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The Press Now Depends on Readers for Revenue and That’s a Problem for Journalism
- stevenalowe 5y agoThey always did and it always was, subscriber model is just more direct than advertiser model
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at th eroot of Mammon, and to sell his own country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. John Swinton, 1880, quoted (anonymously) in Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism (1909) https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/2/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)> Holt's book is an eye-opening view from the dawn of the age of mass advertising and the effects it had already had by the beginning of the 20th century on newspaper and magazine publishing. Holt, like Swinton, was a publisher. The beneficience of advertisers in supporting journalism is ... grossly overstated in TFA.
- underseacables 5y agoI disagree with the authors premise. Good journalism sells, clickbait, partisan, hyperemotional manipulation, eventually gets very tiresome. I’m still searching for a news outlet that is “just the facts” without commentary or the authors personal opinion.