14 ms·

We Never Paid for Journalism

• ravenstine 7y ago
  The actual content begins in the 4th paragraph. The first part made my eyes glaze over.
  • Nasrudith 7y ago
    Reminds me of the one snark that said "style" is because the journalists really want to be novelists but can't finish a full length one or get published so they slip it into their day job. In all seriousness it seems like an attempt to fill a minimum word count without much research or math like say percentages of revenue by ads vs consumer sales over time.
• imgabe 7y ago
  I was going to buy a physical newspaper recently thinking it would make for cheap packing material, only to find that the Sunday edition of the NY Times is like $6 now. It's not as fat as it used to be either it seems.
  • excalibur 7y ago
    Someone keeps leaving physical papers in my driveway despite me never asking them to or subscribing to anything. They usually go directly in the bin, but I also usually feel guilty that I'm not saving them all for some unknown future project.
    • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      You're playing an important role in the economy of unread newsprint. Just keep throwing it away and someone gets to keep their job.
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    Inflation makes up a good part of that. The Sunday Times ran $0.30 in 1969, which is $2.10 in 2019 dollars: https://goodmorninggloucester.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/woodstock-front-page-new-york-times-sunday-august-17-1969.jpg?w=700 https://goodmorninggloucester.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/wo... Price of the Sunday edition was raised to $0.20 in 1952, or $1.92 in 2019 dollars. 1974's $1 Sunday paper would be $5.21 today: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/29/archives/times-to-increase-daily-price-to-20c-rise-affects-city-and-areas.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/29/archives/times-to-increas... The $0.01 daily paper cost of 1898 would (based on 1913 dollars) today be about $0.26. The US dollar actually depreciated generally through about 1900, though at a fairly gradual rate. On September 13, 1987, the Sunday Times reached its maximum extent: 12 pounds (5.4 kg), 1,612 pages. https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-the-new-york-times https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-the-new-york-... https://www.usinflationcalculator.com https://www.usinflationcalculator.com
• EGreg 7y ago
  We need to have a way to pay for digital content with micropayments. Anyone remember Xanadu? Here is what I plan to get done in 2020: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONTENT https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONT...
• vearwhershuh 7y ago
  I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.
  • tambourine_man 7y ago
    Interesting, could you share a link?
    • brm 7y ago
      These are the best three I found with a quick search: http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-mind-edward-bernays-and-the-birth-of-public-relations-44393 http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-... https://books.google.com/books?id=3De8nd_B_C8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=3De8nd_B_C8C&printsec=fron... http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html
    • RaiseProfits 7y ago
      I also recommend Adam Curtis’s four part documentary “The Century of the Self”, the first episode of which is here: https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04 https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04 The first episode deals exclusively with Bernays, and the following three episodes follow a political narrative of impact. I believe Curtis’s “Hypernormalisation” would be more salient to the narrative here, which discusses the funding of misinformation as an alternative to traditional authoritarian power structures like censorship: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    Propaganda, possibly Public Relations, or a different book? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Publications
  • 7y ago
• excalibur 7y ago
  > Today, the advertisers see's exactly how many times their ads have been viewed, and pay accordingly. The rise of Ad blockers did not improve the situation. I eschewed ad blockers until around 2016, when the (relatively mainstream) sites I was frequenting started getting hit with a lot of malicious ads. I'm happy to support content I enjoy, but not at the expense of my own security.
  • CrazyStat 7y ago
    I started strongly encouraging my family and friends to use adblockers around the same time, when nytimes.com was hit by a malvertising campaign. I understand the economic model of free access with advertising, but I'm not going to put my computer and data at risk for it. Allowing ads to include executable code was idiotic.
• jld 7y ago
  It used to be that the "profit" from advertisement paid for journalists to write stories that would get you to look at them. Now the profit from ads largely goes to engineers to build products for the web, (and shareholders of tech companies). Both journalism and web stuff provide public good, but we need to figure out how to replace the revenue that financed journalism. The public was getting it for "free" before, and when it moved online we continued to want to get it for free, but the advertising model did not survive the transition.
  • RhysU 7y ago
    What would it look like to "engineer" journalism?
• sudosteph 7y ago
  > The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized product and how much abuse a newspaper can take, but still wonder if any papers took a stab at delivering other print products before the internet era.
  • iguy 7y ago
    Interesting thought. Although perhaps the network you build to deliver a million identical papers just looks too different to what you'd need to deliver individual items?
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • jagged-chisel 7y ago
    The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, weighing more, for various customers.
    • jbattle 7y ago
      I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable workers. Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's edge
• gitpusher 7y ago
  TL;DR - Advertising was always the primary business model, even in the print age.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• jawns 7y ago
  Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now? Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way they didn't have to do in previous generations. But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off advertising elsewhere.
  • vkou 7y ago
    > They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't. For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web. > What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search. Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.
• jldugger 7y ago
  This is a somewhat obvious take on the decline of paper journalism. Yes, you paid for that newspaper / magazine, but the majority of money is in the ads space. Even that payment? A screening tool for advertisers -- if you don't read the paper or more importantly see the ads, you'll presumably cancel and save the money. There was a tweetstorm by some journalism prof I can't recall that was basically saying newspapers killed themselves, by consolidation, mergers and over-reliance on classified ads and news-by-wire. By the time Yahoo! news came along started publishing AP news wire feeds, and Craigslist allowed free listings, they had already cost optimized away local news they'd need to compete against new entrants. Perhaps someone will find that twitter thread for me.
  • jldugger 7y ago
    Found it! https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233 https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184... A few choice quotes: > For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on. > Classified ads were a damn boondoggle. $500 in a mid-metro to place a car ad. The more expensive your item, the more you got charged. No wonder people rebelled the minute they were offered the ability to do it for free. Newmark didn’t kill classifieds; news publisher greed did. > Profit margins for companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder were commonly around 30-40%. > So chains started gobbling up papers all over the country in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They took on debt to do this because with 40% margins, there wasn’t much downside in that model.
• blueyes 7y ago
  While the 50 cents per edition that newspapers charged was not enough to cover their costs, it sent a signal to advertisers that they were getting a certain type of eyeball. An eyeball that had 50 disposable cents per day to buy packaged news in a local market. That 50 cents was an important signal. Newspapers would find other ways of getting those same eyeballs, by striking deals with hotels and airlines and essentially supplying papers at a deep discount, but making it up with the fees they could charge to advertisers based on their access to travelers, who have a lot more than 50 cents to spend. Some publications took it one step further: they covered business and their readers could put the subscription on their corporate cards as a business expense. Personally, it cost them nothing. This is the strategy of the WSJ, the FT, and what the NYT would like to be with DealBook, etc.
  • ninth_ant 7y ago
    Is that the 50c really signalling disposable income? Or just that it signalled that the newspapers were being read by humans and not just sitting in a pile somewhere? To my intuition 50c per day doesn’t signal a useful amount of disposable income even in 2006 dollars.
    • ggggtez 7y ago
      This is more than a Netflix subscription. And people still share their subscriptions with friends and family to reduce costs. $0.50 a day is real money, even today.
  • flukus 7y ago
    I thought it was more to do with the type of person that read papers more than any price signal. If I were to generalize my experience with people reading papers it's that the poorest 20% of society never read them, the next 20% read the Sunday paper, the next 20% read it daily and the 20% after that read something like the economist. Through self selection advertisers could target their audiences somewhat. Of course those are extremely broad generalizations.
  • nitwit005 7y ago
    Also solved the issue of people walking off with a giant stack of newspapers and throwing them in a gutter, as occurred with some completely free papers.
• pacaro 7y ago
  The same is true for TV in most places, shows are/were carefully constructed to maximize the odds that you wouldn't change channel during the commercial break
• davidw 7y ago
  I subscribe to: * https://www.economist.com/ https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of various subjects worldwide. * https://www.washingtonpost.com/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ - good coverage of US politics * https://www.bendbulletin.com/ https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - because I live here and they're the only ones that always have someone at things like city council meetings, county commissioner meetings and the like.
• Reedx 7y ago
  Journalism is in such a disastrous state, I feel like/hope there's a growing appetite for a source that is of genuinely high quality and has an uncompromising approach. No ads, no clickbait, no partisan nonsense, no dark patterns, no hit pieces, no mixing of news and opinion. Just uncompromisingly focused fact-based journalism (of course there will always be some bias and mistakes, but there's a lot you can do to mitigate these things). I wonder if there are enough people that would pay $X/mo for this to make it viable. I'd happily pay at least $20/mo.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    You pay about $20/month today for a digital subscription for one of the global brands like the New York Times, Economist, etc. which still have ads to a greater or lesser degree. They're doing kinda/sorta OK with digital subscriptions but basically journalism is expensive to produce.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • xtracto 7y ago
    I remember my dad paying subscription for Time magazine since I was a very little (Mexican living in Mexico). I always felt their journalism quality was very good. Are they still doing print?
  • nickrubin 7y ago
    https://winno.app https://winno.app
  • cm2187 7y ago
    I think what you are looking for is news agencies (Reuters, AFP, AP, etc), or perhaps financial news which tend to be less politicised (WSJ).
• bynkman 7y ago
  The rise of Craigslist is one factor. But I'm surprised that nobody is talking about local advertisers vs national. National business and websites are more likely to advertise on a (local) news website, compared to your local business. For example, twenty years ago a local mom and pop pizza joint would be apt to advertise in a newspaper, due to a captive local audience. But today, they'd be less likely to advertise on a local newspaper website. So there goes that revenue. And you're not going to find them pushing ads to the Huffington post. Also the rise of online business review websites (Yelp, Google Reviews, Trip Advisor, ect) are now more useful and specifically targeted to an audience looking for local eats. (And also killed the Yellowpages.)
• frogpelt 7y ago
  The 50 cents probably covered delivery of the paper, right?
• scarejunba 7y ago
  Most newspapers are just the equivalent of retweets - as mediocre journalists rewrite AP and Reuters reports. These jobs are going to go away. Real journalism costs money. And it will go to the real journalists in time. I predict that in the next 30 years we'll have the Taylor Swifts, Kanye Wests, and the Beatles of journalism suck up all of the revenue while the low-effort rewriters are demolished by machines.
• ip26 7y ago
  The model I've wished for is a large micropayment network covering many to most online news sources charging, I don't know, a penny or two per article. Maybe no charge if you close the page after two seconds. Ad views are worth less than that, and I can easily afford ten or twenty cents a day to read the news across a variety of sources. I want to pay for news. But I don't have the budget to pay $20/mo each to six great newspapers all equally worthy of my attention, and nor do most other people. Ten or twenty cents a day is lower than the fifty cents for a paper copy- but the marginal overhead is also zero.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    $20/month is pretty much the rate in current dollars to pay for (at most) one "great newspaper."
    • ip26 7y ago
      Sure, but I think it's just one local optimum. The price is so high that few people will pay it, which means the price has to be high. But if the price was low and paying was painless, far more people might pay and generate the same or better revenue.
• mjparrott 7y ago
  Why read news at all? https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-information-diet/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informati...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• 3xblah 7y ago
  "At the end of the day, the price that you and I pay, whether it is for the print copy or digital, it is only a very small part of the revenue. The price paid for the printed copy was by no means sustaining the newspaper business. It was advertisers all along. And they paid the price for the privilege of having as many eyeballs the newspaper could expose their ads to." Is it possible to keep a newspaper in business by purchasing subscriptions. Think about that the next time someone suggests subscribing to some popular newspaper to counter the effects of declining journalism.
• cm2187 7y ago
  As an unrelated note to the author if he reads this, it helps readability a lot to not write large amounts with all digits ($3,260,060,000) but abbreviated ($3.26bn). Think what you would do with file sizes.