13 ms·

News Websites Are Dumpster Fires

239 points by bradley_taunt 7y ago

ekianjo 7y ago
> These anti-consumer practices will only stop when these organizations start losing money. Nope, I'd wage they will double-down on it even if they start losing money. That's a well known spiral: don't expect anyone but the most useless employees to remain until the end.
throwawaylolx 7y ago
>not to mention most browsers have announced that future updates will be blocking ads by default. Maybe, but _most users_ are using a browser that will not be blocking ads by default anytime soon.
return1 7y ago
> If your business is solely dependent on tracking scripts, tricking users with clickbait titles and using archaic ads - then you’re destined to fail regardless. If that were true, they had 2 decades to fail and they didn't. People like to read the news.
- jnty 7y ago
  News websites are failing every day. Even Buzzfeed had big layoffs a few months ago. If your revenue model relies on making your website increasingly less user-friendly, it might have kept your head above water for longer than some competitors, but it can't be sustainable.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    The successful newspapers appear to enforce strict paywalls. I pay for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times because their content and analysis is good and original. (They also have decent events from time to time.) The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.
  - return1 7y ago
    The real reason they are failing is not user-unfriendliness or tracking though. It's the intense competition and the broadening of the publisher base by 1000x with the advent of the internet, and the natural supply-demand adjustment to very low rates of return from advertising. This leads them to increase the advertising load in order to make ends meet, hence using more trackers.
- mc32 7y ago
  Some news orgs remain despite being unprofitable because they are a billionaire’s pet project. Bezos is one.
- jstrong 7y ago
  the news business has been in economic free fall for the last two decades. at this point, most local newspapers have already folded. have you heard of Newsweek? print ad revenue (formerly their bread and butter) falls year after year, and online ad revenue is peanuts in comparison.
- gnode 7y ago
  I'd say they have failed. Many outlets have gone out of business, many are unprofitable and propped up by ulterior interests (e.g. billionaires and nation states wishing to influence narratives). Quality has suffered in many ways. The revenue graph here gives a good overview of how the industry has declined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Crisis
- HillRat 7y ago
  Yeah, to put it mildly, J. Random Web Developer’s view on the news business is … not helpful. It’s not as if news orgs don’t hate their current monetization models; a quick spin through Poynter would have confirmed that for him, while he probably should be aware that many outlets are focusing on subscriptions, partner content, and so on. But the nature of the web is that the vast majority of consumers are conditioned to have stuff for free, and if they can’t get news from the WSJ they’ll get it from Breitbart, and if they can’t get it from Breitbart they’ll get it from a Romanian teenager running a fake-news clickfarm on Facebook. And that’s without getting into the first- and second-order effects the Web has had on local journalism and newspapers, which have suffered from the twin scourges of the superstar economy (why pay for the Paducha Picayune when I have every national paper at my fingertips?) and the miserable margins of online ads compared to the print ads that used to be their mainstay. The problem is that the ad-supported Internet model hollowed out American journalism, turning it into a howling wasteland of listicles and tracking pixels, and the industry is simply hanging on for dear life at this point. If the OP had some recommendations for a better user experience that wouldn’t essentially kill what remains of the non-top-shelf (NYT, WSJ) or hyper-focused (TPM, Axios) journalism market, I’m all ears, but there’s nothing there that’s helpful.
- matt_s 7y ago
  That's the thing though, there isn't much reading or depth. The majority of sites are like those cheesy carnival games trying to get people to "step right up" and are just as rigged as the games to try and keep you around, blasting your face with ads.
nostalgk 7y ago
I largely find that the majority of news sources really aren't worth the adware tithe they enforce. Hell, these days I often just go to Wikipedia and read the summary if an event is that important. The only other news I really care about is local, and I'm lucky to have local news sites that are pretty much plain text.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Wikipedia has a current events page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
  - nostalgk 7y ago
    One of the many things I like about it.
- olivermarks 7y ago
  The problem here is that Wikipedia is written by a tiny minority of people these days. (77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-... 'News' has always been problematic because the publishing business exists to sell advertising, track you and push the news organization owner agendas. Finding trustworthy reliable information has never been more difficult despite the tsunamai of information at our fingertips online
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    > 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors That's still a lot more writers than your regular newspaper in terms of consumers:writers ratio.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Is it?
empath75 7y ago
I thought that news+ would help turn this around, but the experience of reading a magazine on the iPhone is laughably terrible. It’s just a pdf of the print edition!
- auiya 7y ago
  A PDF of the print edition would be an improvement at least, no?
  - empath75 7y ago
    Not when it has small type and you can’t just scroll to read the article.
georgehayduke 7y ago
This has been a long slow process. I thought there would be some business model innovation before now, but it apart from subscriptions it doesn't seem like anyone has cracked it. Subscriptions are a solid business model, and I think it's important for fund serious newspapers / investigative journalism. However, by putting them behind a paywall, these important stories may no longer have the impact they once did.
ThinkBeat 7y ago
Kinda clickbaity headline, criticizing click bait headlines
- pferde 7y ago
  Is it still a clickbait if it's true?
auiya 7y ago
The solution is to hit F9 to enable reader mode using a modern browser. If it can't render, I close the tab. There are extensions I'm sure which force reader mode on selective lists of particularly egregious sites.
- badfrog 7y ago
  What is reader mode? F9 doesn't do anything for me in Chrome.
  - swashboon 7y ago
    Firefox
    - Theodores 7y ago
      Safari too. "Modern browsers". A pejorative term.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Possibly related to the fact that reader mode also removes ads.
- 0x4a42 7y ago
  Activate Reader View extension for Firefox is the one I use to force Reader Mode. It works pretty well.
- benatkin 7y ago
  Reader view is also great for this article, which uses fonts that are too big, especially in the header. It's not quite a dumpster fire, but isn't great either.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  +1 for reader mode. Or use Lynx (I'm not even joking).
redleggedfrog 7y ago
Ctrl-0. Ctrl-0?! Back button...
jasonlotito 7y ago
Blog post complaining about news sites using clickbait headlines uses clickbait headline to attract views. > I could write up an entire essay about all the shady practices that most news sites are guilty of, but here are just a few top level issues: Proceeds with a random list of complaints you could apply to most sites in general. > using archaic ads I don't know about you, but archaic ads didn't track me, use up many resources, and were just fine. > Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user experience of course) Article writer then offers a suggestion that has been tried in the past, and something people frequently complain about news companies doing. > Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions Promotions? What are "promotions?" Promoting a product? You want news agencies to place a larger emphasis on advertising? And all three suggestions literally fly in the face of: > Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present All these things are "advertising" so the user would be blocked from reading. > News outlets should not be spamming their main revenue supply (the users) or misleading people with false information. Like you did? Your headline is as much a lie as many of the headlines you seem to hate on news sites.
gregwtmtno 7y ago
I won't look at any page that has autoplaying (even silent) video. It's too distracting and it's not worth the effort to click the close button.
bovermyer 7y ago
Part of the difficulty here is that the function newspapers are intended to serve isn't to generate profits, nor even to be cost-effective. Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society. This costs a lot of time and money. The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. Where should the resources necessary to achieve the above goal come from?
- okket 7y ago
  > The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. The government itself can not do this, but it could demand that there is a neutral news organisation which is allowed to collect the necessary money to function from its citizen, like the public broadcasting system in several countries. This would help as a somewhat trusted ground source, IMHO.
  - bpicolo 7y ago
    I'm not sure how U.K. views the BBC, but it seems to be an effective example of this model.
    - jdietrich 7y ago
      A small minority bitterly resent the license fee and/or believe that the BBC are just a propaganda wing of whichever political party they dislike; the vast majority regard it as a beloved national institution. In a poll by Ipsos Mori, 59% of respondents named the BBC as the one news source they trust the most. That level of trust remains consistent across the political spectrum, with readers of the right-leaning Daily Mail and the left-leaning Guardian both reporting high levels of trust in the BBC. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/58001/bbc-annex2.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/58001/b...
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    It's hard though, the BBC is often quoted as an example but they have always had to deal with the government of the day trying to exert influence.
circa 7y ago
At first, I read it quickly as "NEW websites are dumpster fires." Which is also sometimes true. For lack of a better term. I hate the "tablet catered" website look on a desktop. A lot of the news sites look this way too. I'm not really sure how else to describe it.
keithnz 7y ago
The local newspaper here (nzherald.co.nz) is trying to introduce a premium level which you pay for.... but because they still want search engines to see the content, they just deliver all the premium content to the browser and try to hide it.... 5 minutes later, he presto, a plugin that shows the premium content. ublock origin, and there are no ads.... they are really going to have to find a better model.
- kevsim 7y ago
  You’d think a short extract would be enough for SEO and then hide the full article behind the paywall server side.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Keyword/snippet SEO spamming for garbage ad pages was a thing that got cracked down on hard for good reason. Some included even a few relevant seeming paragraphs before heading into more "seeds". I wouldn't be surprised if any snippetting hit their ranking hard.
FerretFred 7y ago
> But They Need Ad Revenue "Local" online news in a lot of the UK has all but died a death. We have a couple of big news outlets that basically publish a little local news in practically no depth and then fill the rest with clickbait "news" items of no value other than to generate clicks. There seem to be practically no real journalists and readers are "invited to send in their pictures" - without payment of course. Hopefully these dumpster files will die out soon..
- lol768 7y ago
  Completely agree. JPIMedia seems to be one of the big players, most of their content is just from "the i newspaper". There's a little bit of local content, and it's all locked behind a "turn off your ad-blocker or else" script. Newsquest is another. Poorly written journalism which usually looks as if it hasn't been proof-read.
mlang23 7y ago
In addition to the reasons listed in the article, I also notice (as someone relying on accessibility) that the overall readability of news sites has gone down dramatically in the recent years, especially considering accessibility. With all this pop up ads and "we need you to accept cookies" nonsense, it has become increasingly hard to just read a news bite. I notice in my own behaviour, that I less regularily click on links that go to news sites, since I dont want to waste my time unnecessaryil.
smacktoward 7y ago
It’s a bad sign when your “what’s the solution?” section starts off by admitting you don’t have one. Not to be deterred by this, though, the piece suggests a couple of shopworn ideas anyway: > Switch over to a monthly subscription plan For this to work you have to put up a paywall, and according to HN conventional wisdom the only thing worse than ads are paywalls, otherwise known as History’s Greatest Monster. > Partner with brands to create sponsored articles Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.” > Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions So, pledge drives! Hope you like tote bags. Public broadcasting already does this, of course; it doesn’t come near to covering all their expenses. Look, here’s the thing. It’s true, news websites are dumpster fires! But they’re dumpster fires for a reason, namely that nobody has yet come up with a reliable business model that allows them to not be dumpster fires. They’re dumpster fires because that’s what happens when the only choices available are all bad ones. If you’ve got an actual way to cut this knot, lots of people in the news business would be very interested in hearing it. But just telling them to stop sucking so hard, man isn’t particularly helpful.
- Semaphor 7y ago
  > > Partner with brands to create sponsored articles > Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.” I disagree. No one said to have everything be sponsored and when the content is good (and clearly marked up as sponsored) it can be fine.
- jonheller 7y ago
  Yes, I found this to be a shallow article with a clickbait headline (oddly, one of the things he criticizes in this very article) without anything new. Surprised to see it so highly voted on Hacker News.
espeed 7y ago
And thus the Google News Initiative, its journalism outreach program and $300M Digital News Fund [1], which launched last year... * Gooole News Initiative https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com * Google Digital News Fund https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/ https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/ * Google News Lab (2017) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/news-lab-year-in-review/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat... * Subscribe with Google (2018) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/introducing-subscribe-google/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat... * The Google News Initiative, One Year In (2019) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/google-news-initiative-one-year/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat... [1] "Google announces a $300M ‘Google News Initiative’ (though this isn’t about giving out grants directly to newsrooms, like it does in Europe)" https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-announces-a-300m-google-news-initiative-though-this-isnt-about-giving-out-grants-directly-to-newsrooms-like-it-does-in-europe/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-announces-a-300m-go...
- efa 7y ago
  Ugh. Google of course has to continue to own every bit of information on the web. Them deciding what is misinformeation is also scary.
  - espeed 7y ago
    That's not what this is. Market forces will sort this mess out. There are external initiatives under way, but it will take time to transition. Until that happens, something has to be done to keep them afloat if they are meant to survive. Look at it this way, the news industry has been turned upside down since the Internet came to be. It's been like a polar shift. Now people go to Google to search for news, and the old-media models don't survive because the old revenue flows right through. Google benefits from keeping them alive -- sure it could do nothing and let them die, but that would be like killing the host -- an environmental disaster and PR catastrophe -- if all the sources went away there would be no more news for people to google. And no one wins in that scenario. Unless humanity is certain that's what it wants to happen, it's probably prudent to save this potentially critical leg from decay. Google has the means and if it's in everyone's interest for the greater good, this is a way to keep one of its leg from falling off until market forces have time to sort the mess out, something new emerges, and everyone has time to transition. In the old days, the government would supply the subsidy to buy the time to transition, but now market forces have aligned. Private industry has evolved and has the means -- it's willing and able. Maybe this is how a healthy, well-functioning system is supposed to work. Maybe this is a glimpse of capitalism at its finest. Maybe it's progress, maybe it's not. Who knows how this will play out? It's uncharted territory. A new chapter in the American experiment. Whatever happens, we will see.
apo 7y ago
The chumbox (https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/ https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...) used to be a good barometer of the spamminess of a site's content. It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming difficult. It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume. Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect finally wearing off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- Semaphor 7y ago
  We trialed a service that was supposed to earn us a lot more ad money (yieldlove.com). Well, revenue did go up. But while I already complained about the horrible quality of those ads (surfing everywhere else with Adblock), the scammy ads that were shown were too much even for my boss. We went back to just using normal AdSense.
0x5002 7y ago
It's not just news. It's ever website, with some notable exceptions, such as HN (minimal, curated, informative headlines, no bloat) or some private blogs (as the one linked - 2.2KB, 0 trackers, yet questionable headlines). Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies) give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads, and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data, and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based blocking) already blocked 42% of the website's content. Not to mention a plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators. And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20% blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to call "the stage before clickbait" - the ones addressing the user directly, presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest ("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and wonderful again"). Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once in a while. One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful, traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by bothering me with paywalls.
wishrider 7y ago
I'm developing a very new approach to tackle this problem with my project https://wishpage.tv/ https://wishpage.tv/ Its still moving but a request based approach to news might work for a small niche.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Blendle.com works fairly well for news consumption. It's the microtransaction model, but they've got it fairly streamlined, they have most of the big names signed up and their daily summary is nice.
- fancyfish 7y ago
  Seconding this, I tried Blendle after seeing it mentioned here a year ago. The UI is minimalist with no ads, and the publisher gets paid per article. As someone who doesn't want to pay for separate full subscriptions to NYTimes, WaPo, and other papers because I don't voraciously read enough articles each day to make it worth the cost, Blendle has been a good alternative.
ankit219 7y ago
News needs to evolve. Right now, we are not frustrated with news websites, but with the way they try to make money, and put obstacles in the way of users getting what they want - news. Infact, for the most users, they are so used to website that they wont even look at the part which displays ads. And there is no point showing ads to the regular readers - unless the ad inventory buyers are unlimited - as the same ad loses relevance over time. Right now, the focus of the news sites is to get as many users as possible (not just views) without focusing on the core users. My feeling is that it wont be a tweak in the business model but more in the way news is offered. One often talked about ideal case is that ads become so relevant that they are not intrusive, but that is yet to take scale, and is costly even for the ones who try to do it. There are good websites which get enough money to live on donation and do produce the content worthy of it. Then there are different ways of consuming news which have worked. Like Inshorts - news in 60 words, mostly a jist without clickbait - which works really well in India, and can survive on ad model around relevant content. Last thing I feel is bringing an offline model online, which for some reason these websites did away with. Newspapers mostly worked because everyone had an opinion after reading the news. News sites dont like community and moderation and prefer to have them on social media, but that is where the opportunity lies. Make room for discussion, get users engaged, let the author explain his point, and then you dont have to show too many ads on the user's first visit. Maybe this is an extension of twitter, or maybe it gets dirty (hence moderation), I think it will work given how it works now on reddit and even whatsapp groups.
boltzmannbrain 7y ago
News websites, if you're going to have a monthly limit of n articles (NYT, HBR, etc.), let me first have the option of continuing to read after loading the page. Too many times following some link (from Hacker News, Twitter, etc.) leads to an article I don't want to read but counts against my tiny monthly allowance.
- asdff 7y ago
  open them in pocket and never fret again.
vilaca 7y ago
I have a mobile phone with a 4.5" screen and since most news websites have chosen to have an huge fixed header and footer in every page I can only read 1 or at most 2 lines of text.
- asdff 7y ago
  Throw them in pocket and enjoy your 4.5" of small font text from edge to edge. I can fit sometimes two whole paragraphs on the screen of my SE.
- viburnum 7y ago
  And that’s after you’ve managed to find the tiny x to dismiss the cookie warning and then the email signup form that blocks 100% of the screen.
tootie 7y ago
I love https://npr.org https://npr.org or, even better https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org
- TrueDuality 7y ago
  Holy crap, that's awesome. I want more of that.
- asdff 7y ago
  Oh man that text only site is glorious good lord. Skim all the news in 2 seconds flat vs. carousel of images, scrolling, and things laid out in no particular order at all.
dscpls 7y ago
Do we have any evidence that these issues are really the causes of people consuming news elsewhere? - Clickbait headings with misleading information Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking? - Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for? - Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users? - Taking massive performance hits (specifically on mobile due to huge JavaScript blocks) Maybe getting closer to what users actually care about - Pop-up ads Again - any evidence this puts normal internet users off so much they'd stop using a site? There must be a reason MEDIUM.COM and every single recipe blog pops up their newsletter subscription as intrusively as possible. - Fixed headers or footers which leads to harder readability / accidental element interactions Here's again an actual deterrent - if someone physically can't use a site, they might actually give up. --- I'm not saying news sites are not dumpster fires, but I'm a techie and love a good boycott. I'd question the premise of this article - it seems to be very much from a techie privacy-active (not just concerned, but actually willing to take action) perspective which I suspect does not represent the majority of the internet. I suspect that if people are actually using news sites less, it's because of much simpler reasons...like that Google intercepts a user's attempt to read news linking to their favourite publications.
- mort96 7y ago
  > - Clickbait headings with misleading information > Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking? I don't know, but I certainly know that there are news (mostly tech news) websites I have all but entirely stopped engaging with because any time I go to them, I read one headline ("This Spotify-feature has been wanted for years!", "Do you see what HP has done here?", "See what Dell has done", something like that) and just close out the tab again. Maybe it puts of "just" 10% of people, but 10% is a fairly big chunk, isn't it? > - Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present > What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for? A random article saying it's 40% on laptops, 15% on mobile: https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-40-percent-laptops-15-percent-mobile-216324 https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-... Another article saying it's 22% of people in the UK, 32% of people in germany, etc: https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018 https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018 Those were just the two first results on Google for the query "what percentage of users are using ad blockers". I don't know how many people just leave when a page asks them to disable their ad blockers, but I have to imagine it's a fairly big chunk of people who use ad blockers, which, as shown above, is a fairly big chunk of internet users. > - Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts > Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users? I don't know, I'm fairly sure the issue with pervasive tracking is relatively well known even among non-"techies". How many regular users haven't been told to use an ad blocker by a tech-literate friend, with third-party tracking being one of the reasons cited? The vast majority of people may not avoid a website just because of invisible trackers (except maybe due to the massive performance hits from all the javascript), but I imagine the knowledge of such tracking scripts at least affects the percentage of people who are willing to disable their ad blockers when a page asks.
Funes- 7y ago
>[...] the news industry has become a cesspool of anti-consumer and blackhat practices that has eroded trust for the sake of money. You could say something quite similar about capitalism as a whole, in the sense that it looks like those practices are what any industry within that particular economic system ends up devolving into, for the sake of monetary growth and under the pretext of "being competitive" or "cost-effective." I guess it would also apply to economic liberalism in general. Here's my opinion: news outlets are not necessary. Their content is mostly irrelevant, biased, and dependent on a very harmful revenue model--advertisements. Uncensorable, decentralized platforms, on the other hand, could provide communities with a means to inform others, express opinions and denounce any issue at hand, if well-designed.
Dotnaught 7y ago
"Partner with brands to create sponsored articles" Are you f*ing kidding? Sponsored articles are ads. The ad industry-driven conflation of editorial and ads is a major reason the media industry is suffering. Many publishers have become indistinguishable from one another thanks to their reliance on ad tech content – "native content" in Facebook parlance and the false hope of social media-driven traffic. In so doing, they've helped empower Google and Facebook and surrendered their own brand power, becoming purveyors of generic sponsored slurry. The original poster is not wrong about the problems with tracker-laden news sites. But he hasn't given much thought to solutions. "I don’t have a fix all band-aid to replace current revenue streams for news websites..." Do let us know when you figure it out. A lot of people have been trying to do so without success. Subscriptions...great for the publishers with huge audiences, not so much for smaller news sites. How many news subscriptions will people pay for after they sign on for the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal? There's a limit to the monthly bleed people will tolerate. And users donations are a bandage not a business model. People rely on donations for unexpected medical expenses in the US – that's a sign of system failure not a model for sustainability. If an answer is found, it will probably have to do with weaning people off social media. Or we'll just have to enjoy our cat videos while investigative journalism withers.
- awinder 7y ago
  Yeah I feel like sponsored content is going to be a flash in the pan on the timeline of history. I do read some sites that monetize that way, but I discount the value of what I’m reading so far that I don’t think that model is built to last. I think I have a somewhat lasting solution but people here especially are not going to like it. I think bezos buying the Washington Post and structure like that build the best version of journalism available to us right now. Structures like NPR and others which have large endowments are another, but basically news runs best when you divorce pure profit models and can run the thing at some kind of operational loss and keep it out of market forces as much as possible.
- thomas 7y ago
  Thank you for a thoughtful response to the article, which got more attention than it warranted.
agentofoblivion 7y ago
The author doesn’t seem to have any self-awareness of the total irony of this article.
yenwel 7y ago
Newspapers are already losing boatloads of money since the ad market collapsed because of the monopoly facebook and google have.
altitudinous 7y ago
This is captain obvious stuff. You don't get a quality journalism experience unless someone is paying. So - a govt funded news website - e.g. the BBC - or a subscriber driven website. I subscribe to my local newspaper which has a great news website.
dbg31415 7y ago
> Switch over to a monthly subscription plan (if no one pays for it maybe you weren’t as useful of a source as you thought) You know what happens when you pay for subscriptions? They still hit you with ads and perpetual reminders to turn ad blockers off. I'm a paying user of about 10 different sites, and most all of them still remind me to turn off my ad blocker (or don't work with an ad blocker running) even after I've signed in. News websites are dumpster fires because it's a race to the bottom. Let's say NYT is a good news source... they'll still lose eyesballs to DIPSHITPOST who doesn't spend time validating their stories before publishing them. And so you say DIPSHITPOST will go under? That's fine, there's always another IDIOTDAILYTIMES out there. Tools like Facebook and Reddit and HackerNews are the sources we all go to to find the content, some are curated better than others, but at the end of the the day whoever gets to market first tends to be the winner. And NYT and other "good" sources will inevitably fail because fast, good, or cheap -- pick at most 2.
PaulHoule 7y ago
That blog post is a site for sore eyes. My immediate complaint was "the fonts are too large" viewing it on my big screen computer, then I remembered to scale it with Ctrl-Minus.
mrtksn 7y ago
The following business model works well in Turkey: Make your news business loss centre, make money from government contracts that you are awarded in exchange of positive news coverage of the politicians in power. A phone conversation of businessmen discussing creating a fund for that purpose leaked a few years ago, they are now the biggest government contractors in the world. The outlets that do not depend heavily on government contract handouts utilize all the tactics criticised in the article. Few more "prestigious" or "independent" publications try the donation and subscription models with limited success. This time the democracy suffers heavily, government accountability is no more.
- driverdan 7y ago
  That's pretty dystopian. Governments shouldn't be commissioning news.
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    Yes, it is. Some try to do some journalism without stepping on government's toes too much, others are pure propaganda. The outlets that are functioning like government propaganda channels have very low ratings, so they are not very good at directing public opinion so they updated the business model to include unvoluntary ad purchases on the absolutely pro-gov media, i.e. if you do not buy ads from these publications they make your life harder even in the private sector. Someone at a popular Turkish social media platform tried to compile a list of companies that advertise on these extremely pro-gov media outlets, the list was taken down by a court order. Turkey sunk deep in the democracy and press freedom indexes. That's what happens when you cannot have a profitable media business.
crazygringo 7y ago
Sorry, but body text of 28px? The first 5 lines have a font size of 42px? The design of the site is a dumpster fire. You shouldn't have to zoom to 67% just to make the article actually readable.
- Andrex 7y ago
  > The design of the site is a dumpster fire. Hyperbole can be used to good effect sometimes, but this isn't one of them. This is a decently-designed blog which loads quickly but has text that's a little too large. It is not a dumpster fire, especially compared to the news sites the blog post was calling out.
- asdff 7y ago
  That's the worst part of modern websites, the font size assume I must be 80 years old and the button sizes assume I'm tapping on the screen with my elbow. Even HN and reddit I read at 80% or less. Give me size 10 font again.
sureaboutthis 7y ago
Maybe off topic but I hope everyone gets my point. My soon to be niece-in-law (she's engaged to my nephew) has a journalism degree from a well-known university in that field. She's now a news producer for a large television station. Last week, I caught her on camera reviewing dog toys with her dog and the best blenders during the morning news. Things have stooped to that level.
jfengel 7y ago
The article (and comments) focus on the sites, but I believe we should look at it from the consumer end. Consumer behavior is far harder to change, but it's more important. The news web sites could just up and vanish for all I care. The question is, what do consumers need and how do we get it to them? The news web sites can go ahead and flame all the dumpsters they want. They're entertainment, and might as well be superhero movies or Angry Birds. "News" is just the hook for novelty. It's consumer behavior that has become quite terrible. Some of it is the realization that most news doesn't matter. It's far away and of little direct meaning to you. That's why the news sites need to dress it up to make it seem interesting. There are things that might be relevant, but they don't happen every 24 hours, and they require a lot of background to understand correctly. The politics are relevant in that you do in fact get to make a choice, though our politics have become more about tribalism than good choices. Voters have never been good about absorbing news and deciding, but mass media have made them easier than ever to distract and derail. We'd like to think a good news site would fix that, but you can't force the horse to drink. Consumers don't want it. And I'd say that doesn't even matter, except that they're making some terrible choices based on it. The best I can think of is for each of us to model better behavior, which means shunning bad news and thoughtfully discussing real news, but I don't honestly believe that will succeed. I would love a better answer.
- freehunter 7y ago
  >It's far away and of little direct meaning to you. That's exactly why I believe small local news is far more important than national or world news. It's important to know what's going on in the broader world, but in terms of actual impact to your daily life, a road closure in your neighborhood is more impactful than (and I'm just taking a headline from the front of CNN.com right now) "Former Belgian king submits DNA in paternity case". For politics, your local city council voting to allow or ban AirBnb or Uber or marijuana businesses has more direct meaning for you than (another CNN.com headline) "Analysis: Trump and Biden escalate their fight". Especially when it comes to crime reporting... you should know about shootings in your area, or car crashes or kidnappings etc. Things that could actually happen to you or impact your life. But me sitting in Michigan reading about stabbings in Japan or a sheriff's deputy being shot in Texas, or a 4 year old boy attacked by a mountain lion in San Diego... what do I do with that information? What is the expected outcome of me reading that story? When I am done reading it, what should I do about it? It's feartainment, fear as an entertainment. I don't need to know it, but when I read it I become afraid and over time I become addicted to fear, and so I check CNN more to see if there is more things I need to be afraid of. It overflows into our local life too, we become addicted to fear and we know others are addicted to fear too, so if we share the most fear-inducing stories we become more popular as people become addicted to the fear we're spreading.
54635124gddd 7y ago
We're all aware of the problems with news sites. News organizations are well aware too. But what choice do they have? Back in the day, newspapers could charge lots for local advertising and classified ads, because they were the only game in town. The internet disrupted this, and since then they've had financial problems. The clickbait, the ad targeting, etc, is just what they have to do to compete in a search engine / social media driven ecosystem, where Facebook and Google not only control what content you see, but also keep most of the ad money. News sites are just trying to play the game that we all created. This site's arm chair solutions are not helpful. News organizations are already aware of these strategies, and many sites already implement them. But they have drawbacks, and are not one-size-fits-all solutions. The way this guy presents these solutions as totally obvious just reaks of arrogance. If solving the problem was so simple, we all wouldn't be struggling to solve it.
Shaddox 7y ago
I'm currently contracting for a rather large news outlet and I had a talk with the VP of Engineering about why every media outlet is like this and he shed some light on me. The print edition is losing money for them and business decided to start giving them away for free to increase brand awareness. The paywalled stuff is making them modest revenue, definitely not enough to make a living for now but they're still experimenting with the model. The ads and user tracking is where the real money is. The bidding ad network stuff is okayish, but it seems the big money is in the sponsored articles and in skins (custom stylesheet designed for a specific brand). The former two seem to make even seven digit figures per contract for them. Looking at the backlog and their style of organizing work you can obviously tell that the users actually visiting the site are treated as second hand citizens while their partners are kings. This leads me to the conclusion that this is what people might not really want, but it's what they got used to. Finding a sustainable high quality news media business model is an interesting problem worthy of a startup I'd say.
S_A_P 7y ago
The quality of the internet is inversely proportional of the number of people with the job of "digital marketing/social media strategist".
wstuartcl 7y ago
Clicked on the post and read the first "reason": - Clickbait headings ... Acknowledged the hypocrisy and closed the tab.
corodra 7y ago
I found my own solution a while back. I started reading newspapers. The up to the minute need for news is total and utter bullshit for like 95% of the population. Being a day behind on news is literally no different to me than knowing within an hour of it happening. Someone is going to mention politics, I know it. Let me beat you to it. What have you done same day when a politician you hated did something? Of consequence of course. Angry twating on twitter doesn’t count. Newspapers are fucking awesome. Easy to read. Easy as hell to skim. Headlines are 95% accurate to their article. Ads don’t track you and in truth, aren’t that lame in the paper compared to online. Granted I mostly read WSJ and sometimes NYTimes. But never online. Only reason I check CNN online is to see if there’s a catastrophe. Like when Notre Dame became an unholy gate to hell. Other than that, the news is pretty useless to begin with.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Aside: Have you seen https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com ?
  - corodra 7y ago
    Yea I’ve seen it. Problem is, I’ve found most online “news” is sensational and shallow as hell. CNN is not the only guilty party. So, again, I mainly go to it because they’re a great source to know who died today. Beyond that, their opinions about... well anything, can go in the dumpster fire. They really lost any potential shred of regaining respect when they were claiming, about 2 years ago, that China’s secret trade weapon was them unloading like a trillion in US bonds in one go. Anyone who has read any economics 101 of anything immediately knows that’s one of the dumbest comments of the century.
- wishrider 7y ago
  This is a delay on what happened in the past, I'm working on a project https://wishpage.tv/ https://wishpage.tv/ where you might have a delay in the other direction, into the future :) That's a request based approach where people vote for what they want to see and then with a delay the news gets delivered afterwards.
dgudkov 7y ago
The news media industry is a weird market. The media are trying to extract constantly decreasing money from people with constantly increasing addiction (overconsumption) to internet news by constantly decreasing quality of content and increasing the use of shady tricks. Both sides (media and consumers) are in denial. The media deny that most of them produce shit content which is not worth a penny and the world would be better without them. The consumers deny the addiction. I personally don't want to be on either side of this market.
stickfigure 7y ago
I'm surprised the article didn't mention the quick hack that improves the UX on pretty much every news site: Disable javascript. The chrome extension I use is one button that blocks JS on the current domain. The page reloads in a flash and is replaced by an easy-to-read block of text. Other websites are unaffected. I am by no means a JS hater; I even tend to like SPAs on the web. It's just that these news sites seem to want us to run with JS disabled. It's really a better browsing experience.
duxup 7y ago
>Switch over to a monthly subscription plan (if no one pays for it maybe you weren’t as useful of a source as you thought) That reminds me of the whole situation where Radiohead sold an album online direct to users. Someone wrote an article about how other bands could do the same: Step 1: Be Radiohead. >Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user experience of course) I have trouble understanding how that isn't an equally or worse idea when compared to the existing problems.
sound1 7y ago
I think the 'news' have become a commodity in this information age. For example, people want to get the time but they can use their smartphone instead of paying for a wristwatch. Now a days there are so many channels to get news it will be increasingly difficult for news outlets to monetize news, IMO, unless there is some unique selling point (eg. live sports).
sizzle 7y ago
The annoying auto playing videos and bright red BREAKING NEWS alert spam are also UX fails
whalabi 7y ago
Agreed, I set up a news site recently, currently focusing on the tech industry. [1] Very deliberately didn't include anything I personally found annoying (I'm pretty easy to annoy with bad UX) Absolutely despise chonky sticky headers/footers. The problem is, these kinds of measures work. As in, if I put a footer that pops up as you scroll down reminding readers to share or subscribe, I'd have more of both. (I can dig up the evidence if required. Off the top of my head there's a presentation from someone like buzzfeed or upworthy that showed double digit percentage improvements with mildly annoying practices.) I disagree with the author's contention that using those methods mean you fail. Publishers use them because they work. [1] e.g. https://unlikekinds.com/article/uber-code-text https://unlikekinds.com/article/uber-code-text
astazangasta 7y ago
I have a solution: bundle. I will never pay the NYTimes, WSJ ot Washington Post for a digital subscription. I don't read these things intentionally; i read them because someone links me to them. To then be told i need to pay to read just makes me turn away in disgust, because my experience of the internet, fast, fluid, has suddenly been interrupted. Shall i go get my credit card, fill in some forms, remember a login etc. just to read some shitty link? Fuck no. This much is obvious and the paywall model these people are using is obviously terrible as a result. It will never work because a website is not the same as a print newspaper. Case in point: i have a subscription to several print newspapers (the FT and the Economist). But i don't read either online, even though i could, because the experience is too painful. I am not going to dig around for separate credentials for each online publication i want to read. The solution is obvious, and has already been employed to great effect by streaming media companies. A media bundle company offers access to 50 or 60 news sites. You get one login; you pay $8 a month or thereabouts. In return you can read the Washington Post, WSJ etc., and each media company gets a payout based on impressions (or better yet, as a share of total consumption, e.g. if i read 2 WSJ and 10 ny times, WSJ gets $6 * 2/12 and NYT gets $6 * 10/12. This gives me what i want: freedom to browse without having to negotiate each link i click. It gives the media companies a revenue stream from satisfied readers. The media pass company gets a fee for a valuable service. Win win win. All that is required is for someone (hint, hint, HN) to successfully negotiate a content agreement for their media pass with a few big players. If you got WSJ, WP, NYT to sign up that would probably make this fly.

239 points by bradley_taunt 7y ago

> These anti-consumer practices will only stop when these organizations start losing money. Nope, I'd wage they will double-down on it even if they start losing money. That's a well known spiral: don't expect anyone but the most useless employees to remain until the end.

throwawaylolx 7y ago

>not to mention most browsers have announced that future updates will be blocking ads by default. Maybe, but _most users_ are using a browser that will not be blocking ads by default anytime soon.

return1 7y ago

> If your business is solely dependent on tracking scripts, tricking users with clickbait titles and using archaic ads - then you’re destined to fail regardless. If that were true, they had 2 decades to fail and they didn't. People like to read the news.

jnty 7y ago
News websites are failing every day. Even Buzzfeed had big layoffs a few months ago. If your revenue model relies on making your website increasingly less user-friendly, it might have kept your head above water for longer than some competitors, but it can't be sustainable.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  The successful newspapers appear to enforce strict paywalls. I pay for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times because their content and analysis is good and original. (They also have decent events from time to time.) The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.
- return1 7y ago
  The real reason they are failing is not user-unfriendliness or tracking though. It's the intense competition and the broadening of the publisher base by 1000x with the advent of the internet, and the natural supply-demand adjustment to very low rates of return from advertising. This leads them to increase the advertising load in order to make ends meet, hence using more trackers.
mc32 7y ago
Some news orgs remain despite being unprofitable because they are a billionaire’s pet project. Bezos is one.
jstrong 7y ago
the news business has been in economic free fall for the last two decades. at this point, most local newspapers have already folded. have you heard of Newsweek? print ad revenue (formerly their bread and butter) falls year after year, and online ad revenue is peanuts in comparison.
gnode 7y ago
I'd say they have failed. Many outlets have gone out of business, many are unprofitable and propped up by ulterior interests (e.g. billionaires and nation states wishing to influence narratives). Quality has suffered in many ways. The revenue graph here gives a good overview of how the industry has declined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Crisis
HillRat 7y ago
Yeah, to put it mildly, J. Random Web Developer’s view on the news business is … not helpful. It’s not as if news orgs don’t hate their current monetization models; a quick spin through Poynter would have confirmed that for him, while he probably should be aware that many outlets are focusing on subscriptions, partner content, and so on. But the nature of the web is that the vast majority of consumers are conditioned to have stuff for free, and if they can’t get news from the WSJ they’ll get it from Breitbart, and if they can’t get it from Breitbart they’ll get it from a Romanian teenager running a fake-news clickfarm on Facebook. And that’s without getting into the first- and second-order effects the Web has had on local journalism and newspapers, which have suffered from the twin scourges of the superstar economy (why pay for the Paducha Picayune when I have every national paper at my fingertips?) and the miserable margins of online ads compared to the print ads that used to be their mainstay. The problem is that the ad-supported Internet model hollowed out American journalism, turning it into a howling wasteland of listicles and tracking pixels, and the industry is simply hanging on for dear life at this point. If the OP had some recommendations for a better user experience that wouldn’t essentially kill what remains of the non-top-shelf (NYT, WSJ) or hyper-focused (TPM, Axios) journalism market, I’m all ears, but there’s nothing there that’s helpful.
matt_s 7y ago
That's the thing though, there isn't much reading or depth. The majority of sites are like those cheesy carnival games trying to get people to "step right up" and are just as rigged as the games to try and keep you around, blasting your face with ads.

nostalgk 7y ago

I largely find that the majority of news sources really aren't worth the adware tithe they enforce. Hell, these days I often just go to Wikipedia and read the summary if an event is that important. The only other news I really care about is local, and I'm lucky to have local news sites that are pretty much plain text.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Wikipedia has a current events page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- nostalgk 7y ago
  One of the many things I like about it.
olivermarks 7y ago
The problem here is that Wikipedia is written by a tiny minority of people these days. (77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-... 'News' has always been problematic because the publishing business exists to sell advertising, track you and push the news organization owner agendas. Finding trustworthy reliable information has never been more difficult despite the tsunamai of information at our fingertips online
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors That's still a lot more writers than your regular newspaper in terms of consumers:writers ratio.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Is it?

empath75 7y ago

I thought that news+ would help turn this around, but the experience of reading a magazine on the iPhone is laughably terrible. It’s just a pdf of the print edition!

auiya 7y ago
A PDF of the print edition would be an improvement at least, no?
- empath75 7y ago
  Not when it has small type and you can’t just scroll to read the article.

georgehayduke 7y ago

This has been a long slow process. I thought there would be some business model innovation before now, but it apart from subscriptions it doesn't seem like anyone has cracked it. Subscriptions are a solid business model, and I think it's important for fund serious newspapers / investigative journalism. However, by putting them behind a paywall, these important stories may no longer have the impact they once did.

ThinkBeat 7y ago

Kinda clickbaity headline, criticizing click bait headlines

pferde 7y ago
Is it still a clickbait if it's true?

auiya 7y ago

The solution is to hit F9 to enable reader mode using a modern browser. If it can't render, I close the tab. There are extensions I'm sure which force reader mode on selective lists of particularly egregious sites.

badfrog 7y ago
What is reader mode? F9 doesn't do anything for me in Chrome.
- swashboon 7y ago
  Firefox
  - Theodores 7y ago
    Safari too. "Modern browsers". A pejorative term.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Possibly related to the fact that reader mode also removes ads.
0x4a42 7y ago
Activate Reader View extension for Firefox is the one I use to force Reader Mode. It works pretty well.
benatkin 7y ago
Reader view is also great for this article, which uses fonts that are too big, especially in the header. It's not quite a dumpster fire, but isn't great either.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
+1 for reader mode. Or use Lynx (I'm not even joking).

redleggedfrog 7y ago

Ctrl-0. Ctrl-0?! Back button...

jasonlotito 7y ago

Blog post complaining about news sites using clickbait headlines uses clickbait headline to attract views. > I could write up an entire essay about all the shady practices that most news sites are guilty of, but here are just a few top level issues: Proceeds with a random list of complaints you could apply to most sites in general. > using archaic ads I don't know about you, but archaic ads didn't track me, use up many resources, and were just fine. > Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user experience of course) Article writer then offers a suggestion that has been tried in the past, and something people frequently complain about news companies doing. > Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions Promotions? What are "promotions?" Promoting a product? You want news agencies to place a larger emphasis on advertising? And all three suggestions literally fly in the face of: > Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present All these things are "advertising" so the user would be blocked from reading. > News outlets should not be spamming their main revenue supply (the users) or misleading people with false information. Like you did? Your headline is as much a lie as many of the headlines you seem to hate on news sites.

gregwtmtno 7y ago

I won't look at any page that has autoplaying (even silent) video. It's too distracting and it's not worth the effort to click the close button.

bovermyer 7y ago

Part of the difficulty here is that the function newspapers are intended to serve isn't to generate profits, nor even to be cost-effective. Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society. This costs a lot of time and money. The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. Where should the resources necessary to achieve the above goal come from?

okket 7y ago
> The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. The government itself can not do this, but it could demand that there is a neutral news organisation which is allowed to collect the necessary money to function from its citizen, like the public broadcasting system in several countries. This would help as a somewhat trusted ground source, IMHO.
- bpicolo 7y ago
  I'm not sure how U.K. views the BBC, but it seems to be an effective example of this model.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    A small minority bitterly resent the license fee and/or believe that the BBC are just a propaganda wing of whichever political party they dislike; the vast majority regard it as a beloved national institution. In a poll by Ipsos Mori, 59% of respondents named the BBC as the one news source they trust the most. That level of trust remains consistent across the political spectrum, with readers of the right-leaning Daily Mail and the left-leaning Guardian both reporting high levels of trust in the BBC. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/58001/bbc-annex2.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/58001/b...
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  It's hard though, the BBC is often quoted as an example but they have always had to deal with the government of the day trying to exert influence.

circa 7y ago

At first, I read it quickly as "NEW websites are dumpster fires." Which is also sometimes true. For lack of a better term. I hate the "tablet catered" website look on a desktop. A lot of the news sites look this way too. I'm not really sure how else to describe it.

keithnz 7y ago

The local newspaper here (nzherald.co.nz) is trying to introduce a premium level which you pay for.... but because they still want search engines to see the content, they just deliver all the premium content to the browser and try to hide it.... 5 minutes later, he presto, a plugin that shows the premium content. ublock origin, and there are no ads.... they are really going to have to find a better model.

kevsim 7y ago
You’d think a short extract would be enough for SEO and then hide the full article behind the paywall server side.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Keyword/snippet SEO spamming for garbage ad pages was a thing that got cracked down on hard for good reason. Some included even a few relevant seeming paragraphs before heading into more "seeds". I wouldn't be surprised if any snippetting hit their ranking hard.

FerretFred 7y ago

> But They Need Ad Revenue "Local" online news in a lot of the UK has all but died a death. We have a couple of big news outlets that basically publish a little local news in practically no depth and then fill the rest with clickbait "news" items of no value other than to generate clicks. There seem to be practically no real journalists and readers are "invited to send in their pictures" - without payment of course. Hopefully these dumpster files will die out soon..

lol768 7y ago
Completely agree. JPIMedia seems to be one of the big players, most of their content is just from "the i newspaper". There's a little bit of local content, and it's all locked behind a "turn off your ad-blocker or else" script. Newsquest is another. Poorly written journalism which usually looks as if it hasn't been proof-read.

mlang23 7y ago

In addition to the reasons listed in the article, I also notice (as someone relying on accessibility) that the overall readability of news sites has gone down dramatically in the recent years, especially considering accessibility. With all this pop up ads and "we need you to accept cookies" nonsense, it has become increasingly hard to just read a news bite. I notice in my own behaviour, that I less regularily click on links that go to news sites, since I dont want to waste my time unnecessaryil.

smacktoward 7y ago

It’s a bad sign when your “what’s the solution?” section starts off by admitting you don’t have one. Not to be deterred by this, though, the piece suggests a couple of shopworn ideas anyway: > Switch over to a monthly subscription plan For this to work you have to put up a paywall, and according to HN conventional wisdom the only thing worse than ads are paywalls, otherwise known as History’s Greatest Monster. > Partner with brands to create sponsored articles Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.” > Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions So, pledge drives! Hope you like tote bags. Public broadcasting already does this, of course; it doesn’t come near to covering all their expenses. Look, here’s the thing. It’s true, news websites are dumpster fires! But they’re dumpster fires for a reason, namely that nobody has yet come up with a reliable business model that allows them to not be dumpster fires. They’re dumpster fires because that’s what happens when the only choices available are all bad ones. If you’ve got an actual way to cut this knot, lots of people in the news business would be very interested in hearing it. But just telling them to stop sucking so hard, man isn’t particularly helpful.

Semaphor 7y ago
> > Partner with brands to create sponsored articles > Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.” I disagree. No one said to have everything be sponsored and when the content is good (and clearly marked up as sponsored) it can be fine.
jonheller 7y ago
Yes, I found this to be a shallow article with a clickbait headline (oddly, one of the things he criticizes in this very article) without anything new. Surprised to see it so highly voted on Hacker News.

espeed 7y ago

And thus the Google News Initiative, its journalism outreach program and $300M Digital News Fund [1], which launched last year... * Gooole News Initiative https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com * Google Digital News Fund https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/ https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/ * Google News Lab (2017) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/news-lab-year-in-review/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat... * Subscribe with Google (2018) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/introducing-subscribe-google/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat... * The Google News Initiative, One Year In (2019) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/google-news-initiative-one-year/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat... [1] "Google announces a $300M ‘Google News Initiative’ (though this isn’t about giving out grants directly to newsrooms, like it does in Europe)" https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-announces-a-300m-google-news-initiative-though-this-isnt-about-giving-out-grants-directly-to-newsrooms-like-it-does-in-europe/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-announces-a-300m-go...

efa 7y ago
Ugh. Google of course has to continue to own every bit of information on the web. Them deciding what is misinformeation is also scary.
- espeed 7y ago
  That's not what this is. Market forces will sort this mess out. There are external initiatives under way, but it will take time to transition. Until that happens, something has to be done to keep them afloat if they are meant to survive. Look at it this way, the news industry has been turned upside down since the Internet came to be. It's been like a polar shift. Now people go to Google to search for news, and the old-media models don't survive because the old revenue flows right through. Google benefits from keeping them alive -- sure it could do nothing and let them die, but that would be like killing the host -- an environmental disaster and PR catastrophe -- if all the sources went away there would be no more news for people to google. And no one wins in that scenario. Unless humanity is certain that's what it wants to happen, it's probably prudent to save this potentially critical leg from decay. Google has the means and if it's in everyone's interest for the greater good, this is a way to keep one of its leg from falling off until market forces have time to sort the mess out, something new emerges, and everyone has time to transition. In the old days, the government would supply the subsidy to buy the time to transition, but now market forces have aligned. Private industry has evolved and has the means -- it's willing and able. Maybe this is how a healthy, well-functioning system is supposed to work. Maybe this is a glimpse of capitalism at its finest. Maybe it's progress, maybe it's not. Who knows how this will play out? It's uncharted territory. A new chapter in the American experiment. Whatever happens, we will see.

apo 7y ago

The chumbox (https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/ https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...) used to be a good barometer of the spamminess of a site's content. It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming difficult. It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume. Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect finally wearing off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Semaphor 7y ago
We trialed a service that was supposed to earn us a lot more ad money (yieldlove.com). Well, revenue did go up. But while I already complained about the horrible quality of those ads (surfing everywhere else with Adblock), the scammy ads that were shown were too much even for my boss. We went back to just using normal AdSense.

0x5002 7y ago

It's not just news. It's ever website, with some notable exceptions, such as HN (minimal, curated, informative headlines, no bloat) or some private blogs (as the one linked - 2.2KB, 0 trackers, yet questionable headlines). Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies) give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads, and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data, and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based blocking) already blocked 42% of the website's content. Not to mention a plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators. And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20% blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to call "the stage before clickbait" - the ones addressing the user directly, presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest ("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and wonderful again"). Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once in a while. One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful, traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by bothering me with paywalls.

wishrider 7y ago

I'm developing a very new approach to tackle this problem with my project https://wishpage.tv/ https://wishpage.tv/ Its still moving but a request based approach to news might work for a small niche.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Blendle.com works fairly well for news consumption. It's the microtransaction model, but they've got it fairly streamlined, they have most of the big names signed up and their daily summary is nice.

fancyfish 7y ago
Seconding this, I tried Blendle after seeing it mentioned here a year ago. The UI is minimalist with no ads, and the publisher gets paid per article. As someone who doesn't want to pay for separate full subscriptions to NYTimes, WaPo, and other papers because I don't voraciously read enough articles each day to make it worth the cost, Blendle has been a good alternative.

ankit219 7y ago

News needs to evolve. Right now, we are not frustrated with news websites, but with the way they try to make money, and put obstacles in the way of users getting what they want - news. Infact, for the most users, they are so used to website that they wont even look at the part which displays ads. And there is no point showing ads to the regular readers - unless the ad inventory buyers are unlimited - as the same ad loses relevance over time. Right now, the focus of the news sites is to get as many users as possible (not just views) without focusing on the core users. My feeling is that it wont be a tweak in the business model but more in the way news is offered. One often talked about ideal case is that ads become so relevant that they are not intrusive, but that is yet to take scale, and is costly even for the ones who try to do it. There are good websites which get enough money to live on donation and do produce the content worthy of it. Then there are different ways of consuming news which have worked. Like Inshorts - news in 60 words, mostly a jist without clickbait - which works really well in India, and can survive on ad model around relevant content. Last thing I feel is bringing an offline model online, which for some reason these websites did away with. Newspapers mostly worked because everyone had an opinion after reading the news. News sites dont like community and moderation and prefer to have them on social media, but that is where the opportunity lies. Make room for discussion, get users engaged, let the author explain his point, and then you dont have to show too many ads on the user's first visit. Maybe this is an extension of twitter, or maybe it gets dirty (hence moderation), I think it will work given how it works now on reddit and even whatsapp groups.

boltzmannbrain 7y ago

News websites, if you're going to have a monthly limit of n articles (NYT, HBR, etc.), let me first have the option of continuing to read after loading the page. Too many times following some link (from Hacker News, Twitter, etc.) leads to an article I don't want to read but counts against my tiny monthly allowance.

asdff 7y ago
open them in pocket and never fret again.

vilaca 7y ago

I have a mobile phone with a 4.5" screen and since most news websites have chosen to have an huge fixed header and footer in every page I can only read 1 or at most 2 lines of text.

asdff 7y ago
Throw them in pocket and enjoy your 4.5" of small font text from edge to edge. I can fit sometimes two whole paragraphs on the screen of my SE.
viburnum 7y ago
And that’s after you’ve managed to find the tiny x to dismiss the cookie warning and then the email signup form that blocks 100% of the screen.

tootie 7y ago

I love https://npr.org https://npr.org or, even better https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org

TrueDuality 7y ago
Holy crap, that's awesome. I want more of that.
asdff 7y ago
Oh man that text only site is glorious good lord. Skim all the news in 2 seconds flat vs. carousel of images, scrolling, and things laid out in no particular order at all.

dscpls 7y ago

Do we have any evidence that these issues are really the causes of people consuming news elsewhere? - Clickbait headings with misleading information Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking? - Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for? - Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users? - Taking massive performance hits (specifically on mobile due to huge JavaScript blocks) Maybe getting closer to what users actually care about - Pop-up ads Again - any evidence this puts normal internet users off so much they'd stop using a site? There must be a reason MEDIUM.COM and every single recipe blog pops up their newsletter subscription as intrusively as possible. - Fixed headers or footers which leads to harder readability / accidental element interactions Here's again an actual deterrent - if someone physically can't use a site, they might actually give up. --- I'm not saying news sites are not dumpster fires, but I'm a techie and love a good boycott. I'd question the premise of this article - it seems to be very much from a techie privacy-active (not just concerned, but actually willing to take action) perspective which I suspect does not represent the majority of the internet. I suspect that if people are actually using news sites less, it's because of much simpler reasons...like that Google intercepts a user's attempt to read news linking to their favourite publications.

mort96 7y ago
> - Clickbait headings with misleading information > Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking? I don't know, but I certainly know that there are news (mostly tech news) websites I have all but entirely stopped engaging with because any time I go to them, I read one headline ("This Spotify-feature has been wanted for years!", "Do you see what HP has done here?", "See what Dell has done", something like that) and just close out the tab again. Maybe it puts of "just" 10% of people, but 10% is a fairly big chunk, isn't it? > - Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present > What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for? A random article saying it's 40% on laptops, 15% on mobile: https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-40-percent-laptops-15-percent-mobile-216324 https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-... Another article saying it's 22% of people in the UK, 32% of people in germany, etc: https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018 https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018 Those were just the two first results on Google for the query "what percentage of users are using ad blockers". I don't know how many people just leave when a page asks them to disable their ad blockers, but I have to imagine it's a fairly big chunk of people who use ad blockers, which, as shown above, is a fairly big chunk of internet users. > - Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts > Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users? I don't know, I'm fairly sure the issue with pervasive tracking is relatively well known even among non-"techies". How many regular users haven't been told to use an ad blocker by a tech-literate friend, with third-party tracking being one of the reasons cited? The vast majority of people may not avoid a website just because of invisible trackers (except maybe due to the massive performance hits from all the javascript), but I imagine the knowledge of such tracking scripts at least affects the percentage of people who are willing to disable their ad blockers when a page asks.

Funes- 7y ago

>[...] the news industry has become a cesspool of anti-consumer and blackhat practices that has eroded trust for the sake of money. You could say something quite similar about capitalism as a whole, in the sense that it looks like those practices are what any industry within that particular economic system ends up devolving into, for the sake of monetary growth and under the pretext of "being competitive" or "cost-effective." I guess it would also apply to economic liberalism in general. Here's my opinion: news outlets are not necessary. Their content is mostly irrelevant, biased, and dependent on a very harmful revenue model--advertisements. Uncensorable, decentralized platforms, on the other hand, could provide communities with a means to inform others, express opinions and denounce any issue at hand, if well-designed.

Dotnaught 7y ago

"Partner with brands to create sponsored articles" Are you f*ing kidding? Sponsored articles are ads. The ad industry-driven conflation of editorial and ads is a major reason the media industry is suffering. Many publishers have become indistinguishable from one another thanks to their reliance on ad tech content – "native content" in Facebook parlance and the false hope of social media-driven traffic. In so doing, they've helped empower Google and Facebook and surrendered their own brand power, becoming purveyors of generic sponsored slurry. The original poster is not wrong about the problems with tracker-laden news sites. But he hasn't given much thought to solutions. "I don’t have a fix all band-aid to replace current revenue streams for news websites..." Do let us know when you figure it out. A lot of people have been trying to do so without success. Subscriptions...great for the publishers with huge audiences, not so much for smaller news sites. How many news subscriptions will people pay for after they sign on for the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal? There's a limit to the monthly bleed people will tolerate. And users donations are a bandage not a business model. People rely on donations for unexpected medical expenses in the US – that's a sign of system failure not a model for sustainability. If an answer is found, it will probably have to do with weaning people off social media. Or we'll just have to enjoy our cat videos while investigative journalism withers.

awinder 7y ago
Yeah I feel like sponsored content is going to be a flash in the pan on the timeline of history. I do read some sites that monetize that way, but I discount the value of what I’m reading so far that I don’t think that model is built to last. I think I have a somewhat lasting solution but people here especially are not going to like it. I think bezos buying the Washington Post and structure like that build the best version of journalism available to us right now. Structures like NPR and others which have large endowments are another, but basically news runs best when you divorce pure profit models and can run the thing at some kind of operational loss and keep it out of market forces as much as possible.
thomas 7y ago
Thank you for a thoughtful response to the article, which got more attention than it warranted.

agentofoblivion 7y ago

The author doesn’t seem to have any self-awareness of the total irony of this article.

yenwel 7y ago

Newspapers are already losing boatloads of money since the ad market collapsed because of the monopoly facebook and google have.

altitudinous 7y ago

This is captain obvious stuff. You don't get a quality journalism experience unless someone is paying. So - a govt funded news website - e.g. the BBC - or a subscriber driven website. I subscribe to my local newspaper which has a great news website.

dbg31415 7y ago

> Switch over to a monthly subscription plan (if no one pays for it maybe you weren’t as useful of a source as you thought) You know what happens when you pay for subscriptions? They still hit you with ads and perpetual reminders to turn ad blockers off. I'm a paying user of about 10 different sites, and most all of them still remind me to turn off my ad blocker (or don't work with an ad blocker running) even after I've signed in. News websites are dumpster fires because it's a race to the bottom. Let's say NYT is a good news source... they'll still lose eyesballs to DIPSHITPOST who doesn't spend time validating their stories before publishing them. And so you say DIPSHITPOST will go under? That's fine, there's always another IDIOTDAILYTIMES out there. Tools like Facebook and Reddit and HackerNews are the sources we all go to to find the content, some are curated better than others, but at the end of the the day whoever gets to market first tends to be the winner. And NYT and other "good" sources will inevitably fail because fast, good, or cheap -- pick at most 2.

PaulHoule 7y ago

That blog post is a site for sore eyes. My immediate complaint was "the fonts are too large" viewing it on my big screen computer, then I remembered to scale it with Ctrl-Minus.

mrtksn 7y ago

The following business model works well in Turkey: Make your news business loss centre, make money from government contracts that you are awarded in exchange of positive news coverage of the politicians in power. A phone conversation of businessmen discussing creating a fund for that purpose leaked a few years ago, they are now the biggest government contractors in the world. The outlets that do not depend heavily on government contract handouts utilize all the tactics criticised in the article. Few more "prestigious" or "independent" publications try the donation and subscription models with limited success. This time the democracy suffers heavily, government accountability is no more.

driverdan 7y ago
That's pretty dystopian. Governments shouldn't be commissioning news.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  Yes, it is. Some try to do some journalism without stepping on government's toes too much, others are pure propaganda. The outlets that are functioning like government propaganda channels have very low ratings, so they are not very good at directing public opinion so they updated the business model to include unvoluntary ad purchases on the absolutely pro-gov media, i.e. if you do not buy ads from these publications they make your life harder even in the private sector. Someone at a popular Turkish social media platform tried to compile a list of companies that advertise on these extremely pro-gov media outlets, the list was taken down by a court order. Turkey sunk deep in the democracy and press freedom indexes. That's what happens when you cannot have a profitable media business.

crazygringo 7y ago

Sorry, but body text of 28px? The first 5 lines have a font size of 42px? The design of the site is a dumpster fire. You shouldn't have to zoom to 67% just to make the article actually readable.

Andrex 7y ago
> The design of the site is a dumpster fire. Hyperbole can be used to good effect sometimes, but this isn't one of them. This is a decently-designed blog which loads quickly but has text that's a little too large. It is not a dumpster fire, especially compared to the news sites the blog post was calling out.
asdff 7y ago
That's the worst part of modern websites, the font size assume I must be 80 years old and the button sizes assume I'm tapping on the screen with my elbow. Even HN and reddit I read at 80% or less. Give me size 10 font again.

sureaboutthis 7y ago

Maybe off topic but I hope everyone gets my point. My soon to be niece-in-law (she's engaged to my nephew) has a journalism degree from a well-known university in that field. She's now a news producer for a large television station. Last week, I caught her on camera reviewing dog toys with her dog and the best blenders during the morning news. Things have stooped to that level.

jfengel 7y ago

The article (and comments) focus on the sites, but I believe we should look at it from the consumer end. Consumer behavior is far harder to change, but it's more important. The news web sites could just up and vanish for all I care. The question is, what do consumers need and how do we get it to them? The news web sites can go ahead and flame all the dumpsters they want. They're entertainment, and might as well be superhero movies or Angry Birds. "News" is just the hook for novelty. It's consumer behavior that has become quite terrible. Some of it is the realization that most news doesn't matter. It's far away and of little direct meaning to you. That's why the news sites need to dress it up to make it seem interesting. There are things that might be relevant, but they don't happen every 24 hours, and they require a lot of background to understand correctly. The politics are relevant in that you do in fact get to make a choice, though our politics have become more about tribalism than good choices. Voters have never been good about absorbing news and deciding, but mass media have made them easier than ever to distract and derail. We'd like to think a good news site would fix that, but you can't force the horse to drink. Consumers don't want it. And I'd say that doesn't even matter, except that they're making some terrible choices based on it. The best I can think of is for each of us to model better behavior, which means shunning bad news and thoughtfully discussing real news, but I don't honestly believe that will succeed. I would love a better answer.

freehunter 7y ago
>It's far away and of little direct meaning to you. That's exactly why I believe small local news is far more important than national or world news. It's important to know what's going on in the broader world, but in terms of actual impact to your daily life, a road closure in your neighborhood is more impactful than (and I'm just taking a headline from the front of CNN.com right now) "Former Belgian king submits DNA in paternity case". For politics, your local city council voting to allow or ban AirBnb or Uber or marijuana businesses has more direct meaning for you than (another CNN.com headline) "Analysis: Trump and Biden escalate their fight". Especially when it comes to crime reporting... you should know about shootings in your area, or car crashes or kidnappings etc. Things that could actually happen to you or impact your life. But me sitting in Michigan reading about stabbings in Japan or a sheriff's deputy being shot in Texas, or a 4 year old boy attacked by a mountain lion in San Diego... what do I do with that information? What is the expected outcome of me reading that story? When I am done reading it, what should I do about it? It's feartainment, fear as an entertainment. I don't need to know it, but when I read it I become afraid and over time I become addicted to fear, and so I check CNN more to see if there is more things I need to be afraid of. It overflows into our local life too, we become addicted to fear and we know others are addicted to fear too, so if we share the most fear-inducing stories we become more popular as people become addicted to the fear we're spreading.

54635124gddd 7y ago

We're all aware of the problems with news sites. News organizations are well aware too. But what choice do they have? Back in the day, newspapers could charge lots for local advertising and classified ads, because they were the only game in town. The internet disrupted this, and since then they've had financial problems. The clickbait, the ad targeting, etc, is just what they have to do to compete in a search engine / social media driven ecosystem, where Facebook and Google not only control what content you see, but also keep most of the ad money. News sites are just trying to play the game that we all created. This site's arm chair solutions are not helpful. News organizations are already aware of these strategies, and many sites already implement them. But they have drawbacks, and are not one-size-fits-all solutions. The way this guy presents these solutions as totally obvious just reaks of arrogance. If solving the problem was so simple, we all wouldn't be struggling to solve it.

Shaddox 7y ago

I'm currently contracting for a rather large news outlet and I had a talk with the VP of Engineering about why every media outlet is like this and he shed some light on me. The print edition is losing money for them and business decided to start giving them away for free to increase brand awareness. The paywalled stuff is making them modest revenue, definitely not enough to make a living for now but they're still experimenting with the model. The ads and user tracking is where the real money is. The bidding ad network stuff is okayish, but it seems the big money is in the sponsored articles and in skins (custom stylesheet designed for a specific brand). The former two seem to make even seven digit figures per contract for them. Looking at the backlog and their style of organizing work you can obviously tell that the users actually visiting the site are treated as second hand citizens while their partners are kings. This leads me to the conclusion that this is what people might not really want, but it's what they got used to. Finding a sustainable high quality news media business model is an interesting problem worthy of a startup I'd say.

S_A_P 7y ago

The quality of the internet is inversely proportional of the number of people with the job of "digital marketing/social media strategist".

wstuartcl 7y ago

Clicked on the post and read the first "reason": - Clickbait headings ... Acknowledged the hypocrisy and closed the tab.

corodra 7y ago

I found my own solution a while back. I started reading newspapers. The up to the minute need for news is total and utter bullshit for like 95% of the population. Being a day behind on news is literally no different to me than knowing within an hour of it happening. Someone is going to mention politics, I know it. Let me beat you to it. What have you done same day when a politician you hated did something? Of consequence of course. Angry twating on twitter doesn’t count. Newspapers are fucking awesome. Easy to read. Easy as hell to skim. Headlines are 95% accurate to their article. Ads don’t track you and in truth, aren’t that lame in the paper compared to online. Granted I mostly read WSJ and sometimes NYTimes. But never online. Only reason I check CNN online is to see if there’s a catastrophe. Like when Notre Dame became an unholy gate to hell. Other than that, the news is pretty useless to begin with.

52-6F-62 7y ago
Aside: Have you seen https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com ?
- corodra 7y ago
  Yea I’ve seen it. Problem is, I’ve found most online “news” is sensational and shallow as hell. CNN is not the only guilty party. So, again, I mainly go to it because they’re a great source to know who died today. Beyond that, their opinions about... well anything, can go in the dumpster fire. They really lost any potential shred of regaining respect when they were claiming, about 2 years ago, that China’s secret trade weapon was them unloading like a trillion in US bonds in one go. Anyone who has read any economics 101 of anything immediately knows that’s one of the dumbest comments of the century.
wishrider 7y ago
This is a delay on what happened in the past, I'm working on a project https://wishpage.tv/ https://wishpage.tv/ where you might have a delay in the other direction, into the future :) That's a request based approach where people vote for what they want to see and then with a delay the news gets delivered afterwards.

dgudkov 7y ago

The news media industry is a weird market. The media are trying to extract constantly decreasing money from people with constantly increasing addiction (overconsumption) to internet news by constantly decreasing quality of content and increasing the use of shady tricks. Both sides (media and consumers) are in denial. The media deny that most of them produce shit content which is not worth a penny and the world would be better without them. The consumers deny the addiction. I personally don't want to be on either side of this market.

stickfigure 7y ago

I'm surprised the article didn't mention the quick hack that improves the UX on pretty much every news site: Disable javascript. The chrome extension I use is one button that blocks JS on the current domain. The page reloads in a flash and is replaced by an easy-to-read block of text. Other websites are unaffected. I am by no means a JS hater; I even tend to like SPAs on the web. It's just that these news sites seem to want us to run with JS disabled. It's really a better browsing experience.

duxup 7y ago

>Switch over to a monthly subscription plan (if no one pays for it maybe you weren’t as useful of a source as you thought) That reminds me of the whole situation where Radiohead sold an album online direct to users. Someone wrote an article about how other bands could do the same: Step 1: Be Radiohead. >Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user experience of course) I have trouble understanding how that isn't an equally or worse idea when compared to the existing problems.

sound1 7y ago

I think the 'news' have become a commodity in this information age. For example, people want to get the time but they can use their smartphone instead of paying for a wristwatch. Now a days there are so many channels to get news it will be increasingly difficult for news outlets to monetize news, IMO, unless there is some unique selling point (eg. live sports).

sizzle 7y ago

The annoying auto playing videos and bright red BREAKING NEWS alert spam are also UX fails

whalabi 7y ago

Agreed, I set up a news site recently, currently focusing on the tech industry. [1] Very deliberately didn't include anything I personally found annoying (I'm pretty easy to annoy with bad UX) Absolutely despise chonky sticky headers/footers. The problem is, these kinds of measures work. As in, if I put a footer that pops up as you scroll down reminding readers to share or subscribe, I'd have more of both. (I can dig up the evidence if required. Off the top of my head there's a presentation from someone like buzzfeed or upworthy that showed double digit percentage improvements with mildly annoying practices.) I disagree with the author's contention that using those methods mean you fail. Publishers use them because they work. [1] e.g. https://unlikekinds.com/article/uber-code-text https://unlikekinds.com/article/uber-code-text

astazangasta 7y ago

I have a solution: bundle. I will never pay the NYTimes, WSJ ot Washington Post for a digital subscription. I don't read these things intentionally; i read them because someone links me to them. To then be told i need to pay to read just makes me turn away in disgust, because my experience of the internet, fast, fluid, has suddenly been interrupted. Shall i go get my credit card, fill in some forms, remember a login etc. just to read some shitty link? Fuck no. This much is obvious and the paywall model these people are using is obviously terrible as a result. It will never work because a website is not the same as a print newspaper. Case in point: i have a subscription to several print newspapers (the FT and the Economist). But i don't read either online, even though i could, because the experience is too painful. I am not going to dig around for separate credentials for each online publication i want to read. The solution is obvious, and has already been employed to great effect by streaming media companies. A media bundle company offers access to 50 or 60 news sites. You get one login; you pay $8 a month or thereabouts. In return you can read the Washington Post, WSJ etc., and each media company gets a payout based on impressions (or better yet, as a share of total consumption, e.g. if i read 2 WSJ and 10 ny times, WSJ gets $6 * 2/12 and NYT gets $6 * 10/12. This gives me what i want: freedom to browse without having to negotiate each link i click. It gives the media companies a revenue stream from satisfied readers. The media pass company gets a fee for a valuable service. Win win win. All that is required is for someone (hint, hint, HN) to successfully negotiate a content agreement for their media pass with a few big players. If you got WSJ, WP, NYT to sign up that would probably make this fly.