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I think what the "legacy" news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and re

by nr2x 6y ago

I think what the "legacy" news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting. I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think "the media" is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive "an agenda". In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees. Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc. Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, "information wants to be free". I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes. Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive. So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).

kbutler 6y ago
> "the media" is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive "an agenda". In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees. You are suggesting these are mutually exclusive.
- nr2x 6y ago
  Per my final point, I'm suggesting adtech has given us more of the former to the detriment of the latter.
  - kbutler 6y ago
    I don't think there is any evidence to suggest deep, unbiased, evidence-based journalism ever dominated the field, or that the "crass commercial" interests didn't drive the news rooms. See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example. Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore.
    - farias0 6y ago
      I thought it was widely understood that bias-less journalism is impossible in practice, and that this doesn't diminish its value.
      - mdiesel 6y ago
        Maybe, but just because it's impossible doesn't mean there shouldn't be an effort to try or that we shouldn't appreciate better journalism. Biased isn't a boolean, it's a scale. Something that is a little bit biased is more useful for trying to understand all the issues at hand. Something that's very biased is still useful, but only for telling you what the author (and their readership) thinks.
      - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
        Sure, then why are people upset when others rightfully point out that so much of "the media" has a specific bias and that that's affecting us in negative ways as a society?
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > I don't think there is any evidence to suggest deep, unbiased, evidence-based journalism ever dominated the field, or that the "crass commercial" interests didn't drive the news rooms. > See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example. > Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore. Those examples are stale. It's like saying there's no evidence that English language literature was ever common in any library, and citing the contents of some British library circa 1100AD as proof. Pulitzer's yellow journalism phase spanned from the late 1800s to about 1900. In the last decade of his life, he rejected it an apparently turned his paper into a respectable publication [1]. Duranty's reporting occurred in the early 1930s, and has since been scathingly criticized and rejected by the paper he published it in [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#After_the_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#After_the_wa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Calls_for_revocation_of_Pulitzer_Prize,_1990%E2%80%932003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Calls_for_revoc...
doitLP 6y ago
This makes sense for big, well researched investigative journalism. But that is not the case for the other 95% of the drivel on most news sites -— the engagement driving crap that keeps the lights on.
- a3camero 6y ago
  They don’t even make most of that 95%. It’s licensed from wire services like Reuters and AP.
- nr2x 6y ago
  Lots of people want to see sports scores, news, and commentary. I'm not a "sports guy", but those types of benign tribal affinities can help community cohesion and also generate revenue for more expensive forms of journalism. I don't think it's a bad thing, either for people who get excited to "root for the home team" and get that from a newspaper, or the newspaper reaping that reward and reallocating it elsewhere in the business.
hodgesrm 6y ago
Speaking as somebody who has been involved in tech sales for a long time, 'communicating' is not the main problem. You need a monetization model that channels users into paths that oblige them to pay for content. And it needs to work at scale. $120 a year for a subscription might seem iniquitous to HN readers. From the business point of view you need over 1500 subscription to pay for a single dev working at non-large-city rate, e.g., in Richmond Virginia. That's just to run the website, not to generate content. It's a big hill to climb. My estimate assumes a $150/year salary + benefits, $120 subscription, and 20% customer acquisition cost for each subscription. 150000 / (120 * (1 - .20))
- nr2x 6y ago
  My point was more about software engineers having trouble grasping effort/production costs involved in media outside of their immediate domain, despite having the power to dramatically affect revenue calculations in other domains.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  How would a news website do this though? If all their content is behind a paywall, people won't read it and they'll make no money. If they try to limit you to 3 articles a day then ask you to pay for a subscription, sites which aggregate news articles make it easy for users to skirt around that restriction. What other alternatives are there? I've genuinely not thought about it enough to come up with another one that works. EDIT: Actually the Buzzfeed model might be the best one for newsrooms. Pump out tons of free, clickbaity content. Solicit paid sponsorships for lots of that content (e.g. "We try snacks from around the world" then solicit snack companies in that niche to sponsor the video) and use the profits to run a successful investigative journalism section as well.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  You think you (or anyone else) could earn $150k/yr working as a webdev for a media outlet based in Richmond, VA?
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
Alex3917 6y ago
> In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Investigative journalism is 1 or 2% of the budget of most media companies. Saying that running a media company is expensive because of investigative journalism is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks. A more apt analogy would be that it was like saying Google was expensive to run because of theoretical CS basic research.
- nr2x 6y ago
  From a business perspective, perhaps. From a social benefit perspective, getting rid of corrupt politicians, exposing pollution, and giving citizens the ability to understand what the powerful are doing has massive benefit. Think of all the fraud and waste that has been uncovered over the years, recouping that money doesn't go to the newspaper, but it may benefit society more broadly. Simple fact is places with less free media have more corruption and misuse of public funds.
  - merb 6y ago
    most articles are bought, so...
    - nr2x 6y ago
      A shockingly high number of people who would have been journalists 20 years ago now work in Public Relations. Many journalism school graduates try to find work in the trade and end up as corporate mouthpieces.
      - merb 6y ago
        well I wouldn't say corporate mouthpieces, but journalism is mostly rewriting news from bigger agencies (like the dpa from germany) or from freelancers. I mean it's basically impossible to fill a daily newspaper with just own articles/personal. so newspaper call agencies to fill a lot of stuff. and they bring mostly a few original stories.
uncomputation 6y ago
YES! This! I worked for a higher-up “legacy”(?) news paper for three years and what people don’t understand is that “the news” isn’t just some objective collection of facts. It’s work to collect, analyze, verify, source, and interpret those facts. That’s why it’s always so sigh-worthy when I see some other startup crop up in the HN-esque circle that’s “going to fix news” when these people have essentially 0 actual journalists as their friends or even as consultants on their product. Everyone wants to complain about paywalls and say their undemocratic or even say they violate “free speech” (misunderstanding both words in that right) and then offer no other alternative other than “trust us, we’ll do it better.” The fundamental problem is that a contrarian take on pop culture gets vastly (3-10x) more views than something which took several months and dozens of sources to put together. I could go on and on but point being: Y-E-S, us tech people cannot “fix” other industries. We can help, but cannot lead.
- nr2x 6y ago
  Even worse is the amount of time a publisher maintained their status as the "exclusive" source for a story used to be a least a couple days - meaning a subscription to an outlet that regularly has an edge is valuable (particularly in finance journalism, which has fared better than the industry as a whole). Now, a newsroom spends a year preparing a story and somebody summarizes the key points, devoid of context, in a Twitter thread and nobody sees the actual story. Why pay for getting the story first if you can just wait a couple minutes to get the free summary?
ardy42 6y ago
> I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think "the media" is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive "an agenda". In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. That's not just an impression, it's a fact. More than once have I seen commenters suggest (with what I assume is a straight face) that amateur bloggers can effectively replace "the media." A similar position I've seen frequently is that science reporting is worthless, and individuals should just sift through the all raw papers instead (which not even actual scientists do). The best bloggers can do is substitute for opinion writers, since having and expressing an opinion is really a solo endeavor, regardless of where you do it. Pretty much everything else needs a bigger team and more support structure.
- specialist 6y ago
  I was an activist that blogged. Data gathering and analysis was exhausting. My efforts changed policies, socialized reforms. Does your poor esteem for bloggers apply to activists like me?
  - sdljfjafsd 6y ago
    I think OP was trying to make a point that the entire investigative journalism industry can't be replaced by freelance bloggers, not that freelance bloggers don't add value.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > I think OP was trying to make a point that the entire investigative journalism industry can't be replaced by freelance bloggers, not that freelance bloggers don't add value. That's exactly it. I elided some thoughts about sustainability from my comment, but I basically think reporting is so much more labor intensive than opinionating that no configuration of amateur or part-time bloggers can substitute for all the vital civic functions of a newspaper. That's not to say that bloggers can't to real reporting, but when they do, by necessity it will have a far narrower topical focus and will either burn out an amateur blogger or force that blogger to professionalize and evolve their blog into something a lot like a traditional media organization. Given how much easier opinionating is, I'd wager 99%+ of bloggers will stick to it (and other easy things like link aggregation) 99%+ of the time. If you skim the cream, you could probably come up with something more-or-less comparable to a newspaper opinion page.
logicalmonster 6y ago
> I think what the "legacy" news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting. Among many parts of the public, the perception (that IMO is correct) is that serious news gathering and reporting is the rare exception, not the norm. It certainly seems like most news pieces these days take the form of uncritically reporting anything the government proclaims as fact, thinly veiled activism, and meaningless outrage click farming. The respectable journalists out there with a shred of integrity and effort put into their reporting are very rare. Maybe a Glenn greenwald (who is an idealogical opposite of mine) is a rare exception. But I’d struggle to name more than like 5 journalists i think are even largely interested in truth, willing to take some risks, and have a bit of integrity. The business model of journalism has changed (outrage based click farming) and the profession’s respectability (to me) has changed with it. Journalism was respectable before you could measure clicks and therefore profit.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  > uncritically reporting anything the government proclaims as fact Not just governments, but also corporations and universities. Very often 'news stories' are just thinly veiled press releases.
will4274 6y ago
> I think what the "legacy" news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting I think what they failed at was actually putting in the time and effort. I read news stories every day that fail to include basic pieces of information. How many news stories have you read that say "The Republicans proposed X dollars and the Democrats proposed Y dollars" that don't make any sort of historical or international comparison? It seems to me that "serious news gathering and reporting" would include comparing the amount of money to similar situations in the past or to similar situations in other countries, and yet, I almost never see that. The word "stenographers" has become more and more common for a reason - news stories, particularly political news stories, increasingly include quotes from the few active actors on the topic today, but no serious research or serious context outside of the people who literally called the reporter.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago
Take out some subscriptions. Free news is basically news entertainment. If you want high quality long form articles, pay for them.
theamk 6y ago
> Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing only "stripping the authorship" makes it unethical, all the other things are totally fine and approved in the open source world. Make an entire copy of debian software repository? People will thank you for another "mirror". create a webpage which hosts existing docs (like man pages or software package documentation)? Totally fine as long as the docs are not modified (so any AUTHOR section is intact) create another "how to get started with ZZZ" website, which is three quarter official docs? Ok as long as license allows remixing. Many do. start a business which took over many project's discussion forums and centralized information in one place? And then the said business gets millions from ads and kills many previous forums? People love this, some even say that Stack Overflow is "the best thing that happened to programming" and so on... so for people used to open source model, news aggregators are totally fine, as long as content is not modified and there is a clear attribution. The GP comment mentions "iframes", so both of those would have been true - it's not like you can blank out author name from a third-party iframe. Yes, the journalism is different and the open source rules do not apply to it. But hopefully you can see where does this "information wants to be free" mindset is coming from.

by nr2x 6y ago

kbutler 6y ago

> "the media" is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive "an agenda". In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees. You are suggesting these are mutually exclusive.

nr2x 6y ago
Per my final point, I'm suggesting adtech has given us more of the former to the detriment of the latter.
- kbutler 6y ago
  I don't think there is any evidence to suggest deep, unbiased, evidence-based journalism ever dominated the field, or that the "crass commercial" interests didn't drive the news rooms. See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example. Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore.
  - farias0 6y ago
    I thought it was widely understood that bias-less journalism is impossible in practice, and that this doesn't diminish its value.
    - mdiesel 6y ago
      Maybe, but just because it's impossible doesn't mean there shouldn't be an effort to try or that we shouldn't appreciate better journalism. Biased isn't a boolean, it's a scale. Something that is a little bit biased is more useful for trying to understand all the issues at hand. Something that's very biased is still useful, but only for telling you what the author (and their readership) thinks.
    - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
      Sure, then why are people upset when others rightfully point out that so much of "the media" has a specific bias and that that's affecting us in negative ways as a society?
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I don't think there is any evidence to suggest deep, unbiased, evidence-based journalism ever dominated the field, or that the "crass commercial" interests didn't drive the news rooms. > See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example. > Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore. Those examples are stale. It's like saying there's no evidence that English language literature was ever common in any library, and citing the contents of some British library circa 1100AD as proof. Pulitzer's yellow journalism phase spanned from the late 1800s to about 1900. In the last decade of his life, he rejected it an apparently turned his paper into a respectable publication [1]. Duranty's reporting occurred in the early 1930s, and has since been scathingly criticized and rejected by the paper he published it in [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#After_the_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#After_the_wa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Calls_for_revocation_of_Pulitzer_Prize,_1990%E2%80%932003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Calls_for_revoc...

doitLP 6y ago

This makes sense for big, well researched investigative journalism. But that is not the case for the other 95% of the drivel on most news sites -— the engagement driving crap that keeps the lights on.

a3camero 6y ago
They don’t even make most of that 95%. It’s licensed from wire services like Reuters and AP.
nr2x 6y ago
Lots of people want to see sports scores, news, and commentary. I'm not a "sports guy", but those types of benign tribal affinities can help community cohesion and also generate revenue for more expensive forms of journalism. I don't think it's a bad thing, either for people who get excited to "root for the home team" and get that from a newspaper, or the newspaper reaping that reward and reallocating it elsewhere in the business.

hodgesrm 6y ago

Speaking as somebody who has been involved in tech sales for a long time, 'communicating' is not the main problem. You need a monetization model that channels users into paths that oblige them to pay for content. And it needs to work at scale. $120 a year for a subscription might seem iniquitous to HN readers. From the business point of view you need over 1500 subscription to pay for a single dev working at non-large-city rate, e.g., in Richmond Virginia. That's just to run the website, not to generate content. It's a big hill to climb. My estimate assumes a $150/year salary + benefits, $120 subscription, and 20% customer acquisition cost for each subscription. 150000 / (120 * (1 - .20))

nr2x 6y ago
My point was more about software engineers having trouble grasping effort/production costs involved in media outside of their immediate domain, despite having the power to dramatically affect revenue calculations in other domains.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
How would a news website do this though? If all their content is behind a paywall, people won't read it and they'll make no money. If they try to limit you to 3 articles a day then ask you to pay for a subscription, sites which aggregate news articles make it easy for users to skirt around that restriction. What other alternatives are there? I've genuinely not thought about it enough to come up with another one that works. EDIT: Actually the Buzzfeed model might be the best one for newsrooms. Pump out tons of free, clickbaity content. Solicit paid sponsorships for lots of that content (e.g. "We try snacks from around the world" then solicit snack companies in that niche to sponsor the video) and use the profits to run a successful investigative journalism section as well.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
You think you (or anyone else) could earn $150k/yr working as a webdev for a media outlet based in Richmond, VA?
- lotsofpulp 6y ago

Alex3917 6y ago

> In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Investigative journalism is 1 or 2% of the budget of most media companies. Saying that running a media company is expensive because of investigative journalism is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.

whatshisface 6y ago
>is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks. A more apt analogy would be that it was like saying Google was expensive to run because of theoretical CS basic research.
nr2x 6y ago
From a business perspective, perhaps. From a social benefit perspective, getting rid of corrupt politicians, exposing pollution, and giving citizens the ability to understand what the powerful are doing has massive benefit. Think of all the fraud and waste that has been uncovered over the years, recouping that money doesn't go to the newspaper, but it may benefit society more broadly. Simple fact is places with less free media have more corruption and misuse of public funds.
- merb 6y ago
  most articles are bought, so...
  - nr2x 6y ago
    A shockingly high number of people who would have been journalists 20 years ago now work in Public Relations. Many journalism school graduates try to find work in the trade and end up as corporate mouthpieces.
    - merb 6y ago
      well I wouldn't say corporate mouthpieces, but journalism is mostly rewriting news from bigger agencies (like the dpa from germany) or from freelancers. I mean it's basically impossible to fill a daily newspaper with just own articles/personal. so newspaper call agencies to fill a lot of stuff. and they bring mostly a few original stories.

uncomputation 6y ago

YES! This! I worked for a higher-up “legacy”(?) news paper for three years and what people don’t understand is that “the news” isn’t just some objective collection of facts. It’s work to collect, analyze, verify, source, and interpret those facts. That’s why it’s always so sigh-worthy when I see some other startup crop up in the HN-esque circle that’s “going to fix news” when these people have essentially 0 actual journalists as their friends or even as consultants on their product. Everyone wants to complain about paywalls and say their undemocratic or even say they violate “free speech” (misunderstanding both words in that right) and then offer no other alternative other than “trust us, we’ll do it better.” The fundamental problem is that a contrarian take on pop culture gets vastly (3-10x) more views than something which took several months and dozens of sources to put together. I could go on and on but point being: Y-E-S, us tech people cannot “fix” other industries. We can help, but cannot lead.

nr2x 6y ago
Even worse is the amount of time a publisher maintained their status as the "exclusive" source for a story used to be a least a couple days - meaning a subscription to an outlet that regularly has an edge is valuable (particularly in finance journalism, which has fared better than the industry as a whole). Now, a newsroom spends a year preparing a story and somebody summarizes the key points, devoid of context, in a Twitter thread and nobody sees the actual story. Why pay for getting the story first if you can just wait a couple minutes to get the free summary?

ardy42 6y ago

> I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think "the media" is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive "an agenda". In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. That's not just an impression, it's a fact. More than once have I seen commenters suggest (with what I assume is a straight face) that amateur bloggers can effectively replace "the media." A similar position I've seen frequently is that science reporting is worthless, and individuals should just sift through the all raw papers instead (which not even actual scientists do). The best bloggers can do is substitute for opinion writers, since having and expressing an opinion is really a solo endeavor, regardless of where you do it. Pretty much everything else needs a bigger team and more support structure.

specialist 6y ago
I was an activist that blogged. Data gathering and analysis was exhausting. My efforts changed policies, socialized reforms. Does your poor esteem for bloggers apply to activists like me?
- sdljfjafsd 6y ago
  I think OP was trying to make a point that the entire investigative journalism industry can't be replaced by freelance bloggers, not that freelance bloggers don't add value.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I think OP was trying to make a point that the entire investigative journalism industry can't be replaced by freelance bloggers, not that freelance bloggers don't add value. That's exactly it. I elided some thoughts about sustainability from my comment, but I basically think reporting is so much more labor intensive than opinionating that no configuration of amateur or part-time bloggers can substitute for all the vital civic functions of a newspaper. That's not to say that bloggers can't to real reporting, but when they do, by necessity it will have a far narrower topical focus and will either burn out an amateur blogger or force that blogger to professionalize and evolve their blog into something a lot like a traditional media organization. Given how much easier opinionating is, I'd wager 99%+ of bloggers will stick to it (and other easy things like link aggregation) 99%+ of the time. If you skim the cream, you could probably come up with something more-or-less comparable to a newspaper opinion page.

logicalmonster 6y ago

> I think what the "legacy" news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting. Among many parts of the public, the perception (that IMO is correct) is that serious news gathering and reporting is the rare exception, not the norm. It certainly seems like most news pieces these days take the form of uncritically reporting anything the government proclaims as fact, thinly veiled activism, and meaningless outrage click farming. The respectable journalists out there with a shred of integrity and effort put into their reporting are very rare. Maybe a Glenn greenwald (who is an idealogical opposite of mine) is a rare exception. But I’d struggle to name more than like 5 journalists i think are even largely interested in truth, willing to take some risks, and have a bit of integrity. The business model of journalism has changed (outrage based click farming) and the profession’s respectability (to me) has changed with it. Journalism was respectable before you could measure clicks and therefore profit.

bigbubba 6y ago
> uncritically reporting anything the government proclaims as fact Not just governments, but also corporations and universities. Very often 'news stories' are just thinly veiled press releases.

will4274 6y ago

> I think what the "legacy" news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting I think what they failed at was actually putting in the time and effort. I read news stories every day that fail to include basic pieces of information. How many news stories have you read that say "The Republicans proposed X dollars and the Democrats proposed Y dollars" that don't make any sort of historical or international comparison? It seems to me that "serious news gathering and reporting" would include comparing the amount of money to similar situations in the past or to similar situations in other countries, and yet, I almost never see that. The word "stenographers" has become more and more common for a reason - news stories, particularly political news stories, increasingly include quotes from the few active actors on the topic today, but no serious research or serious context outside of the people who literally called the reporter.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago

Take out some subscriptions. Free news is basically news entertainment. If you want high quality long form articles, pay for them.

theamk 6y ago

> Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing only "stripping the authorship" makes it unethical, all the other things are totally fine and approved in the open source world. Make an entire copy of debian software repository? People will thank you for another "mirror". create a webpage which hosts existing docs (like man pages or software package documentation)? Totally fine as long as the docs are not modified (so any AUTHOR section is intact) create another "how to get started with ZZZ" website, which is three quarter official docs? Ok as long as license allows remixing. Many do. start a business which took over many project's discussion forums and centralized information in one place? And then the said business gets millions from ads and kills many previous forums? People love this, some even say that Stack Overflow is "the best thing that happened to programming" and so on... so for people used to open source model, news aggregators are totally fine, as long as content is not modified and there is a clear attribution. The GP comment mentions "iframes", so both of those would have been true - it's not like you can blank out author name from a third-party iframe. Yes, the journalism is different and the open source rules do not apply to it. But hopefully you can see where does this "information wants to be free" mindset is coming from.