11 ms·

I subscribe to the paper version of my local paper because it is so much easier to actually get information from. It's so well designed. I think the reason peop

I subscribe to the paper version of my local paper because it is so much easier to actually get information from. It's so well designed. I think the reason people have gravitated to online news is herd mentality. What I like about paper news: my focus is more under my control. I can evaluate and skim whole articles at once. I am not constrained by what if visible in the window. Also, no distractions. Every time I open my computer or phone I am waylaid by distractions. I am a software / AI engineer and I think we have created a dystopia. One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.

hilbertseries 7y ago
Yea, pretty much 100% the web is destroying news. Everyone wants a free ad supported product now and the only way that model works is if you get enough page views. So news websites have to prioritize content that generates views, rather than good reporting. Which is slowly killing journalism.
- Swizec 7y ago
  This has always been the case in physical news as well. You live and die by your readership (views). Real money always came from ads.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Yeah, but the market effect is very different when readers view articles individually verse having to buy the entire paper. If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered. With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks. This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      > If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered. This also depends on how much competition you have. If there are maybe half a dozen competing newspapers, outrageous gossipy headlines and perhaps the promise of a nude woman on page 3 will sell an entire newspaper to a specific target market towards which you can tailor your advertising. Another newspaper can make lots of money by targeting a different market segment. This is how clickbait works, too. Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Brietbart, and the Daily Mail could have all been paper newspapers that someone would buy in a competitive enough newspaper market. One of them is!
    - fancyfish 7y ago
      I'm torn because unbundling also allows for niche publications to get the readers who are interested in reading a few articles but not enough to pay for a full subscription to a publication they may or may not like. I guess another solution to that would be the heavily-discounted "intro" period offer or x-free articles per month. For me there are a few magazines I enjoy reading the occasional article from but don't want to pay for a subscription because the costs would quickly get out of hand. But I acknowledge that paying per article could hurt the "subsidies" within a paper, for example the revenue from sports section readers helping pay for investigative journalism, leading to a race to the bottom as you point out.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      This is ignores that when a niche is saturated, you have to do something different to avoid losing to the strongest competitor.
  - rch 7y ago
    > Real money always came from ads This could still be the case, but it should work more like craigslist.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Craigslist has completely dominated the old market for classified ads, and it did it without having to keep a vestigial newspaper attached.
  - hansthehorse 7y ago
    Back in the day a very significant percentage of revenue came from the classifieds.
    - pixl97 7y ago
      Craigslist killed the newspaper.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Yes, the advertising section.
    - majos 7y ago
      I have heard this. Does anyone have numbers to back it up?
    - DrScump 7y ago
      The San Jose Mercury-News used to be hugely profitable for exactly this reason. They had the biggest classified section of any paper in the country. The Monday edition was maybe 4X as thick as its modern equivalent.
- philwelch 7y ago
  This is a massive oversimplification. The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time. It was called "yellow journalism", it incited the Spanish-American War, and it was the business model of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In other words, if you are an excellent journalist, you get a prize named after the guy who founded and ran the Gilded Age equivalent of Buzzfeed. Each US city used to have maybe dozens of newspapers of varying quality and bias. (This is similar to the UK newspaper landscape--in fact, the lower end of that landscape includes the Daily Mail, which translated its tabloid journalism model rather seamlessly to the era of clickbait.) What started killing print journalism was radio and later TV journalism, which were far less substantial (because they lacked the information density of the written word) but far more appealing (because of the ease of consumption and the stimulation of sound and video). This is what culled the vast newspaper markets down to the city-wide monopoly or duopoly system. And because the remaining newspaper readership consisted of the more literate and invested members of the population, print journalism briefly had more journalistic value. Then cable news disrupted the broadcast networks, talk radio disrupted the editorial oligopoly of the major newspapers and TV news, and finally the internet broke the whole thing wide open. Including the glorious period of time when "blogs" were considered a serious threat to "legitimate journalism".
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    In your theory, why did literate and engaged people abandon print journalism for Internet but not TV?
    - Spivak 7y ago
      Because this theory gets the timeline right but the value judgements wrong. The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away. People who were previously “engaged” with local newspapers are now the commenters on news sites.
      - 7y ago
anthk 7y ago
I just use an RSS reader.
- Valord 7y ago
  This. At a minimum RSS keeps you off bloated sites for headline/article browsing. Some sites like Arstechnica give you full text RSS feeds with their subscription.

hilbertseries 7y ago

Yea, pretty much 100% the web is destroying news. Everyone wants a free ad supported product now and the only way that model works is if you get enough page views. So news websites have to prioritize content that generates views, rather than good reporting. Which is slowly killing journalism.

Swizec 7y ago
This has always been the case in physical news as well. You live and die by your readership (views). Real money always came from ads.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Yeah, but the market effect is very different when readers view articles individually verse having to buy the entire paper. If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered. With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks. This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    > If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered. This also depends on how much competition you have. If there are maybe half a dozen competing newspapers, outrageous gossipy headlines and perhaps the promise of a nude woman on page 3 will sell an entire newspaper to a specific target market towards which you can tailor your advertising. Another newspaper can make lots of money by targeting a different market segment. This is how clickbait works, too. Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Brietbart, and the Daily Mail could have all been paper newspapers that someone would buy in a competitive enough newspaper market. One of them is!
  - fancyfish 7y ago
    I'm torn because unbundling also allows for niche publications to get the readers who are interested in reading a few articles but not enough to pay for a full subscription to a publication they may or may not like. I guess another solution to that would be the heavily-discounted "intro" period offer or x-free articles per month. For me there are a few magazines I enjoy reading the occasional article from but don't want to pay for a subscription because the costs would quickly get out of hand. But I acknowledge that paying per article could hurt the "subsidies" within a paper, for example the revenue from sports section readers helping pay for investigative journalism, leading to a race to the bottom as you point out.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    This is ignores that when a niche is saturated, you have to do something different to avoid losing to the strongest competitor.
- rch 7y ago
  > Real money always came from ads This could still be the case, but it should work more like craigslist.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Craigslist has completely dominated the old market for classified ads, and it did it without having to keep a vestigial newspaper attached.
- hansthehorse 7y ago
  Back in the day a very significant percentage of revenue came from the classifieds.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    Craigslist killed the newspaper.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Yes, the advertising section.
  - majos 7y ago
    I have heard this. Does anyone have numbers to back it up?
  - DrScump 7y ago
    The San Jose Mercury-News used to be hugely profitable for exactly this reason. They had the biggest classified section of any paper in the country. The Monday edition was maybe 4X as thick as its modern equivalent.
philwelch 7y ago
This is a massive oversimplification. The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time. It was called "yellow journalism", it incited the Spanish-American War, and it was the business model of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In other words, if you are an excellent journalist, you get a prize named after the guy who founded and ran the Gilded Age equivalent of Buzzfeed. Each US city used to have maybe dozens of newspapers of varying quality and bias. (This is similar to the UK newspaper landscape--in fact, the lower end of that landscape includes the Daily Mail, which translated its tabloid journalism model rather seamlessly to the era of clickbait.) What started killing print journalism was radio and later TV journalism, which were far less substantial (because they lacked the information density of the written word) but far more appealing (because of the ease of consumption and the stimulation of sound and video). This is what culled the vast newspaper markets down to the city-wide monopoly or duopoly system. And because the remaining newspaper readership consisted of the more literate and invested members of the population, print journalism briefly had more journalistic value. Then cable news disrupted the broadcast networks, talk radio disrupted the editorial oligopoly of the major newspapers and TV news, and finally the internet broke the whole thing wide open. Including the glorious period of time when "blogs" were considered a serious threat to "legitimate journalism".
- lonelappde 7y ago
  In your theory, why did literate and engaged people abandon print journalism for Internet but not TV?
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Because this theory gets the timeline right but the value judgements wrong. The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away. People who were previously “engaged” with local newspapers are now the commenters on news sites.
    - 7y ago

anthk 7y ago

I just use an RSS reader.

Valord 7y ago
This. At a minimum RSS keeps you off bloated sites for headline/article browsing. Some sites like Arstechnica give you full text RSS feeds with their subscription.