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> Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks. Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being informed by low quality "journalism" that is really

> Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks. Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being informed by low quality "journalism" that is really just entertainment in disguise. By paying 0 bucks we need to spend more time reading things to be well informed, or we'll just accept being less informed by news that's more entertainment than journalism. > High quality public news is also still available Sure, but increasingly you need to pay for it or you need to be good at finding it. Not everyone has the skills to sus out good journalism, and almost nobody can avoid their time being wasted by garbage articles and click bait. This is the price we're paying.

seanp2k2 5y ago
https://apnews.com/ https://apnews.com/ uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network does pretty well at cutting out most ads. Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying is not always the solution. We must demand better journalism, even though everything seems to be trending toward entertainment and sensationalism.
- billytetrud 5y ago
  > uBlock or AdGuard Sure, adblock is nice, but its kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The fact that you block ads doesn't change the fact that most news is paid for by ads (that people who don't have adblock get). In fact, adblock probably reduces the quality of news even further, because the people who don't have adblock are probably less smart on average than the people who do use adblock - and thus the articles who cater to that group more earn more money. > paying is not always the solution You're creating a straw man here. Did I say that "paying is the solution"? No I didn't, I said ad-funded news has lead to the trashy news dystopia we live in today. The reason is not because of ads per se - its because these pages get paid on a per click basis. If you click, they get paid, even if the article ends up sucking. This incentivizes massive amounts of low quality click bait. If there were such a thing as an advertisement mechanism where low-quality content wouldn't get paid, that would solve the problem without paying. > We must demand better journalism Sorry, but you don't just get better things because you demand it. We live in a world where the only way to actually make your own tiny individual impact on journalism quality is to purchase subscriptions to quality news sources and to avoid clicking on anything online. Ever. If you're still going to click on things online, you're not demanding better journalism in a way that will make an impact. And how many people do you expect to do that? Very few. I doubt you'll do it yourself, even tho you care about getting better journalism. What we need are better tools that allow people to only give money (ad revenue or otherwise) to publishers of quality journalism.

seanp2k2 5y ago

https://apnews.com/ https://apnews.com/ uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network does pretty well at cutting out most ads. Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying is not always the solution. We must demand better journalism, even though everything seems to be trending toward entertainment and sensationalism.

billytetrud 5y ago
> uBlock or AdGuard Sure, adblock is nice, but its kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The fact that you block ads doesn't change the fact that most news is paid for by ads (that people who don't have adblock get). In fact, adblock probably reduces the quality of news even further, because the people who don't have adblock are probably less smart on average than the people who do use adblock - and thus the articles who cater to that group more earn more money. > paying is not always the solution You're creating a straw man here. Did I say that "paying is the solution"? No I didn't, I said ad-funded news has lead to the trashy news dystopia we live in today. The reason is not because of ads per se - its because these pages get paid on a per click basis. If you click, they get paid, even if the article ends up sucking. This incentivizes massive amounts of low quality click bait. If there were such a thing as an advertisement mechanism where low-quality content wouldn't get paid, that would solve the problem without paying. > We must demand better journalism Sorry, but you don't just get better things because you demand it. We live in a world where the only way to actually make your own tiny individual impact on journalism quality is to purchase subscriptions to quality news sources and to avoid clicking on anything online. Ever. If you're still going to click on things online, you're not demanding better journalism in a way that will make an impact. And how many people do you expect to do that? Very few. I doubt you'll do it yourself, even tho you care about getting better journalism. What we need are better tools that allow people to only give money (ad revenue or otherwise) to publishers of quality journalism.