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> For too long, journalists have given away their stories for free in exchange for distribution by the duopoly. The news industry does not "give" their stories

> For too long, journalists have given away their stories for free in exchange for distribution by the duopoly. The news industry does not "give" their stories to Facebook or Google. It allows the placement of links to the stories on those sites. (I use the term "allow" loosely, since in many jurisdictions they do not have the right to restrict in-linking.) The news industry is free to try to prevent in-linking. The technical capability already exists in the form of robots.txt and the referer header. Although I can tell you right now what will happen. People will read less news, and read more of other stuff that is still distributed on Facebook or Google. They won't stop using Facebook or Google. Honestly, it would probably be better for the world. People are reading too much news and it is contributing to polarization. Won't help the news industry's bottom line, though. Won't hurt Google or Facebook's.

breck 6y ago
Exactly. I have not done a formal study, but my guess would be that the majority of profit made by the "news" comes from rumormonging and trolling (with a few exceptions like the data-heavy WSJ). Now Facebook and the like are keeping that money instead. I think we should #AbolishImaginaryProperyLaws and not reward the creation of non-sense by any of these actors.
qsort 6y ago
This. The claim Google/Facebook are stealing from the news industry is neither here nor there, they want those stories to appear on social media/search results; if they didn't, they could just paywall their entire websites. They are just trying to cry loud enough that the government will intervene, pretty much like their colleagues here in the EU.
93po 6y ago
It boggles my mind that the same people who support mainstream news coverage as legitimate journalism would also agree with you that people need to stop reading so much news and news is the reason there is so much polarization. News is good and legitimate, and news is also causing huge societal problems? Not accusing you of this sentiment, more just frustrated that any respects journalism in this day and age
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  There can be too much of a good thing. And not all news is contextualized in a way that helps people understand how big or small of a deal a given thing is.

breck 6y ago

Exactly. I have not done a formal study, but my guess would be that the majority of profit made by the "news" comes from rumormonging and trolling (with a few exceptions like the data-heavy WSJ). Now Facebook and the like are keeping that money instead. I think we should #AbolishImaginaryProperyLaws and not reward the creation of non-sense by any of these actors.

qsort 6y ago

This. The claim Google/Facebook are stealing from the news industry is neither here nor there, they want those stories to appear on social media/search results; if they didn't, they could just paywall their entire websites. They are just trying to cry loud enough that the government will intervene, pretty much like their colleagues here in the EU.

93po 6y ago

It boggles my mind that the same people who support mainstream news coverage as legitimate journalism would also agree with you that people need to stop reading so much news and news is the reason there is so much polarization. News is good and legitimate, and news is also causing huge societal problems? Not accusing you of this sentiment, more just frustrated that any respects journalism in this day and age

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
There can be too much of a good thing. And not all news is contextualized in a way that helps people understand how big or small of a deal a given thing is.