13 ms·

How a Newspaper Dies

139 points by spking 8y ago

tschellenbach 8y ago
It's not just newspapers. Journalism as a whole is shrinking rapidly. Concerns over privacy and personalized advertising will have long terms impacts on ad revenue. Ad revenue is the primary way through which journalism is funded. Unless you have a great brand like the Economist, or the Wall Street Journal you're in trouble. To do well you now have to write content that people are willing to pay for. That's a pretty high bar to reach.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  I'd add to this a somewhat controversial stance: I'm not sure that the world needs or can sustain journalism as a job anymore. Let me explain a bit. By "can sustain", I mean that the whole point of being a journalist is objective reporting, with cultivating trust as a goal. Without trust, a journalist is no better than a blogger with a writing degree. Except I don't think that trust meaningfully exists anymore. Most news in the largest nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests, and with there being no legal obligation to divorce fact from opinion from advertising, they probably will not, so long as not doing so remains as profitable as it has been. What's the substantial difference between a journalist you can't trust to distill pertinent facts from events, and a random blogger you have no reason to trust in the first place? One makes more money. Maybe. Are you sure you didn't just read a native ad? By "needs", I mean that faced with this loss of trust, individual people are going to have to do what they should have been doing in the first place, namely choosing their news sources carefully and paying more attention to subtle and not-so-subtle bias. It's a huge mistake to rely on media credentials as a proxy for likelihood of telling the truth, yet that is the entire concept of journalism as a career path.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - cornholio 8y ago
    > people are going to have to do what they should have been doing in the first place, namely choosing their news sources carefully and paying more attention to subtle and not-so-subtle bias. It's a huge mistake to rely on media credentials as a proxy for likelihood of telling the truth, yet that is the entire concept of journalism as a career path. Media credentials are a way to aggregate that trust on the long run and invest decades into building a reputation of integrity. With the expectation that it will be profitable in the future, people will come to rely on you because they know how costly any damage to that reputation is to you. In the model where every internet page is a source that has to vetted individually, the journalists are indeed obsolete but not because they weren't useful; now every citizen must do their own full journalistic investigations before trusting anything written. Most people lack the skills and education to do that work and society is, on the whole, worse off. People will not be doing what "they should be doing in the first place", we will get the misinformation soup that served us with Trump, Brexit, antivaxx and the score of post-truth social ills.
    - someguydave 8y ago
      >People will not be doing what "they should be doing in the first place", we will get the misinformation soup that served us with Trump, Brexit, antivaxx and the score of post-truth social ills. This is why Trump won.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Yes, people like to believe the lies of Trump, Brexit, and antivaxxers, and that led to Trump winning. So how do we convince them not to choose comforting lies?
    - anon1385 8y ago
      The MMR scare, which is the origin of a lot of the modern antivax movement, was something that was largely created by (UK) newspapers[1]. This was back in the 90s before the subsequent decline in revenue from advertising and competition from online news; it wasn't something that happened due to lack of resources to do fact checking- papers took an active decision to 'campaign' in support of Wakefield and dedicated huge amounts of resources and column inches to the topic. It wan't just a tabloid thing either, most of the media gorged themselves on a festival of misinformation and emotive scare stories for years after the original article had been retracted by most of the authors. You really couldn't have picked a worse example. Brexit is a more complicated topic, but it's worth pointing out that it occurs after a decades long smear campaign by much of the UK media against the EU. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_role https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_...
  - golergka 8y ago
    > Most news in the largest nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests But they are also at odds with each other, and can gain advantage by exposing one another. Just like with politicians — a true democratic system is designed with crooks and liars in mind, and balances them one against the other.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > Most news in the largest nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests That was true for a long time, but the Internet in fact greatly increases the news options: The Internet lowers barrier to entry compared with the old newspaper (presses and distribution costs) and TV (broadcast facilities, spectrum licenses, etc.). My locality has several publications that wouldn't exist without the Internet. Also on larger scales there is the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, ProPublica, etc. etc. etc. Think of the world of IT news; how many of those would make it as print publications? The Internet also makes news from other localities far more available. I can easily read news from all over the world; in fact HN links to it. The Internet and web technologies also lower the cost to free for much news (with all the complications that involves), and allows aggregation and other facilitation. And of all the news sources I've referred to (local, national, international, etc.), think of how incredibly long the list of owners is and how diverse it is.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      Serious question - how many of those many news sources have you taken the time to trace their ownership or influencers? As an example, you mentioned BuzzFeed - did you know that Comcast nee NBCUniversal invested roughly $400M into them[1] in the last couple years? Or that they were caught deleting posts[2] critical of their advertisers in 2015? Did you know that Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch are all owned by Verizon[3]? I'm not sure the proliferation of sources amounts to much, as many of those sources are hardly independent at the end of the day. What's your favorite flavor of tech news.. Verizon or Comcast? I'm not being fatalistic here, I'm saying that most people don't bother to do this work, and so they aren't aware of how few owners actually exist in the journalism market. This is not a healthy state of affairs. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Funding [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Advertiser_influence_on_editorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Advertiser_influence_... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Inc
      - forapurpose 8y ago
        That is very informative and helpful; thank you. I wasn't aware or didn't remember all that. I still think there's more diversity now than before the Internet. There are several more publications in my locale, for example, and some are more focused on local public affairs than the leading local newspapers were (which I assume have to appeal to a wider audience). And there are the other sources I mentioned. Do you know if it's objectively worse than before the Internet?
  - watwut 8y ago
    Wasn't most actual past real world journalism opinionated one? There was never period when it was objective in a sense of "fully factual, does not cherry pick, does not ignore point and arguments that don't fit journal worldview". It is likely not even possible.
  - cf498 8y ago
    Trust isnt the only point though. The threat of a decline is full time journalists means also some things will fall through the cracks because no one invests the time to look at it. A good example might be the Snowden documents. They were quite numerous and multiple news agencies put a lot of manpower into actually looking through them.
- mngthrowaway 8y ago
  I honestly think there just isn't enough innovation in the newspaper industry for it to survive. Newspapers are too old school to innovate/iterate their models. For example, mng has 50+ newspapers. Why not identify 10 different ideas and test them out on a few newspapers. Some bad ideas that get my point across: - Have a reddit-style front page with upvotes/downvotes - Put all articles on a map so users can see whats relevant near them - Ask users to sign in to facebook and google on the website so that each ad is more targeted and provides more revenue
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > I honestly think there just isn't enough innovation in the newspaper industry for it to survive. Newspapers are too old school to innovate/iterate their models. This frustrates the hell out of me. The public greatly needs the journalism, not the paper and ink. Despite decades of warning and preparation, many just can't seem to embrace the new medium and find profitable models. You can see it in their generally awful websites: Nobody designing a website from scratch, including for news, would make those choices; you could show me dozens of unidentified news websites and I expect I could easily pick out the newspapers. Also, they can't seem to embrace any medium of communication but text, as if it were 1995 and other media on computer were just being developed. They are still trying to stick to paper-and-ink layout and mediums, just displayed on a website. The New York Times is scary to watch. I know people laud its digital efforts, but I suspect that's based only on reputation because I haven't seen anything laudable. They also can't seem to fully integrate other media; the other media is displayed beside the text, not integrated fluently into it as most bloggers or social media users could do - imagine communicating with images! Looped animations! Short video clips! Their social media manager, at least as of several months ago, was someone who didn't use social media himself. A little while ago, a NYT IT staffer's wriieup of their newly developed "text editor" was posted here - they used the term repeatedly, but it wasn't a text editor; it was a content management or enterprise publishing system; they didn't seem to know that basic terminology - at the NY Times! (It's not that I care about terminology, it's that it's a red flag - if someone referred to a CMS as a "text editor" in an interview, I'd be concerned.)
  - intended 8y ago
fortythirteen 8y ago
If you read this article you'll also get to learn how journalism dies - through opinion pieces promoted as objective reporting.
mudil 8y ago
It is tied to the invasion of privacy. Facebook and Google control close to 85% of the digital ad market. The rest 15% goes to the content creators and to the journalism. If Google and FB were not able to invade everyone's privacy, that would have created a level playing field for national, regional, and specialized media to prosper. But because they know who you are, they can display an ad for you on any platform. If you are from Denver, here's an ad for a Denver event on your mobile game. So who needs journalism if an article in Denver Post is on par to a Candy Crush screen? Who needs quality content on the internet? There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever! Neither Google nor FB should be gathering personal information worse than NSA. Personal information is personal, and free people in a free society should not be followed by multinational corporations.
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  The opposite is true: Less personalized ads -> Lower revenue per user -> An even smaller budget for journalism. There are indeed ethical concerns with this level of tracking. That doesn't change that there's a flipside though. A lot of good journalism will have no monetization model to rely on. Paid content only works for the top publications that aim at a wealthier audience.
  - bmomb 8y ago
    But before the algorithm personalized ads journalism wasn’t “dying”, there is ways to do personalized ads without tracking my every move.
  - mudil 8y ago
    There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever. I maintain a website since 2004 for doctors to learn about medical technologies, i.e. new FDA approvals, interviews, product reviews, etc etc, like TechCrunch for doctors. Fourteen years of every day reporting! We should be able to sustain ourselves via ads, but we barely survive. Why? Because of the invasion of privacy, because Google follows users, and it can display ads for doctors on Candy Crush. So who needs journalism? Google doesn't.
fredsanford 8y ago
Most newspapers are filled with regurgitated press releases. When I noticed this, I stopped my subs. I grew up reading newspapers that had investigative journalists out in the field. Gov't was much more accountable.
- snambi 8y ago
  very true.
- Lionsion 8y ago
  > Most newspapers are filled with regurgitated press releases. When I noticed this, I stopped my subs. I grew up reading newspapers that had investigative journalists out in the field. Gov't was much more accountable. That's a strategy that will get you more regurgitated press releases. I still subscribe to a newspaper, but at this point I think of it like a donation to a nonprofit. Journalism is important, and I think the people who value it need to concentrate their resources to maintain and support the organizations who will still do it. However, now I'm going to have to make sure my money's not going to a private equity vulture like this guy.
  - dublinben 8y ago
    You can give money directly to actual non-profit organizations that engage in investigative journalism, like the Center for Investigative Reporting or ProPublica.
    - Lionsion 8y ago
      Don't those nonprofits tend to focus on national issues? State and local issues still need investigation.
- alexkavon 8y ago
  Both current newspapers and online blogging profitability stem from advertising. I think the current situation is a conflated hybrid of both. Here's a previous rant: "We live in an age where blogging careers required tricking Google algorithms to thinking your site was valuable in order to increase traffic and thus serve ads to consumers (or grab their email for later product blasts, for example signing up for a free ebook on passive income). This trend spiraled into "spinning articles" which essentially was a method of using software to change articles via word/sentence substitution. The spun articles would then be posted to similar websites that then linked back to one of your main sites. All of them nicely littered with ads of course and leading you in a research circle. This of course evolved into clickbait headlines. Buzzfeed and its ilk are born to maximize this growing pile of garbage echoing, and labels itself as a brilliant strategy which is then echoed out again. Release a few high quality long form articles every once in a while, call yourself journalism instead of blogging (difference being the above strategies and highly opinionated pieces), badda-bing-badda-boom, media is changed. Now instead of reporting on a subject, we regurgitate something else for a few sentences and post the source and call it a day. No understanding, investigation, expansion, or reworking required because the author is no longer writing for an audience but instead for an advertiser click minimum." [0] I think the fact that newspapers, blogs, whatever else aren't writing for an audience any more is huge. The idea being that the writer is most likely trying to fill some quota in order to make a buck. I'm not saying that writers are only loyal to their bottom line but they're incentivized to produce much more garbage. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17049804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17049804
mngthrowaway 8y ago
Disclaimer: I work for media news group. I can look out the windows in that pic from my desk. While the article is true, it doesn't show the whole picture. Alden capital recognized an opportunity: Hundreds of newspapers with brand recognition and skilled employees. While the newspaper will die, these two things can be used to make money / slow the death a bit. The solution is "adtaxi". All the MNG newspapers act as local sales people, account managers, etc and use their local newspapers brand recognition to generate sales. Adtaxi is the digital fulfillment agency - so newspapers can sell social, search, and programmatic advertising. This is a growing chunk of each newspapers revenue, but something I haven't seen mentioned. If Alden capital really wanted to make money, they'd recognize the viability of this model to scale, and that would in turn save newspapers. The problem is newspapers are stuck with tons of old employees, old money, and old ways of doing things. They don'y want digital to save them, they'd rather die doing what they know.
- subpixel 8y ago
  The solution you describe is actually the problem the article points out: MNG is killing the actual newspapers they are making money operating.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
25 years ago Wired (which at that point was a pretty good magazine) published Michael Crichton's speech on the future of newspapers, Mediasaurus: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/ https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/ And it seems like not much has changed... Concerning the Denver Post, I realized long ago that the function of the local newspaper was selling ads, and only looking at approved scandals. There was plenty of fraud going on in the site choosing, site bidding and construction of the new Denver International Airport ; and the Denver Post never investigated any of it. Some improbably large amount of concrete was paid for during the construction of the airport, and I don't think that it was because of the alien underground base... a simpler and more logical explanation for this has to do with large bags of cash... EDIT: Note that the best journalism you can find on it, was done by Westword, which used to have escort/gay/gentlemen's club ads in the back and was given away free (they now are making $$$ because all the ad space is bought by marijuana advertisers). http://www.westword.com/news/speak-no-evil-5056426 http://www.westword.com/news/speak-no-evil-5056426
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Wow the rabbit hole goes pretty deep there. Update on the execrable Zinser, who fired Deans [0]. One has to assume that for every case like this that comes to light, many other cases do not... [0] https://votesmart.org/public-statement/962803/misconduct-of-inspector-general-todd-zinser-commerce-department https://votesmart.org/public-statement/962803/misconduct-of-...
  - patrickg_zill 8y ago
    Thank you very much for that link! Zinser should have lost his pension...
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Or Hamilton Holt, 1909. [T]his is the explanation of the condition that confronts most publications to-day. By throwing the preponderating weight of commercialism into the scales of production, advertising is at the present moment by far the greatest menace to the disinterested practice of a profession upon which the diffusion of intelligence most largely depends. If journalism is no longer a profession, but a commercial enterprise, it is due to the growth of advertising, and nothing else. https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
fipple 8y ago
The private equity guy is making all the money but he is not killing the industry. The industry is dying because people don’t pay for ad-laden newspapers that they leaf through carefully every morning. 184 journalists at the Denver Post?! That needs more revenue than banner ads from Facebook clicks.
mc32 8y ago
I wonder if the likes of nextdoor can take on journalism. They have a captive audience with pretty good engamemt, maybe they could add local news through local journalists, but who knows...
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Nextdoor is awful. The only thing it's good for is learning just how many of your neighbors will report "suspicious activity" when they see a black man walking his dog. If that's the future of journalism, just let it die.
  - mc32 8y ago
    From what I’ve seen they have helped catch delivery thieves, prowlers; alerts about lost and found, free stuff, car break-in’s miscellaneous activities, both positive and negative. I think they could try adding local news into their feed. I’ve learned having an externally pointing sec cam is valuable in capturing suspicious chars.
Lionsion 8y ago
> By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product. Wherever newspapers can be found reducing page size, cutting news pages, narrowing coverage area, reducing staff, shrinking circulation area, postponing the purchase of new equipment and raising subscription prices, they are harvesting market position. Attention anyone sill subscribed to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the San Jose Mercury News and the Orange County Register: it's time to quit. If those papers have any local competitors left, they should get the money instead.
- ProAm 8y ago
  > By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product I can't help but feel a tiny analogy to Apple with this statement.
  - georgeecollins 8y ago
    It is also an analogy for Apple in 1995. Companies harvest their market position sometimes, and then innovate at other times.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      I think this is a standard technique for fast-food businesses, although I've never heard it mentioned. Run some flashy ad campaign for low-priced good food for a few months. Leave the low prices in place for about a year. Then slowly, slowly ratchet up your prices. After 8-10 years of this, your only remaining customers have very little price sensitivity, but at some point along the way you soaked every single customer as hard as you could. If you need to raise revenue now that you've chased away lots of customers, start over from the beginning. I guess someone at Arby's didn't get the "start over" memo...
rmason 8y ago
Our local (Lansing) paper has a full section on national news and another on sports which are both dated and stale. Add in another section of USA Today which is both dated and stale. I want just local news. In depth pieces on sports that go beyond the score. Our excellent minor league baseball team, the Lugnuts, isn't covered by our paper at all! Add in investigative journalists covering politics and local university. Heck the biggest story at the university in fifty years was broken by the Indianapolis paper hundreds of miles away. I think if the paper did all those things and updated the mobile app more than once every three days they could triple the number of subscribers.
- combatentropy 8y ago
  I agree. Won't we always need local news?
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  The problem is that sports and national news is super cheap and easy. You just pick and choose a few articles from AP that sell across the country. Investigative journalism is expensive, local journalism has a tiny audience which makes it expensive. Would you pay the same amount for a newspaper that only had the current quantity of local and investigative news? Or would you pay a lot more for one that had the desired amounts? It's like lamenting that your burger has a thin beef patty, a mountain of fries and a large soda that's half ice: you paid $5 for the meal, plus the overhead, they can't put $4 worth of beef in it so it's mostly filler. Also, Lugnuts drool. Whitecaps rule!
  - rmason 8y ago
    Yes they're defaulting to easy and putting out an inferior product. I'm willing to pay the same for a smaller paper that contains more of what I want. More importantly could you double or triple the number of subscribers? I don't have an easy way of knowing for sure unless someone tries it. They could have fewer ads but charge more for them if they can get more subscribers in the 18-36 range. I admit with the economics of actually printing the paper it might make more financial sense to go entirely digital. Sadly I haven't seen anyone do that successfully.
Theodores 8y ago
The many aspects of newspaper readership decline are very neatly summarised on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers I grew up delivering newspapers door to door first thing in the morning with yet more newspaper delivering in the afternoon, after school, this one being the local paper. I got to be very good at reading all of them and I was a believer in the product. My papers of choice were the Financial Times and The Guardian. I started out reading the smaller articles at the foot of the page and progressed to reading the big articles at the top of the page. Sometimes a 'child mind' is quite helpful for being objective and seeing things as they are. I was truly shocked at how low the reading age was for the tabloid papers - up to and including the Daily Mail. I also found The Times to be 'faking it', i.e. using big words for the sake of it rather than to convey meaning. I found The Telegraph to be legit but with Tory viewpoint which was fine, you didn't have to read the editorial, if you wanted crime stories they were all there on page 3, the international news was there and the sport, e.g. cricket was pretty good too. There were some howevers, for instance I was quite a fan of F1 at the time so after a race I was reading the reports in all of the papers, I can even remember the writer names. I didn't want to know about just the winners on the podium, the fortunes of the back of the grid guys interested me too, yet the only way I could get a bit of an idea of how they fared was to read all the papers. I still found this lacking. Nowadays if I need to know that level of information I can get so much more and for free, reading blogs and whatnot as well as the BBC overview. There is no way I would consider reading what the newspapers have to say about F1 even if I had access to every newspaper for free, even if online rather than in dead tree format. There was another 'however' - as a child delivering papers I did not think outside of the frame set by the newspapers, so if there was a story on how the British bid to sell tanks to Saudi Arabia hadn't happened then I would 'believe' that this was bad for jobs and the balance of payments - as if that mattered. I was not able to think that 'we' (as in the Royal 'we') should not be selling tanks to the Saudis. The Guardian (never mind the Daily Mail) didn't let my mind stray as far as questioning whether selling these tanks was ethical or outside of the founding charter of the United Nations. I was not given the words to think that. Back then the wars that happened seemed pretty legit. Even the Falklands seemed 'fair'. The war in Afghanistan and the Olympic boycotts that followed all seemed okay. If we had the internet then then I might have been able to find out that the Afghanistan war was instigated by America, funding the terrorists and bringing down a democratically elected government. Much like the F1 situation, the information was just not obtainable, even if you went out to seek it. My grandmother did say that you should not believe what they write in the papers, but the other out there stuff was not there so the default was to believe what the papers said. Nowadays, post Iraq, post the Syria fake chemical attacks and with so many other obvious lies told how is anyone expected to believe the truthiness of the papers? So as well as the many reasons for newspaper decline given in the Wikipedia article is a fundamental problem that means no mainstream newspapers have a core readership of 'fans' - truth. It is just absent from the mainstream news. We as a society are no longer on the same page when it comes to facts. Online blogs do have the '1000 core fans' needed to give them life, the mainstream news does not have that. In the UK the printed newspapers are only read by two groups of people - commuters in tube trains with no WiFi and the old baby boomer generation. I learned how the 'old baby boomer generation' read their papers back in the day of delivering them. They read these things much like how one might eat lots of 'fiber' in one's diet, because it is allegedly good for you. There would be sugar coating in the Sunday magazine supplements, so people would actually be 'licking off the sugar coating' and reading the lifestyle or sport articles rather than the 'news'. So they weren't really reading papers for reasons beyond entertainment. This goes on today, it is the same ritual, something to fill your lazy Sunday afternoon doing. So nobody is reading these papers and even if they are then their thoughts and opinion on current affairs matter not. They have been sheeple-ified into believing the five minutes of hate with no ability to think outside the frame. A lot of 'young people' who don't touch newspapers with a bargepole are not illiterate oafs, chances are they have cut the cord with TV and really do not want to be told what to think anymore. Sadly they get drawn in to fake news and conspiracy stories thanks to Facebook and what the likes of Cambridge Analytica do. So we still have not escaped 'the frame'. We have escaped it enough though for dead-tree newspapers to be as good as dead.
zandjager 8y ago
Anyone remembers something akin to "TV tax" ? It was a tax paid to sustain national TV (media) in a large scale, which provides them the possibility of being independent and not struggle with financing problems. It is simple, and it works, but I guess it's not an option anymore. Without a guaranteed unbiased source of money we cannot claim to have independent news or news that serves global interests (with global meaning the pool of contributors which in this case is close to global). Local news are not interesting. If you want to know what happened in your neighborhood, go out and ask your neighbors, talk to them.
- gxs 8y ago
  This may not be the proper place to ask - but I'm generally disconnected from the news cycle outside of tech and sports, mainly because I don't know of any good, objective news sources. Is there anything that you or anyone else on HN can recommend?
  - notamy 8y ago
    Personally, I try to subscribe to subreddits like r/news, r/worldnews, ... and a few subreddits on both sides of the American political spectrum; I find that it's been good enough for me so far.
    - DuskStar 8y ago
      If you think r/news or r/worldnews are neutral, I've got some bad news for you...
      - notamy 8y ago
        I never said I thought they were neutral; I just use them as one way to get a view of what's going on in the world.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    I built an app called Read Across The Aisle that offers a variety of news sources across the political spectrum and has a timer that tracks the aggregate political bias in your news consumption. The app is free — and provides free access to the WSJ, thanks to a generous partnership they offered us. http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com
mathattack 8y ago
If it's at all profitable to produce a newspaper with more than the bare minimum writers, wouldn't a new paper start up after the last local one dies? What am I missing?
- PeterisP 8y ago
  It's profitable while there's a customer base that still (due to tradition, habit, brand name) are willing to pay for an increasingly bad service. The last paper dies when it has "spent" that customer base by motivating them to change these habits, and at that point it won't be profitable for anyone ever again.
paulddraper 8y ago
Interesting timing; this was published day before Salt Lake Tribune (Utah) laid off one-third the staff.
rconti 8y ago
Just as importantly, whoever sold the paper to Smith is guilty of the exact same thing he is. They're both trying to make as much money as possible off a dying business. And, to be honest, how much can you blame either?
notatoad 8y ago
This is going to be an unpopular opinion here, but does a local Denver paper really need almost 200 journalists working for it? Reading the average mid-sized city paper, I'd assume they have about 40-50 reporters. Considering that I'd never heard anything about the Denver Post prior to all this discussion about it being harvested by "vulture capitalists", they don't seem to be doing anything exceptional. If it really takes 184 journalists to produce a daily newspaper of middling quality, is print journalism worth saving?
- azemetre 8y ago
  They've won and been nominated for multiple Pulitzer prizes, they aren't exactly middling quality. That's extremely unfair to label them as such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Pulitzer_Prizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Pulitzer_Prize...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - repolfx 8y ago
    Of those 9 prizes only two are related to actually reporting news. The rest are for cartoons or photography. The world is full of people giving away photos for free, and as for "editorial cartooning", well ... the world is also full of people being funny for free. Of the two prizes for news reporting both were for mass shootings that happened to take place locally. I am skeptical these prizes were awarded based on some objective evaluation of their reporting skill; the Pulitzer is probably just awarded on the basis of emotions. Like so much else in journalism, there are no systems worth a damn.
- watwut 8y ago
  > Considering that I'd never heard anything about the Denver Post prior to all this discussion about it being harvested by "vulture capitalists", they don't seem to be doing anything exceptional. ... middling quality ... Ugh. I dont know about it therefore it is bad?
zeth___ 8y ago
>“The old model of a general-purpose newspaper fit the industrial age when advertisers needed mass audiences to sell the products of mass production. But the marketplace no longer supports the model of a few messages to many people. Now it is many messages, each to a few people,” Meyer tells me via email. The advertising as spying model is dying, too. The EU GDPR killed it in the second largest market on the planet. It is a matter of political opportunity for the same to happen in the US. What we are seeing is the limit of advertising as a business model in general.
dredmorbius 8y ago
David Simon's 2008 UC Beerkeley address, "The Audacity of Despair", addresses the decline of print media beginning in the 1990s. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw
jillesvangurp 8y ago
The problem is not saving the publishers and aggregators (aka. newspapers, magazines, etc) but reinventing journalism. All major publications, including the big ones, have been squeezing on journalistic quality. There's a surplus of journalists that are either unemployed or peddling their services writing freelance articles where they are payed by the word. That's not sustainable in its current form but it might be the beginnings of something new: offering these people a way to get revenue. This business is essentially reputation driven; good journalists get payed more and have an easier time getting their work published. Right now they do this at fixed price by selling themselves to media syndicates that are taking most of the profits for themselves. There seems to be no way other than monetizing through largely ad driven media silos. This is a race to the bottom. You get shit articles that offer confirmation bias to pre-selected demographics based on what ads they can publish. I'd gladly pay up for a netflix/spotify style news subscription model with a fair distribution model. This would enable niche publications and journalists to do their thing in the same way that niche artists and series are thriving on spotify and netflix. But it would have to be an inclusive platform; I'm not paying for a handful of big brand publications with some filler content that I can get elsewhere for free. I want basically a good subset of all relevant publications in the same way that most artists are on Spotify. I don't want to have to micromanage subscriptions either. Just measure what I read, and how long I read it, etc. and make sure the relevant copyright owners get their cut. I want good journalists to get a fair cut of the earnings. That's money the journalists are missing out on. I've not bought a news paper in years, I have no online news subscriptions and never payed for paper subscriptions. I also have an ad-blocker and routinely bypass naively implemented paywalls with private browsers. That's billions of completely untapped revenue potentially and none of it ad based. Enough to pay for the work of tens of thousands of journalists. At 5$/month, 20 million subscribers is about 1 billion in revenue, which at a generous 100K per year could pay for 10K journalists. I'd say a good enough platform can easily do better than that in just the US alone.
- TheCondor 8y ago
  10k journalists and your most popular articles are going to be about the Kardashians, what celebrities wore to an awards show and what celebrity couple is splitting up. Maybe Lebron pokes in to the top 10. Journalism is like science, an entire career might have a few interesting publications if you’re lucky, something really big is like winning the lottery. Current society isn’t designed to appreciate that kind of hit ratio. There is all sorts of low grade grift and corruption in business and politics but there aren’t enough big scandals to keep the kardashians out of our papers.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Another related piece that can't be recommended enough is, "The Bad News About the News" by Robert Kaiser. Kaiser was the managing editor of the Washington Post pre-Bezos and spent more than 50 years at the paper working as both a reporter and an editor. That time frame gives him an incredibly insightful view on the decline of media and where it is inevitably headed. [1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-news.html http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...

139 points by spking 8y ago

It's not just newspapers. Journalism as a whole is shrinking rapidly. Concerns over privacy and personalized advertising will have long terms impacts on ad revenue. Ad revenue is the primary way through which journalism is funded. Unless you have a great brand like the Economist, or the Wall Street Journal you're in trouble. To do well you now have to write content that people are willing to pay for. That's a pretty high bar to reach.

Karunamon 8y ago
I'd add to this a somewhat controversial stance: I'm not sure that the world needs or can sustain journalism as a job anymore. Let me explain a bit. By "can sustain", I mean that the whole point of being a journalist is objective reporting, with cultivating trust as a goal. Without trust, a journalist is no better than a blogger with a writing degree. Except I don't think that trust meaningfully exists anymore. Most news in the largest nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests, and with there being no legal obligation to divorce fact from opinion from advertising, they probably will not, so long as not doing so remains as profitable as it has been. What's the substantial difference between a journalist you can't trust to distill pertinent facts from events, and a random blogger you have no reason to trust in the first place? One makes more money. Maybe. Are you sure you didn't just read a native ad? By "needs", I mean that faced with this loss of trust, individual people are going to have to do what they should have been doing in the first place, namely choosing their news sources carefully and paying more attention to subtle and not-so-subtle bias. It's a huge mistake to rely on media credentials as a proxy for likelihood of telling the truth, yet that is the entire concept of journalism as a career path.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cornholio 8y ago
  > people are going to have to do what they should have been doing in the first place, namely choosing their news sources carefully and paying more attention to subtle and not-so-subtle bias. It's a huge mistake to rely on media credentials as a proxy for likelihood of telling the truth, yet that is the entire concept of journalism as a career path. Media credentials are a way to aggregate that trust on the long run and invest decades into building a reputation of integrity. With the expectation that it will be profitable in the future, people will come to rely on you because they know how costly any damage to that reputation is to you. In the model where every internet page is a source that has to vetted individually, the journalists are indeed obsolete but not because they weren't useful; now every citizen must do their own full journalistic investigations before trusting anything written. Most people lack the skills and education to do that work and society is, on the whole, worse off. People will not be doing what "they should be doing in the first place", we will get the misinformation soup that served us with Trump, Brexit, antivaxx and the score of post-truth social ills.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    >People will not be doing what "they should be doing in the first place", we will get the misinformation soup that served us with Trump, Brexit, antivaxx and the score of post-truth social ills. This is why Trump won.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Yes, people like to believe the lies of Trump, Brexit, and antivaxxers, and that led to Trump winning. So how do we convince them not to choose comforting lies?
  - anon1385 8y ago
    The MMR scare, which is the origin of a lot of the modern antivax movement, was something that was largely created by (UK) newspapers[1]. This was back in the 90s before the subsequent decline in revenue from advertising and competition from online news; it wasn't something that happened due to lack of resources to do fact checking- papers took an active decision to 'campaign' in support of Wakefield and dedicated huge amounts of resources and column inches to the topic. It wan't just a tabloid thing either, most of the media gorged themselves on a festival of misinformation and emotive scare stories for years after the original article had been retracted by most of the authors. You really couldn't have picked a worse example. Brexit is a more complicated topic, but it's worth pointing out that it occurs after a decades long smear campaign by much of the UK media against the EU. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_role https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_...
- golergka 8y ago
  > Most news in the largest nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests But they are also at odds with each other, and can gain advantage by exposing one another. Just like with politicians — a true democratic system is designed with crooks and liars in mind, and balances them one against the other.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > Most news in the largest nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests That was true for a long time, but the Internet in fact greatly increases the news options: The Internet lowers barrier to entry compared with the old newspaper (presses and distribution costs) and TV (broadcast facilities, spectrum licenses, etc.). My locality has several publications that wouldn't exist without the Internet. Also on larger scales there is the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, ProPublica, etc. etc. etc. Think of the world of IT news; how many of those would make it as print publications? The Internet also makes news from other localities far more available. I can easily read news from all over the world; in fact HN links to it. The Internet and web technologies also lower the cost to free for much news (with all the complications that involves), and allows aggregation and other facilitation. And of all the news sources I've referred to (local, national, international, etc.), think of how incredibly long the list of owners is and how diverse it is.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    Serious question - how many of those many news sources have you taken the time to trace their ownership or influencers? As an example, you mentioned BuzzFeed - did you know that Comcast nee NBCUniversal invested roughly $400M into them[1] in the last couple years? Or that they were caught deleting posts[2] critical of their advertisers in 2015? Did you know that Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch are all owned by Verizon[3]? I'm not sure the proliferation of sources amounts to much, as many of those sources are hardly independent at the end of the day. What's your favorite flavor of tech news.. Verizon or Comcast? I'm not being fatalistic here, I'm saying that most people don't bother to do this work, and so they aren't aware of how few owners actually exist in the journalism market. This is not a healthy state of affairs. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Funding [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Advertiser_influence_on_editorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Advertiser_influence_... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_Inc
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      That is very informative and helpful; thank you. I wasn't aware or didn't remember all that. I still think there's more diversity now than before the Internet. There are several more publications in my locale, for example, and some are more focused on local public affairs than the leading local newspapers were (which I assume have to appeal to a wider audience). And there are the other sources I mentioned. Do you know if it's objectively worse than before the Internet?
- watwut 8y ago
  Wasn't most actual past real world journalism opinionated one? There was never period when it was objective in a sense of "fully factual, does not cherry pick, does not ignore point and arguments that don't fit journal worldview". It is likely not even possible.
- cf498 8y ago
  Trust isnt the only point though. The threat of a decline is full time journalists means also some things will fall through the cracks because no one invests the time to look at it. A good example might be the Snowden documents. They were quite numerous and multiple news agencies put a lot of manpower into actually looking through them.
mngthrowaway 8y ago
I honestly think there just isn't enough innovation in the newspaper industry for it to survive. Newspapers are too old school to innovate/iterate their models. For example, mng has 50+ newspapers. Why not identify 10 different ideas and test them out on a few newspapers. Some bad ideas that get my point across: - Have a reddit-style front page with upvotes/downvotes - Put all articles on a map so users can see whats relevant near them - Ask users to sign in to facebook and google on the website so that each ad is more targeted and provides more revenue
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > I honestly think there just isn't enough innovation in the newspaper industry for it to survive. Newspapers are too old school to innovate/iterate their models. This frustrates the hell out of me. The public greatly needs the journalism, not the paper and ink. Despite decades of warning and preparation, many just can't seem to embrace the new medium and find profitable models. You can see it in their generally awful websites: Nobody designing a website from scratch, including for news, would make those choices; you could show me dozens of unidentified news websites and I expect I could easily pick out the newspapers. Also, they can't seem to embrace any medium of communication but text, as if it were 1995 and other media on computer were just being developed. They are still trying to stick to paper-and-ink layout and mediums, just displayed on a website. The New York Times is scary to watch. I know people laud its digital efforts, but I suspect that's based only on reputation because I haven't seen anything laudable. They also can't seem to fully integrate other media; the other media is displayed beside the text, not integrated fluently into it as most bloggers or social media users could do - imagine communicating with images! Looped animations! Short video clips! Their social media manager, at least as of several months ago, was someone who didn't use social media himself. A little while ago, a NYT IT staffer's wriieup of their newly developed "text editor" was posted here - they used the term repeatedly, but it wasn't a text editor; it was a content management or enterprise publishing system; they didn't seem to know that basic terminology - at the NY Times! (It's not that I care about terminology, it's that it's a red flag - if someone referred to a CMS as a "text editor" in an interview, I'd be concerned.)
- intended 8y ago

fortythirteen 8y ago

If you read this article you'll also get to learn how journalism dies - through opinion pieces promoted as objective reporting.

mudil 8y ago

It is tied to the invasion of privacy. Facebook and Google control close to 85% of the digital ad market. The rest 15% goes to the content creators and to the journalism. If Google and FB were not able to invade everyone's privacy, that would have created a level playing field for national, regional, and specialized media to prosper. But because they know who you are, they can display an ad for you on any platform. If you are from Denver, here's an ad for a Denver event on your mobile game. So who needs journalism if an article in Denver Post is on par to a Candy Crush screen? Who needs quality content on the internet? There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever! Neither Google nor FB should be gathering personal information worse than NSA. Personal information is personal, and free people in a free society should not be followed by multinational corporations.

tschellenbach 8y ago
The opposite is true: Less personalized ads -> Lower revenue per user -> An even smaller budget for journalism. There are indeed ethical concerns with this level of tracking. That doesn't change that there's a flipside though. A lot of good journalism will have no monetization model to rely on. Paid content only works for the top publications that aim at a wealthier audience.
- bmomb 8y ago
  But before the algorithm personalized ads journalism wasn’t “dying”, there is ways to do personalized ads without tracking my every move.
- mudil 8y ago
  There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever. I maintain a website since 2004 for doctors to learn about medical technologies, i.e. new FDA approvals, interviews, product reviews, etc etc, like TechCrunch for doctors. Fourteen years of every day reporting! We should be able to sustain ourselves via ads, but we barely survive. Why? Because of the invasion of privacy, because Google follows users, and it can display ads for doctors on Candy Crush. So who needs journalism? Google doesn't.

fredsanford 8y ago

Most newspapers are filled with regurgitated press releases. When I noticed this, I stopped my subs. I grew up reading newspapers that had investigative journalists out in the field. Gov't was much more accountable.

snambi 8y ago
very true.
Lionsion 8y ago
> Most newspapers are filled with regurgitated press releases. When I noticed this, I stopped my subs. I grew up reading newspapers that had investigative journalists out in the field. Gov't was much more accountable. That's a strategy that will get you more regurgitated press releases. I still subscribe to a newspaper, but at this point I think of it like a donation to a nonprofit. Journalism is important, and I think the people who value it need to concentrate their resources to maintain and support the organizations who will still do it. However, now I'm going to have to make sure my money's not going to a private equity vulture like this guy.
- dublinben 8y ago
  You can give money directly to actual non-profit organizations that engage in investigative journalism, like the Center for Investigative Reporting or ProPublica.
  - Lionsion 8y ago
    Don't those nonprofits tend to focus on national issues? State and local issues still need investigation.
alexkavon 8y ago
Both current newspapers and online blogging profitability stem from advertising. I think the current situation is a conflated hybrid of both. Here's a previous rant: "We live in an age where blogging careers required tricking Google algorithms to thinking your site was valuable in order to increase traffic and thus serve ads to consumers (or grab their email for later product blasts, for example signing up for a free ebook on passive income). This trend spiraled into "spinning articles" which essentially was a method of using software to change articles via word/sentence substitution. The spun articles would then be posted to similar websites that then linked back to one of your main sites. All of them nicely littered with ads of course and leading you in a research circle. This of course evolved into clickbait headlines. Buzzfeed and its ilk are born to maximize this growing pile of garbage echoing, and labels itself as a brilliant strategy which is then echoed out again. Release a few high quality long form articles every once in a while, call yourself journalism instead of blogging (difference being the above strategies and highly opinionated pieces), badda-bing-badda-boom, media is changed. Now instead of reporting on a subject, we regurgitate something else for a few sentences and post the source and call it a day. No understanding, investigation, expansion, or reworking required because the author is no longer writing for an audience but instead for an advertiser click minimum." [0] I think the fact that newspapers, blogs, whatever else aren't writing for an audience any more is huge. The idea being that the writer is most likely trying to fill some quota in order to make a buck. I'm not saying that writers are only loyal to their bottom line but they're incentivized to produce much more garbage. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17049804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17049804

mngthrowaway 8y ago

Disclaimer: I work for media news group. I can look out the windows in that pic from my desk. While the article is true, it doesn't show the whole picture. Alden capital recognized an opportunity: Hundreds of newspapers with brand recognition and skilled employees. While the newspaper will die, these two things can be used to make money / slow the death a bit. The solution is "adtaxi". All the MNG newspapers act as local sales people, account managers, etc and use their local newspapers brand recognition to generate sales. Adtaxi is the digital fulfillment agency - so newspapers can sell social, search, and programmatic advertising. This is a growing chunk of each newspapers revenue, but something I haven't seen mentioned. If Alden capital really wanted to make money, they'd recognize the viability of this model to scale, and that would in turn save newspapers. The problem is newspapers are stuck with tons of old employees, old money, and old ways of doing things. They don'y want digital to save them, they'd rather die doing what they know.

subpixel 8y ago
The solution you describe is actually the problem the article points out: MNG is killing the actual newspapers they are making money operating.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

25 years ago Wired (which at that point was a pretty good magazine) published Michael Crichton's speech on the future of newspapers, Mediasaurus: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/ https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/ And it seems like not much has changed... Concerning the Denver Post, I realized long ago that the function of the local newspaper was selling ads, and only looking at approved scandals. There was plenty of fraud going on in the site choosing, site bidding and construction of the new Denver International Airport ; and the Denver Post never investigated any of it. Some improbably large amount of concrete was paid for during the construction of the airport, and I don't think that it was because of the alien underground base... a simpler and more logical explanation for this has to do with large bags of cash... EDIT: Note that the best journalism you can find on it, was done by Westword, which used to have escort/gay/gentlemen's club ads in the back and was given away free (they now are making $$$ because all the ad space is bought by marijuana advertisers). http://www.westword.com/news/speak-no-evil-5056426 http://www.westword.com/news/speak-no-evil-5056426

jessaustin 8y ago
Wow the rabbit hole goes pretty deep there. Update on the execrable Zinser, who fired Deans [0]. One has to assume that for every case like this that comes to light, many other cases do not... [0] https://votesmart.org/public-statement/962803/misconduct-of-inspector-general-todd-zinser-commerce-department https://votesmart.org/public-statement/962803/misconduct-of-...
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  Thank you very much for that link! Zinser should have lost his pension...
dredmorbius 8y ago
Or Hamilton Holt, 1909. [T]his is the explanation of the condition that confronts most publications to-day. By throwing the preponderating weight of commercialism into the scales of production, advertising is at the present moment by far the greatest menace to the disinterested practice of a profession upon which the diffusion of intelligence most largely depends. If journalism is no longer a profession, but a commercial enterprise, it is due to the growth of advertising, and nothing else. https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

fipple 8y ago

The private equity guy is making all the money but he is not killing the industry. The industry is dying because people don’t pay for ad-laden newspapers that they leaf through carefully every morning. 184 journalists at the Denver Post?! That needs more revenue than banner ads from Facebook clicks.

mc32 8y ago

I wonder if the likes of nextdoor can take on journalism. They have a captive audience with pretty good engamemt, maybe they could add local news through local journalists, but who knows...

Analemma_ 8y ago
Nextdoor is awful. The only thing it's good for is learning just how many of your neighbors will report "suspicious activity" when they see a black man walking his dog. If that's the future of journalism, just let it die.
- mc32 8y ago
  From what I’ve seen they have helped catch delivery thieves, prowlers; alerts about lost and found, free stuff, car break-in’s miscellaneous activities, both positive and negative. I think they could try adding local news into their feed. I’ve learned having an externally pointing sec cam is valuable in capturing suspicious chars.

Lionsion 8y ago

> By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product. Wherever newspapers can be found reducing page size, cutting news pages, narrowing coverage area, reducing staff, shrinking circulation area, postponing the purchase of new equipment and raising subscription prices, they are harvesting market position. Attention anyone sill subscribed to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the San Jose Mercury News and the Orange County Register: it's time to quit. If those papers have any local competitors left, they should get the money instead.

ProAm 8y ago
> By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills the product I can't help but feel a tiny analogy to Apple with this statement.
- georgeecollins 8y ago
  It is also an analogy for Apple in 1995. Companies harvest their market position sometimes, and then innovate at other times.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    I think this is a standard technique for fast-food businesses, although I've never heard it mentioned. Run some flashy ad campaign for low-priced good food for a few months. Leave the low prices in place for about a year. Then slowly, slowly ratchet up your prices. After 8-10 years of this, your only remaining customers have very little price sensitivity, but at some point along the way you soaked every single customer as hard as you could. If you need to raise revenue now that you've chased away lots of customers, start over from the beginning. I guess someone at Arby's didn't get the "start over" memo...

rmason 8y ago

Our local (Lansing) paper has a full section on national news and another on sports which are both dated and stale. Add in another section of USA Today which is both dated and stale. I want just local news. In depth pieces on sports that go beyond the score. Our excellent minor league baseball team, the Lugnuts, isn't covered by our paper at all! Add in investigative journalists covering politics and local university. Heck the biggest story at the university in fifty years was broken by the Indianapolis paper hundreds of miles away. I think if the paper did all those things and updated the mobile app more than once every three days they could triple the number of subscribers.

combatentropy 8y ago
I agree. Won't we always need local news?
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
The problem is that sports and national news is super cheap and easy. You just pick and choose a few articles from AP that sell across the country. Investigative journalism is expensive, local journalism has a tiny audience which makes it expensive. Would you pay the same amount for a newspaper that only had the current quantity of local and investigative news? Or would you pay a lot more for one that had the desired amounts? It's like lamenting that your burger has a thin beef patty, a mountain of fries and a large soda that's half ice: you paid $5 for the meal, plus the overhead, they can't put $4 worth of beef in it so it's mostly filler. Also, Lugnuts drool. Whitecaps rule!
- rmason 8y ago
  Yes they're defaulting to easy and putting out an inferior product. I'm willing to pay the same for a smaller paper that contains more of what I want. More importantly could you double or triple the number of subscribers? I don't have an easy way of knowing for sure unless someone tries it. They could have fewer ads but charge more for them if they can get more subscribers in the 18-36 range. I admit with the economics of actually printing the paper it might make more financial sense to go entirely digital. Sadly I haven't seen anyone do that successfully.

Theodores 8y ago

The many aspects of newspaper readership decline are very neatly summarised on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers I grew up delivering newspapers door to door first thing in the morning with yet more newspaper delivering in the afternoon, after school, this one being the local paper. I got to be very good at reading all of them and I was a believer in the product. My papers of choice were the Financial Times and The Guardian. I started out reading the smaller articles at the foot of the page and progressed to reading the big articles at the top of the page. Sometimes a 'child mind' is quite helpful for being objective and seeing things as they are. I was truly shocked at how low the reading age was for the tabloid papers - up to and including the Daily Mail. I also found The Times to be 'faking it', i.e. using big words for the sake of it rather than to convey meaning. I found The Telegraph to be legit but with Tory viewpoint which was fine, you didn't have to read the editorial, if you wanted crime stories they were all there on page 3, the international news was there and the sport, e.g. cricket was pretty good too. There were some howevers, for instance I was quite a fan of F1 at the time so after a race I was reading the reports in all of the papers, I can even remember the writer names. I didn't want to know about just the winners on the podium, the fortunes of the back of the grid guys interested me too, yet the only way I could get a bit of an idea of how they fared was to read all the papers. I still found this lacking. Nowadays if I need to know that level of information I can get so much more and for free, reading blogs and whatnot as well as the BBC overview. There is no way I would consider reading what the newspapers have to say about F1 even if I had access to every newspaper for free, even if online rather than in dead tree format. There was another 'however' - as a child delivering papers I did not think outside of the frame set by the newspapers, so if there was a story on how the British bid to sell tanks to Saudi Arabia hadn't happened then I would 'believe' that this was bad for jobs and the balance of payments - as if that mattered. I was not able to think that 'we' (as in the Royal 'we') should not be selling tanks to the Saudis. The Guardian (never mind the Daily Mail) didn't let my mind stray as far as questioning whether selling these tanks was ethical or outside of the founding charter of the United Nations. I was not given the words to think that. Back then the wars that happened seemed pretty legit. Even the Falklands seemed 'fair'. The war in Afghanistan and the Olympic boycotts that followed all seemed okay. If we had the internet then then I might have been able to find out that the Afghanistan war was instigated by America, funding the terrorists and bringing down a democratically elected government. Much like the F1 situation, the information was just not obtainable, even if you went out to seek it. My grandmother did say that you should not believe what they write in the papers, but the other out there stuff was not there so the default was to believe what the papers said. Nowadays, post Iraq, post the Syria fake chemical attacks and with so many other obvious lies told how is anyone expected to believe the truthiness of the papers? So as well as the many reasons for newspaper decline given in the Wikipedia article is a fundamental problem that means no mainstream newspapers have a core readership of 'fans' - truth. It is just absent from the mainstream news. We as a society are no longer on the same page when it comes to facts. Online blogs do have the '1000 core fans' needed to give them life, the mainstream news does not have that. In the UK the printed newspapers are only read by two groups of people - commuters in tube trains with no WiFi and the old baby boomer generation. I learned how the 'old baby boomer generation' read their papers back in the day of delivering them. They read these things much like how one might eat lots of 'fiber' in one's diet, because it is allegedly good for you. There would be sugar coating in the Sunday magazine supplements, so people would actually be 'licking off the sugar coating' and reading the lifestyle or sport articles rather than the 'news'. So they weren't really reading papers for reasons beyond entertainment. This goes on today, it is the same ritual, something to fill your lazy Sunday afternoon doing. So nobody is reading these papers and even if they are then their thoughts and opinion on current affairs matter not. They have been sheeple-ified into believing the five minutes of hate with no ability to think outside the frame. A lot of 'young people' who don't touch newspapers with a bargepole are not illiterate oafs, chances are they have cut the cord with TV and really do not want to be told what to think anymore. Sadly they get drawn in to fake news and conspiracy stories thanks to Facebook and what the likes of Cambridge Analytica do. So we still have not escaped 'the frame'. We have escaped it enough though for dead-tree newspapers to be as good as dead.

zandjager 8y ago

Anyone remembers something akin to "TV tax" ? It was a tax paid to sustain national TV (media) in a large scale, which provides them the possibility of being independent and not struggle with financing problems. It is simple, and it works, but I guess it's not an option anymore. Without a guaranteed unbiased source of money we cannot claim to have independent news or news that serves global interests (with global meaning the pool of contributors which in this case is close to global). Local news are not interesting. If you want to know what happened in your neighborhood, go out and ask your neighbors, talk to them.

gxs 8y ago
This may not be the proper place to ask - but I'm generally disconnected from the news cycle outside of tech and sports, mainly because I don't know of any good, objective news sources. Is there anything that you or anyone else on HN can recommend?
- notamy 8y ago
  Personally, I try to subscribe to subreddits like r/news, r/worldnews, ... and a few subreddits on both sides of the American political spectrum; I find that it's been good enough for me so far.
  - DuskStar 8y ago
    If you think r/news or r/worldnews are neutral, I've got some bad news for you...
    - notamy 8y ago
      I never said I thought they were neutral; I just use them as one way to get a view of what's going on in the world.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  I built an app called Read Across The Aisle that offers a variety of news sources across the political spectrum and has a timer that tracks the aggregate political bias in your news consumption. The app is free — and provides free access to the WSJ, thanks to a generous partnership they offered us. http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com

mathattack 8y ago

If it's at all profitable to produce a newspaper with more than the bare minimum writers, wouldn't a new paper start up after the last local one dies? What am I missing?

PeterisP 8y ago
It's profitable while there's a customer base that still (due to tradition, habit, brand name) are willing to pay for an increasingly bad service. The last paper dies when it has "spent" that customer base by motivating them to change these habits, and at that point it won't be profitable for anyone ever again.

paulddraper 8y ago

Interesting timing; this was published day before Salt Lake Tribune (Utah) laid off one-third the staff.

rconti 8y ago

Just as importantly, whoever sold the paper to Smith is guilty of the exact same thing he is. They're both trying to make as much money as possible off a dying business. And, to be honest, how much can you blame either?

notatoad 8y ago

This is going to be an unpopular opinion here, but does a local Denver paper really need almost 200 journalists working for it? Reading the average mid-sized city paper, I'd assume they have about 40-50 reporters. Considering that I'd never heard anything about the Denver Post prior to all this discussion about it being harvested by "vulture capitalists", they don't seem to be doing anything exceptional. If it really takes 184 journalists to produce a daily newspaper of middling quality, is print journalism worth saving?

azemetre 8y ago
They've won and been nominated for multiple Pulitzer prizes, they aren't exactly middling quality. That's extremely unfair to label them as such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Pulitzer_Prizes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Pulitzer_Prize...
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- repolfx 8y ago
  Of those 9 prizes only two are related to actually reporting news. The rest are for cartoons or photography. The world is full of people giving away photos for free, and as for "editorial cartooning", well ... the world is also full of people being funny for free. Of the two prizes for news reporting both were for mass shootings that happened to take place locally. I am skeptical these prizes were awarded based on some objective evaluation of their reporting skill; the Pulitzer is probably just awarded on the basis of emotions. Like so much else in journalism, there are no systems worth a damn.
watwut 8y ago
> Considering that I'd never heard anything about the Denver Post prior to all this discussion about it being harvested by "vulture capitalists", they don't seem to be doing anything exceptional. ... middling quality ... Ugh. I dont know about it therefore it is bad?

zeth___ 8y ago

>“The old model of a general-purpose newspaper fit the industrial age when advertisers needed mass audiences to sell the products of mass production. But the marketplace no longer supports the model of a few messages to many people. Now it is many messages, each to a few people,” Meyer tells me via email. The advertising as spying model is dying, too. The EU GDPR killed it in the second largest market on the planet. It is a matter of political opportunity for the same to happen in the US. What we are seeing is the limit of advertising as a business model in general.

dredmorbius 8y ago

David Simon's 2008 UC Beerkeley address, "The Audacity of Despair", addresses the decline of print media beginning in the 1990s. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw

jillesvangurp 8y ago

The problem is not saving the publishers and aggregators (aka. newspapers, magazines, etc) but reinventing journalism. All major publications, including the big ones, have been squeezing on journalistic quality. There's a surplus of journalists that are either unemployed or peddling their services writing freelance articles where they are payed by the word. That's not sustainable in its current form but it might be the beginnings of something new: offering these people a way to get revenue. This business is essentially reputation driven; good journalists get payed more and have an easier time getting their work published. Right now they do this at fixed price by selling themselves to media syndicates that are taking most of the profits for themselves. There seems to be no way other than monetizing through largely ad driven media silos. This is a race to the bottom. You get shit articles that offer confirmation bias to pre-selected demographics based on what ads they can publish. I'd gladly pay up for a netflix/spotify style news subscription model with a fair distribution model. This would enable niche publications and journalists to do their thing in the same way that niche artists and series are thriving on spotify and netflix. But it would have to be an inclusive platform; I'm not paying for a handful of big brand publications with some filler content that I can get elsewhere for free. I want basically a good subset of all relevant publications in the same way that most artists are on Spotify. I don't want to have to micromanage subscriptions either. Just measure what I read, and how long I read it, etc. and make sure the relevant copyright owners get their cut. I want good journalists to get a fair cut of the earnings. That's money the journalists are missing out on. I've not bought a news paper in years, I have no online news subscriptions and never payed for paper subscriptions. I also have an ad-blocker and routinely bypass naively implemented paywalls with private browsers. That's billions of completely untapped revenue potentially and none of it ad based. Enough to pay for the work of tens of thousands of journalists. At 5$/month, 20 million subscribers is about 1 billion in revenue, which at a generous 100K per year could pay for 10K journalists. I'd say a good enough platform can easily do better than that in just the US alone.

TheCondor 8y ago
10k journalists and your most popular articles are going to be about the Kardashians, what celebrities wore to an awards show and what celebrity couple is splitting up. Maybe Lebron pokes in to the top 10. Journalism is like science, an entire career might have a few interesting publications if you’re lucky, something really big is like winning the lottery. Current society isn’t designed to appreciate that kind of hit ratio. There is all sorts of low grade grift and corruption in business and politics but there aren’t enough big scandals to keep the kardashians out of our papers.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

Another related piece that can't be recommended enough is, "The Bad News About the News" by Robert Kaiser. Kaiser was the managing editor of the Washington Post pre-Bezos and spent more than 50 years at the paper working as both a reporter and an editor. That time frame gives him an incredibly insightful view on the decline of media and where it is inevitably headed. [1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-news.html http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...