Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

niemanlab.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 365 posts

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#211

Post by dv_dt »

stillkicking wrote: post #163

Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces. 'Member when The Guardian was one of the outlets boldly reporting the Snowden and Manning leaks? I member. Right now on their front page I can read how democracy is being undermined "by not distinguishing between fact and opinion". And you know what? They're right on this fro…

It's possible for a newspaper to publish a mix of quality material as well as more generally popular material... it might even be an objective to to that depending on your business model.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#212

Post by ogre_magi »

hitekker wrote: post #210
ogre_magi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both sides perceive the outgroup as the source of all evil in the world. You could replace left/right and republican/democrat in your comment and there would be people on the other side who sincerely believe it as much as you do. Neither claim is accurate.

For those curious, I'd recommend looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance . Sometimes, right and wrong isn't always obvious. To know one from another may require effort and thought. Often times, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and so we develop instincts that ensure we can take a step back and not immediately point fingers. That's good; most of us…

We probably don't share the same values, and would not be able to reach consensus on the "right side."

This is an acceptable and unavoidable situation that technocrats need to learn to live with. People will want different outcomes, and will have different moral matrices. People on the left and right will each disagree with the other side's characterization of their politician's sins.

Edit: Just want to note that the parent comment was substantially edited in ways that might make this comment seem weird.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#213

Post by tsbertalan »

khawkins wrote: post #192
stillkicking wrote: post #163

Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces. 'Member when The Guardian was one of the outlets boldly reporting the Snowden and Manning leaks? I member. Right now on their front page I can read how democracy is being undermined "by not distinguishing between fact and opinion". And you know what? They're right on this fro…

> Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces. Won't this crowdfunding potentially polarize journalism even more? In general, individuals are more passionate about their political opinions and social causes than for neutral, high-quality journalism which sometimes confirms, sometimes rejects their world-views. You also…

I don't understand. What you call "crowdfunding" I'd just call "subscription", which is how all journalism was paid for until fairly recently. You're really arguing that openly corporate-funded "journalism" would be superior, and have a lesser tendency to promote a particular angle, like, say, the capitalism-cures-all-ills mantra?

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#214

Post by root_axis »

ouid wrote: post #201
stillkicking wrote: post #163

Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces. 'Member when The Guardian was one of the outlets boldly reporting the Snowden and Manning leaks? I member. Right now on their front page I can read how democracy is being undermined "by not distinguishing between fact and opinion". And you know what? They're right on this fro…

You and a friend go to a house on halloween and there's a bowl that says take one. You sheepishly take two, and your friend, after you, empties the entire bowl into his sack. You ask of him, outraged, "How could you do such a malicious thing?!" and he responds, "Me?!?! what about you?!" This is whataboutism, and yeah, you're guilty of it. Our right wing is at least two orders of magnitude more corrupt than our left w…

> Pointing fingers at "all guilty parties" means pointing fingers almost exclusively at republicans.

Almost exclusively? That's definitely an unhelpful exaggeration. I agree with the spirit of your analogy, but even invoking the term "exclusively" when referring to political behavior, qualifiers or not, is going to undermine your argument.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#215

Post by hsod »

ogre_magi wrote: post #207
ouid wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and a friend go to a house on halloween and there's a bowl that says take one. You sheepishly take two, and your friend, after you, empties the entire bowl into his sack. You ask of him, outraged, "How could you do such a malicious thing?!" and he responds, "Me?!?! what about you?!" This is whataboutism, and yeah, you're guilty of it. Our right wing is at least two orders of magnitude more corrupt than our left w…

Both sides perceive the outgroup as the source of all evil in the world. You could replace left/right and republican/democrat in your comment and there would be people on the other side who sincerely believe it as much as you do. Neither claim is accurate.

This seems like relativism run amok. All political positions are not equal except in a completely unmoored ethical system.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#216

Post by Red_Tarsius »

stillkicking wrote: post #163

Now imagine how much more they'd make if they actually published quality material instead of culture war clickbait and freshman opinion pieces. 'Member when The Guardian was one of the outlets boldly reporting the Snowden and Manning leaks? I member. Right now on their front page I can read how democracy is being undermined "by not distinguishing between fact and opinion". And you know what? They're right on this fro…

The Guardian is not different from any other Tabloid, except the viewership is the left higher class. The journalists still mispresent data and exploit racial/gender tensions to make bucks. I used to read it every day, now I only look at the environment section.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#217

Post by ogre_magi »

hsod wrote: post #215
ogre_magi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both sides perceive the outgroup as the source of all evil in the world. You could replace left/right and republican/democrat in your comment and there would be people on the other side who sincerely believe it as much as you do. Neither claim is accurate.

This seems like relativism run amok. All political positions are not equal except in a completely unmoored ethical system.

I don't subscribe to an objective morality. There are things that I value and attempt to maximize, but I don't feel the need to compel all sentients in the universe to adopt my position.

I'm willing to "live and let live," with the understanding that conflict will still happen sometimes and that's okay.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#218

Post by ouid »

root_axis wrote: post #214
ouid wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and a friend go to a house on halloween and there's a bowl that says take one. You sheepishly take two, and your friend, after you, empties the entire bowl into his sack. You ask of him, outraged, "How could you do such a malicious thing?!" and he responds, "Me?!?! what about you?!" This is whataboutism, and yeah, you're guilty of it. Our right wing is at least two orders of magnitude more corrupt than our left w…

> Pointing fingers at "all guilty parties" means pointing fingers almost exclusively at republicans. Almost exclusively? That's definitely an unhelpful exaggeration. I agree with the spirit of your analogy, but even invoking the term "exclusively" when referring to political behavior, qualifiers or not, is going to undermine your argument.

Alright, say you had to sort them from most guilty to least guilty. I don't have the resources to do this, but start listing off republicans until you find one who is "less guilty" than a democrat. How many places on this list does that take you? Probably more than 100.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#219

Post by peoplewindow »

m00g00 wrote: post #131
joosters wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me a comments section of an online newspaper that isn't full of bile and hate? It unfortunately seems unavoidable, and so many publications are just removing their comments sections. Much better than leaving the hate in, IMO.

It's the selective nature of their disabling of comments. Notice on this very article, at the top, is a link to a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album, and comments are enabled for it. Both articles are obviously opinions, so why the difference? Only thing I can think of is one is more likely to see a backlash in the comments (because the article is ridiculous and deserves it) than the other.

They used to have comments enabled on most stories. I remember, from the time they were covering Snowden, all their stories seemed to have comments enabled.

I believe they largely shut down comments for a couple of reasons:

- Like a lot of newspapers, they feel very strongly that they have to moderate comments very aggressively. They didn't use automated systems to do that, because often the comments they wanted to delete were highly scored, so they ended up paying an army of moderators. That's not affordable for an organisation that loses tens of millions of pounds a year.

- As their columnists got crazier the comments got more vitriolic. It became commonplace for me to read a loopy story and go down to the comments to find people pointing out factual errors by the writers, or flaming them for their extreme opinions. I think the staff got tired of commenters trying to bring them back down to earth.

Nowadays they only rarely seem to enable comments. Presumably to keep mod costs down.

Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads

#220

Post by Nursie »

ghaff wrote: post #19
f055 wrote: post #10

This. Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat. Somehow, when the respected newspapers moved to the web, they forgot that, and kept pumping ads like crazy. This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content - these two don't mix. Consequen…

My understanding is that paid subscribers (and newsstand sales) largely went into paying for printing and distribution while ads paid for basically everything else. Therefore, I expect that part of the thinking was that ads by themselves could pay for digital content creation and delivery. It's also the case that most people assume that an outsized percentage of costs goes into the physical copy of things. At one poi…

>> t one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively.

I still get miffed when the e-book costs more than the paper copy. It's not like I expect them to be free, but when I'm buying the same product without the physical distribution, I would expect it to be <= the paper price.

Post reply on HN