251–260 of 360 posts
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Even the Financial Time is starting to drift in that direction...
I’m not alone then. I moved my subscription from the NYT to FT looking for a less politically slanted product but the tone at the FT is definitely going in the same direction. Any suggestions? P.s I have to phone the FT to cancel my subscription apparently.
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> What I can imagine is a "digital pass" this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.
The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the BBC itself (in reality outsourced).
Offtopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?
The Washington Post and the NY Times are both very fine papers: they take the traditional 20th Century American view of journalism (attempting to be objective and authoritative, and taking accuracy seriously) which is a bit alien to the European print tradition, but that's not a bad thing if you want different perspectives. The Wall Street Journal is also a fine paper if you like your news more economically and finan…
what are European newspapers like then? tabloids?
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The Washington Post and the NY Times are both very fine papers: they take the traditional 20th Century American view of journalism (attempting to be objective and authoritative, and taking accuracy seriously) which is a bit alien to the European print tradition, but that's not a bad thing if you want different perspectives. The Wall Street Journal is also a fine paper if you like your news more economically and finan…
>they take the traditional 20th Century American view of journalism (attempting to be objective and authoritative, and taking accuracy seriously) which is a bit alien to the European print tradition what are European newspapers like then? tabloids?
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Even the Financial Time is starting to drift in that direction...
I’m not alone then. I moved my subscription from the NYT to FT looking for a less politically slanted product but the tone at the FT is definitely going in the same direction. Any suggestions? P.s I have to phone the FT to cancel my subscription apparently.
That’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding. This would confirm most of the newspapers out there a…
This is just my opinion, but things change. Change is not necessarily bad. If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT). Given the dismal quality of many small publications--possibly caused by the need to bring people via search engines--I welcome replacing them wit…
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> They also show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very backward to me. So are you also cancelling your cable subscription, any magazine subscriptions, physical newspaper subscriptions, no longer driving on toll roads with billboard...? I'm not saying it's right, or good, or valid--but the standard practice, for as long as I can remember, for most mediums, is to still show ads for things you pay for.…
A lot of people have cancelled their cable subscription and get by with ad-free services like Netflix and Hulu, MLB.tv, etc... The other things you mention - magazines, newspapers, and billboards - usually don't track you and build a profile on you so they are less objectionable.
Magazines and newspapers may not track you to the extent that websites can and do. But they certainly sell your information to third parties. And they have at least some basic profile information about you (if you're subscribing to Cat Fancier, it's a pretty good bet you love cats). Even an address or zip code provides a likely income range, political leaning, etc.
Billboards.... well that depends what you consider a "billboard" and what you consider "tracking". There has certainly been stories here on HN about eyesight tracking, stores tracking you using cell-phone beacons to see where you are going. These things can and have been used in signage (i.e. "small billboards").
But that's not really the point, anyway. My original point was that it was not "backwards" to pay for a particular service and have it show you ads. It's very, very common. And in most cases it's actually the norm, in almost any type of media. So I stand by my original point: showing ads is not "backwards", it's the norm.
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Arguably, the kind of environment in which one elects a President who generalises an entire nationality as criminals and rapists except for "a few, [who] I assume, are good people." If you want to find how low the bar has fallen, understand that one side of the political divide lowered it long before Jeong got there. Your final assertion is not worth addressing.
Sarah Jeong's anti-white, anti-male, anti-cop tweets date back to 2013, long before the election. https://archive.fo/7m0Tz I don't agree with you that "they did it first" is a valid defense for this behavior, but if it were, it would be a defense for Trump, not for Jeong.
EDIT: To further clarify, I'm not saying "they did it first" is a defence. I'm explaining that this is the context that Vox article going around is saying is missing when people want to condemn those tweets -- the tone and vocabulary of a certain part of Twitter. Jeong's mistake was posting those tweets with a particular audience in mind - one that understood the touchstones of these conversations (e.g. "kill all men" being obviously not a serious rallying cry to murder males) - when, although Twitter can sometimes feel like a clubhouse, it's still a public forum. At the time, I, and many other people situated within that context, understood Jeong's meaning perfectly, and even as a white man I empathise with what she's saying. Others may not be aware of that context, or choose to ignore it, which is where the fraughtness of her comments lay, not the content itself.
I'm certain the response to this will be along the lines of "Then why are white men persecuted for making racist jokes?" and the answer is because young Asian-American women have a lot more to fear from young white men than vice versa, which is the power dynamic at the heart of why Jeong's comments can only be called "racist" in the strictest definition of the term, disregarding the present situation. But this is all getting too complex to outline in a comment unambiguously, so I hesitate to say even that much.
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There's just too many vital services that can't function with just ad financing. It's so obvious, that I have a slight hope we'll see new business models to accommodate for that. The problem is that I don't read a hundred articles a month by the NYT, I read maybe 5. And then 5 others on 30 different sites, each. What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a massive amount of content for a…
> What I can imagine is a "digital pass" this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.
The BBC specifically has a trust issue in the UK. Even one of its own long term journalists wrote a book called "Can we trust the BBC?" (spoiler warning: the given answer is no).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Trust-BBC-Robin-Aitken/dp/08264...
Tax-funded institutions that are not accountable to the people paying the tax is corrosive. Resentment builds and has nowhere to go. For now at least if you're willing to disconnect from broadcast television entirely, you can avoid paying the license fee. But similar license fees in other countries have been adapted to include the internet; it's hard to know if the same will happen in the UK.
My favourite recent example of ridiculous tabloid-level BBC journalism is "Brexit threat to sandwiches":
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44960293
Staying in the EU for a bit longer would keep the chiller cabinet full of sandwiches - but it would doubtless raise the political temperature.
The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.
This is hardly an isolated example. Consider what sort of journalistic process led to this story being written, edited, reviewed and approved for publication. Is it one citizens should be forced to fund? What does that sort of thing do long term? Is it any wonder that trust in the press is in long term decline in the UK?