5 ms·

Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the loca

Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” We need that again. As I point out occasionally, read news, and ask yourself which stories started out as a press release. For the City News Bureau, nothing started as a press release. They had people pounding the streets of Chicago for a century. Today, the pundit to reporter ratio is far too high. There's a great book about the Bureau, called "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite". (by Dornfield, not the one by Sears, which is something else entirely.)[1] [1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/06/20/if-city-news-bureau-says-that-its-100-years-old-check-it-out/ https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/06/20/if-city-news-burea... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sweetheart-Get-Me-Rewrite/dp/0897332628 https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sweetheart-Get-Me-Rewrite/dp/08...

api 1y ago
The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars. Would people pay for real journalism?
- harimau777 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - gotoeleven 1y ago
    The article here is about bad faith left wing arguments. Presumably you'd pay for those I guess?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - harimau777 1y ago
      No. What I would pay for is good faith left wing arguments.
- hamhock666 1y ago
  Don't people already pay for things like the NYT? I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
  - Onavo 1y ago
    NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > NYT is an exception > The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. How is the NYT an exception?
      - insane_dreamer 1y ago
        a large paid subscription base
        thaumasiotes 1y ago
        That's no different from the other papers and magazines. Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.
        eddythompson80 1y ago
        That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models. Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"
- lanfeust6 1y ago
  I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content I don't care about. More bang for buck. People have to be met halfway.
  - Animats 1y ago
    > I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for. Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works. The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads. There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.
    - lanfeust6 1y ago
      Yeah, it's good. I just find it expensive to pay for regularly.
    - setopt 1y ago
      I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman. I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.
      - 1y ago
- bobsmooth 1y ago
  >Would people pay for real journalism? See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
  - piva00 1y ago
    The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable. All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue. Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      > The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.
      - CWuestefeld 1y ago
        One big difference there is that for the vast majority of people, they can get the vast majority of their music or video content from that single service (or at worst a small number of them). But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles. Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.
- firecall 1y ago
  Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media. You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf... Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do. You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.
  - adamc 1y ago
    "You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight." I have literally never seen this. In the US?
    - arl79 1y ago
      In Europe for instance
  - CWuestefeld 1y ago
    You're really just observing that the marginal cost of reading is tiny. That doesn't mean that the fixed cost of producing an article or edition isn't very large, and needs to be paid for somehow.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    The beginning of the end was Gannett and USA today...
- blisster138 1y ago
  Surprised that no one has mentioned 404 media, a dedicated news sub I pay for annually. Good reporting is worth it to me, especially to get past all the b.s. marketing hype and influencer shilling. Maybe they’re unpopular here on HN but I stand by the sentiment: legit, good journalism is worth supporting financially.
- chiffre01 1y ago
  Lets be real here, in the past advertisers did pay for it, but all advertising spend has moved on to the clickbait-youtube/google/Facebook garbage heap.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  The underlying assumption is that of capitalism, that is, that things should be profitable or at least self-sustaining. But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc. Independent news should be completely free from capitalist interests. [0] https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/ https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/
  - Zefiroj 1y ago
    > But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc. and that is a problem because? These are funded by tax dollars collected. It's impossible for people to stop paying for them whether they make sense or not.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit.. I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961 >This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  The Rust evangelists don't want you know this, but a land value tax would fix data races
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Haha it feels like it makes sense!
dlcarrier 1y ago
Legacy journalism has changed from a low-barrier-to-entry working man's occupation, with entry level reporting leading to high-paying punditry, into a high-barrier-to-entry ivy league occupation with new entrants to the field expecting prestigious positions from the start.
- gboss 1y ago
  It’s also what’s called a high prestige low pay career which is by definition exclusionary of poor and middle income people, so the news makers are further and further detached from regular people. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-of-high-status-low-wage-jobs/ https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-...
- MisterBastahrd 1y ago
  There are still hundreds of thousands of journalists around the country who don't have ivy league educations and are getting paid a pittance to work in their fields. I once worked for a publisher which hired reporters making $12 an hour who easily worked over 60 hours a week. Big city reporters might push out a few stories a week. The small town people are cranking them out by the dozen, with about 3/4ths of their bylines being "<newpaper>" Staff so that people remain unaware of how understaffed these papers are.
Tiktaalik 1y ago
Yes the deeply depressing thing is that these sort of city news articles are now very much taken verbatim from press releases, and those press releases are from professional police communications departments, and so this gives enormous new powers to the police in able to shape the broader narrative as their politics and agenda see fit. For example we can see here that this news article is lifting directly from the police press release. https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3luw5twhjzk26 https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3lu... Maybe it wasn't even an overworked city reporter that did this but simply an automated AI creating news articles straight from the police press releases.

api 1y ago

The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars. Would people pay for real journalism?

harimau777 1y ago
[flagged]
- gotoeleven 1y ago
  The article here is about bad faith left wing arguments. Presumably you'd pay for those I guess?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - harimau777 1y ago
    No. What I would pay for is good faith left wing arguments.
hamhock666 1y ago
Don't people already pay for things like the NYT? I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
- Onavo 1y ago
  NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > NYT is an exception > The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. How is the NYT an exception?
    - insane_dreamer 1y ago
      a large paid subscription base
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
        That's no different from the other papers and magazines. Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.
        eddythompson80 1y ago
        That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models. Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"
lanfeust6 1y ago
I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content I don't care about. More bang for buck. People have to be met halfway.
- Animats 1y ago
  > I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for. Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works. The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads. There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.
  - lanfeust6 1y ago
    Yeah, it's good. I just find it expensive to pay for regularly.
  - setopt 1y ago
    I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman. I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.
    - 1y ago
bobsmooth 1y ago
>Would people pay for real journalism? See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
- piva00 1y ago
  The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable. All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue. Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    > The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.
    - CWuestefeld 1y ago
      One big difference there is that for the vast majority of people, they can get the vast majority of their music or video content from that single service (or at worst a small number of them). But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles. Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.
firecall 1y ago
Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media. You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf... Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do. You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.
- adamc 1y ago
  "You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight." I have literally never seen this. In the US?
  - arl79 1y ago
    In Europe for instance
- CWuestefeld 1y ago
  You're really just observing that the marginal cost of reading is tiny. That doesn't mean that the fixed cost of producing an article or edition isn't very large, and needs to be paid for somehow.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  The beginning of the end was Gannett and USA today...
blisster138 1y ago
Surprised that no one has mentioned 404 media, a dedicated news sub I pay for annually. Good reporting is worth it to me, especially to get past all the b.s. marketing hype and influencer shilling. Maybe they’re unpopular here on HN but I stand by the sentiment: legit, good journalism is worth supporting financially.
chiffre01 1y ago
Lets be real here, in the past advertisers did pay for it, but all advertising spend has moved on to the clickbait-youtube/google/Facebook garbage heap.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
The underlying assumption is that of capitalism, that is, that things should be profitable or at least self-sustaining. But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc. Independent news should be completely free from capitalist interests. [0] https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/ https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/
- Zefiroj 1y ago
  > But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc. and that is a problem because? These are funded by tax dollars collected. It's impossible for people to stop paying for them whether they make sense or not.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago

Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit.. I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961 >This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
The Rust evangelists don't want you know this, but a land value tax would fix data races
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Haha it feels like it makes sense!

dlcarrier 1y ago

Legacy journalism has changed from a low-barrier-to-entry working man's occupation, with entry level reporting leading to high-paying punditry, into a high-barrier-to-entry ivy league occupation with new entrants to the field expecting prestigious positions from the start.

gboss 1y ago
It’s also what’s called a high prestige low pay career which is by definition exclusionary of poor and middle income people, so the news makers are further and further detached from regular people. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-of-high-status-low-wage-jobs/ https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-...
MisterBastahrd 1y ago
There are still hundreds of thousands of journalists around the country who don't have ivy league educations and are getting paid a pittance to work in their fields. I once worked for a publisher which hired reporters making $12 an hour who easily worked over 60 hours a week. Big city reporters might push out a few stories a week. The small town people are cranking them out by the dozen, with about 3/4ths of their bylines being "<newpaper>" Staff so that people remain unaware of how understaffed these papers are.

Tiktaalik 1y ago

Yes the deeply depressing thing is that these sort of city news articles are now very much taken verbatim from press releases, and those press releases are from professional police communications departments, and so this gives enormous new powers to the police in able to shape the broader narrative as their politics and agenda see fit. For example we can see here that this news article is lifting directly from the police press release. https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3luw5twhjzk26 https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3lu... Maybe it wasn't even an overworked city reporter that did this but simply an automated AI creating news articles straight from the police press releases.