5 ms·

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 mean

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.
- pard68 7y ago
  Depends on the nation. I suspect it would be fine in a lot of Europe, and is already the case in a lot of Europe I believe. In the former British colonies,and the United States in particular, that wouldn't fly over too well. The US public broadcasting networks are often not news outlets but entertainment sources (kids shows, education, etc). The US and to some extent the rest of the colonies hold a lot more distrust for the government than European nations and a government funded news organization would be considered a government shill. Also, a US government news organization would have to contend with laws which would make it difficult for them to function .
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - matthew349hall 7y ago
    What about NPR?
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Well, private persons/corporations can't fund newspapers without bias either, so I'm not sure why the focus on government is relevant ?
- gonzo41 7y ago
  I've often wondered why the government doesn't establish a trust to fund public news.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Separation of powers. Private people and corporations can't have you arrested and then spread stories about how you deserved it. The paranoia that it would be abused is very rational given that mere Whitehouse Access has been abused as a carrot/stick to influence reporting.
chunkyslink 7y ago
There is no difficulty. The BBC news.bbc.co.uk and theguardian.co.uk are both examples of well funded, non biased news sources.
- koodiorja 7y ago
  I would argue that no news source is unbiased, at least I've yet to find a news source that has no bias whatsoever about any topic related to politics and society.
- sefrost 7y ago
  I started reading The Guardian a few years ago because the site loaded so fast, and that in turn literally caused me to change my views on various issues. Perhaps food for thought for the other news sites.
- lsd5you 7y ago
  This is a ludicrous position. Apart from the fact that they have different editorial positions from each other. They cannot be both unbiased. The BBC makes some effort to be unbiased - by giving air time based on e.g. based on success at the ballot, but inevitably reflects the metropolitan position of most of it's employees.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  The Guardian has taken a clear turn towards a clickbait approach in the last several years. Much of the newspaper is now as as sensationalist as a tabloid, although The Guardian has taken the opposite side of the culture wars from most of them as its niche. I still find some quality reporting in The Guardian, but it too is clearly facing the same financial pressures as other newspapers.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    I'd happily pay for membership of The Guardian if there was an option to block all the opinion pieces. The actual news part of their operation seems to make a good-faith effort to report impartially, but it's being pushed out by an increasing quantity of rabble-rousing opinion. I'd be more than willing to support the former, but I couldn't in good conscience support the latter.
p2t2p 7y ago
Well, if people aren't ready to pay for "accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society" may be said sources of such information should naturally die-off and people which weren't ready to fund them should bear the consequences which will be disastrous? On other hand, this bias thing is not inherent. ABC survives somehow in Australia, even though current clowns in the shitshow in Canberra work hard to kill it.
rahimnathwani 7y ago
Perhaps not everyone agrees what newspapers are 'meant to be'. Maybe their owners and managers generally seek to maximise profits. Maybe those which have an overriding mission (NYT? WSJ? The Guardian? The Economist?) are exceptions.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  As a customer, I don't care about your profit. The more obviously you try to maximize it, the more sacrifices you make on the product (by e.g. using ads, "native advertising", tracking, and other scummy business practices), and the less I want it. In the limit, the newspaper that follows "maximize profits" route look like Breitbart.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Most aren't out to maximize profits for personal gain. It's almost a joke at this point that you don't get into the business to make real money anymore. The corporations that [in some cases, once and no longer] held the media properties that are suffering sought those kinds of gains—in more recent years it seems to be left to either companies or "benefactors" who want the outlets to persist who buy them up and inject money into them rather than taking exponential profits. Sadly, many things that look like efforts to maximize profits are more desperate efforts to keep the lights on. In fact the numbers I hear talked about with any fervor the most are readership and awards. Side note: the actual money-making business for the publisher I've been working with is their custom-content business. Basically arranging, design, and print/digital distribution of advertisements and catalogs for other businesses. This is completely distinct from any editorial products.
freehunter 7y ago
I run a company that has a bunch of small-town local news websites and we run into this all the time. It takes money to keep a website running. And in order for people to have the time to go into the field chasing down stories, they need to get paid. And our own advertising that we run to get and retain readers costs us real money. But where does/should our money come from? Right now we're get some money from businesses advertising on our sites, but it's small money because it's small businesses in small towns. Just enough to keep the lights on, with a little left over for reinvestment into the company's mission. None of the founders have taken even a single paycheck. And taking business's money makes me nervous because I feel pressure on every article we write to make sure we're business-friendly to not scare away advertisers, which is not a good pressure for a news company to have. And in towns of 5k-10k residents, your audience is limited to the point where referral ads or Google ads are pointless. Probably half of our company meetings have some kind of "where are we going to get money" conversations.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  This is a vital mission and one I'm intensely curious about. I previously was a devops engineer and manager for a large regional newspaper, so this issue is near and dear to my heart. What part of the world do you operate in?
  - freehunter 7y ago
    I spoke more about the company recently in another thread [1]. The company is called Citieo [2]. We're based out of Michigan. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere. Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. We see a lot of NIMBY-ism and fear propagated on social media and in outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, and we want to foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face. We still have a lot of work to do (a lot of work) but we're a pretty small organization working as hard as we can with not a lot of money. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971460 [2] https://citieo.com/posts/citieo-real-life https://citieo.com/posts/citieo-real-life
Nasrudith 7y ago
I think the unfortunate assumption fact is that intentions and especially original intentions don't really matter with how much they drift. Newspapers really mostly cost time - it is just that people can't spare the time - much less with the relevant abilities. I am not sure if there is one without problems in some way. Even independent funding can always be corrupted. I sadly must question the historic effectiveness of the newspapers at the first goal. In the past they were really /even worse/. Kent State was initially greeted with a "the damn kids had it coming" reaction and the Winter Soldier testimonies of War Crimes committed or witnessed in Vietnam were outright ignored on the east coast. We remember Woodward and Bernstein well for their role in the Pentagon Papers but they were outliers and even they relied upon covert betrayals showing the ineffectiveness of the news institutions at being effective oversight under those circumstances when there was an entire additional secret and illegal undeclared war in Cambodia. Internet reporting can be better at least for breaking big stories as anyone can post bombshells - but anyone can also post absolute crap.
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
Accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society is presumably of great value to those members of society - which is to say, people would pay for that. If that information costs $1,000 to gather and publish, and 1,500 people are willing to pay a dollar to read it (or rather, 100,000 people will pay $0.25 to read it and a collection of other stories like it), then you're in business! Unfortunately, it's proven to be a hard problem to look at your $500 profit and refuse an additional $500 profit to run a scummy ad next to the valued story. Ethics and long-term-value decisions are just not easy to optimize for - and I don't think the government is very good at that either; they just optimize for the next election instead of profits, which doesn't seem any better.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society is presumably of great value to those members of society - which is to say, people would pay for that. One of the main reason behind government-imposed taxes is precisely because things that benefit society are not perceived as worthwhile to pay for by individuals, even if said individuals get direct benefit from it. The mission of news platform looks like something perfectly aligned with public funding... except for the risk of government influence on published content.
kalleboo 7y ago
Some nordic countries subsidize their newspapers after a trend in the 60's where cities and towns lost their second local newspapers and ended up with only a single (possibly biased) one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support
- draugadrotten 7y ago
  BAD IDEA. As a result, big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources, and use the ownership of the second local newspaper cash in from the free lunch. Instead of helping the small publishers, the subsidies go to the biggest creating an even worse competitive situation for small publishers. Real world Example: Sweden's media giant Bonnier News is also the LARGEST receiver of subsidies. https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/bonniers-dominans-okar-i-mediesverige https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/bonniers-dominans-okar-i-mediesve...
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    > big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources That sounds like Sinclair. Seems the U.S. ended up in the same place.
- nokcha 7y ago
  Exempting newspapers from sales tax seems like a good idea. Perhaps the government could go even further and match subscription fees up X dollars per year per customer, as an incentive for people to subscribe. To prevent abuse (such as kickbacks to subscribers), the government could require that participating newspaper companies limit the benefits of matched subscriptions to (1) delivery of a physical newspaper and (2) online access to the content of the physical newspaper.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
> Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society. Are they? Have they ever been? The Daily Mail has been promoting a specific political stance since its inception. Fact and relevance are secondary. One Lord Rothermere was a bit keen on fascism in the 1930s so ran the front page feature "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" praising their good, sound conservative ideas. W Randolph Hearst just about created the US gutter press promoting sensationalism over fact, sales over fact, etc. Pulitzer and Hearst spent decades trying to out-sensationalise each other. Yet after WW1 he leaned conservative and started promoting US isolationism. One thing he wasn't was consistent. There's a big irony to the Pulitzer prize, established some time after his death promoting values that Pulitzer himself never did. That most traditional newspapers have been funded by the wealthy has tended to bias them as you might expect.
linuxftw 7y ago
IMO, the government does indirectly fund the larger news organizations, at least in the US. Political ad spending is the cash-cow of the news industry.
PretzelFisch 7y ago
Wouldn't the same model PBS/NPR work for print news as well? Some funding from the government but most from donations.
patentatt 7y ago
Should reporters be publicly elected and publicly funded? We don’t perceive politicians as subject to “state bias,” right? Would that politicize the reporting too much? Interesting to think about
zzzcpan 7y ago
> Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society. They never ever meant to be that. They always meant to do one thing and one thing only - influence opinions. So it's hard to figure out an honest way of paying for news, because that would mean paying for newspapers that advance your interests, but reach and try to influence other people with different interests. This is also the reason why bias is not really a problem, biased news is just news as they meant to be. You just call them biased when you don't like who is trying to influence you, but nevertheless influence is always there and is what news are about. In general big news publishers are bad for society, since they concentrate too much influence over significant parts of it.
asdff 7y ago
Paid subscriptions. The people bitching about paywalls in reddit and HN comment sections are a loud minority. The fact is, they work and are worth it imo.
dexen 7y ago
>the function newspapers are intended to serve isn't to generate profits, nor even to be cost-effective By disclaiming profit you're ditching both the measuring tool, and also the motivation. With profit motive gone, the "long term greedy" investors who wants to build out wide & stable business over decades, to ensure safe retirement & good future for children go elsewhere, and instead replaced by vultures circling the last few scraps of value. With profit motive gone, the well prepared, diligent, and knowledgeable journalists go elsewhere, and their roles get filled in with inexperienced, energetic activists, who get "paid" with access to audience to perform activism on. Which is exactly what we see presently among the big names in online news.

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.
pard68 7y ago
Depends on the nation. I suspect it would be fine in a lot of Europe, and is already the case in a lot of Europe I believe. In the former British colonies,and the United States in particular, that wouldn't fly over too well. The US public broadcasting networks are often not news outlets but entertainment sources (kids shows, education, etc). The US and to some extent the rest of the colonies hold a lot more distrust for the government than European nations and a government funded news organization would be considered a government shill. Also, a US government news organization would have to contend with laws which would make it difficult for them to function .
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- matthew349hall 7y ago
  What about NPR?

BlueTemplar 7y ago

Well, private persons/corporations can't fund newspapers without bias either, so I'm not sure why the focus on government is relevant ?

gonzo41 7y ago
I've often wondered why the government doesn't establish a trust to fund public news.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Separation of powers. Private people and corporations can't have you arrested and then spread stories about how you deserved it. The paranoia that it would be abused is very rational given that mere Whitehouse Access has been abused as a carrot/stick to influence reporting.

chunkyslink 7y ago

There is no difficulty. The BBC news.bbc.co.uk and theguardian.co.uk are both examples of well funded, non biased news sources.

koodiorja 7y ago
I would argue that no news source is unbiased, at least I've yet to find a news source that has no bias whatsoever about any topic related to politics and society.
sefrost 7y ago
I started reading The Guardian a few years ago because the site loaded so fast, and that in turn literally caused me to change my views on various issues. Perhaps food for thought for the other news sites.
lsd5you 7y ago
This is a ludicrous position. Apart from the fact that they have different editorial positions from each other. They cannot be both unbiased. The BBC makes some effort to be unbiased - by giving air time based on e.g. based on success at the ballot, but inevitably reflects the metropolitan position of most of it's employees.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
The Guardian has taken a clear turn towards a clickbait approach in the last several years. Much of the newspaper is now as as sensationalist as a tabloid, although The Guardian has taken the opposite side of the culture wars from most of them as its niche. I still find some quality reporting in The Guardian, but it too is clearly facing the same financial pressures as other newspapers.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  I'd happily pay for membership of The Guardian if there was an option to block all the opinion pieces. The actual news part of their operation seems to make a good-faith effort to report impartially, but it's being pushed out by an increasing quantity of rabble-rousing opinion. I'd be more than willing to support the former, but I couldn't in good conscience support the latter.

p2t2p 7y ago

Well, if people aren't ready to pay for "accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society" may be said sources of such information should naturally die-off and people which weren't ready to fund them should bear the consequences which will be disastrous? On other hand, this bias thing is not inherent. ABC survives somehow in Australia, even though current clowns in the shitshow in Canberra work hard to kill it.

rahimnathwani 7y ago

Perhaps not everyone agrees what newspapers are 'meant to be'. Maybe their owners and managers generally seek to maximise profits. Maybe those which have an overriding mission (NYT? WSJ? The Guardian? The Economist?) are exceptions.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
As a customer, I don't care about your profit. The more obviously you try to maximize it, the more sacrifices you make on the product (by e.g. using ads, "native advertising", tracking, and other scummy business practices), and the less I want it. In the limit, the newspaper that follows "maximize profits" route look like Breitbart.
52-6F-62 7y ago
Most aren't out to maximize profits for personal gain. It's almost a joke at this point that you don't get into the business to make real money anymore. The corporations that [in some cases, once and no longer] held the media properties that are suffering sought those kinds of gains—in more recent years it seems to be left to either companies or "benefactors" who want the outlets to persist who buy them up and inject money into them rather than taking exponential profits. Sadly, many things that look like efforts to maximize profits are more desperate efforts to keep the lights on. In fact the numbers I hear talked about with any fervor the most are readership and awards. Side note: the actual money-making business for the publisher I've been working with is their custom-content business. Basically arranging, design, and print/digital distribution of advertisements and catalogs for other businesses. This is completely distinct from any editorial products.

freehunter 7y ago

I run a company that has a bunch of small-town local news websites and we run into this all the time. It takes money to keep a website running. And in order for people to have the time to go into the field chasing down stories, they need to get paid. And our own advertising that we run to get and retain readers costs us real money. But where does/should our money come from? Right now we're get some money from businesses advertising on our sites, but it's small money because it's small businesses in small towns. Just enough to keep the lights on, with a little left over for reinvestment into the company's mission. None of the founders have taken even a single paycheck. And taking business's money makes me nervous because I feel pressure on every article we write to make sure we're business-friendly to not scare away advertisers, which is not a good pressure for a news company to have. And in towns of 5k-10k residents, your audience is limited to the point where referral ads or Google ads are pointless. Probably half of our company meetings have some kind of "where are we going to get money" conversations.

bovermyer 7y ago
This is a vital mission and one I'm intensely curious about. I previously was a devops engineer and manager for a large regional newspaper, so this issue is near and dear to my heart. What part of the world do you operate in?
- freehunter 7y ago
  I spoke more about the company recently in another thread [1]. The company is called Citieo [2]. We're based out of Michigan. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere. Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. We see a lot of NIMBY-ism and fear propagated on social media and in outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, and we want to foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face. We still have a lot of work to do (a lot of work) but we're a pretty small organization working as hard as we can with not a lot of money. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971460 [2] https://citieo.com/posts/citieo-real-life https://citieo.com/posts/citieo-real-life

Nasrudith 7y ago

I think the unfortunate assumption fact is that intentions and especially original intentions don't really matter with how much they drift. Newspapers really mostly cost time - it is just that people can't spare the time - much less with the relevant abilities. I am not sure if there is one without problems in some way. Even independent funding can always be corrupted. I sadly must question the historic effectiveness of the newspapers at the first goal. In the past they were really /even worse/. Kent State was initially greeted with a "the damn kids had it coming" reaction and the Winter Soldier testimonies of War Crimes committed or witnessed in Vietnam were outright ignored on the east coast. We remember Woodward and Bernstein well for their role in the Pentagon Papers but they were outliers and even they relied upon covert betrayals showing the ineffectiveness of the news institutions at being effective oversight under those circumstances when there was an entire additional secret and illegal undeclared war in Cambodia. Internet reporting can be better at least for breaking big stories as anyone can post bombshells - but anyone can also post absolute crap.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

Accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society is presumably of great value to those members of society - which is to say, people would pay for that. If that information costs $1,000 to gather and publish, and 1,500 people are willing to pay a dollar to read it (or rather, 100,000 people will pay $0.25 to read it and a collection of other stories like it), then you're in business! Unfortunately, it's proven to be a hard problem to look at your $500 profit and refuse an additional $500 profit to run a scummy ad next to the valued story. Ethics and long-term-value decisions are just not easy to optimize for - and I don't think the government is very good at that either; they just optimize for the next election instead of profits, which doesn't seem any better.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society is presumably of great value to those members of society - which is to say, people would pay for that. One of the main reason behind government-imposed taxes is precisely because things that benefit society are not perceived as worthwhile to pay for by individuals, even if said individuals get direct benefit from it. The mission of news platform looks like something perfectly aligned with public funding... except for the risk of government influence on published content.

kalleboo 7y ago

Some nordic countries subsidize their newspapers after a trend in the 60's where cities and towns lost their second local newspapers and ended up with only a single (possibly biased) one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_support

draugadrotten 7y ago
BAD IDEA. As a result, big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources, and use the ownership of the second local newspaper cash in from the free lunch. Instead of helping the small publishers, the subsidies go to the biggest creating an even worse competitive situation for small publishers. Real world Example: Sweden's media giant Bonnier News is also the LARGEST receiver of subsidies. https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/bonniers-dominans-okar-i-mediesverige https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/bonniers-dominans-okar-i-mediesve...
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  > big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources That sounds like Sinclair. Seems the U.S. ended up in the same place.
nokcha 7y ago
Exempting newspapers from sales tax seems like a good idea. Perhaps the government could go even further and match subscription fees up X dollars per year per customer, as an incentive for people to subscribe. To prevent abuse (such as kickbacks to subscribers), the government could require that participating newspaper companies limit the benefits of matched subscriptions to (1) delivery of a physical newspaper and (2) online access to the content of the physical newspaper.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

> Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society. Are they? Have they ever been? The Daily Mail has been promoting a specific political stance since its inception. Fact and relevance are secondary. One Lord Rothermere was a bit keen on fascism in the 1930s so ran the front page feature "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" praising their good, sound conservative ideas. W Randolph Hearst just about created the US gutter press promoting sensationalism over fact, sales over fact, etc. Pulitzer and Hearst spent decades trying to out-sensationalise each other. Yet after WW1 he leaned conservative and started promoting US isolationism. One thing he wasn't was consistent. There's a big irony to the Pulitzer prize, established some time after his death promoting values that Pulitzer himself never did. That most traditional newspapers have been funded by the wealthy has tended to bias them as you might expect.

linuxftw 7y ago

IMO, the government does indirectly fund the larger news organizations, at least in the US. Political ad spending is the cash-cow of the news industry.

PretzelFisch 7y ago

Wouldn't the same model PBS/NPR work for print news as well? Some funding from the government but most from donations.

patentatt 7y ago

Should reporters be publicly elected and publicly funded? We don’t perceive politicians as subject to “state bias,” right? Would that politicize the reporting too much? Interesting to think about

zzzcpan 7y ago

> Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society. They never ever meant to be that. They always meant to do one thing and one thing only - influence opinions. So it's hard to figure out an honest way of paying for news, because that would mean paying for newspapers that advance your interests, but reach and try to influence other people with different interests. This is also the reason why bias is not really a problem, biased news is just news as they meant to be. You just call them biased when you don't like who is trying to influence you, but nevertheless influence is always there and is what news are about. In general big news publishers are bad for society, since they concentrate too much influence over significant parts of it.

asdff 7y ago

Paid subscriptions. The people bitching about paywalls in reddit and HN comment sections are a loud minority. The fact is, they work and are worth it imo.

dexen 7y ago

>the function newspapers are intended to serve isn't to generate profits, nor even to be cost-effective By disclaiming profit you're ditching both the measuring tool, and also the motivation. With profit motive gone, the "long term greedy" investors who wants to build out wide & stable business over decades, to ensure safe retirement & good future for children go elsewhere, and instead replaced by vultures circling the last few scraps of value. With profit motive gone, the well prepared, diligent, and knowledgeable journalists go elsewhere, and their roles get filled in with inexperienced, energetic activists, who get "paid" with access to audience to perform activism on. Which is exactly what we see presently among the big names in online news.