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There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

talkingpointsmemo.com

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Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#91

Post by ghaff »

jabretti wrote: post #86
serhei wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.

Motley Fool seems to be the leaders in this -- if you search google news for any stock you're interested in then you'll find that Motley Fool seems to be cranking out largely-boilerplate articles about it; sometimes they seem to have had some human intervention, other times they seem to be fully computer-generated.

Routine financial news, sports... Anything that can be largely churned out in boilerplate fashion based on some standard facts. This has been done for a while now and it will only increase as long as there's a business model for quickly published, largely undifferentiated, rote stories. It's a low-cost, high-volume game.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#92

Post by JayNeely »

indubitable wrote: post #52

A couple of weeks back there was a headline about a site surreptitiously using visitor's hardware to mine some form of crypto. People were upset, but it made me wonder.. why isn't this a viable business model? Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to be your customer again, instead of the companies advertis…

Well for one, the trend is hugely toward people consuming media on mobile devices, where resources like processor power and battery life are much more limited and unsuited to effective crypto mining than even a standard PC is.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#93

Post by auggierose »

stephengillie wrote: post #12
Jaruzel wrote: post #7

Relevant... I got told a few days ago that: "Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within reason)." Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the web suddenly made sense.

Publish or perish?

They publish and society perishes.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#94

Post by acdha »

eli wrote: post #31
acdha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of those profitable businesses?

Well, you can check my profile for one :) Skift is another (and if you've been following digital media for a while you may recognize its founder Rafat Ali) These are B2B examples. Consumer media is a lot harder because you have to figure out a way to carve out a niche audience that is attractive to advertisers, but I think it's possible. And I think success is a lot more likely if you bootstrap something rather than…

The B2B focus seems like a smart move — and it's good to see another local business which isn't focused on the government, too.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#95

Post by coolgeek »

soared wrote: post #72
brokentone wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's posted on TPM on the "Editor's Blog" and the byline says "Josh Marshall is editor and publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com." what else do you need on his credentials? There are links scattered throughout, but part of the point of this post is that no one is really talking about this issue at least at the depth it deserves, so understandably it's light on references. In this case, I'd treat a lot of this as an orig…

Thats completely meaningless. I've got that byline on 4 different websites. There is one link in the entire post. So because it deserves depth, he does the opposite? There are thousands of 'publishers' like this - I don't believe he's qualified to claim the industry is broken. He can't see anything from a macro perspective.

He's a Polk Award-winning journalist, he has a History PhD from Brown, and he has written for many other publications over at least the last 20 years.

Given that he has a wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Marshall, it's pretty obvious that you're not interested in doing the slightest bit of research into the subject that you're criticizing.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#96

Post by soared »

coolgeek wrote: post #95
soared wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats completely meaningless. I've got that byline on 4 different websites. There is one link in the entire post. So because it deserves depth, he does the opposite? There are thousands of 'publishers' like this - I don't believe he's qualified to claim the industry is broken. He can't see anything from a macro perspective.

He's a Polk Award-winning journalist, he has a History PhD from Brown, and he has written for many other publications over at least the last 20 years. Given that he has a wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Marshall , it's pretty obvious that you're not interested in doing the slightest bit of research into the subject that you're criticizing.

All of which should go in his by-line.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#97

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

davidwitt415 wrote: post #42

Josh Marshall is well qualified on this subject, and is walking the walk with TPM by pushing it towards a subscription model, and away from too much dependency on ad revenue. (He has previously published insightful posts on the dangers of relying on Google and FB, and their capricious business practices). In a larger way, this is an indictment/logical endpoint of the 'free' business model. You still get what you pay…

> "Perhaps things really need to get shitty with free content (ahem, autoplay video)"

As if things weren't bad enough already. I can imagine they could get worse, but I think we're close to the bottom (knock on wood).

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#98

Post by dredmorbius »

jabretti wrote: post #86
serhei wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.

Motley Fool seems to be the leaders in this -- if you search google news for any stock you're interested in then you'll find that Motley Fool seems to be cranking out largely-boilerplate articles about it; sometimes they seem to have had some human intervention, other times they seem to be fully computer-generated.

I was seeing credible copy produced for financial reporting in the late 1990s.

The underlying data are available, the vocabulary is distinctly limited, and the reporting was already highly pro-forma. Mad-libbing a few variants of language and selecting the best of the lot does work fairly well.

That actually raises the underlying question: why publish narrative copy at all in cases such as this, rather than data tables or charts? News and journalism are curiously allergic to data or presenting it in a usable fashion -- I've seen tables essentially written out over several paragraphs that could have been expressed in a few grid squares.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#99

Post by dredmorbius »

Romanulus wrote: post #78
Jaruzel wrote: post #7

Relevant... I got told a few days ago that: "Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within reason)." Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the web suddenly made sense.

Although Buzzfeed and the similar ilk are all terrible, you cannot blame them for doing what they do. They are all merely a symptom of the burgeoning idiocracy they pander to.

Parts of Buzzfeed are quite bad.

Others are actually quite good. At least Buzzfeed are balancing this and funding real journalism with the fake crap.

This from someone who'd been a very harsh critic. Some of their coverage of the TPP, ISDS, and international lawsuits in particular struck me as excellent.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#100

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

reader5000 wrote: post #5

The content produced by millions of unpaid people like this comment is way more interesting than the boilerplate content produced by paid people written to conform to a particular zine's "style". The very idea of "lets pay a bunch of people to write about shit that everybody already knows about" is absurd.

For this reason, my primary source of Internet reading is HN upvoted stories & comments. I will often read the top HN comment on an article before reading the article.
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