4 ms·
Seems like there will inevitably end up being only two national news papers behind paywalls, The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ. I guess the
by fullshark 3y ago
Seems like there will inevitably end up being only two national news papers behind paywalls, The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ. I guess the Post as Bezos's plaything might survive for a while but what's the value add going to be v. the Times?
Edit: I bring this up not to derail the thread, but because the Athletic is a national sports news play, seems like the NY Times's end goal is to be the national news source.
- Pet_Ant 3y agoThe problem with modern capitalism is that it doesn't actually incentivise the production of value, but of monetization. News, _especially_ investigative journalism, produces value but is hard to have a moat around and monetise (this is true too of basic science). Whereas Twitter or Facebook or Reddit really don't provide much that a rival couldn't except for that fact that they already exist and people use them and the network effect is near insurmountable (Threads is not a counter argument), but because of that they are better at monetising. Solving this fundamental commons issue is what is needed because otherwise all the effort will be spent hunting for walled gardens and not actually producing value.
- sokoloff 3y agoAre Twitter and Reddit actually good at monetizing? Both have utility, but I don't think of either as particularly successful on the financial aspect of their businesses.
- FollowingTheDao 3y agoThey were looking good for monetizing, until the users, the ones who make the platforms valuable, screwed it up for them.
- afavour 3y agoI've always assumed that's why NYT has spent a ton of money building out its cooking and gaming verticals (including buying Wordle). They can basically subsidize the news operation/the bundle can bring in more readers than news would alone. FWIW this isn't a modern phenomenon: until the internet came along hard news was heavily subsidized by classified ads.
- no_wizard 3y agoHow is Threads not a counter argument? Its clearly a counter argument. Twitter has shown great weakness, and something good is coming in, with the marketing muscle and thoughtful support of certain features that are well positioned, breaking Twitters moat. I suspect if Twitter wasn't perceived as going "down hill" in the first place, Threads wouldn't exist.
- Pet_Ant 3y agoThreads is not a counter-argument because it's only working because it has Meta/FaceBook/Instagram and their existing network backing. It's not an unknown player simply offering a better mousetrap.
- delfinom 3y agoYou know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. They've also were spamming basically anything as "Breaking News" for awhile that I had to block all notifications for the app. I've generally found WaPo to be a bit more pleasant.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoI subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.
- antigonemerlin 3y agoGod bless the good reporters who put a one paragraph article into one paragraph, unlike some reporters who insist on stretching it out into an entire essay that says nothing. And they use bullet points! Bullet points! Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoAxios is (i think) unreadable in that way
- goodbyesf 3y ago> I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed. That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.
- ahstilde 3y agowhy is that inevitable?
- fullshark 3y agoDon't think the market can support multiple newspapers behind paywalls, the leaders will take control with better coverage + features and the differentiator will be the editorial slant.
- Analemma_ 3y agoMost markets with zero distribution and switching costs are winner-take-all. The only reason newspapers were regional to begin with was that it cost a lot of money to print and ship them, once the Internet made that stop being true, the natural equilibrium was toward only a few large papers and the rest dying off.
- DaveExeter 3y agoThat's not it. Newspapers used to have a monopoly on advertising, at least in the local area. Once they lost their monopoly they were no longer financially viable.
- massysett 3y agoThey never had a monopoly: direct mail, billboards, Yellow Pages, TV, radio, leaflets…
- DaveExeter 3y agoThe local movie theatre wasn't going to be advertising show times anywhere but it the newspaper! If you wanted to sell a car, or fill a job opening, or rent out an apartment, you needed to advertise in the classifieds.
- massysett 3y agoThere were classifieds other than the daily paper. All around town were newspaper boxes with ads for cars, apartments, and jobs. There were also weekly papers with classifieds. Even during the time when towns had just one daily paper, this paper did not have a monopoly on nearly any form of advertising.
- synetic 3y agoWhat is the definition of left leaning as it pertains to a newspaper? Is this an impression you have or is there a roughly objective criterion that the NYT meets to called left leaning?
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoThat's always going to be a subjective metric, but the general consensus, including my own perspective, is that NYT is a traditionally liberal (so slightly left leaning) paper.
- theironhammer 3y agoLeft on Identity politics, right on economics. In USA it's all neoliberalism. There is really no Left.
- orwin 3y agoAnd to most Europeans, liberals are center-right. Center-left is socdem and part of the green (the bicycle part), then you have socialists/radical greens (both part of the 'radical left' but still like or at least tolerate representative democracy, they mostly want technical solutions for 'better vote'), then you have the far left/revolutionary left, two branches, one based on trotskism, one on anarchism, mostly Jaques Decoeur, Emma Goldman as an ideological pivot from 'regular' Marxism
- willcipriano 3y agoThe most recent Republican candidate they endorsed for president was Dwight D. Eisenhower. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_election_endorsements_made_by_The_New_York_Times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
- Kye 3y agoThe Republican party is only right in the sense that they've gone over the edge, and the Democrats have chosen to stop short of it. We don't really have a left with meaningful power in the US unless you bulldoze the traditional meaning of left and build a shopping center over it. What we have is a nationalist party and a neoliberal party domestically. Every so often a member of one will realize this and move over to the party that aligns with their views. Both are nationalist when it comes to geopolitics.
- goodbyesf 3y ago> The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ Neither are left or right. They are both serve the interest of the same ambidextrous elite. Also, in the internet era, all newspapers are 'national' ( or even 'international' ) since they are all equally accessible by the population via their news feeds. All news essentially has national or global distribution now.
- fullshark 3y agoPopulist papers will be in front of paywalls.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoBreitbart and Jacobin confirm this statement.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- gowld 3y agoThe establishment has left and right wings. You may have notices, for example, US Congress (and most others), which literally has seating in two parts, a left wing and right wing.
- UtopiaPunk 3y agoBoth sides of established power uphold the capitalist status quo. While they'll fight over culture war nonsense, they agree more often than not. As it stands, the USA cannot build things like a universal healthcare system or significantly reduce military spending, because the most powerful people in the USA benefit from the status quo (and those in Congress listen to those powerful people more than the rest of us, giving them more power). So, sure, Congress and media outlets have a left and right, but they largely serve as boundaries as to what is considered the "acceptable" range of ideas. Noam Chomsky explores the idea well in Manufacturing Consent (both in the book and in the documentary).
- ramraj07 3y agoFrom Outside of this weird polarization/persecution fetish bubble a lot of Americans seem to be in, the nytimes seems to be doing a decent job trying to be centrist with a left tinge. If it looks too leftist, consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end. I think the pandemic played a big number on entitled people suddenly being asked to do things out of their choice and obey rules everyone else is subjected to, and polarize them against socialist ideals than before.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago> consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end Putting off the New York Times specifically for a moment, this is a "no true scotsman" fallacy. Example: "The New York Times is not that left-wing, and all centrists realize this." "Many centrists think they are getting more left-wing." "No true centrist would think that, therefore, they aren't centrists."
- asfgisroshnio 3y ago"Beef is not vegan, and all vegans realize this." "Many vegans think it is vegan." "No true vegan would think that, therefore, they aren't vegans." No True Scotsman is about a particular form of reasoning, not any sentence that includes the word "true". It's a form of ad-hoc rationalization where someone rejects counterexamples out of hand. ramraj07 wasn't really making a generalization, and the rejection of the "counterexample" was neither ad-hoc nor unjustified. Many people outside the U.S. have always viewed the American "left" as right-wing, and this is justified because American politics actually are right-wing compared to much of the world.
- ramraj07 3y agoIt’s not exactly rocket science to substantiate my position. Nyt regularly publishes opinion pieces from quite right wing people. Their editorial stance also often call out clearly problematic extreme left views (like Lea Thomas controversy).