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>Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. The switch from printed to online distribution changed the game completely.

>Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. The switch from printed to online distribution changed the game completely. If you are selling printed copies, you are physically limited in how much text you can cram into a single issue. So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues. With digital ad-sponsored distribution the competition is about churning out as much low-quality clickbait as possible. If you spend time researching the topic and validating your sources, while your competitor hires 5 fresh graduates to write 5 slightly different nonsensical articles on the same topic, you will quickly be out of business. You don't care that most of your readers will forget what they read in less than an hour. You don't care that the most clickbaity articles end up being the most divisive. You are now competing for 30 seconds of attention from 10 million of readers, and that's the only way to win that competition.

wernst 6y ago
I dont think this exactly applies to the NYT and the New Yorker which are subscriptions based. I do think subscription based journalism can be just as pernicious. The most profitable route now is to find a niche group and produce content that they want. In general people "want" the objective truth, but its so much more tantalizing when it's spun to confirm your biases. There's likely a point where people will pay to get 90% of the truth and 10% confirmation bias, and if that's the most profitable route pubishers are going to report in that way (hence the left lean of NYT in particular, and right lean of other publications).
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  Or 30% truth and 70% confirmation bias, as the case may be....
tsimionescu 6y ago
> So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues. That is true to some extent, but it forgets the second half of the revenue of all newspapers, which has always been advertising, or direct injections of capital by a rich owner looking for a mouthpiece. Which is to say, newspapers have always needed to be advertiser friendly, even if it meant avoiding certain topics. But you're right that this has become even worse in the move to the internet.

wernst 6y ago

I dont think this exactly applies to the NYT and the New Yorker which are subscriptions based. I do think subscription based journalism can be just as pernicious. The most profitable route now is to find a niche group and produce content that they want. In general people "want" the objective truth, but its so much more tantalizing when it's spun to confirm your biases. There's likely a point where people will pay to get 90% of the truth and 10% confirmation bias, and if that's the most profitable route pubishers are going to report in that way (hence the left lean of NYT in particular, and right lean of other publications).

bzbarsky 6y ago
Or 30% truth and 70% confirmation bias, as the case may be....

tsimionescu 6y ago

> So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues. That is true to some extent, but it forgets the second half of the revenue of all newspapers, which has always been advertising, or direct injections of capital by a rich owner looking for a mouthpiece. Which is to say, newspapers have always needed to be advertiser friendly, even if it meant avoiding certain topics. But you're right that this has become even worse in the move to the internet.