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Nah, it's because the internet lets you find hundreds or thousands of news sources very easily, and the lack of willingness for people to pay for subscriptions/
by CM30 6y ago
Nah, it's because the internet lets you find hundreds or thousands of news sources very easily, and the lack of willingness for people to pay for subscriptions/ease of setting up an ad supported news site means there's no reason to pay money for any of them.
The traditional media only surived because they had little competition and there's a decent barrier to entry when it came to publishing information/news. Now they're competing with every other media outlet in the world, plus anyone with a blog or YouTube channel. Add this to ways the news is discussed online (people can just paraphrase details from stories and discuss them on social media), and the value of a news story has just completely crashed.
Does that mean Google and Facebook haven't done any damage? No probably not. The fact they control so much of the advertising market has had some effects, and some might say things like requiring paywalled stories to be viewable without a subscription in search has had an effect too.
But the fundamental issue isn't that. It's that the internet and technology has fundamentally broken the business model these outlets used to rely on, and there's basically nothing they can do to change that.