is an example of why we need institutions like the Wall Street Journal. You had a passionate reporter. But there was so much more needed to bring the story to light. "When the Journal confronted [Theranos] with its findings based on the reporting thus far and sought its input, Theranos waged an aggressive campaign to discredit Mr. Carreyrou and his sources. Sunny Balwani, Theranos’s president, flew to the Phoenix area, where Theranos was offering its blood tests in Walgreens stores. There, some doctors who had talked with Carreyrou said Mr. Balwani pressured them to recant their statements. The famed litigator David Boies came twice to the Journal’s newsroom in midtown Manhattan to discuss the issues and tried to get the story killed. The Journal’s top editors and lawyers, who had closely monitored Mr. Carreyrou’s reporting from an early stage, unflinchingly stood by him" [1]. Switching to a model where news is done philanthropically means turning off public oversight on anyone who can file a federal lawsuit. [1] http://businessjournalism.org/2016/11/testing-theranos-how-they-did-it/ http://businessjournalism.org/2016/11/testing-theranos-how-t...
arjie 9y ago
Now you optimize for getting your information from the guy who cares the most about it. How is this supposed to free you of bias?
- 9y ago

Nadya 9y ago

>I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I find that having people pay for operations does not inherently mean that it becomes unbiased - and from American and British media (read: English media that I can read and judge) I do not find this to be the case.

roguecoder 9y ago

Being paid doesn't make journalists free of incentives: it just changes where those incentives lie. The New York Times, for example, is busy blowing up a hundred years of reputation to try to pretend the Republican and Democratic parties are equally deserving of criticism because its readers want to feel intellectually superior to "partisans". Paid news will deliver what its users want, and it is dangerous to pretend that that is "objective" or "true" just because that's what the PR says.