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Bloomberg and Economist seem to be doing OK, so it is possible.
by petilon 12d ago
Bloomberg and Economist seem to be doing OK, so it is possible.
- xp84 12d agoI'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth. That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles. The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
- xp84 11d agooops, forgot citation: [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers... and https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/households.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families... (Table HH4)