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How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations? News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons: 1. L

by BeetleB 3mo ago

How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations? News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons: 1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google) 2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.

josephg 3mo ago
Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people. Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars. I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.
- coatmatter 3mo ago
  Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.
  - NikolaNovak 3mo ago
    I think a mixture of BBC, cnn, al jazeera, economist, will get a casual reader to a decent spot, and they're all mainstream media. Possibly guardian but emlarhically not their opinion pages (I agree with them, but even so they're gratingly opinionated, hate to think what a die hard conservative will think of them :)
    - fsckboy 3mo ago
      BBC, CNN, and al jazeera are complete trash. Economist always was good but I have not read it in a while so I can't speak to it. If it has not changed, that would be great.
      - michaelmrose 3mo ago
        Let's pick one. Why is the BBC trash?
        inigyou 3mo ago
        It only covers Israel/Palestine from the pro-Israel side?
        Arkhaine_kupo 3mo ago
        That is a weird accusation considering the fact that the BBC is still hiding an internal report they made about their Israel / Palestine reporting after they were accused of antisemitism in the early 2000s. If the report exonerated them, and showed they even have a Israeli bias, why would they spend 50k in lawyer fees (disclosed so far, real number is probably higher) to hide that report? There is obvious distrust on western sources of the conflict and the UK active participation in the creation of the 2 state solution, as well as its alliance with America all taint the possible impartiality or accuracy of the BBC. But the accusations against them for antisemitism and anti israeli bias go back decades
        Poacher5 3mo ago
        The BBC's "impartiality" is frequently it's biggest downfall - It's a very standard UK joke that if the BBC was discussing if the earth was flat you'd get a 5 minute interview with a top geographer or physicist from Cambridge followed by an equally credulous 5 minute interview with a madman in his basement claiming it's all the work of the lizard people. The covererage of the Genocide in Palestine (and I'm betraying my view just by calling it that) just brings this into incredibly sharp relief as there are, to a first approximation, no real centrists in that discussion. And yet you still get the same 5 minutes of interview for a doctor on the ground in Palestine and for Ben Gvir, presented as if there's some kind of happy middle ground that everyone can broadly agree on.
  - fsckboy 3mo ago
    if mainstream media has gone downhill, why would somebody have a preferred outlet? What's your preferred outlet?
    - hhh 3mo ago
      your preferred outlet would be something not mainstream then, it doesn't mean it has to be some mega conglomerate.
    - Citizen_Lame 3mo ago
      I personally do astral travelling during the night and get my news and knowledge from various entities. Can't say what others are doing but so far this has never let me down.
  - tehjoker 3mo ago
    Dropsite news is good, but are you familiar with manufacturing consent’s propaganda model of the mass media? A simplified explanation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M&ra=m https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M&ra=m
  - econ 3mo ago
    Depends on the topic. For some it is possible to find sources without a horse in the race. (Different countries) Sometimes you just have to accept that you still know nothing despite 100 articles describing a topic. I think we have over a million games that visualize war more clearly than any news agency.
  - samspot 3mo ago
    There's a cool site I like: news.ycombinator.com
cyanydeez 3mo ago
you dropped 3. its more valuable to pay for propaganda
slickdork 3mo ago
I suspect the third reason might be that most media is owned by a handful of people. If there's no money in news, why are these companies owned by billionaires? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...
- zhivota 3mo ago
  There's not much money to be made by doing quality news, but plenty to be made in click bait crap news. And if you're a billionaire there's a lot of intangible value in owning news outlets.
- Ferret7446 3mo ago
  Mainstream media effectively lets you control the people. Being able to control how people vote is worth a lot of money.
abofh 3mo ago
I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value. The industry got it wrong when it digitized
- katzgrau 3mo ago
  Plenty of startups have tried the “penny per article” approach and failed. They might get 20% of the penny on behalf of the publisher - who has to get 1M pageviews to get $10k. Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.
protocolture 3mo ago
>How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations? I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends. Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions. I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.
wolvoleo 3mo ago
We have plenty of state funded public news services in Europe but they do the same. Just shallow Reuters copy paste slop. The real deep dives are hard to find. And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort. A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care. And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.
leonidasrup 3mo ago
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades, but the relationship of news organizations with the current US goverment has been shaped by the current president. "Donald Trump frequently attacks the American media as having a left-wing bias and being "corrupt", and also uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that give him unfavorable coverage. Trump has sued various media outlets for perceived inaccuracies or biases, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with_the_news_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with...
lynx97 3mo ago
I life in a country where we have a mandatory monthly fee for the state-run media outlet. Its roughly 2x a youtube premium. And quality of said outlet is still declining with everyone else. Pretty non-critical reporting, basically forwarding of what others have claimed. Typos, questionable headlines which get corrected half an hour later. I refute your claim. Its not about financing. Journalists have just become very lazy. Mainstream media deserves the same "I vote with my wallet" treatment as everyone else. And the state forcing me to pay for a specific outlet is just so broken, I am questioning the sanity of our politicians. But lobbying helps I guess. Instead of doing a good/great job, the new tactics is to insist that "you" are an indispensible part of democracy, even though you aren't doing any critical reporting anymore...
Jensson 3mo ago
> News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons: The primary reason is the click metrics, they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs. It doesn't matter how much you pay for it when they will just invest more into those things. You can see this in gaming, the more people paid for Ubisoft games the more toxic transactions Ubisoft put into them.
- gnz11 3mo ago
  > they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs. No, that’s not a new phenomenon. Tabloids and political rags filled that market well before the Internet. News organizations aren’t static entities, they come in a wide variety of flavors.
inigyou 3mo ago
99% of everything is crap, even the ones you pay for. Some are good and worth supporting, like 404 Media. everything is broadly declining, too, as we grow up taking it for granted while the older generation retires, and we also are too busy working menial jobs to pay the rent.

by BeetleB 3mo ago

josephg 3mo ago

Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people. Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars. I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.

coatmatter 3mo ago
Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.
- NikolaNovak 3mo ago
  I think a mixture of BBC, cnn, al jazeera, economist, will get a casual reader to a decent spot, and they're all mainstream media. Possibly guardian but emlarhically not their opinion pages (I agree with them, but even so they're gratingly opinionated, hate to think what a die hard conservative will think of them :)
  - fsckboy 3mo ago
    BBC, CNN, and al jazeera are complete trash. Economist always was good but I have not read it in a while so I can't speak to it. If it has not changed, that would be great.
    - michaelmrose 3mo ago
      Let's pick one. Why is the BBC trash?
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        It only covers Israel/Palestine from the pro-Israel side?
        Arkhaine_kupo 3mo ago
        That is a weird accusation considering the fact that the BBC is still hiding an internal report they made about their Israel / Palestine reporting after they were accused of antisemitism in the early 2000s. If the report exonerated them, and showed they even have a Israeli bias, why would they spend 50k in lawyer fees (disclosed so far, real number is probably higher) to hide that report? There is obvious distrust on western sources of the conflict and the UK active participation in the creation of the 2 state solution, as well as its alliance with America all taint the possible impartiality or accuracy of the BBC. But the accusations against them for antisemitism and anti israeli bias go back decades
        Poacher5 3mo ago
        The BBC's "impartiality" is frequently it's biggest downfall - It's a very standard UK joke that if the BBC was discussing if the earth was flat you'd get a 5 minute interview with a top geographer or physicist from Cambridge followed by an equally credulous 5 minute interview with a madman in his basement claiming it's all the work of the lizard people. The covererage of the Genocide in Palestine (and I'm betraying my view just by calling it that) just brings this into incredibly sharp relief as there are, to a first approximation, no real centrists in that discussion. And yet you still get the same 5 minutes of interview for a doctor on the ground in Palestine and for Ben Gvir, presented as if there's some kind of happy middle ground that everyone can broadly agree on.
- fsckboy 3mo ago
  if mainstream media has gone downhill, why would somebody have a preferred outlet? What's your preferred outlet?
  - hhh 3mo ago
    your preferred outlet would be something not mainstream then, it doesn't mean it has to be some mega conglomerate.
  - Citizen_Lame 3mo ago
    I personally do astral travelling during the night and get my news and knowledge from various entities. Can't say what others are doing but so far this has never let me down.
- tehjoker 3mo ago
  Dropsite news is good, but are you familiar with manufacturing consent’s propaganda model of the mass media? A simplified explanation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M&ra=m https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M&ra=m
- econ 3mo ago
  Depends on the topic. For some it is possible to find sources without a horse in the race. (Different countries) Sometimes you just have to accept that you still know nothing despite 100 articles describing a topic. I think we have over a million games that visualize war more clearly than any news agency.
- samspot 3mo ago
  There's a cool site I like: news.ycombinator.com

cyanydeez 3mo ago

you dropped 3. its more valuable to pay for propaganda

slickdork 3mo ago

I suspect the third reason might be that most media is owned by a handful of people. If there's no money in news, why are these companies owned by billionaires? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

zhivota 3mo ago
There's not much money to be made by doing quality news, but plenty to be made in click bait crap news. And if you're a billionaire there's a lot of intangible value in owning news outlets.
Ferret7446 3mo ago
Mainstream media effectively lets you control the people. Being able to control how people vote is worth a lot of money.

abofh 3mo ago

I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value. The industry got it wrong when it digitized

katzgrau 3mo ago
Plenty of startups have tried the “penny per article” approach and failed. They might get 20% of the penny on behalf of the publisher - who has to get 1M pageviews to get $10k. Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.

protocolture 3mo ago

>How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations? I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends. Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions. I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.

wolvoleo 3mo ago

We have plenty of state funded public news services in Europe but they do the same. Just shallow Reuters copy paste slop. The real deep dives are hard to find. And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort. A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care. And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.

leonidasrup 3mo ago

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades, but the relationship of news organizations with the current US goverment has been shaped by the current president. "Donald Trump frequently attacks the American media as having a left-wing bias and being "corrupt", and also uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that give him unfavorable coverage. Trump has sued various media outlets for perceived inaccuracies or biases, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with_the_news_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with...

lynx97 3mo ago

I life in a country where we have a mandatory monthly fee for the state-run media outlet. Its roughly 2x a youtube premium. And quality of said outlet is still declining with everyone else. Pretty non-critical reporting, basically forwarding of what others have claimed. Typos, questionable headlines which get corrected half an hour later. I refute your claim. Its not about financing. Journalists have just become very lazy. Mainstream media deserves the same "I vote with my wallet" treatment as everyone else. And the state forcing me to pay for a specific outlet is just so broken, I am questioning the sanity of our politicians. But lobbying helps I guess. Instead of doing a good/great job, the new tactics is to insist that "you" are an indispensible part of democracy, even though you aren't doing any critical reporting anymore...

Jensson 3mo ago

> News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons: The primary reason is the click metrics, they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs. It doesn't matter how much you pay for it when they will just invest more into those things. You can see this in gaming, the more people paid for Ubisoft games the more toxic transactions Ubisoft put into them.

gnz11 3mo ago
> they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs. No, that’s not a new phenomenon. Tabloids and political rags filled that market well before the Internet. News organizations aren’t static entities, they come in a wide variety of flavors.

inigyou 3mo ago

99% of everything is crap, even the ones you pay for. Some are good and worth supporting, like 404 Media. everything is broadly declining, too, as we grow up taking it for granted while the older generation retires, and we also are too busy working menial jobs to pay the rent.