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Aside from Bloomberg's scummy behavior, this story highlights the eternal dilemma of journalism. To write good stories, you need access to the subjects. But i

Aside from Bloomberg's scummy behavior, this story highlights the eternal dilemma of journalism. To write good stories, you need access to the subjects. But if the stories make the subjects look bad, you lose access. Coupled with the fact that newspapers don't always make a lot of money these days, and often rely on wealthy benefactors that make their money in other ways, you can end up in an awkward spot where one wrong story can damage a newspaper's base of information but also it's financial foundations. I don't think there's any good answer to this question.

yters 6y ago
Why would Bloomberg need to continue selling terminals to China for the journalists to research and publish?
- recursive 6y ago
  Because in order for their journalists to research and publish, Bloomberg must continue to exist.
  - yters 6y ago
    I suspect even if they lost the China market, Bloomberg would get along fine.
briandear 6y ago
They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link. A second point (that actually justifies the practice of paywall bypass,) is that who is willing to pay for news when news outlets function frequently as PR organs for the constituencies they “cover?” The idea that you have to be nice to subjects in order to cover them is nonsense. What that actually means is that reporters lack courage or even basic training on how to get stories from confrontational subjects. So what if China gets pissed off. Publishing Xinhua-approved stories isn’t journalism, it’s PR. It’s not different than publishing DNC or RNC talking points. If all the journalists in China get kicked out, that still doesn’t preclude covering China — it just makes it harder — but it’s already hard, so there isn’t any difference. By letting China dictate coverage, that’s worse than no coverage at all since only an approved version of the story is all that gets out and people then are inclined to accept that “truth” without challenge because $some_international_media_outlet reported it. China’s obfuscations and outright lies during the Coronavirus situation makes this topic even more noteworthy — outlets promoting and parroting the CCP official line have been deadly; one example was China officially reporting that the Wuhan Coronavirus wasn’t human-to-human transmissible even after they knew that to be completely false and they themselves instituted mitigation for human-to-human transmission that, according to them, couldn’t happen. Even more ridiculously, the UN appointed China to a human rights panel on free speech.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
  >They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link. As a paid subscriber of several digital-only newspapers, I only want them to publish their news as publicly as possible, so I and others can know better. Walls don't help. When we stop pretending that the news must be rarified to be of value, then we may start supporting actual journalism for what it does best: investigate and publish, instead of sell the news as a product. So as the readers, we should support them, not buy them.

yters 6y ago

Why would Bloomberg need to continue selling terminals to China for the journalists to research and publish?

recursive 6y ago
Because in order for their journalists to research and publish, Bloomberg must continue to exist.
- yters 6y ago
  I suspect even if they lost the China market, Bloomberg would get along fine.

briandear 6y ago

They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link. A second point (that actually justifies the practice of paywall bypass,) is that who is willing to pay for news when news outlets function frequently as PR organs for the constituencies they “cover?” The idea that you have to be nice to subjects in order to cover them is nonsense. What that actually means is that reporters lack courage or even basic training on how to get stories from confrontational subjects. So what if China gets pissed off. Publishing Xinhua-approved stories isn’t journalism, it’s PR. It’s not different than publishing DNC or RNC talking points. If all the journalists in China get kicked out, that still doesn’t preclude covering China — it just makes it harder — but it’s already hard, so there isn’t any difference. By letting China dictate coverage, that’s worse than no coverage at all since only an approved version of the story is all that gets out and people then are inclined to accept that “truth” without challenge because $some_international_media_outlet reported it. China’s obfuscations and outright lies during the Coronavirus situation makes this topic even more noteworthy — outlets promoting and parroting the CCP official line have been deadly; one example was China officially reporting that the Wuhan Coronavirus wasn’t human-to-human transmissible even after they knew that to be completely false and they themselves instituted mitigation for human-to-human transmission that, according to them, couldn’t happen. Even more ridiculously, the UN appointed China to a human rights panel on free speech.

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
>They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link. As a paid subscriber of several digital-only newspapers, I only want them to publish their news as publicly as possible, so I and others can know better. Walls don't help. When we stop pretending that the news must be rarified to be of value, then we may start supporting actual journalism for what it does best: investigate and publish, instead of sell the news as a product. So as the readers, we should support them, not buy them.