5 ms·

In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit c

by zpeti 6y ago

In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage. (and Fox is just as bad, but its not an online publication for the sake of my point)

nojito 6y ago
>Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting. NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. Which is a symptom of the low quality "social media news" that currently exists.
- beervirus 6y ago
  > The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.
  - nojito 6y ago
    No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight. https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion Just like every other high quality news source.
    - beervirus 6y ago
      That doesn't refute what I said at all. Yes, they have an opinion section. They also inject a lot of opinion into articles that are nominally straight news.
      - nojito 6y ago
        This just isn’t true at all. They are distinct and completely governed by different editors.
- FqOD4xih7Uq6m9Z 6y ago
  Yeah, Fox never had one of their Pulitzer prize winning journalists writing literal propaganda handed to them by the Soviet Union to cover up the Holodomor.
  - tootie 6y ago
    Lol, Fox has never won a Pulitzer and for good reason. They run propaganda in prime time every single night. Roger Ailes was a bona fide conspiracy nut: https://www.axios.com/john-boehner-book-ted-cruz-fox-news-a17d646c-ed6a-48a0-85e8-e115823c94aa.html https://www.axios.com/john-boehner-book-ted-cruz-fox-news-a1... NY Times has been in operation for 170 years and has made a few mistakes. There is just no comparison. They are best news source in the country bar none.
    - culot 6y ago
      >They run propaganda in prime time every single night. All major news outlets run propaganda - not just in prime time, but all of the time. That is their job. The NY Times does have the privilege of being one of the primary establishment press outfits, resulting in their main aim being setting the tone for propaganda outfits around the nation and throughout much of the western world. If you want to know which way the wind is blowing inside the FBI or CIA, the NY Times is where you go. To compare them to Fox is pointless, as Fox does little to no print journalism. NY Times excels in [often overly-]lengthy, well-written articles, whereas I don't think Fox has ever done much more than briefs and blurbs.
- MikeUt 6y ago
  > They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. Both sides indeed. They report on news of national importance, such as a playground scuffle: A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/dreadlocks-cut-off-immanuel-christian-school.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim... Once it turns out the story was a hoax, they do their journalistic duty and remove any reference to race from the title: Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/dreadlocks-cut-off-immanuel-christian-school.html https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim... I wonder if they would have reported on it at all if victim and perpetrator were reversed, or featured race so prominently. But if they were reversed, the story would not be important to the national conversation, would it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
clairity 6y ago
the same with npr, a crumbling sheen of objectivity thinly veiling increasingly blatant partisanship. there is value in curation, as demonstrated by subscriptions (or 'donations'), but these outlets have lost sight of that value in the quest to ever-more-desperately shape public opinion while retaining relevance. they've slid down the slippery slope from objective(-ish) curation to the coercive variety and have no one but themselves--principally their wealthy owners/directors/executives but also the rank & file--to blame. i'd love to pay for objective(-ish) curation, and ideally slower, more considered reporting but that latter bit may be more than is practically possible right now. the paradox of choice makes it really hard to curate your own news feed as substack invites you to do. just like a portfolio of stocks, you won't get great returns on a (likely) highly correlated group of individual newsletters. and without a plethora of them (like 60+), you'd likely fail to garner enough breadth to even have a chance of avoiding false correlation, much like how the nyt and npr (and fox) fail via partisanship bias.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  The problem articulated by Antonio Garcia-Martinez: > The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back at themselves in more articulate form. Nobody actually pays for news, unless your livelihood depends on it, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will still flourish, but nothing vaguely resembling news will otherwise remain in a subscription-driven world. Source: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elites https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elite...
  - clairity 6y ago
    that's a decent and succinct summary of the situation, and perhaps why the hybrid funding model of subscriptions, ads, and classifieds balanced out to objective-ish news for the few decades before the internet flattened out the business model entirely. the news industry is roughly $100B in the US (depending on how you define it). as a thought experiment, maybe we could give each of our 330M residents $300/year (~10% of the military budget) to spend on any news source, and only news sources, and preclude other forms of revenue for the industry. that'd make journalism directly accountable to the entirety of the population rather than just to moneyed interests.
maest 6y ago
The optimistic view is that there is a market for unbiased reporting and someone will step in to service that demand. But who know.
b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago
After rewatching the film, Network from the 1970s last night I felt a weird sense of shame for supporting almost any modern news. The film conceptualized the modern issue with news and money in an unbelievably perfect manner for today.

by zpeti 6y ago

nojito 6y ago

>Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting. NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. Which is a symptom of the low quality "social media news" that currently exists.

beervirus 6y ago
> The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.
- nojito 6y ago
  No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight. https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion Just like every other high quality news source.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    That doesn't refute what I said at all. Yes, they have an opinion section. They also inject a lot of opinion into articles that are nominally straight news.
    - nojito 6y ago
      This just isn’t true at all. They are distinct and completely governed by different editors.
FqOD4xih7Uq6m9Z 6y ago
Yeah, Fox never had one of their Pulitzer prize winning journalists writing literal propaganda handed to them by the Soviet Union to cover up the Holodomor.
- tootie 6y ago
  Lol, Fox has never won a Pulitzer and for good reason. They run propaganda in prime time every single night. Roger Ailes was a bona fide conspiracy nut: https://www.axios.com/john-boehner-book-ted-cruz-fox-news-a17d646c-ed6a-48a0-85e8-e115823c94aa.html https://www.axios.com/john-boehner-book-ted-cruz-fox-news-a1... NY Times has been in operation for 170 years and has made a few mistakes. There is just no comparison. They are best news source in the country bar none.
  - culot 6y ago
    >They run propaganda in prime time every single night. All major news outlets run propaganda - not just in prime time, but all of the time. That is their job. The NY Times does have the privilege of being one of the primary establishment press outfits, resulting in their main aim being setting the tone for propaganda outfits around the nation and throughout much of the western world. If you want to know which way the wind is blowing inside the FBI or CIA, the NY Times is where you go. To compare them to Fox is pointless, as Fox does little to no print journalism. NY Times excels in [often overly-]lengthy, well-written articles, whereas I don't think Fox has ever done much more than briefs and blurbs.
MikeUt 6y ago
> They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. Both sides indeed. They report on news of national importance, such as a playground scuffle: A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/dreadlocks-cut-off-immanuel-christian-school.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim... Once it turns out the story was a hoax, they do their journalistic duty and remove any reference to race from the title: Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/dreadlocks-cut-off-immanuel-christian-school.html https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim... I wonder if they would have reported on it at all if victim and perpetrator were reversed, or featured race so prominently. But if they were reversed, the story would not be important to the national conversation, would it?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

clairity 6y ago

the same with npr, a crumbling sheen of objectivity thinly veiling increasingly blatant partisanship. there is value in curation, as demonstrated by subscriptions (or 'donations'), but these outlets have lost sight of that value in the quest to ever-more-desperately shape public opinion while retaining relevance. they've slid down the slippery slope from objective(-ish) curation to the coercive variety and have no one but themselves--principally their wealthy owners/directors/executives but also the rank & file--to blame. i'd love to pay for objective(-ish) curation, and ideally slower, more considered reporting but that latter bit may be more than is practically possible right now. the paradox of choice makes it really hard to curate your own news feed as substack invites you to do. just like a portfolio of stocks, you won't get great returns on a (likely) highly correlated group of individual newsletters. and without a plethora of them (like 60+), you'd likely fail to garner enough breadth to even have a chance of avoiding false correlation, much like how the nyt and npr (and fox) fail via partisanship bias.

unicornporn 6y ago
The problem articulated by Antonio Garcia-Martinez: > The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back at themselves in more articulate form. Nobody actually pays for news, unless your livelihood depends on it, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will still flourish, but nothing vaguely resembling news will otherwise remain in a subscription-driven world. Source: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elites https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elite...
- clairity 6y ago
  that's a decent and succinct summary of the situation, and perhaps why the hybrid funding model of subscriptions, ads, and classifieds balanced out to objective-ish news for the few decades before the internet flattened out the business model entirely. the news industry is roughly $100B in the US (depending on how you define it). as a thought experiment, maybe we could give each of our 330M residents $300/year (~10% of the military budget) to spend on any news source, and only news sources, and preclude other forms of revenue for the industry. that'd make journalism directly accountable to the entirety of the population rather than just to moneyed interests.

maest 6y ago

The optimistic view is that there is a market for unbiased reporting and someone will step in to service that demand. But who know.

b0tzzzzzzman 6y ago

After rewatching the film, Network from the 1970s last night I felt a weird sense of shame for supporting almost any modern news. The film conceptualized the modern issue with news and money in an unbelievably perfect manner for today.