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>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem. >directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.

akira2501 3y ago
> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me. Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process? The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place. Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
- izacus 3y ago
  > To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage. Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either. Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply. I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome. I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?
    - izacus 3y ago
      AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers. You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them. There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
      - akira2501 3y ago
        > AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers. That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it. > of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view. > There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls. You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.
- notatoad 3y ago
  > How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me. nobody other than the publishers is trying to say the money should be based on view counts. tying anything to view counts is obviously a dumb idea.
wustangdan 3y ago
> I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism You know that with Substack all these actual journalists are having no issue getting paid very well. I'm not sure why we'd want to expand NPR or make more NPR's. We need less of their low-quality and biased journalism IMO, not more.
- drawkward 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - wustangdan 3y ago
    A senior editor just admitted they are biased. You can try and guess my politics (you'd be wrong), but I can guess that you don't think journalists who agree with your politics can be biased. I can agree with NPR's politics and still admit they are biased, why can't you? https://www.allsides.com/news-source/npr-fact-check-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/news-source/npr-fact-check-media-bi...
    - drawkward 3y ago
      One person has made some claims.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  NPR is pretty high quality. You just don’t like what they publish.
  - leereeves 3y ago
    I guess you missed the op-ed written by a senior NPR editor recently. He admitted that NPR suppressed stories because they might help Trump and pursued poorly sourced (and ultimately false) stories because they would hurt Trump. https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
cush 3y ago
> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets
- Solvency 3y ago
  uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.
  - pompino 3y ago
    >who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
    - jjackson5324 3y ago
      What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....? Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit? You can see the Core Web Vitals. What modern day news organizations are doing is nowhere close to that.
      - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
        It's the advertising arm of Google rather than the search part that incrntivises this stuff.
      - pompino 3y ago
asow92 3y ago
As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news. The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.
- xedrac 3y ago
  > 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. So much of news today is not even worthy of my attention, let alone my money.
  - asow92 3y ago
    What about news specific to your locale?
    - Thiez 3y ago
      Definitely not. Nothing noteworthy happens locally, and if it does it will be on the national news.
      - asow92 3y ago
        You have no interest at all in if cronyism is affecting your local politics? Do you care about how your taxes are spent?
        Thiez 3y ago
        Not enough to invest money and time, no. And my preferred party isn't in power, so it's not like knowing the current leadership is corrupt would change my vote - I don't vote for them anyway.
notjulianjaynes 3y ago
>yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism The problem with this is the problem with every scheme I have seen so far alongb these lines.It gives the government more control over what is and isn't "journalism." Either you give money to spam farms and watch dogs equally, or you wind up with cronyism.

akira2501 3y ago

> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me. Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process? The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place. Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.

izacus 3y ago
> To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage. Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either. Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.
- akira2501 3y ago
  Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply. I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome. I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?
  - izacus 3y ago
    AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers. You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them. There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      > AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers. That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it. > of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view. > There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls. You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.
notatoad 3y ago
> How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me. nobody other than the publishers is trying to say the money should be based on view counts. tying anything to view counts is obviously a dumb idea.

wustangdan 3y ago

> I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism You know that with Substack all these actual journalists are having no issue getting paid very well. I'm not sure why we'd want to expand NPR or make more NPR's. We need less of their low-quality and biased journalism IMO, not more.

drawkward 3y ago
[flagged]
- wustangdan 3y ago
  A senior editor just admitted they are biased. You can try and guess my politics (you'd be wrong), but I can guess that you don't think journalists who agree with your politics can be biased. I can agree with NPR's politics and still admit they are biased, why can't you? https://www.allsides.com/news-source/npr-fact-check-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/news-source/npr-fact-check-media-bi...
  - drawkward 3y ago
    One person has made some claims.
chris_wot 3y ago
NPR is pretty high quality. You just don’t like what they publish.
- leereeves 3y ago
  I guess you missed the op-ed written by a senior NPR editor recently. He admitted that NPR suppressed stories because they might help Trump and pursued poorly sourced (and ultimately false) stories because they would hurt Trump. https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...

cush 3y ago

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets

Solvency 3y ago
uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.
- pompino 3y ago
  >who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
  - jjackson5324 3y ago
    What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....? Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit? You can see the Core Web Vitals. What modern day news organizations are doing is nowhere close to that.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      It's the advertising arm of Google rather than the search part that incrntivises this stuff.
    - pompino 3y ago

asow92 3y ago

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news. The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.

xedrac 3y ago
> 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. So much of news today is not even worthy of my attention, let alone my money.
- asow92 3y ago
  What about news specific to your locale?
  - Thiez 3y ago
    Definitely not. Nothing noteworthy happens locally, and if it does it will be on the national news.
    - asow92 3y ago
      You have no interest at all in if cronyism is affecting your local politics? Do you care about how your taxes are spent?
      - Thiez 3y ago
        Not enough to invest money and time, no. And my preferred party isn't in power, so it's not like knowing the current leadership is corrupt would change my vote - I don't vote for them anyway.

notjulianjaynes 3y ago

>yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism The problem with this is the problem with every scheme I have seen so far alongb these lines.It gives the government more control over what is and isn't "journalism." Either you give money to spam farms and watch dogs equally, or you wind up with cronyism.