14 ms·

Why media layoffs keep happening

130 points by spzx 8y ago

olivermarks 8y ago
'This is a stab to the heart of democratic accountability.' Not convinced about this - the internet is a fabulous source of information. Most 'newspapers' run AP service international 'stories' and local news, most of which you'll find a lot quicker online
- WalterSear 8y ago
  It's online because of local news reporters.
- danso 8y ago
  The AP is a news organization that is funded by local news orgs licensing fees. And yes, you can find local news online because news orgs have put it online. When those news orgs close down, they won’t be publishing online.
- bloomer 8y ago
  I think you are mistaking source for distribution channel. The "internet" doesn't produce anything it just distributes it very cheaply.
  - rahimnathwani 8y ago
    Technically that's true, but practically it is not. I can go to a local library and view newspaper articles on microfilm. But where can I go to find forum discussions and cat videos that were produced before the internet? Nowhere, because they didn't exist. The internet (and applications built on top of it) encourage and facilitate creation. It's not just about distributing content that would have been created anyway.
- pryelluw 8y ago
  It is also a fabulous source of cheap disinformation. For every well researched journalism piece, there are thousands of image based memes that influence people's opinion on any subject. That's why social media sites and search companies need to be regulated. Until there is no downside to publishing and marketing disinformation, every organization (legal or otherwise) will have the ability to do so.
  - olivermarks 8y ago
    I disagree with this: free speech is sacrosanct in the free world. 'Well researched journalism pieces' are all too often written by salaried employees of organizations with a mission to push a political slant and/or agenda. The idea that the material published by these businesses is 'fair and balanced' has never been true as the long a sordid history of yellow journalism proves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism There is no shortage of good investigative writers but a dearth of editors who will publish their work. That material is now largely to be found online rather than under corporate 'news' mastheads.
rhacker 8y ago
Back when I was growing up, we got the newspaper. It was kinda something you just expected to be available. Then my parents one day just told the paper boy to stop delivering. My dad was just getting into Yahoo news and getting his wall street fix online. There was no longer a need for a paper. The product was not the paper but just this entire morning experience - coffee and newspaper. And the idea that different family members would grab different sections. It was totally incredible. Would I ever get a newspaper subscription? Nah, but I think there's a lot missing from the good ole days of it.
- Cerium 8y ago
  I'm under 30 and have been a newspaper subscriber for about 6 years. I plan to be a subscriber as long as they will keep delivering it. My parents subscribe to two papers: the San Francisco Chronicle, and what is now called the East Bay Times. Like you, I've long viewed the paper as an important family experience, where you sit around and trade sections over breakfast. When I moved out, I didn't expect to become a subscriber, but I got a free trial at some point and decided that I enjoyed the paper and wished to support the establishment.
- acranox 8y ago
  Same here. You could always try it though. I got a subscription last year. It was good, but ultimately decided to just keep the online subscription, as it meshed with my reading patterns better.
- flukus 8y ago
  > The product was not the paper but just this entire morning experience - coffee and newspaper. And the idea that different family members would grab different sections. It was totally incredible. I don't think it's even the experience that mattered. What newspapers never realized was that they're in the distribution business, people were paying them to print out their content and deliver, they were never really paying for the content itself. The internet made the distribution business obsolete and now they have nothing to offer. We saw the same with the music business, it wasn't the songs we were paying for, it was for them to distribute the music in a format that's convenient. Now we're seeing the same with online video, everyone keeps trying to make proprietary content to get subscribers but people just want a dumb pipe to deliver everything.
anticodon 8y ago
I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country where I currently live) I see lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don't fit the current media paradigm, or even obvious lies. I don't see a point in spending my money and my time to read fake news. I've just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better. Social networks and Internet in general are much worse in this respect. There's immense amount of bots/government agents (from every government in the world) spreading all kinds of fake information. Then real people start reposting that. You still can do fact-checking but if you'd fact-check everything, it would require as much time as a full-time job. So I'm planning on stopping reading the social networks also because in most social networks there's no way of blocking reposts or filtering out the politics-related messages.
- RickJWagner 8y ago
  Yes, I agree. My personal technique for dealing with this is try to look at multiple online news sources, not just one. I'll look at one from each side of the political spectrum and try to triangulate what a reasonable person should think.
  - skilled 8y ago
    Think about what? A system that doesn't care about you? A reasonable person should think for himself and not on the basis of soulless news columns.
    - untog 8y ago
      What are you saying, that people should read no news sources at all? That's absurd. You need to know actual information if you're going to make an informed choice.
      - sigstoat 8y ago
        an informed choice about what? the news is full of things you can't have an impact on. focus on things you can impact, like your own life and the people around you.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Is anyone in the publishing business reading this? If so, I've got a personal story to share. I love cars. I'm a gearhead and I just love cars. I subscribe to several car magazines. Except I don't get Car & Driver anymore, and my subscription to Motor Trend is going to go unrenewed. Why? In both cases, the car mags started running political commentary. If it were balanced, I wouldn't like it but wouldn't quit reading. But it's not balanced-- both mags express support for one side of the political spectrum, disdain for the other. I can't justify paying for that. So I wrote (not for publication) notes to the editors, telling them I'd quit subscribing if they didn't stick to the proper wheelhouse. Neither editor replied. That's enough for me, I'm not going to pay for that kind of content. I think ESPN has undergone a similar cycle. I believe their subscriber base is greatly diminished, yet they seem to continue on with a politicized agenda. I just can't understand why the business owners allow this to continue. It seems counter-productive to me.
- raleigh_user 8y ago
  Have experienced the same. Canceled subscriptions. Hell I use to ALWAYS watch ESPN. Now I never do. It’s sad because the product use to be so good. Now everyone in sports wants to be a politician and talk about the very stuff im watching espn to escape!
  - shard972 8y ago
    At least men's razors are still non-political /s
- analyst74 8y ago
  People in news have always been aware of their power to influence public opinions, they didn't just start wielding it today. What's happening is due to current political divide, there are now in-fighting among American news outlets, making their politicized agenda more obvious to average Americans. People from countries vilified by American media have always been aware the politicized agendas.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  I'm surprised Car Magazines are getting involved in politics outside of say... car industry politics. One thing I hate are the pricey opinion writers media likes to hire these days. In major publications these people can make $250,000/year (and up) to basically write partisan hot-takes that you can get for free on twitter. You could hire 3-4 investigative journalists for the same price.
simplecomplex 8y ago
Small newsrooms have been replaced by Reddit, blogs, and a nexus of updates from Facebook, mailing lists, and instant messaging. News isn’t just what gets printed on paper. There’s nothing about printing information on paper that somehow makes it special.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bloomer 8y ago
  Reddit, blogs, Facebook and the rest have not broken any important stories. Actual news is broken by paid investigative reporters.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    This is absolutely not true. Places like reddit break news all the time. At least in the subjects that I follow, those being gaming and livestreaming, I see news stories break on reddit, because of something that someone posted in the comment section, or as a top level original content post form a user created clip, with extreme frequency! Reddit is argueable the best place to find developing news for these specific subjects, at least. And it only hits the "mainstream" media hours and hours after some rando had just made a comment about it, and posted a video link.
    - matt4077 8y ago
      “Games and live-streaming” isn’t news.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
gnicholas 8y ago
> Google and FB have something print newspapers used to have: a reliable, captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for, because they know people will be there. Interesting observation, which raises the question: who will own the eyeballs next?
- Uhhrrr 8y ago
  AR
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I think this article's arguments are extremely weak. It brings out numerous examples of how "things you thought killed newspapers", like the Internet, Craigslist, etc., really weren't the root causes, but instead things like "corporate greed" and "lack of innovation" were. Yet there are no convincing examples of how the news business would have done any better if these corporations were somehow less greedy or more innovative. There was a fundamental technology shift that made the newspaper product much less unique or defendable, and that would have happened no matter what the newspapers did.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  David Simon's "The Audacity of Despair". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw
amanzi 8y ago
On a side note... Twitter seems like an odd choice for long-form writing. The author had to delete and re-post some of the tweets to get them back into the right order. What a nightmare.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  Twitter is not just an odd choice, but a horrible one. TheReaderApp makes the experience bad instead of horrible, which in all fairness, is a step up.
retox 8y ago
The distinguishing factor for 'real' journalists over internet posters was that they could be trusted, but they have single-handedly destroyed their own credibility over the last few years. The glut of online magazines, newspapers etc lead to the rise of click-bait just to make ends meet, which in turn lead to the sensationalism we see played out now. There is good journalism going on, but it doesn't pay for these huge media companies that they have become.
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  We thought they could be trusted. Back when it was almost impossible to fact check them or seek alternative sources. Any given source have always been inaccurate or biased to one degree or another.
  - iguy 8y ago
    Yes, this is true. But there was also a business model in providing facts, when facts were hard to get. Now that they are a commodity, the business model seems to be in providing opinions.
    - pnw_hazor 8y ago
      More "Shouting" and hot takes for sure. But the bias driven inaccuracies were commonplace. As well as plenty of malice driven inaccuracies.
Scoundreller 8y ago
Meanwhile, a Salt Lake City TV and Radio company, KSL, grudgingly decided to get into online classifieds in 2000, and now dominates their local market, with 100 people working on the product: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ksl-craigslist-classifieds/521916/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ksl-c... We saw the same thing at RIM/Blackberry. BBM was a flagship IM product, but kept restricted to their devices. The strategy worked, until it didn't, and the company is still worth less than half of what it could have been: Whatsapp.
rb808 8y ago
Yes I subscribe to my local newspaper. Most days I don't even read it, but there are a few reporters there that report on the local city politicians. If these reporters don't write, I don't think anyone will be keeping an eye on these yokel city politicians.
RandomInteger4 8y ago
"And who’s moving in right now to pick through the scraps? Hedge funds. They’ve destroyed several papers, and are working their way through some biggies like the Denver Post." Uh, wat? Am I mistaken, or does that not make sense? Since when are hedge funds involved in corporate plundering? I think he's getting "hedge fund" confused with private equity and venture capital, no? That being said, is it that the venture capital firms are picking through the scraps or that these web media companies are not grown organically, which is why we're seeing massive layoffs. They operate mostly on venture capital and haven't been making a profit ... at least not directly; who knows what stories have been generated for the sake of some other business dealings elsewhere; a sort of accounting trick where losses are incurred in one area for the sake of profit in another area. Conspiratorial? Yeah, but not unlikely. EDIT: To add on to this, lately these brands have been tarnished, so perhaps one could speculate that those wielding the venture capital are downsizing to work on new brands going into the 2020 election season; brands not tainted by a loss of trust.
ctdonath 8y ago
Those media people laid off are in the incredibly enviable position of being able to literally start a new high-demand news outlet overnight. There's enough across the industry's spectrum who know each other that they could, starting with just their cell phones, launch a business filling an industry void: reporting objective news.
acslater00 8y ago
This is ridiculous. "Greed" didn't kill newspapers. You think the classified business would be any better today off if newspapers had artificially held ad. and sub. prices down in the 80s and 90s? $0 is $0, and that's what people will pay for classifieds now. "Hedge Funds", everyone's favorite bogeyman. "Lack of Innovation", as if the Chicago Tribune was going to save itself by opening a geocities page in 1996. The 'news' business is a zombie because it sells a product that is basically free to produce and free to consume. That's it! You don't really need a newsroom to give you "the news" anymore, and so the market for a product whose main feature is a professional, standing writing staff that simply yesterday's events no longer meaningfully exists. No amount of investment in technology by media companies in the 90s was going to do anything but _hasten_ that shift. But, there's plenty of great media out there. You can sell good writing if it is actually good; you can monetize your opinions if people will actually pay attention to them; you can sell your access if you actually have it; these are media business models with staying power. They might not be billion-dollar properties and they might not report "the news" per se but they provide value and they will be fine. My household subscribes to The Athletic, Foreign Affairs, Tablet, The New Yorker, and The Information, to name a few. All great.
- rainonmoon 8y ago
  The real issue is the pervasive attitude in this thread, which you've also exhibited, that news is "basically free to produce." It isn't, and it's absolutely incredible to me how many otherwise intelligent people can't track just how much of what they read online traces back to original reporting. If this cost was passed to the reader, it would be absurd, and so it was historically majorly subsidised by wealthy families and the advertising business. The incentives have since changed; those media owners now see it's more profitable not to report the news but increasingly use these channels disingenuously. Here's the great joke: if we would hold them to account for this, we could do something about it. But nobody does. Nobody thinks to blame the ownership (unless they're an established boogeyman like Murdoch.) Instead, as you can see everywhere in this thread, the blame is put on journalists, who now have to pick battles against corporate interest to get ANYTHING of value over the line, under ridiculous deadlines, with zero job security. What's being lost here isn't "good writing" or the ability to "monetize opinions" -- it's the institutional protection and resources required to hold power accountable, examine and reflect on trends, and uncover essential facts about our world. Okay, we can point to examples where institutions have gotten it wrong, and they deserve holding to account for those instances too. But there are just as many and more where journalists have put their health, families, jobs, and lives at risk to ensure people aren't so easily hoodwinked by money and authority. If all someone wants to read is Medium blogs for the rest of their lives, fine, crack a beer and enjoy the end of journalism. But especially for a community that prides itself on values like intellectualism, open communication, and bettering the world, it's incredibly disheartening every time a thread like this appears on HN and the response is "maybe newspapers shouldn't be so bad then!" This is an information crisis that is being celebrated by the people who should be fighting it the hardest.
avivo 8y ago
The OP is accurate—but it's missing two more critical reasons why newspapers are dying. 1) Ad fraud. It reduces the value of advertising. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advertisers-lose-billions-of-dollars-to-ad-fraud.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advert... "The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates online ad fraud costs advertisers $8.2 billion annually." And I've heard numbers alleged much higher; as much as 30% of revenue for a news site... 2) User tracking. If you have the choice of paying X for an ad for a user on the NYT site, or (1/3)X for the same user on some clickbait site, which do you do? (particularly as an advertising middleman attempting to maximize impressions per $). This type of arbitrage—sometimes unwittingly coming from user data from the higher quality sites—could significantly reduce their revenue making them unprofitable.
rland 8y ago
So, advertiser dollars in the "attention economy" have been redirected from newspapers to ad-tech. I wonder, who is a better steward of this money, and the control it entails? Tech has been getting a bad rep recently; but there was a lot of crap in the print newspapers from the old days, too.
- rland 8y ago
  Immediately after writing that, I realized that "tech" is kind of a bad label for our Googles and Facebooks. "Attention companies" is perhaps a more suitable term, because attention is the product they're selling.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    "Information technoloy" is largely media. Media are information technology. Google and Facebook are media companies.
pp19dd 8y ago
There's a lot of shortsightedness here and I'm compelled to react to it (why didn't the article cover the origin and nuances of yellow journalism and draw some parallels?) But I'll pose a question to illustrate all these opinions in hopes of adding something useful to the discussion. How does a story get written? - Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and paraphrases it (very often) - Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and opines on it (often) - Someone reads a press release written by someone else and paraphrases it (often, esp in science) - Someone documents crowd behavior (trending reddit) and reports on it (very very often since it's an easy kill with assurance of results) - Citizen or a whistleblower calls a newsroom and provides a tip to be investigated (rare) - Agency reporter digs through a dataset (provided by a gubmit agency) and derives a story out of it (rare) - Agency reporter compiles a dataset (scrapes, etc) and derives a story out of it (rarer) - Gumshoe reporter, on their regular beat, catches a story and reports on it (takes time) Of all of those methods, only the last two have elements of first-hand fact collecting and checking, and that kind of original reporting costs a boatload of money to sustain. Like to the tune of $20 a story by some meter, which a reasonable reader would never pay for to read a single story. That mind-blowing cost was traditionally covered by print advertising - online advertising never became a significant fraction before brick and mortar news agencies started crumbling. If you consider what I have said, I think you'll find that tons of popular stories are cheaply produced but not cheaply broken. In other words, traditional news agencies and new-age ad-infested freelance cabbage leaf sites both regurgitate stories and story ideas from others. Sometimes a regurgitated story has supplemental reporting, but it's never that significant. When you run into a story ask yourself what the sources are and how they came to be written by those reporters and try to classify it in the crude pantheon I've constructed. I think you'll find that many stories that reach you weren't broken by the place you read them on.
- gcb0 8y ago
  and then there's the shortsighted view on money. that work was paid by the subscribers. now it's paid by the news. see the fast rise of puff-piece-for-hire type of press, like wired and vice and Bloomberg (the video branch). they do Oscar grade short documentaries by the wazoo lately. and vice specially exclusively on incendiary fake news topics.
bashwizard 8y ago
When the big mainstream media are pushing fake news to the left and right on an almost daily basis and getting caught doing it, people tend to look elsewhere for their news.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- robertrobot 8y ago
  I was having this thought this morning in the gym, they had fox news blaring and I thought, who still believes this nonsense? The US should bring back the FCC fairness doctrine pertaining to TV and radio news channels, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
conductr 8y ago
> There is money out there. Google and FB have something print newspapers used to have: a reliable, captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for, because they know people will be there Last paragraph acknowledged demand for the product of local reporting has fallen way off and I’d argue it would have even if newspaper owners operated on supermarket margins. It’s just a consumer trend, consumption of sustenance in media is down because frivolous media is now readily available
sdoering 8y ago
Regardless of the discussion on "fake news" or "not so fake news" or "trustworthy news" I found the ration of signal vs. noise for my personal life to just not justify news consume. If I was consuming about 30 pieces of news per day (and that is not so much actually) I would consume nearly 11.000 news pieces per year. I was asking myself: "How many of the news pieces I consumed did actually influence any relevant decision I made?" The answer in that given year was three, max. four. So of nearly 11.000 data points only 3 or 4 were actionable enough to influence a more or less important decision? This was the reason I switched from a "just in case" mindset (I need to know this, just in case it might become important - also called "FOMO: Fear of missing out") to a "just in time" mindset. If something is of any particular interest to me - I start to investigate the context. To then be able to come to a valid decision.
- Faark 8y ago
  I emphasize with not having a good idea on what and how much news to consume. Especially developing news... just reading the summary afterwards seems way less time consuming. A digital counterpart to a weekly newspapers, doing the selecting, would be nice. I haven't found a convenient way to do that, yet. Would love recommendations. But we cannot just ignore news at all... there must be some minimum time to invest. Democracy can only work if your choice in the voting booth is actually informed. For that, journalism seems to be the best of the bad options we have. Most comments in this thread painting it as worthless or worse is downright scary.
  - sdoering 8y ago
    > Democracy can only work if your choice in the voting booth is actually informed. I am totally with you on that. But I also believe, that I am able to inform me "just in time". When I read about the least years, read the party programs, read the proposals and the essayists discussing them. I do this in the weeks leading up to an election. And - we are imho lucky to have this in Germany - am able to use an online tool to check all party programs against the things important to me in a kind of "who fits best" tool. This is done by an independent organisation and is nowadays kind of an institution by itself.
yesplorer 8y ago
Here's the thing. If you tell me traditional print newspapers are dying because of falling subscription and display ad numbers, I get it. But online news portals laying off is, in my opinion, more of a sign of incompetence and less of falling subscriptions. These companies like HuffPo and BuzzFeed came around when the problems facing traditional newspapers were clear as day. Indeed, they directly contributed to the problem of falling subscription of newspapers with their chase for eyeballs as probably their sole metric for success. The onus lied on them to scale their business as their revenue scaled. Don't hire expensive offices and hundreds of people just to churn out listicles and a little bit of journalism a la Buzzfeed. Grow with the growth in your revenue and metric growth in key areas. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the news industry establishment of Buzzfeed so they can't cry of falling subscription. Regardless of amount of VC money you receive, businesses should have profitability and sustainability in mind from day one instead of "let's build they will come". Of course chasing growth with revenue taking a backseat worked for Google or Facebook but for every Facebook/Google, there are thousands of companies, employee lives and millions of dollars wasted on such an unsustainable model.
- _red 8y ago
  I find it odd timing that all of sudden, two paychecks into the government shutdown, suddenly multiple online news sites are being shuttered. Is it possible these sites were surviving on deep-state money?
  - chowells 8y ago
    No. "deep state" is a conspiracy fantasy used by some voters to blame someone else for the obvious consequences of voting for people and policies which destroy things they were relying on to survive. It's not possible that it's responsible for anything, since it doesn't exist.
gerbilly 8y ago
I am not in the newspaper industry, but close to it you could say. Do you have any idea how many people have worked on a print story before it got printed? It's not just the reporter, but fact checkers, copy editors, editors, sometimes lawyers. You can say what you will about the physical print medium being obsolete now that we have the internet, but can anyone argue that your average online site is going to invest as much manpower in checking over their stories before publishing?
arcaster 8y ago
Vice News is considered "journalism". Let that sink in...
robertrobot 8y ago
No wonder, we must bring back the FCC fair doctrine act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
threwawasy1228 8y ago
One thing that I always find in these discussions is that a lot of people who think that you can trust 'real' news outlets to accurately report anything have never been on the interviewed side of the table. I have never once been interviewed or had a project or event I've been involved with featured in a media outlet that wasn't grossly distorted to the point of comedy. I've had my age reported incorrectly, my title reported incorrectly, quotes made up that are literally the opposite of what I said to the reporter, reporters taking things out of context. And for this sort of thing to be coming up on fairly minor everyday reporting? Having experienced this in my life so many times I never saw any news on any topic the same way again. When you imagine this kind of massive distortion on something minor, it is impossible for me to fathom how distorted big stories actually are.
- GenerocUsername 8y ago
  This. Its similar to watching a tv show about something you personally know very well. The errors, generalizations, narrative and even the facts can be so far off you hope no one takes it serious. But people who do not know the subject matter take the presentation of it as fact. Imagine how many doctors cringe watching E.R. or House. News is this, but for real life events.
  - CM30 8y ago
    Don't have to imagine, there's a whole YouTube channel based around an actual medical doctor reacting to medical shows like E.R and House: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QHWhjbe5fGJEPz3sVb6nw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QHWhjbe5fGJEPz3sVb6nw There's also a very similar one showing a lawyer reacting to courtroom procedurals/shows: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpa-Zb0ZcQjTCPP1Dx_1M8Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpa-Zb0ZcQjTCPP1Dx_1M8Q
antisthenes 8y ago
The media in the 21st century are simply what the textile workers were at some point in the 19th century. News reporting has an unprecedented level of efficiency now, that a single website can serve hundreds of thousands of global visitors in the span of minutes. Compare this to the traditional methods of distributing news, such as a printed newspaper. How long would it take to distribute the news via newspaper to, say, a million of readers spread out throughout the whole world, even if you used airplanes and fast trucks? The efficiency improvement here is on the scale of 2 orders of magnitude, at the minimum, perhaps more. You can have 3 people in the pipeline now report an event to millions of people (e.g. 1 reporter at the physical location of the event, the editor at the news org. HQ, and, let's say a tech person to make sure it all works and gets published correctly). 100 years ago this would be impossible. Hell, even 30 years ago it would be near impossible.
robomartin 8y ago
Insightful article from Politico in 2017. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...

130 points by spzx 8y ago

'This is a stab to the heart of democratic accountability.' Not convinced about this - the internet is a fabulous source of information. Most 'newspapers' run AP service international 'stories' and local news, most of which you'll find a lot quicker online

WalterSear 8y ago
It's online because of local news reporters.
danso 8y ago
The AP is a news organization that is funded by local news orgs licensing fees. And yes, you can find local news online because news orgs have put it online. When those news orgs close down, they won’t be publishing online.
bloomer 8y ago
I think you are mistaking source for distribution channel. The "internet" doesn't produce anything it just distributes it very cheaply.
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  Technically that's true, but practically it is not. I can go to a local library and view newspaper articles on microfilm. But where can I go to find forum discussions and cat videos that were produced before the internet? Nowhere, because they didn't exist. The internet (and applications built on top of it) encourage and facilitate creation. It's not just about distributing content that would have been created anyway.
pryelluw 8y ago
It is also a fabulous source of cheap disinformation. For every well researched journalism piece, there are thousands of image based memes that influence people's opinion on any subject. That's why social media sites and search companies need to be regulated. Until there is no downside to publishing and marketing disinformation, every organization (legal or otherwise) will have the ability to do so.
- olivermarks 8y ago
  I disagree with this: free speech is sacrosanct in the free world. 'Well researched journalism pieces' are all too often written by salaried employees of organizations with a mission to push a political slant and/or agenda. The idea that the material published by these businesses is 'fair and balanced' has never been true as the long a sordid history of yellow journalism proves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism There is no shortage of good investigative writers but a dearth of editors who will publish their work. That material is now largely to be found online rather than under corporate 'news' mastheads.

rhacker 8y ago

Back when I was growing up, we got the newspaper. It was kinda something you just expected to be available. Then my parents one day just told the paper boy to stop delivering. My dad was just getting into Yahoo news and getting his wall street fix online. There was no longer a need for a paper. The product was not the paper but just this entire morning experience - coffee and newspaper. And the idea that different family members would grab different sections. It was totally incredible. Would I ever get a newspaper subscription? Nah, but I think there's a lot missing from the good ole days of it.

Cerium 8y ago
I'm under 30 and have been a newspaper subscriber for about 6 years. I plan to be a subscriber as long as they will keep delivering it. My parents subscribe to two papers: the San Francisco Chronicle, and what is now called the East Bay Times. Like you, I've long viewed the paper as an important family experience, where you sit around and trade sections over breakfast. When I moved out, I didn't expect to become a subscriber, but I got a free trial at some point and decided that I enjoyed the paper and wished to support the establishment.
acranox 8y ago
Same here. You could always try it though. I got a subscription last year. It was good, but ultimately decided to just keep the online subscription, as it meshed with my reading patterns better.
flukus 8y ago
> The product was not the paper but just this entire morning experience - coffee and newspaper. And the idea that different family members would grab different sections. It was totally incredible. I don't think it's even the experience that mattered. What newspapers never realized was that they're in the distribution business, people were paying them to print out their content and deliver, they were never really paying for the content itself. The internet made the distribution business obsolete and now they have nothing to offer. We saw the same with the music business, it wasn't the songs we were paying for, it was for them to distribute the music in a format that's convenient. Now we're seeing the same with online video, everyone keeps trying to make proprietary content to get subscribers but people just want a dumb pipe to deliver everything.

anticodon 8y ago

I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country where I currently live) I see lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don't fit the current media paradigm, or even obvious lies. I don't see a point in spending my money and my time to read fake news. I've just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better. Social networks and Internet in general are much worse in this respect. There's immense amount of bots/government agents (from every government in the world) spreading all kinds of fake information. Then real people start reposting that. You still can do fact-checking but if you'd fact-check everything, it would require as much time as a full-time job. So I'm planning on stopping reading the social networks also because in most social networks there's no way of blocking reposts or filtering out the politics-related messages.

RickJWagner 8y ago
Yes, I agree. My personal technique for dealing with this is try to look at multiple online news sources, not just one. I'll look at one from each side of the political spectrum and try to triangulate what a reasonable person should think.
- skilled 8y ago
  Think about what? A system that doesn't care about you? A reasonable person should think for himself and not on the basis of soulless news columns.
  - untog 8y ago
    What are you saying, that people should read no news sources at all? That's absurd. You need to know actual information if you're going to make an informed choice.
    - sigstoat 8y ago
      an informed choice about what? the news is full of things you can't have an impact on. focus on things you can impact, like your own life and the people around you.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Is anyone in the publishing business reading this? If so, I've got a personal story to share. I love cars. I'm a gearhead and I just love cars. I subscribe to several car magazines. Except I don't get Car & Driver anymore, and my subscription to Motor Trend is going to go unrenewed. Why? In both cases, the car mags started running political commentary. If it were balanced, I wouldn't like it but wouldn't quit reading. But it's not balanced-- both mags express support for one side of the political spectrum, disdain for the other. I can't justify paying for that. So I wrote (not for publication) notes to the editors, telling them I'd quit subscribing if they didn't stick to the proper wheelhouse. Neither editor replied. That's enough for me, I'm not going to pay for that kind of content. I think ESPN has undergone a similar cycle. I believe their subscriber base is greatly diminished, yet they seem to continue on with a politicized agenda. I just can't understand why the business owners allow this to continue. It seems counter-productive to me.

raleigh_user 8y ago
Have experienced the same. Canceled subscriptions. Hell I use to ALWAYS watch ESPN. Now I never do. It’s sad because the product use to be so good. Now everyone in sports wants to be a politician and talk about the very stuff im watching espn to escape!
- shard972 8y ago
  At least men's razors are still non-political /s
analyst74 8y ago
People in news have always been aware of their power to influence public opinions, they didn't just start wielding it today. What's happening is due to current political divide, there are now in-fighting among American news outlets, making their politicized agenda more obvious to average Americans. People from countries vilified by American media have always been aware the politicized agendas.
spamizbad 8y ago
I'm surprised Car Magazines are getting involved in politics outside of say... car industry politics. One thing I hate are the pricey opinion writers media likes to hire these days. In major publications these people can make $250,000/year (and up) to basically write partisan hot-takes that you can get for free on twitter. You could hire 3-4 investigative journalists for the same price.

simplecomplex 8y ago

Small newsrooms have been replaced by Reddit, blogs, and a nexus of updates from Facebook, mailing lists, and instant messaging. News isn’t just what gets printed on paper. There’s nothing about printing information on paper that somehow makes it special.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bloomer 8y ago
Reddit, blogs, Facebook and the rest have not broken any important stories. Actual news is broken by paid investigative reporters.
- stale2002 8y ago
  This is absolutely not true. Places like reddit break news all the time. At least in the subjects that I follow, those being gaming and livestreaming, I see news stories break on reddit, because of something that someone posted in the comment section, or as a top level original content post form a user created clip, with extreme frequency! Reddit is argueable the best place to find developing news for these specific subjects, at least. And it only hits the "mainstream" media hours and hours after some rando had just made a comment about it, and posted a video link.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    “Games and live-streaming” isn’t news.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

gnicholas 8y ago

> Google and FB have something print newspapers used to have: a reliable, captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for, because they know people will be there. Interesting observation, which raises the question: who will own the eyeballs next?

Uhhrrr 8y ago
AR

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

I think this article's arguments are extremely weak. It brings out numerous examples of how "things you thought killed newspapers", like the Internet, Craigslist, etc., really weren't the root causes, but instead things like "corporate greed" and "lack of innovation" were. Yet there are no convincing examples of how the news business would have done any better if these corporations were somehow less greedy or more innovative. There was a fundamental technology shift that made the newspaper product much less unique or defendable, and that would have happened no matter what the newspapers did.

dredmorbius 8y ago
David Simon's "The Audacity of Despair". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw

amanzi 8y ago

On a side note... Twitter seems like an odd choice for long-form writing. The author had to delete and re-post some of the tweets to get them back into the right order. What a nightmare.

Semaphor 8y ago
Twitter is not just an odd choice, but a horrible one. TheReaderApp makes the experience bad instead of horrible, which in all fairness, is a step up.

retox 8y ago

The distinguishing factor for 'real' journalists over internet posters was that they could be trusted, but they have single-handedly destroyed their own credibility over the last few years. The glut of online magazines, newspapers etc lead to the rise of click-bait just to make ends meet, which in turn lead to the sensationalism we see played out now. There is good journalism going on, but it doesn't pay for these huge media companies that they have become.

pnw_hazor 8y ago
We thought they could be trusted. Back when it was almost impossible to fact check them or seek alternative sources. Any given source have always been inaccurate or biased to one degree or another.
- iguy 8y ago
  Yes, this is true. But there was also a business model in providing facts, when facts were hard to get. Now that they are a commodity, the business model seems to be in providing opinions.
  - pnw_hazor 8y ago
    More "Shouting" and hot takes for sure. But the bias driven inaccuracies were commonplace. As well as plenty of malice driven inaccuracies.

Scoundreller 8y ago

Meanwhile, a Salt Lake City TV and Radio company, KSL, grudgingly decided to get into online classifieds in 2000, and now dominates their local market, with 100 people working on the product: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ksl-craigslist-classifieds/521916/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ksl-c... We saw the same thing at RIM/Blackberry. BBM was a flagship IM product, but kept restricted to their devices. The strategy worked, until it didn't, and the company is still worth less than half of what it could have been: Whatsapp.

rb808 8y ago

Yes I subscribe to my local newspaper. Most days I don't even read it, but there are a few reporters there that report on the local city politicians. If these reporters don't write, I don't think anyone will be keeping an eye on these yokel city politicians.

RandomInteger4 8y ago

"And who’s moving in right now to pick through the scraps? Hedge funds. They’ve destroyed several papers, and are working their way through some biggies like the Denver Post." Uh, wat? Am I mistaken, or does that not make sense? Since when are hedge funds involved in corporate plundering? I think he's getting "hedge fund" confused with private equity and venture capital, no? That being said, is it that the venture capital firms are picking through the scraps or that these web media companies are not grown organically, which is why we're seeing massive layoffs. They operate mostly on venture capital and haven't been making a profit ... at least not directly; who knows what stories have been generated for the sake of some other business dealings elsewhere; a sort of accounting trick where losses are incurred in one area for the sake of profit in another area. Conspiratorial? Yeah, but not unlikely. EDIT: To add on to this, lately these brands have been tarnished, so perhaps one could speculate that those wielding the venture capital are downsizing to work on new brands going into the 2020 election season; brands not tainted by a loss of trust.

ctdonath 8y ago

Those media people laid off are in the incredibly enviable position of being able to literally start a new high-demand news outlet overnight. There's enough across the industry's spectrum who know each other that they could, starting with just their cell phones, launch a business filling an industry void: reporting objective news.

acslater00 8y ago

This is ridiculous. "Greed" didn't kill newspapers. You think the classified business would be any better today off if newspapers had artificially held ad. and sub. prices down in the 80s and 90s? $0 is $0, and that's what people will pay for classifieds now. "Hedge Funds", everyone's favorite bogeyman. "Lack of Innovation", as if the Chicago Tribune was going to save itself by opening a geocities page in 1996. The 'news' business is a zombie because it sells a product that is basically free to produce and free to consume. That's it! You don't really need a newsroom to give you "the news" anymore, and so the market for a product whose main feature is a professional, standing writing staff that simply yesterday's events no longer meaningfully exists. No amount of investment in technology by media companies in the 90s was going to do anything but _hasten_ that shift. But, there's plenty of great media out there. You can sell good writing if it is actually good; you can monetize your opinions if people will actually pay attention to them; you can sell your access if you actually have it; these are media business models with staying power. They might not be billion-dollar properties and they might not report "the news" per se but they provide value and they will be fine. My household subscribes to The Athletic, Foreign Affairs, Tablet, The New Yorker, and The Information, to name a few. All great.

rainonmoon 8y ago
The real issue is the pervasive attitude in this thread, which you've also exhibited, that news is "basically free to produce." It isn't, and it's absolutely incredible to me how many otherwise intelligent people can't track just how much of what they read online traces back to original reporting. If this cost was passed to the reader, it would be absurd, and so it was historically majorly subsidised by wealthy families and the advertising business. The incentives have since changed; those media owners now see it's more profitable not to report the news but increasingly use these channels disingenuously. Here's the great joke: if we would hold them to account for this, we could do something about it. But nobody does. Nobody thinks to blame the ownership (unless they're an established boogeyman like Murdoch.) Instead, as you can see everywhere in this thread, the blame is put on journalists, who now have to pick battles against corporate interest to get ANYTHING of value over the line, under ridiculous deadlines, with zero job security. What's being lost here isn't "good writing" or the ability to "monetize opinions" -- it's the institutional protection and resources required to hold power accountable, examine and reflect on trends, and uncover essential facts about our world. Okay, we can point to examples where institutions have gotten it wrong, and they deserve holding to account for those instances too. But there are just as many and more where journalists have put their health, families, jobs, and lives at risk to ensure people aren't so easily hoodwinked by money and authority. If all someone wants to read is Medium blogs for the rest of their lives, fine, crack a beer and enjoy the end of journalism. But especially for a community that prides itself on values like intellectualism, open communication, and bettering the world, it's incredibly disheartening every time a thread like this appears on HN and the response is "maybe newspapers shouldn't be so bad then!" This is an information crisis that is being celebrated by the people who should be fighting it the hardest.

avivo 8y ago

The OP is accurate—but it's missing two more critical reasons why newspapers are dying. 1) Ad fraud. It reduces the value of advertising. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advertisers-lose-billions-of-dollars-to-ad-fraud.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advert... "The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates online ad fraud costs advertisers $8.2 billion annually." And I've heard numbers alleged much higher; as much as 30% of revenue for a news site... 2) User tracking. If you have the choice of paying X for an ad for a user on the NYT site, or (1/3)X for the same user on some clickbait site, which do you do? (particularly as an advertising middleman attempting to maximize impressions per $). This type of arbitrage—sometimes unwittingly coming from user data from the higher quality sites—could significantly reduce their revenue making them unprofitable.

rland 8y ago

So, advertiser dollars in the "attention economy" have been redirected from newspapers to ad-tech. I wonder, who is a better steward of this money, and the control it entails? Tech has been getting a bad rep recently; but there was a lot of crap in the print newspapers from the old days, too.

rland 8y ago
Immediately after writing that, I realized that "tech" is kind of a bad label for our Googles and Facebooks. "Attention companies" is perhaps a more suitable term, because attention is the product they're selling.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  "Information technoloy" is largely media. Media are information technology. Google and Facebook are media companies.

pp19dd 8y ago

There's a lot of shortsightedness here and I'm compelled to react to it (why didn't the article cover the origin and nuances of yellow journalism and draw some parallels?) But I'll pose a question to illustrate all these opinions in hopes of adding something useful to the discussion. How does a story get written? - Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and paraphrases it (very often) - Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and opines on it (often) - Someone reads a press release written by someone else and paraphrases it (often, esp in science) - Someone documents crowd behavior (trending reddit) and reports on it (very very often since it's an easy kill with assurance of results) - Citizen or a whistleblower calls a newsroom and provides a tip to be investigated (rare) - Agency reporter digs through a dataset (provided by a gubmit agency) and derives a story out of it (rare) - Agency reporter compiles a dataset (scrapes, etc) and derives a story out of it (rarer) - Gumshoe reporter, on their regular beat, catches a story and reports on it (takes time) Of all of those methods, only the last two have elements of first-hand fact collecting and checking, and that kind of original reporting costs a boatload of money to sustain. Like to the tune of $20 a story by some meter, which a reasonable reader would never pay for to read a single story. That mind-blowing cost was traditionally covered by print advertising - online advertising never became a significant fraction before brick and mortar news agencies started crumbling. If you consider what I have said, I think you'll find that tons of popular stories are cheaply produced but not cheaply broken. In other words, traditional news agencies and new-age ad-infested freelance cabbage leaf sites both regurgitate stories and story ideas from others. Sometimes a regurgitated story has supplemental reporting, but it's never that significant. When you run into a story ask yourself what the sources are and how they came to be written by those reporters and try to classify it in the crude pantheon I've constructed. I think you'll find that many stories that reach you weren't broken by the place you read them on.

gcb0 8y ago
and then there's the shortsighted view on money. that work was paid by the subscribers. now it's paid by the news. see the fast rise of puff-piece-for-hire type of press, like wired and vice and Bloomberg (the video branch). they do Oscar grade short documentaries by the wazoo lately. and vice specially exclusively on incendiary fake news topics.

bashwizard 8y ago

When the big mainstream media are pushing fake news to the left and right on an almost daily basis and getting caught doing it, people tend to look elsewhere for their news.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
robertrobot 8y ago
I was having this thought this morning in the gym, they had fox news blaring and I thought, who still believes this nonsense? The US should bring back the FCC fairness doctrine pertaining to TV and radio news channels, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

conductr 8y ago

> There is money out there. Google and FB have something print newspapers used to have: a reliable, captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for, because they know people will be there Last paragraph acknowledged demand for the product of local reporting has fallen way off and I’d argue it would have even if newspaper owners operated on supermarket margins. It’s just a consumer trend, consumption of sustenance in media is down because frivolous media is now readily available

sdoering 8y ago

Regardless of the discussion on "fake news" or "not so fake news" or "trustworthy news" I found the ration of signal vs. noise for my personal life to just not justify news consume. If I was consuming about 30 pieces of news per day (and that is not so much actually) I would consume nearly 11.000 news pieces per year. I was asking myself: "How many of the news pieces I consumed did actually influence any relevant decision I made?" The answer in that given year was three, max. four. So of nearly 11.000 data points only 3 or 4 were actionable enough to influence a more or less important decision? This was the reason I switched from a "just in case" mindset (I need to know this, just in case it might become important - also called "FOMO: Fear of missing out") to a "just in time" mindset. If something is of any particular interest to me - I start to investigate the context. To then be able to come to a valid decision.

Faark 8y ago
I emphasize with not having a good idea on what and how much news to consume. Especially developing news... just reading the summary afterwards seems way less time consuming. A digital counterpart to a weekly newspapers, doing the selecting, would be nice. I haven't found a convenient way to do that, yet. Would love recommendations. But we cannot just ignore news at all... there must be some minimum time to invest. Democracy can only work if your choice in the voting booth is actually informed. For that, journalism seems to be the best of the bad options we have. Most comments in this thread painting it as worthless or worse is downright scary.
- sdoering 8y ago
  > Democracy can only work if your choice in the voting booth is actually informed. I am totally with you on that. But I also believe, that I am able to inform me "just in time". When I read about the least years, read the party programs, read the proposals and the essayists discussing them. I do this in the weeks leading up to an election. And - we are imho lucky to have this in Germany - am able to use an online tool to check all party programs against the things important to me in a kind of "who fits best" tool. This is done by an independent organisation and is nowadays kind of an institution by itself.

yesplorer 8y ago

Here's the thing. If you tell me traditional print newspapers are dying because of falling subscription and display ad numbers, I get it. But online news portals laying off is, in my opinion, more of a sign of incompetence and less of falling subscriptions. These companies like HuffPo and BuzzFeed came around when the problems facing traditional newspapers were clear as day. Indeed, they directly contributed to the problem of falling subscription of newspapers with their chase for eyeballs as probably their sole metric for success. The onus lied on them to scale their business as their revenue scaled. Don't hire expensive offices and hundreds of people just to churn out listicles and a little bit of journalism a la Buzzfeed. Grow with the growth in your revenue and metric growth in key areas. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the news industry establishment of Buzzfeed so they can't cry of falling subscription. Regardless of amount of VC money you receive, businesses should have profitability and sustainability in mind from day one instead of "let's build they will come". Of course chasing growth with revenue taking a backseat worked for Google or Facebook but for every Facebook/Google, there are thousands of companies, employee lives and millions of dollars wasted on such an unsustainable model.

_red 8y ago
I find it odd timing that all of sudden, two paychecks into the government shutdown, suddenly multiple online news sites are being shuttered. Is it possible these sites were surviving on deep-state money?
- chowells 8y ago
  No. "deep state" is a conspiracy fantasy used by some voters to blame someone else for the obvious consequences of voting for people and policies which destroy things they were relying on to survive. It's not possible that it's responsible for anything, since it doesn't exist.

gerbilly 8y ago

I am not in the newspaper industry, but close to it you could say. Do you have any idea how many people have worked on a print story before it got printed? It's not just the reporter, but fact checkers, copy editors, editors, sometimes lawyers. You can say what you will about the physical print medium being obsolete now that we have the internet, but can anyone argue that your average online site is going to invest as much manpower in checking over their stories before publishing?

arcaster 8y ago

Vice News is considered "journalism". Let that sink in...

robertrobot 8y ago

No wonder, we must bring back the FCC fair doctrine act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

threwawasy1228 8y ago

One thing that I always find in these discussions is that a lot of people who think that you can trust 'real' news outlets to accurately report anything have never been on the interviewed side of the table. I have never once been interviewed or had a project or event I've been involved with featured in a media outlet that wasn't grossly distorted to the point of comedy. I've had my age reported incorrectly, my title reported incorrectly, quotes made up that are literally the opposite of what I said to the reporter, reporters taking things out of context. And for this sort of thing to be coming up on fairly minor everyday reporting? Having experienced this in my life so many times I never saw any news on any topic the same way again. When you imagine this kind of massive distortion on something minor, it is impossible for me to fathom how distorted big stories actually are.

GenerocUsername 8y ago
This. Its similar to watching a tv show about something you personally know very well. The errors, generalizations, narrative and even the facts can be so far off you hope no one takes it serious. But people who do not know the subject matter take the presentation of it as fact. Imagine how many doctors cringe watching E.R. or House. News is this, but for real life events.
- CM30 8y ago
  Don't have to imagine, there's a whole YouTube channel based around an actual medical doctor reacting to medical shows like E.R and House: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QHWhjbe5fGJEPz3sVb6nw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QHWhjbe5fGJEPz3sVb6nw There's also a very similar one showing a lawyer reacting to courtroom procedurals/shows: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpa-Zb0ZcQjTCPP1Dx_1M8Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpa-Zb0ZcQjTCPP1Dx_1M8Q

antisthenes 8y ago

The media in the 21st century are simply what the textile workers were at some point in the 19th century. News reporting has an unprecedented level of efficiency now, that a single website can serve hundreds of thousands of global visitors in the span of minutes. Compare this to the traditional methods of distributing news, such as a printed newspaper. How long would it take to distribute the news via newspaper to, say, a million of readers spread out throughout the whole world, even if you used airplanes and fast trucks? The efficiency improvement here is on the scale of 2 orders of magnitude, at the minimum, perhaps more. You can have 3 people in the pipeline now report an event to millions of people (e.g. 1 reporter at the physical location of the event, the editor at the news org. HQ, and, let's say a tech person to make sure it all works and gets published correctly). 100 years ago this would be impossible. Hell, even 30 years ago it would be near impossible.

robomartin 8y ago

Insightful article from Politico in 2017. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...