6 ms·

News Outlets to Seek Bargaining Rights Against Google and Facebook

56 points by panarky 9y ago

sparkzilla 9y ago
Real title: Failing news outlets seek government protection for past failures and outdated business models. The legacy news media has completely failed to understand two things 1) that distribution is king, not content and 2) that their potential customers have so many more options now than just news. They gave away their distribution to Google and Facebook and still think that better content is the driver of their businesses. I am sick of hearing the CEO of News Corp whining about Google and Facebook. They could easily have invested in creating their own alternative distribution networks, but they completely blew the opportunity they had, with MySpace and they could have bought Instagram, What's App, SnapChat (if you don't think these are news networks then you've not been paying attention). So now they go whining to the government? Shame on them.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Eh, I disagree. Content is still king, and the sources of good, quality content is still limited. The problem is that Google and Facebook are more than willing to steal that content, and are too large for anyone to fight. If cornered on it with laws like the Spanish link tax, they're more than happy to just leave until the business situation is more favorable to them, and obviously if any given single provider bans Google's collection, Google can simply post from one of the litany of blogs that reposts other journalists' reporting instead.
  - sparkzilla 9y ago
    Thinking that 'content is king' is how newspapers got into this situation. If you have large distribution (Facebook), even if it is pictures of cats, you can make money and then buy "quality" content, which is a niche. If you lose control of distribution (Legacy news) you can't make money and you can't make any content, no matter how good it is. >The problem is that Google and Facebook are more than willing to steal that content Really? While Facebook was letting people copy video content from Facebook with no penalty (freebooting), this was never an issue for the news companies. As for the Spanish situation, the news companies gave in because they realised that without Google they had even less distribution than before.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      That's the whole reason news companies are asking for an antitrust consideration: Google can hurt them massively by simply walking away from the negotiating table. Either they give up their content for free or Google drops them, and they hurt even worse. Obviously for the news agencies, their hope would be that Google be somehow forced to pay them for access and not be allowed to shut down the service. Of course, it's hard to imagine how the government could require Google News to operate as a service. The thing that's broken here is that in any other content situation like movies or music, the content is unique and copyrighted. If you want Katy Perry or Star Wars, you have to deal with the companies with rights to those, and the MPAA and RIAA are formidable industry associations which can swing a lot of weight and force a negotiation. If you want any "music" at all, really, you have to sit down with the RIAA. News, however, can't really be copyrighted that way, since fact can be restated by anyone. It's fair use. In a traditional situation, all the affected corporations (like every major news org) would band together and set the bar for negotiation. Someone like Google would have to comply or lose out on a lot of information to base their services on. However, in the case of news, Google has an infinite amount of blogspam to feed off of that is cannibalizing and resharing the news from journalists. Google wouldn't be hurt enough by news agencies blocking them, at least, compared to how much it would hurt news agencies to not be distributed by them.
      - sparkzilla 9y ago
        >Either they give up their content for free or Google drops them, and they hurt even worse. They haven't give up their content to Google/Facebook; they give up their distribution. Links to news sites on Google and Facebook are a form of distribution that link back to the original article. As for antitrust, that's somewhat difficult to argue when a new entrant (Facebook) is currently taking a massive amount of distribution and ad revenue away from Google. Who's to say that another new entrant, funded by the legacy news industry, couldn't do the same? The legacy news media should have, and still should, focus on making or buying new distribution channels. Instead of whining to the government, they should compete in the market.
        9y ago
  - Shivetya 9y ago
    I disagree that they are limited. They were limited when these organization had captive local audiences and enough reputation that those if far off places would buy a subscription. Back in the day where getting competing sources was either difficult or not even an option. So now being able to pick and choose from dozens of great companies for news, both national and international in source, these once "protected" companies need to up their game. So like with any other industry, if you ignore competition from other sources to include other countries, that are as equally respected or more, you do so at your own peril
- untog 9y ago
  > they could have bought Instagram, What's App, SnapChat (if you don't think these are news networks then you've not been paying attention). They aren't news networks. They are social networks that carry news. That's the main problem news organisations face - news is no longer an individual destination for users, it's something they pick up with other content. Any news organisation that bought Instagram would never have been able to execute on it, because its strength was always in social connections, not in delivering news. People rightly criticise news companies for their "outdated business models", but I'm yet to see anyone propose a modern business model that would actually work. When the bulk of traffic comes from Google and Facebook (I don't realistically see how anyone could have stopped this from happening) you're stuck chasing clicks no matter what. Subscriptions help you earn money, but they drastically cut back your reach. I don't have any particularly good answers myself, but I really, really don't like the world we live in today where clickability is the primary metric of success - it leads to overhyped outrage and outright fiction being posted to people's walls every day. And FB and Google sit on top of it all earning more and more money. They have no incentive to change anything. A successful and free press is in every citizen's interest, but today's business environment makes it all but impossible to succeed.
- TheGirondin 9y ago
  Why single out News Corp (Fox News) when the NYT, WaPo, and the WSJ are also involved in this?
  - sparkzilla 9y ago
    Because they blew it with MySpace, and the CEO is always whining on about how Facebook and Google are upsetting him.
randomerr 9y ago
The New York Times has been fighting against anything Google for their advertising network and Facebook for offering alternative news services. With the change of Google News demoting NYT stories this maybe their last chance at being viable as a national news source. Maybe if the NYT would get rid of that paywall they get more readers and relinkers.
- fixermark 9y ago
  It does seem self-contradictory to attempt to be a news media outlet with exclusive access in a day where information is this easy to replicate and distribute. I think you run the real risk, when you make your content exclusive, of simply being run over by media that doesn't. Unless you can compete on quality, which they usually do but how long and to what end? Facts aren't copyrightable.
- jerrylives 9y ago
  The New York Times is severely fucked even without Google messing with their rankings. They still make most of their money from dead tree newspaper subscribers who are almost all over 50 but are losing those subscribers at a massive rate. There is an internal initiative to basically double digital revenue by 2020 to make up for the losses on the paper side but, speaking as someone who worked there, it's not looking good. At all. They brag about how they just got 40k new digital subscribers in the month after Trump got elected but a lot of those are subsidized / deal subs and won't be sticking around in the long term. It also doesn't help that the NYT continually downsizes its newsroom and editorial staff to make ill-informed forays into tech (The NYT digital r&d department was a complete joke - like they paid 5 engineers high six figure salaries to basically jerk off and put a monitor behind a mirror - oh wow so innovative). Most of the bloat at the NYT is absolutely in the tech department but they rarely fire anyone there (I quit). They have big teams supporting legacy systems that are used by maybe a hundred people a month. They have an entire lexical / semantic team with a "sophisticated" (re: expensive, old, and clunky) tagging system that does essentially nothing for the NYT, because guess how many people use their "topic" knowledge base (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton)? I'll give you a hint: more than zero, but not by much. But there's like four or five full time engineers with six figure salaries supporting it.
AznHisoka 9y ago
"it is impossible for us to go as a one-off company and negotiate or even get an appointment with these companies.” boohoo. cry me a river. this sounds so entitled. Like the Big Banks who cried for a bailout during the Financial Crisis in 2008. "i deserve help because I make lots of money"
- Spivak 9y ago
  It's interesting to see that apparently only now do news organizations now realize who their real masters are. Did they not see the writing on the wall when their analytics showed almost all of their traffic originating from Google and Facebook?
  - untog 9y ago
    Of course they did. But what can you do when Google and Facebook command almost all of the traffic on the internet?
phkahler 9y ago
"that once paid for the quality journalism that Google and Facebook now offer for free." What? I have yet to see Facebook offer "journalism" of pretty much any kind.
- trendia 9y ago
  They're saying: NYTimes is quality journalism. People used to pay for the NYTimes. Now Google and Facebook offer the news from NYTimes for free.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    >> Now Google and Facebook offer the news from NYTimes for free. But they don't. They offer links to the NYTimes. Well, actually they probably get paid to offer links to the NYTimes.
- dforrestwilson 9y ago
  True, but what we have all seen at one point or another is a Facebook post by someone who was actually at the scene of an event/crime/celebration that gets shared by friends of friends and makes it to our wall somehow.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Your friend has no reach. The impact of eyewitness posts on Facebook is orders of magnitude smaller then that of traditional media.
iamben 9y ago
It was what, 7 or so years ago that Rupert Murdoch was threatening to remove all links and content from Google, and News Corp were saying: "The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it." Oh how times change. Another example of a situation where a little bit of forward thinking, rather than clinging to an established model with a blinkered attitude, would have gone a long way.
- panarky 9y ago
  It's curious that the publishers' trade group lobbying Congress to allow them to form a cartel made their argument in a Wall Street Journal editorial. "How Antitrust Undermines Press Freedom" https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-antitrust-undermines-press-freedom-1499638532 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-antitrust-undermines-press-... Since the WSJ is paywalled the public can't even read their argument. What's the rationale here? Does paywalling their argument get more subscribers for the WSJ? Or does it intentionally limit visibility to elites likely to have a subscription while keeping the public in the dark?
SirensOfTitan 9y ago
All of these media companies saw changes for decades? around distribution occurring and seemingly did nothing about it. Even now, as better distribution models are making their businesses obsolete, they refuse to innovate and seek legal protections instead. I don't have much sympathy here. The history is revisionist: these companies used to be powerful actors who now find their businesses evaporating. And many of them had a big hand in the rise of fake news themselves. They're all apparently blameless in both scenarios.
panarky 9y ago
Markets for widgets generally work pretty well. The consumer pays the distributor and the distributor pays the producer. When consumer preferences change, the supply chain produces more or less widgets with higher or lower quality. But markets for information are leaky. Consumers can get information without paying the distributor. Many consumers can't tell the difference between high-quality information and information that's deceptive or manipulative. Most consumers aren't willing to pay for high-quality information. So markets for information don't work as well as markets for widgets. Producers don't get paid, the supply of quality information is diminished, and we are all poorer as a result. Now the producers want to form a cartel to negotiate with distributors as a bloc. But this only increases the cost of content to the distributor. A cartel doesn't fix the root cause. Consumers still don't want to pay. Increasing the cost without changing consumers' willingness to pay will only make a bad situation even worse. At a higher cost, even less high-quality information will be demanded, so even less will be produced. Producers will shrink further into irrelevance, low-quality information will dominate, and we'll all be even poorer. When consumers aren't willing to pay, markets don't work well. It's unlikely consumers will suddenly become willing to pay for information they can get for free, so feeds will fill up with even more low-quality, deceptive and manipulative information. Maybe markets just aren't the right mechanism. Since the public needs high-quality information now more than ever, maybe we need to examine non-market methods to produce it.
- diafygi 9y ago
  What are examples of situations in other industries where producers were able to change consumers' willingness to pay?
  - phreeza 9y ago
    AFAIK Tesla Superchargers used to be free, but are no longer?
  - panarky 9y ago
    Television used to be free, supported by 8 minutes of ads per hour. Then cable companies let us pay $12 per month for ad-free TV. Today we pay $60 per month for basic cable plus 16 minutes of ads per hour.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
losteverything 9y ago
Ultimately, what do they want? (assume they can bargain together)
- hardtke 9y ago
  They likely want to implement a pay to link scheme for news articles. This would be similar to the way that every songwriter gets a small royalty when their song is played on the radio or on a streaming service. In the case of the songwriters, it is government sanctioned and therefore not an illegal cartel.
  - losteverything 9y ago
    Who pays? Goog & fb? Its funny, when i read the article it said "this is your last free article this month" I would love to have fb pay - but i never will.
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    and this is how I would react if I was Google: "awesome, ok.. so you know what? you win. you are right. we shouldnt link to you without paying you anything. So instead of paying you we've decided to remove all your links from our index. happy? no? but thats what you wanted! no..? ok i am confused.. what do you want?.. wait you want free money? ok.... then"
carlmungz 9y ago
Speaking as an ex-journalist, I think the battle has already been lost because the distribution platforms will always make more money than the content producers. Even when I was a journalist I rarely bought physical newspapers/magazines or had any subscriptions because I consumed things on story by story basis from different publications. I worked in local news and I think there's probably more hope for smaller, nimble outfits which combine tech and news well to survive. Depending on your geographical location, I think you can provide enough local value to sustain < 10 staff. But then that requires having access to engineers willing to work in such an operation.

56 points by panarky 9y ago

Real title: Failing news outlets seek government protection for past failures and outdated business models. The legacy news media has completely failed to understand two things 1) that distribution is king, not content and 2) that their potential customers have so many more options now than just news. They gave away their distribution to Google and Facebook and still think that better content is the driver of their businesses. I am sick of hearing the CEO of News Corp whining about Google and Facebook. They could easily have invested in creating their own alternative distribution networks, but they completely blew the opportunity they had, with MySpace and they could have bought Instagram, What's App, SnapChat (if you don't think these are news networks then you've not been paying attention). So now they go whining to the government? Shame on them.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Eh, I disagree. Content is still king, and the sources of good, quality content is still limited. The problem is that Google and Facebook are more than willing to steal that content, and are too large for anyone to fight. If cornered on it with laws like the Spanish link tax, they're more than happy to just leave until the business situation is more favorable to them, and obviously if any given single provider bans Google's collection, Google can simply post from one of the litany of blogs that reposts other journalists' reporting instead.
- sparkzilla 9y ago
  Thinking that 'content is king' is how newspapers got into this situation. If you have large distribution (Facebook), even if it is pictures of cats, you can make money and then buy "quality" content, which is a niche. If you lose control of distribution (Legacy news) you can't make money and you can't make any content, no matter how good it is. >The problem is that Google and Facebook are more than willing to steal that content Really? While Facebook was letting people copy video content from Facebook with no penalty (freebooting), this was never an issue for the news companies. As for the Spanish situation, the news companies gave in because they realised that without Google they had even less distribution than before.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    That's the whole reason news companies are asking for an antitrust consideration: Google can hurt them massively by simply walking away from the negotiating table. Either they give up their content for free or Google drops them, and they hurt even worse. Obviously for the news agencies, their hope would be that Google be somehow forced to pay them for access and not be allowed to shut down the service. Of course, it's hard to imagine how the government could require Google News to operate as a service. The thing that's broken here is that in any other content situation like movies or music, the content is unique and copyrighted. If you want Katy Perry or Star Wars, you have to deal with the companies with rights to those, and the MPAA and RIAA are formidable industry associations which can swing a lot of weight and force a negotiation. If you want any "music" at all, really, you have to sit down with the RIAA. News, however, can't really be copyrighted that way, since fact can be restated by anyone. It's fair use. In a traditional situation, all the affected corporations (like every major news org) would band together and set the bar for negotiation. Someone like Google would have to comply or lose out on a lot of information to base their services on. However, in the case of news, Google has an infinite amount of blogspam to feed off of that is cannibalizing and resharing the news from journalists. Google wouldn't be hurt enough by news agencies blocking them, at least, compared to how much it would hurt news agencies to not be distributed by them.
    - sparkzilla 9y ago
      >Either they give up their content for free or Google drops them, and they hurt even worse. They haven't give up their content to Google/Facebook; they give up their distribution. Links to news sites on Google and Facebook are a form of distribution that link back to the original article. As for antitrust, that's somewhat difficult to argue when a new entrant (Facebook) is currently taking a massive amount of distribution and ad revenue away from Google. Who's to say that another new entrant, funded by the legacy news industry, couldn't do the same? The legacy news media should have, and still should, focus on making or buying new distribution channels. Instead of whining to the government, they should compete in the market.
      - 9y ago
- Shivetya 9y ago
  I disagree that they are limited. They were limited when these organization had captive local audiences and enough reputation that those if far off places would buy a subscription. Back in the day where getting competing sources was either difficult or not even an option. So now being able to pick and choose from dozens of great companies for news, both national and international in source, these once "protected" companies need to up their game. So like with any other industry, if you ignore competition from other sources to include other countries, that are as equally respected or more, you do so at your own peril
untog 9y ago
> they could have bought Instagram, What's App, SnapChat (if you don't think these are news networks then you've not been paying attention). They aren't news networks. They are social networks that carry news. That's the main problem news organisations face - news is no longer an individual destination for users, it's something they pick up with other content. Any news organisation that bought Instagram would never have been able to execute on it, because its strength was always in social connections, not in delivering news. People rightly criticise news companies for their "outdated business models", but I'm yet to see anyone propose a modern business model that would actually work. When the bulk of traffic comes from Google and Facebook (I don't realistically see how anyone could have stopped this from happening) you're stuck chasing clicks no matter what. Subscriptions help you earn money, but they drastically cut back your reach. I don't have any particularly good answers myself, but I really, really don't like the world we live in today where clickability is the primary metric of success - it leads to overhyped outrage and outright fiction being posted to people's walls every day. And FB and Google sit on top of it all earning more and more money. They have no incentive to change anything. A successful and free press is in every citizen's interest, but today's business environment makes it all but impossible to succeed.
TheGirondin 9y ago
Why single out News Corp (Fox News) when the NYT, WaPo, and the WSJ are also involved in this?
- sparkzilla 9y ago
  Because they blew it with MySpace, and the CEO is always whining on about how Facebook and Google are upsetting him.

randomerr 9y ago

The New York Times has been fighting against anything Google for their advertising network and Facebook for offering alternative news services. With the change of Google News demoting NYT stories this maybe their last chance at being viable as a national news source. Maybe if the NYT would get rid of that paywall they get more readers and relinkers.

fixermark 9y ago
It does seem self-contradictory to attempt to be a news media outlet with exclusive access in a day where information is this easy to replicate and distribute. I think you run the real risk, when you make your content exclusive, of simply being run over by media that doesn't. Unless you can compete on quality, which they usually do but how long and to what end? Facts aren't copyrightable.
jerrylives 9y ago
The New York Times is severely fucked even without Google messing with their rankings. They still make most of their money from dead tree newspaper subscribers who are almost all over 50 but are losing those subscribers at a massive rate. There is an internal initiative to basically double digital revenue by 2020 to make up for the losses on the paper side but, speaking as someone who worked there, it's not looking good. At all. They brag about how they just got 40k new digital subscribers in the month after Trump got elected but a lot of those are subsidized / deal subs and won't be sticking around in the long term. It also doesn't help that the NYT continually downsizes its newsroom and editorial staff to make ill-informed forays into tech (The NYT digital r&d department was a complete joke - like they paid 5 engineers high six figure salaries to basically jerk off and put a monitor behind a mirror - oh wow so innovative). Most of the bloat at the NYT is absolutely in the tech department but they rarely fire anyone there (I quit). They have big teams supporting legacy systems that are used by maybe a hundred people a month. They have an entire lexical / semantic team with a "sophisticated" (re: expensive, old, and clunky) tagging system that does essentially nothing for the NYT, because guess how many people use their "topic" knowledge base (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton)? I'll give you a hint: more than zero, but not by much. But there's like four or five full time engineers with six figure salaries supporting it.

AznHisoka 9y ago

"it is impossible for us to go as a one-off company and negotiate or even get an appointment with these companies.” boohoo. cry me a river. this sounds so entitled. Like the Big Banks who cried for a bailout during the Financial Crisis in 2008. "i deserve help because I make lots of money"

Spivak 9y ago
It's interesting to see that apparently only now do news organizations now realize who their real masters are. Did they not see the writing on the wall when their analytics showed almost all of their traffic originating from Google and Facebook?
- untog 9y ago
  Of course they did. But what can you do when Google and Facebook command almost all of the traffic on the internet?

phkahler 9y ago

"that once paid for the quality journalism that Google and Facebook now offer for free." What? I have yet to see Facebook offer "journalism" of pretty much any kind.

trendia 9y ago
They're saying: NYTimes is quality journalism. People used to pay for the NYTimes. Now Google and Facebook offer the news from NYTimes for free.
- phkahler 9y ago
  >> Now Google and Facebook offer the news from NYTimes for free. But they don't. They offer links to the NYTimes. Well, actually they probably get paid to offer links to the NYTimes.
dforrestwilson 9y ago
True, but what we have all seen at one point or another is a Facebook post by someone who was actually at the scene of an event/crime/celebration that gets shared by friends of friends and makes it to our wall somehow.
- vkou 9y ago
  Your friend has no reach. The impact of eyewitness posts on Facebook is orders of magnitude smaller then that of traditional media.

iamben 9y ago

It was what, 7 or so years ago that Rupert Murdoch was threatening to remove all links and content from Google, and News Corp were saying: "The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it." Oh how times change. Another example of a situation where a little bit of forward thinking, rather than clinging to an established model with a blinkered attitude, would have gone a long way.

panarky 9y ago
It's curious that the publishers' trade group lobbying Congress to allow them to form a cartel made their argument in a Wall Street Journal editorial. "How Antitrust Undermines Press Freedom" https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-antitrust-undermines-press-freedom-1499638532 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-antitrust-undermines-press-... Since the WSJ is paywalled the public can't even read their argument. What's the rationale here? Does paywalling their argument get more subscribers for the WSJ? Or does it intentionally limit visibility to elites likely to have a subscription while keeping the public in the dark?

SirensOfTitan 9y ago

All of these media companies saw changes for decades? around distribution occurring and seemingly did nothing about it. Even now, as better distribution models are making their businesses obsolete, they refuse to innovate and seek legal protections instead. I don't have much sympathy here. The history is revisionist: these companies used to be powerful actors who now find their businesses evaporating. And many of them had a big hand in the rise of fake news themselves. They're all apparently blameless in both scenarios.

panarky 9y ago

Markets for widgets generally work pretty well. The consumer pays the distributor and the distributor pays the producer. When consumer preferences change, the supply chain produces more or less widgets with higher or lower quality. But markets for information are leaky. Consumers can get information without paying the distributor. Many consumers can't tell the difference between high-quality information and information that's deceptive or manipulative. Most consumers aren't willing to pay for high-quality information. So markets for information don't work as well as markets for widgets. Producers don't get paid, the supply of quality information is diminished, and we are all poorer as a result. Now the producers want to form a cartel to negotiate with distributors as a bloc. But this only increases the cost of content to the distributor. A cartel doesn't fix the root cause. Consumers still don't want to pay. Increasing the cost without changing consumers' willingness to pay will only make a bad situation even worse. At a higher cost, even less high-quality information will be demanded, so even less will be produced. Producers will shrink further into irrelevance, low-quality information will dominate, and we'll all be even poorer. When consumers aren't willing to pay, markets don't work well. It's unlikely consumers will suddenly become willing to pay for information they can get for free, so feeds will fill up with even more low-quality, deceptive and manipulative information. Maybe markets just aren't the right mechanism. Since the public needs high-quality information now more than ever, maybe we need to examine non-market methods to produce it.

diafygi 9y ago
What are examples of situations in other industries where producers were able to change consumers' willingness to pay?
- phreeza 9y ago
  AFAIK Tesla Superchargers used to be free, but are no longer?
- panarky 9y ago
  Television used to be free, supported by 8 minutes of ads per hour. Then cable companies let us pay $12 per month for ad-free TV. Today we pay $60 per month for basic cable plus 16 minutes of ads per hour.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

losteverything 9y ago

Ultimately, what do they want? (assume they can bargain together)

hardtke 9y ago
They likely want to implement a pay to link scheme for news articles. This would be similar to the way that every songwriter gets a small royalty when their song is played on the radio or on a streaming service. In the case of the songwriters, it is government sanctioned and therefore not an illegal cartel.
- losteverything 9y ago
  Who pays? Goog & fb? Its funny, when i read the article it said "this is your last free article this month" I would love to have fb pay - but i never will.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  and this is how I would react if I was Google: "awesome, ok.. so you know what? you win. you are right. we shouldnt link to you without paying you anything. So instead of paying you we've decided to remove all your links from our index. happy? no? but thats what you wanted! no..? ok i am confused.. what do you want?.. wait you want free money? ok.... then"

carlmungz 9y ago

Speaking as an ex-journalist, I think the battle has already been lost because the distribution platforms will always make more money than the content producers. Even when I was a journalist I rarely bought physical newspapers/magazines or had any subscriptions because I consumed things on story by story basis from different publications. I worked in local news and I think there's probably more hope for smaller, nimble outfits which combine tech and news well to survive. Depending on your geographical location, I think you can provide enough local value to sustain < 10 staff. But then that requires having access to engineers willing to work in such an operation.