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Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?
- FredPret 3y ago> Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience. About two decades too late.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago[flagged]
- runamuck 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240210150126/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/is-the-media-prepared-for-an-extinction-level-event https://web.archive.org/web/20240210150126/https://www.newyo...
- lulzury 3y agoSharing an archive.org link to read about media’s existential crisis? We're not just observing the iceberg but offering the ship a speed boost.
- dredmorbius 3y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989>
- kvonhorn 3y agohttps://archive.is/8sTWS https://archive.is/8sTWS
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoIs there some material that explains why news websites are against aggregators that provide news from a variety of sources, such that I don't have to pay a hundred news outlets? This, to me, seems like a much better model since the revenue can be distributed to whatever set of publications I've read for that month.
- massysett 3y agoIsn’t that Apple News?
- Kerrick 3y agoTraditionally your local newspaper was exactly this. They paid exorbitant sums of money to _wire services_ for the right to republish their stories, and readers had access to both the local reporting and the national/global/interest content with a single local subscription.
- yorwba 3y agoIf you used such an aggregator, it would quickly become obvious that original reporting is only a small fraction of what news outlets publish, with the rest being made of slightly edited newswires and press releases, as well as fast-follow reporting on other media reports. In other words, all news sources are already aggregators, and exclusive content is how they attempt to differentiate themselves and win market share from their competitors.
- XorNot 3y agoI mean, overtly a market place with lower friction of customer mobility is bad for the sellers because they have to compete more (a counterpoint is that a race to the bottom to write "clickbait" is the end state as well, so it's not all self-interest).
- mbgerring 3y agoA lot of companies have tried this and it doesn’t work financially.
- amadeuspagel 3y agoHere you go: https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/ In brief, all value is captured by monopolies, aggregators necessarily are monopolies, news websites want to be monopolies themselves.
- ungreased0675 3y agoUnemployed journalists could learn to code?
- kwere 3y agoyou need critical thinking skills to code, not all people can do it.
- tiznow 3y agoif HN posters can, anyone can.
- cjbgkagh 3y agoWith all the tech layoffs, what are people supposed to lean now?
- gonzo41 3y agoPrompting!
- mbgerring 3y agoA lot of us have, this doesn’t do anything to fix the very real social peril of not having a functioning news media.
- kvonhorn 3y agoMaybe the media could all chip in to elect a Donald Trump-like figure to boost revenue through subscriptions and ads? It seems like a model that could be replicated all over the world.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoGood riddance. Journalists and the media have abandoned their roles as truthful arbiters forcing everyone into their biased corners (msnbc, Fox News, etc). I want non sensationalized, truthful reporting and it’s clear only Ai can get me that. Human reporters are too emotional and it’s shown during the Trump era, and continued now.
- tarruda 3y ago> I want non sensationalized, truthful reporting and it’s clear only Ai can get me that. Can you elaborate on how AI helps here?
- xvector 3y agoHave you tried any leading LLM? Something better than GPT 3.5. Given the same source data AI will write with far less bias (and often more insight) than your average human journalist.
- api 3y agoIsn’t this customer driven though? Biased sources telling some group what they want to hear get way more engagement than journalists trying to be objective. Fox kind of proved this business model out and since then we now have others they cater to either further right or left wing audiences. Of course now more independent and even less trustworthy sources are taking audiences by cranking this model up even more. Now it’s random rage bait trolls on social media providing “news” to hordes of infinite scroll addicts.
- xvector 3y agoAlmost entirely self-inflicted by greedy media corporations and "journalists" with no sense of ethics. Somehow we put these journalists on an unassailable pedestal with zero accountability, while we enforce professional ethics in nearly every other profession on the planet. There are very few journalists left actually providing a positive benefit to society. I cannot wait for GPT-4+ to put the rest out of job. Given the same source data, it writes better articles, with less bias, more closely sticking to the facts.
- mbgerring 3y agoIf you think LLMs can replace journalist you don’t actually understand what journalists do.
- xvector 3y agoNo, I'm discussing LLMs replacing "journalists" (ie the ones that churn out worthless sensationalized article after article), not journalists (the ones with actual boots on the ground experience or real insight). The former could easily have their jobs automated away.
- mbgerring 3y agoah yes, the good old “no true scotsman”
- FredPret 3y agoReplace, maybe not; but put out of a job, absolutely. So in a way, that's a replacement in the sense that the end user gets the same product (infotainment) but from an LLM
- billy99k 3y agoIt's already in progress. I haven't watched mainstream news for years now. Independent podcasts/youtubers have taken their place. You can also usually get breaking news on Twitter/social media now, without ever having to turn on your TV or going to cnn.com.
- geodel 3y agoSo people create bunkers with multi-year food supplies and other necessities for extinction level event. Will media create bunkers to hoard multi-year news articles and opinion pieces for that?
- mbgerring 3y agoSince I was in school for journalism in 2007 I’ve been saying the same thing — instead of continuing to produce episodic articles, the news media could have shifted to providing context that helps people keep track of long-running processes that affect them. I do that for my friends, because I listen to the news all the time, and I can explain how events in the news today are part of much longer series of events. They find it very valuable. But if the news media ever does this, they tuck it in to existing article formats, but unless you are very attentive over years, its not possible, easily, to keep track of why something is happening or what led to it. Hypertext and databases were made for this, but the news media can’t see it. I tried, for years, in school, at conferences and in various journalism jobs, to get people to see how this could make journalism more useful and powerful, but here in 2024, we’re still doing “articles, except on the internet”. And I can’t afford to keep working in the news media long enough to be in a position to try it out. Nobody can, unless their actual livelihood is coming from somewhere else. So here we are, in total context collapse, and a dying news media whose slow disappearance, especially at the local level, is actively hurting people, and our democracy. It’s bad, and its going to get a lot worse as AI makes it cheaper and cheaper to lie convincingly. But what can anyone do?
- bwb 3y agoYa ive been hoping to see something similar emerge. Both in terms of putting the story within big picture numbers and a chain of stories to explain what and why it happened as more time passes.
- klooney 3y ago> the news media could have shifted to providing context that helps people keep track of long-running processes that affect them This was Vox's initial schtick, but they kind of abandoned it after a while- it didn't bring readers in, and they wanted to be ad-supported.
- mbgerring 3y agoThey were also trying to do it at a national level, with stories that are incredibly well-covered already. If someone did this for San Francisco, so frustrated people could get deeply-reported, verifiable answers to “why is [x] like this,” you would create an enormous amount of value. P.S. if anyone wants to give me a million dollars to do this, I am both an experienced news editor and a senior-level software engineer, email in profile
- AnnoyedComment 3y ago[dead]
- nla 3y agoThe media's ability to adapt has been abysmal. They were all bankrupt before Trump got in, he saved their bacon, but that's not a sustainable business model. These companies don't even have the skills to put their own ad blocker solutions together. There is no capability, no innovation, and no future for any of them. A new breed of news companies will emerge, the old guard is done.
- kvonhorn 3y ago> that's not a sustainable business model Why not? Trump's 2016 election alone seems to have caused subscriptions to places like the Washington Post and New York Times to increase, and led to a small but fervent industry in creating Trump- and MAGA-related merchandise outside the news industry. It seems like there should be potential for a company or cartel to market elections more like WWE or boxing matches, pitting a hero against a heel, selecting hype men and women to be VP picks, and selling merchandise along the way. There are only so many Wordle's that the NYT can buy, but you can fly at least five Trump flags from the back of a pickup. I think the industry could easily adapt (or at least, new media companies could form) by making a greater spectacle of elections and bankrolling the campaigns of those they think could drive views and subscriptions should they be elected. I've seen what Fox News has done to the political discourse in this country, and I think we could go WAY darker as these legacy media companies continue to fight the dying light.
- bormaj 3y ago> The model was, the financial journalist Felix Salmon wrote, in 2010, “looking increasingly like a race to the bottom, where publishers desperately try every trick in the book to boost their pageviews and ad impressions, just to compensate for the fact that their revenues per page are very small. The results—sensationalism, salaciousness, and slideshows—only serve to further erode the value of the sites in the eyes of advertisers.” Journalism will still be relevant in the world, but the vast majority of these outlets have been forced into a race to the bottom for sure. For corners of this industry to survive, they will likely need to form a symbiotic relationship with a more lucrative adjacent industry. Meanwhile the outlets pushing meaningless, clickbait-first content will hopefully wither away.
- coding123 3y agoDoes it need to be? Reporting and journalism has already moved off to YouTube. There is no need to have CNN or Fox, we have Cenk and Dave Rubin.
- dukeofdoom 3y agoI pretty much almost stopped using google since ChatGPT came out. AI will make up the news for us.
- thesid 3y agoI hope they go extinct. I don't know how its in the USA but in India is has become a joke. Every news site is owned by a political party.
- kvonhorn 3y agoIn the US, the billionaires are largely buying up legacy media.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoPeople over here needs education A simple word on media and propaganda is enough to get you "flagged" Take a short break and lecture yourself: https://www.amazon.com/Social-History-Media-Gutenberg-Internet/dp/0745635113 https://www.amazon.com/Social-History-Media-Gutenberg-Intern...
- poisonborz 3y agoHonesty, in an ideal world wide web, there isn't a need for much paid journalism. The metamorphosis that's happening now is natural and needed. Following a story, making summaries of ongoing events or even doing investigative reporting can be made as a side job by people interested in a subject (like Australian history, astronomy or the life of Britney Spears), most probably better than a run of the mill reporter who's being thrown across topics. They can build their follower base and span out on topics or staff up organically. Special needs reporting like war reporting or a documentary on rainforest destruction, like the above, can also be freelancing work and licensed to larger networks. It's not really "media" that dies, but generic news channels and editorial teams. The concept of "notable news" is too diverse to be covered in these formats.
- Doctor-R 3y agoI tried to read the article, but received a popup in the face asking for a subscription. I guess the answer is, "Yea, a media extinction event has already happened".
- OCTalkRadio 3y agoSo if AI gathers the "facts" (as it finds them) and puts them into a summary for you, who will provide the commentary or "context". Who will help us make sense of the world around us? And connect the dots? Will AI provide "insight" or "perspective"? Will AI predict "what might happen next?" And will AI help us make sense of the world around us? Or just a summary (in whatever "voice" or "style" you like)?