19 ms·

The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media co

by gfodor 6y ago

The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press. Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it's also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we're going to get are "tabloids for politics" - and that is what we see. It's just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening. Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the "opposite side" media as tabloid-like, it's been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it's still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam's Razor to their own. This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it's critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.

throwaway3699 6y ago
What do you make of the idea that independent journalists on the web being the future?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  They are an alternative, but not a substitute for institutional journalism. News exists to give you an approximate representation of what is happening without having to invest too much effort in actual investigation. It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
  - TheKarateKid 6y ago
    > It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher. While this may be true theoretically, it's already been disproven in practice. People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, whether it is a no-name website or a random tweet that goes viral.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      > People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, Some people certainly do. Whether the majority of voters as a whole do has not been proven to me. There are still millions of loyal subscribers to the big institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, etc.
  - chongli 6y ago
    There is no royal road to trust in journalism, to paraphrase a famous mathematician. If venerable institutions such as the New York Times can be corrupted by the transition to new media and the excesses of the zeitgeist, then there is no quick fix in the form of trust in institutions. The web, more than any other medium before it, has elevated the individual. Therefore, it stands to reason that we ought to place our trust in the individual alone, for whom reputation remains meaningful, and for whom the holding of accountability remains possible.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      Agreed. It is the best approach. I think it is laughable that editorial reasons for publishing are brought to front. I actually remember the political articles I read from the last years. I wouldn't have released the Biden story but certainly not because of alleged editorial reasons. Everyone lies, but you should set sensible limits.
  - jlevers 6y ago
    One source of news that I find particularly trustworthy and impartial (partially because there is no way to financially profit from twisting it, AFAIK) is Wikipedia's current events page[0]. Someone else shared this on HN in the last few weeks, and I've been looking at it almost daily. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- pm90 6y ago
  It isn’t reasonable to expect independent journalists to take over the work that news media currently engages in. While there are legitimate criticisms of media companies becoming too large and being driven by outrage based engagements, they also provide the resources for some of the best journalists to spend a large part of their lives dedicated to digging into a story rather than worrying about how to make ends meet. The press is a pillar of American democracy. Independent journalists are great but they just won’t have the same power or credibility as they do when they’re organized.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    And, to the degree that they're actually doing investigative journalism, it's really hard to see how the finances work out. I guess there's patronage of various sorts but that tends not to work very well and certainly isn't very scalable.
  - hnhnsomething12 6y ago
    My sense is that trust is the invariant in the reader-writer relationship. (Lack of) financing is one method to undermine trust, and a method that news organizations are not immune to. Just look at what the internet has done to them! I'm curious about independent accreditation that journalists can attain and what kind of signal that could provide to contemporary distribution methods. It's easier for Twitter's algorithm to trust such an agency than it is to somehow infer credibility from the lame like/retweet signals it has direct access to.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zarkov99 6y ago
  It won't work, we will simply just have a collection of disparate, narrowly focused and financially limited sources, from which anyone can draw to reinforce whatever view of the world they already have. You need an instution with the resources to look deep and wide and enough of a reputation that people will listen when it reports something they do not like.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  Same is it ever was; IF Stone was one of the greats of his era, and he basically fed himself with a private newsletter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone
drchopchop 6y ago
Why would Substack solve this? It's just a more refined Medium with better monetization opportunities. Being on Substack doesn't mean the author is trustworthy, only that they have content that people will engage with (and potentially pay for), which is still the same KPI you're referring to.
- gfodor 6y ago
  Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. It may turn out that the "V" in MVP here necessarily required monetization, for those who see journalism as the search for truth, not the search for clicks, to take the leap of going indie. Certainly if that trend continues we ought to expect larger organization - where solo-indies merge into mini-guilds, and so on, hopefully to the point where these become large organizations comparable to the 'old' media companies before they shifted away from journalism. Certainly Taibbi and Greenwald could be the first "dyad" to collaborate within this alternative media universe, so that might give us a clue of what organizing principles this new world may operate under, with these new incentives.
- dash2 6y ago
  Substack allows you to subscribe (paid) to an individual journalist or publication. They can then post long-form stories to your inbox. That gives them the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with you where credibility matters. At any rate, that is the argument. I don't think it will work, because buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive. Hell, buying it one paper at a time is too expensive. The better approach is the Apple News Plus or Google News one, where you pay a single subscription for a very wide range of outlets.... But, their idea isn't crazy.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    > "buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive" Yes and no. It is if you want to get all of your daily news that way. But if it's an area you care about and you're somewhat affluent, it's well worth the money. (I'd think a good chunk of HN e.g. has a subscription to Stratechery) It's a workable strategy for a few extremely good journalists. But there are a lot of issues with it. Societally, this is problematic in that it makes decent reporting a luxury good. Long-term, this is a problem because there's no institution where junior journalists can learn the trade. In terms of information, it's a problem because there'll likely be no way to get a wider overview of world news in that way.
HNthrow22 6y ago
> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement KPI for whose benefit? Shareholders or the 'public good'? Why would a for-profit entity optimize for the public good over profits? Fox news is crushing all their competitors optimizing for engagement. Who is winning optimizing for trust?
- gfodor 6y ago
  It goes back to what a company's value proposition is. Media companies certainly benefit from optimizing this KPI, but it means they are now going to become entertainment companies. This isn't necessarily "bad" from the standpoint of the media companies or their shareholders, but insofar as the people who make up those organizations still want the company's value proposition to their customers to be providing journalism, the company has failed. Given the culture of journalism being a mission-oriented pursuit, it's fair to assume that many people will feel remorse at these changes occurring within these organizations, even if those organizations become very valuable entertainment companies.
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  And a vast majority of Fox's growth has been from talking faces, not news. Tucker Carlson has mentioned several times that he's "not the news", but an opinion commentator. I think this reinforces the OPs point. Maybe we need to have more strict regulations on what can call itself a "news agency", when most of its programming is entertainment opinion commentary.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Many journalists lobbied themselves into a position where they can only be seen as opinion commentators, so we have little else anymore. You just have to pick the opinion you like most. This is not an endorsement of Carlson, just for the record.
- intended 6y ago
  The conversation here is missing this point and the actual market dynamics - news pays crap. Advertising goes to the place with most eyeballs. If you had to choose between the super bowl and Tucker Carlson, it’s not hard to guess where the ad will go. The internet killed off the classifieds so that leaves even less money for news firms. Add in consolidation and king making functions under Murdoch - and media firms like Fox have a very different purpose now. The business of News is losing to the business of entertainment. No one wants to pay to be bored. The only people who will pay for boring news are people who get more value out of it than boredom. This is a society level issue, not industry level issue.
zarkov99 6y ago
I agree there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism. But who would anyone trust? The incentives in the media point towards pandering and outraging. Left to the shareholders a news organization is mandated to maximize short term profit in whatever way it can. So capitalism is out. Perhaps a benevolent billionaire could support such an effort? But again, who would trust him? Its a pikle.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism There are new media organizations that do very good work, independently. But you have to look for them, and most people are too lazy to bother seeking out quality journalism when the garbage is forced in front of them every waking second by social media. The other problem is that most of the good work is regional. WTTW in Chicago, The Texas Tribune in Texas, various public radio stations around the country. There's plenty of good journalism. But it's an effort to piece it all together.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    I have looked, many times, and I have not been able to find a single institution I would trust to keep me broadly informed. I do not think the problem is lazyness. What would you recommend for US coverage?
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      US coverage ...and there lies the problem/laziness. The United States is far to large, populous, and diverse to expect a single entity to do a good job covering the entire country. It's like reading an encyclopedia entry about wine and expecting to get insights into how 1,000 different varieties taste. Or closer to the point, I don't expect to understand what's happening in Bangkok by reading the news in Tokyo. It's all Asia, right?
      - free_rms 6y ago
lordnacho 6y ago
This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They're expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational. All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.
- dmix 6y ago
  > Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade. I'm still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website. WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it's not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.
  - sumedh 6y ago
    > WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly I would imagine its probably because their advertising revenue has been falling down because of the internet. You have to be flexible with your standards when your revenue is declining.
    - friendlybus 6y ago
      It's getting harder to buy this line as their financials keep getting better and better. They have nearly 5 million subscribers and aiming to hit 10mil by 2025. The advertising revenue isn't growing much, but subscriptions are. https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2020-02-06/ny-times-publishers-4q-profit-grows-as-it-adds-subscribers https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2020-02-06/ny-...
      - sumedh 6y ago
zpeti 6y ago
What amazing comment.
jiveturkey 6y ago
> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press. That's a big 'if'. The 'media's value prop is not to promote a free press. Those that believe that to be the case are quickly going extinct. > This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. [...] I think the market will correct this error If it's true (I don't think it is), and to the degree that you can sustain a business over many years. I don't think it's even possible to be true, because the money itself is corrupting. The market cannot correct what doesn't require correction. I think where your analysis fails is that you presume that the media has shifted their position on their own. They haven't; they've reacted to the public. It's actually a positive feedback loop, not negative -- it's just that it's positive in the direction you dislike. We cannot depend on or hope for market correction. A free press in modern times requires public funding.
- babesh 6y ago
  That hasn’t worked recently. Look at NPR. It’s been captured.
Shivetya 6y ago
the danger when we do change who is President in the US is we get a complicit press, a press that does not look, and worse a press that prevents looking
xvedejas 6y ago
A nitpick on technical language: what you describe is a _positive_ feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is one that is able to calibrate its output by applying corrections to fluctuations. On the other hand, a positive feedback is one which can grow out of control, because it does the opposite. I think that's what you meant when describing how failing media outlets will double-down on the wrong strategy.
rajacombinator 6y ago
This is a really great way of looking at the problem. Unfortunately it’s also really hard to balance the incentives throughout a media org in a way that works - see pg’s famous “submarine” article. There’s just too much value in manipulating your audience, selling or trading access, etc.
tootie 6y ago
IDK what you're talking about here since First Look Media is a non-profit that runs no ads. You talk about the need to maximize trust and stringent editorial guidelines are part of that. This is a story that even most conservative media didn't want to touch because it was so fishy. Greenwald has always worn his bias on his sleeve and the article and editorial objections (both linked from this post) are pretty clear on that. His entire article is saying the media are covering a poorly-sourced and inconclusive story aggressively enough. His opinion is larded with weaselly statements about how there's no evidence of wrongdoing but there could be. That's terrible journalism and the editor knows it. Greenwald has absolutely always been like this. He's the sensationalist and The Intercept was trying to keep him in line.
blazespin 6y ago
This is why the antri trust against Google is so important, to make it easier for the media to sell subscriptions so as not to have to resort to clickbait.
thinking2smll0 6y ago
If your goal is fighting oppression or war, does it make sense to give Trump an edge? Who died an made Glenn Greenwald the arbiter of other people’s truth? I’m afraid Glenn just does this for new attention, as a grift, at this point. Rabble rouse over press oppression, go start new big press corp, rinse repeat. Greenwald would be more interesting if he wasn’t as repetitive as Chris Mathews with a different career trajectory. Just publish under “Glenn Greenwald” if that’s his wish? What’s with hoping traditional business mentality will result in something different? Laws alone don’t dictate the hierarchy. Interpretation goes a long way. We’ve optimized for it. Ymmv
rdtsc 6y ago
Well said. I think there is an element were individuals in the system, say journalists like Greenwald, may understand and see how dishonest their organization has become, and how it’s turning into a partisan tabloid, and some of the audience do too. However, they can’t easily voice their opinion or disagree without paying a price. Granted in this case he did speak up and put his job on the line, but many others probably just stay quiet and employed. So the tabloidization just spreads like cancer. On another level I think they are selling their ability to change public opinion. That’s for to anyone willing to pay. Large companies, governments, political campaigns and so on. Chomsky said somewhere that with media like this, you can often invert what they are saying to find the truth. Especially if they say “don’t look here, nothing to see here, look over there instead”. That could be a clue there is something really interesting they are hiding. The more effort they are expending, the more interesting the information. This laptop story has that kind of a vibe to it. If there was nothing to it, and it was a fabrication, they would gladly turn it into a 24/7 advertisement money maker, exposing the fakery and showing everyone their journalistic investigative skills. But this level of suppression certainly raises my eyebrows...
dustingetz 6y ago
It's not a trap, it just is. In the end you're forced to choose: revenue or something else? "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value ... when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we by default actively optimize against Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your-family/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
learnstats2 6y ago
If I take your argument at face value (that you want to maximise trust), publishing an article which is critical of someone is likely to reduce the audience's trust in you - I believe this holds true in personal interactions, whether or not they agree and whether or not you are being truthful. So it doesn't seem to me that it's "trust" you are aiming for here.
achileas 6y ago
That's not the issue here. Greenwald just doesn't like having editors and thinks he's above having them, when he's clearly not after desperately pushing a clear propaganda story.
RoutinePlayer 6y ago
Agree, but maybe "the market" will NOT correct this error, maybe we need some key regulations, or maybe we need a little more infusion of money to public-funded journalism? Call me a pessimist, but this core issue is a threat to democracy, and I'm not sure we can rely entirely on "the market" to auto-correct itself.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk Glenn Greenwald on fox news (starting with 4:00) My summary: During the last four years the left lost its scepticism towards the secret service, this as the CIA has tried to topple Trump. Now they are in the same boat (in his words 'full union with') the CIA/security state. Snowden was motivated by his anger at the interference of the NSA in internal affairs (who are all supposed to deal in foreign affairs only), now the whole lot is deep within internal matters and 'telling Americans what to think'. He says the whole thing is very dangerous - as the CIA guys are professional disinformation specialists with an authoritarian mindset, and they are likely to gain a lot of influence.

by gfodor 6y ago

throwaway3699 6y ago

What do you make of the idea that independent journalists on the web being the future?

whimsicalism 6y ago
They are an alternative, but not a substitute for institutional journalism. News exists to give you an approximate representation of what is happening without having to invest too much effort in actual investigation. It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
- TheKarateKid 6y ago
  > It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher. While this may be true theoretically, it's already been disproven in practice. People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, whether it is a no-name website or a random tweet that goes viral.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, Some people certainly do. Whether the majority of voters as a whole do has not been proven to me. There are still millions of loyal subscribers to the big institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, etc.
- chongli 6y ago
  There is no royal road to trust in journalism, to paraphrase a famous mathematician. If venerable institutions such as the New York Times can be corrupted by the transition to new media and the excesses of the zeitgeist, then there is no quick fix in the form of trust in institutions. The web, more than any other medium before it, has elevated the individual. Therefore, it stands to reason that we ought to place our trust in the individual alone, for whom reputation remains meaningful, and for whom the holding of accountability remains possible.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Agreed. It is the best approach. I think it is laughable that editorial reasons for publishing are brought to front. I actually remember the political articles I read from the last years. I wouldn't have released the Biden story but certainly not because of alleged editorial reasons. Everyone lies, but you should set sensible limits.
- jlevers 6y ago
  One source of news that I find particularly trustworthy and impartial (partially because there is no way to financially profit from twisting it, AFAIK) is Wikipedia's current events page[0]. Someone else shared this on HN in the last few weeks, and I've been looking at it almost daily. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
pm90 6y ago
It isn’t reasonable to expect independent journalists to take over the work that news media currently engages in. While there are legitimate criticisms of media companies becoming too large and being driven by outrage based engagements, they also provide the resources for some of the best journalists to spend a large part of their lives dedicated to digging into a story rather than worrying about how to make ends meet. The press is a pillar of American democracy. Independent journalists are great but they just won’t have the same power or credibility as they do when they’re organized.
- ghaff 6y ago
  And, to the degree that they're actually doing investigative journalism, it's really hard to see how the finances work out. I guess there's patronage of various sorts but that tends not to work very well and certainly isn't very scalable.
- hnhnsomething12 6y ago
  My sense is that trust is the invariant in the reader-writer relationship. (Lack of) financing is one method to undermine trust, and a method that news organizations are not immune to. Just look at what the internet has done to them! I'm curious about independent accreditation that journalists can attain and what kind of signal that could provide to contemporary distribution methods. It's easier for Twitter's algorithm to trust such an agency than it is to somehow infer credibility from the lame like/retweet signals it has direct access to.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zarkov99 6y ago
It won't work, we will simply just have a collection of disparate, narrowly focused and financially limited sources, from which anyone can draw to reinforce whatever view of the world they already have. You need an instution with the resources to look deep and wide and enough of a reputation that people will listen when it reports something they do not like.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scottlocklin 6y ago
Same is it ever was; IF Stone was one of the greats of his era, and he basically fed himself with a private newsletter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone

drchopchop 6y ago

Why would Substack solve this? It's just a more refined Medium with better monetization opportunities. Being on Substack doesn't mean the author is trustworthy, only that they have content that people will engage with (and potentially pay for), which is still the same KPI you're referring to.

gfodor 6y ago
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. It may turn out that the "V" in MVP here necessarily required monetization, for those who see journalism as the search for truth, not the search for clicks, to take the leap of going indie. Certainly if that trend continues we ought to expect larger organization - where solo-indies merge into mini-guilds, and so on, hopefully to the point where these become large organizations comparable to the 'old' media companies before they shifted away from journalism. Certainly Taibbi and Greenwald could be the first "dyad" to collaborate within this alternative media universe, so that might give us a clue of what organizing principles this new world may operate under, with these new incentives.
dash2 6y ago
Substack allows you to subscribe (paid) to an individual journalist or publication. They can then post long-form stories to your inbox. That gives them the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with you where credibility matters. At any rate, that is the argument. I don't think it will work, because buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive. Hell, buying it one paper at a time is too expensive. The better approach is the Apple News Plus or Google News one, where you pay a single subscription for a very wide range of outlets.... But, their idea isn't crazy.
- groby_b 6y ago
  > "buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive" Yes and no. It is if you want to get all of your daily news that way. But if it's an area you care about and you're somewhat affluent, it's well worth the money. (I'd think a good chunk of HN e.g. has a subscription to Stratechery) It's a workable strategy for a few extremely good journalists. But there are a lot of issues with it. Societally, this is problematic in that it makes decent reporting a luxury good. Long-term, this is a problem because there's no institution where junior journalists can learn the trade. In terms of information, it's a problem because there'll likely be no way to get a wider overview of world news in that way.

HNthrow22 6y ago

> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement KPI for whose benefit? Shareholders or the 'public good'? Why would a for-profit entity optimize for the public good over profits? Fox news is crushing all their competitors optimizing for engagement. Who is winning optimizing for trust?

gfodor 6y ago
It goes back to what a company's value proposition is. Media companies certainly benefit from optimizing this KPI, but it means they are now going to become entertainment companies. This isn't necessarily "bad" from the standpoint of the media companies or their shareholders, but insofar as the people who make up those organizations still want the company's value proposition to their customers to be providing journalism, the company has failed. Given the culture of journalism being a mission-oriented pursuit, it's fair to assume that many people will feel remorse at these changes occurring within these organizations, even if those organizations become very valuable entertainment companies.
tomnipotent 6y ago
And a vast majority of Fox's growth has been from talking faces, not news. Tucker Carlson has mentioned several times that he's "not the news", but an opinion commentator. I think this reinforces the OPs point. Maybe we need to have more strict regulations on what can call itself a "news agency", when most of its programming is entertainment opinion commentary.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Many journalists lobbied themselves into a position where they can only be seen as opinion commentators, so we have little else anymore. You just have to pick the opinion you like most. This is not an endorsement of Carlson, just for the record.
intended 6y ago
The conversation here is missing this point and the actual market dynamics - news pays crap. Advertising goes to the place with most eyeballs. If you had to choose between the super bowl and Tucker Carlson, it’s not hard to guess where the ad will go. The internet killed off the classifieds so that leaves even less money for news firms. Add in consolidation and king making functions under Murdoch - and media firms like Fox have a very different purpose now. The business of News is losing to the business of entertainment. No one wants to pay to be bored. The only people who will pay for boring news are people who get more value out of it than boredom. This is a society level issue, not industry level issue.

zarkov99 6y ago

I agree there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism. But who would anyone trust? The incentives in the media point towards pandering and outraging. Left to the shareholders a news organization is mandated to maximize short term profit in whatever way it can. So capitalism is out. Perhaps a benevolent billionaire could support such an effort? But again, who would trust him? Its a pikle.

reaperducer 6y ago
there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism There are new media organizations that do very good work, independently. But you have to look for them, and most people are too lazy to bother seeking out quality journalism when the garbage is forced in front of them every waking second by social media. The other problem is that most of the good work is regional. WTTW in Chicago, The Texas Tribune in Texas, various public radio stations around the country. There's plenty of good journalism. But it's an effort to piece it all together.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  I have looked, many times, and I have not been able to find a single institution I would trust to keep me broadly informed. I do not think the problem is lazyness. What would you recommend for US coverage?
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    US coverage ...and there lies the problem/laziness. The United States is far to large, populous, and diverse to expect a single entity to do a good job covering the entire country. It's like reading an encyclopedia entry about wine and expecting to get insights into how 1,000 different varieties taste. Or closer to the point, I don't expect to understand what's happening in Bangkok by reading the news in Tokyo. It's all Asia, right?
    - free_rms 6y ago

lordnacho 6y ago

This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They're expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational. All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.

dmix 6y ago
> Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade. I'm still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website. WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it's not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly I would imagine its probably because their advertising revenue has been falling down because of the internet. You have to be flexible with your standards when your revenue is declining.
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    It's getting harder to buy this line as their financials keep getting better and better. They have nearly 5 million subscribers and aiming to hit 10mil by 2025. The advertising revenue isn't growing much, but subscriptions are. https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2020-02-06/ny-times-publishers-4q-profit-grows-as-it-adds-subscribers https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2020-02-06/ny-...
    - sumedh 6y ago

zpeti 6y ago

What amazing comment.

jiveturkey 6y ago

> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press. That's a big 'if'. The 'media's value prop is not to promote a free press. Those that believe that to be the case are quickly going extinct. > This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. [...] I think the market will correct this error If it's true (I don't think it is), and to the degree that you can sustain a business over many years. I don't think it's even possible to be true, because the money itself is corrupting. The market cannot correct what doesn't require correction. I think where your analysis fails is that you presume that the media has shifted their position on their own. They haven't; they've reacted to the public. It's actually a positive feedback loop, not negative -- it's just that it's positive in the direction you dislike. We cannot depend on or hope for market correction. A free press in modern times requires public funding.

babesh 6y ago
That hasn’t worked recently. Look at NPR. It’s been captured.

Shivetya 6y ago

the danger when we do change who is President in the US is we get a complicit press, a press that does not look, and worse a press that prevents looking

xvedejas 6y ago

A nitpick on technical language: what you describe is a _positive_ feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is one that is able to calibrate its output by applying corrections to fluctuations. On the other hand, a positive feedback is one which can grow out of control, because it does the opposite. I think that's what you meant when describing how failing media outlets will double-down on the wrong strategy.

rajacombinator 6y ago

This is a really great way of looking at the problem. Unfortunately it’s also really hard to balance the incentives throughout a media org in a way that works - see pg’s famous “submarine” article. There’s just too much value in manipulating your audience, selling or trading access, etc.

tootie 6y ago

IDK what you're talking about here since First Look Media is a non-profit that runs no ads. You talk about the need to maximize trust and stringent editorial guidelines are part of that. This is a story that even most conservative media didn't want to touch because it was so fishy. Greenwald has always worn his bias on his sleeve and the article and editorial objections (both linked from this post) are pretty clear on that. His entire article is saying the media are covering a poorly-sourced and inconclusive story aggressively enough. His opinion is larded with weaselly statements about how there's no evidence of wrongdoing but there could be. That's terrible journalism and the editor knows it. Greenwald has absolutely always been like this. He's the sensationalist and The Intercept was trying to keep him in line.

blazespin 6y ago

This is why the antri trust against Google is so important, to make it easier for the media to sell subscriptions so as not to have to resort to clickbait.

thinking2smll0 6y ago

If your goal is fighting oppression or war, does it make sense to give Trump an edge? Who died an made Glenn Greenwald the arbiter of other people’s truth? I’m afraid Glenn just does this for new attention, as a grift, at this point. Rabble rouse over press oppression, go start new big press corp, rinse repeat. Greenwald would be more interesting if he wasn’t as repetitive as Chris Mathews with a different career trajectory. Just publish under “Glenn Greenwald” if that’s his wish? What’s with hoping traditional business mentality will result in something different? Laws alone don’t dictate the hierarchy. Interpretation goes a long way. We’ve optimized for it. Ymmv

rdtsc 6y ago

Well said. I think there is an element were individuals in the system, say journalists like Greenwald, may understand and see how dishonest their organization has become, and how it’s turning into a partisan tabloid, and some of the audience do too. However, they can’t easily voice their opinion or disagree without paying a price. Granted in this case he did speak up and put his job on the line, but many others probably just stay quiet and employed. So the tabloidization just spreads like cancer. On another level I think they are selling their ability to change public opinion. That’s for to anyone willing to pay. Large companies, governments, political campaigns and so on. Chomsky said somewhere that with media like this, you can often invert what they are saying to find the truth. Especially if they say “don’t look here, nothing to see here, look over there instead”. That could be a clue there is something really interesting they are hiding. The more effort they are expending, the more interesting the information. This laptop story has that kind of a vibe to it. If there was nothing to it, and it was a fabrication, they would gladly turn it into a 24/7 advertisement money maker, exposing the fakery and showing everyone their journalistic investigative skills. But this level of suppression certainly raises my eyebrows...

dustingetz 6y ago

It's not a trap, it just is. In the end you're forced to choose: revenue or something else? "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value ... when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we by default actively optimize against Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your-family/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...

learnstats2 6y ago

If I take your argument at face value (that you want to maximise trust), publishing an article which is critical of someone is likely to reduce the audience's trust in you - I believe this holds true in personal interactions, whether or not they agree and whether or not you are being truthful. So it doesn't seem to me that it's "trust" you are aiming for here.

achileas 6y ago

That's not the issue here. Greenwald just doesn't like having editors and thinks he's above having them, when he's clearly not after desperately pushing a clear propaganda story.

RoutinePlayer 6y ago

Agree, but maybe "the market" will NOT correct this error, maybe we need some key regulations, or maybe we need a little more infusion of money to public-funded journalism? Call me a pessimist, but this core issue is a threat to democracy, and I'm not sure we can rely entirely on "the market" to auto-correct itself.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk Glenn Greenwald on fox news (starting with 4:00) My summary: During the last four years the left lost its scepticism towards the secret service, this as the CIA has tried to topple Trump. Now they are in the same boat (in his words 'full union with') the CIA/security state. Snowden was motivated by his anger at the interference of the NSA in internal affairs (who are all supposed to deal in foreign affairs only), now the whole lot is deep within internal matters and 'telling Americans what to think'. He says the whole thing is very dangerous - as the CIA guys are professional disinformation specialists with an authoritarian mindset, and they are likely to gain a lot of influence.