2 ms·

I think the author is in the right ballpark, but frames it in a way that makes me wonder if they're right for the wrong reason. News has always been partisan a

by madrox 2y ago

I think the author is in the right ballpark, but frames it in a way that makes me wonder if they're right for the wrong reason. News has always been partisan and flawed. The internet just makes the flaws more obvious, because no single source gets nearly the same control over the narrative as pre-internet. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way about things, news will have this problem. Which is also why no one will pay for it. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way, they'll happily give you that content for free. How can a subscription service compete with that? The article does cite these reasons, but in a way that makes me think they see these as bugs in the system and not endemic to the newscycle. When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product.

Viliam1234 2y ago
> When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product. Sometimes, even when you are paying for the product, you are the product. Nothing prevents companies from taking money from you and then making more money e.g. by selling your personal data.
- madrox 2y ago
  Quite right
dredmorbius 2y ago
Author here. Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics. On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise). On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all. At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere). One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated. There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.

by madrox 2y ago

Viliam1234 2y ago

> When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product. Sometimes, even when you are paying for the product, you are the product. Nothing prevents companies from taking money from you and then making more money e.g. by selling your personal data.

madrox 2y ago
Quite right

dredmorbius 2y ago

Author here. Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics. On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise). On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all. At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere). One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated. There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.