4 ms·

In addition, the internet reduced the cost of information to near 0. News is just information.

• bombcar 4y ago
  This is another big thing people forget - often if you "wanted to know what happened" you bought the latest newspaper. I still remember spending hours reading the details on the Loma Prieta earthquake in the paper - printed on green paper with the amazing "line graphic" art showing how and why the viaduct collapsed, etc. Now if you're interested in something that is "breaking" you can find live footage and even expert discussion, for free, on the internet.
• LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  The specifics are worse than that! It did little to make the cost of producing information cheaper; that still requires a human to analyze data, interview relevant people, and synthesize a useful article. It did reduce the incremental cost of delivering that information to even closer to zero. Yes, serving a kilobyte of data is slightly cheaper than the paper and ink to put a thousand characters on a newspaper, but neither problem was actually all that expensive within living memory. The major problem is that it increased the value of being that information provider to something significantly greater than the cost of distributing it. Reader attention and reader data can be sold for more than it costs to push a page to that reader, pushing the information content to the side and inverting the newspaper provider -> information consumer relationship into an attention selling consumer -> attention buying advertiser relationship, incentivizing clickbait, advertorials, and listicles. This new format is more economically powerful, and like an invasive species, it out-competes less greedy formats into extinction.