Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#421

Post by tivert » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

presscast wrote: post #416

nemacol wrote: post #313

I signed up for NYT and canceled the next day. After becoming a paying customer they do not remove the ads from apps, pop ups on the website, etc etc. I was annoyed so I decided to cancel. The cancellation process was also quite annoying. Couldn't just do it through a form, I had to chat or call. I was on hold in the chat room for 35 minutes before someone got on and asked me what I wanted. At that point I was quite…

Full disclosure: as my handle implies, I'm one of the co-founders of presscast.io. Obviously, I have a horse in this race. I want to point out that advertising doesn't have to be intrusive. While this isn't appropriate for an independent journalistic institution like the NYT, the vast majority of for-profit publishers actually can continue with an ad-driven model without degrading their site's experience. One solutio…

> One solution is to accept paid contributions to articles by advertisers with actual expertise in the subject matter. For e.g. marketing or tech periodicals, this works quite well.

Advertorials are an even worse solution than ads.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#422

Post by webninja » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 6:35 PM UTC

sirwanqutbi wrote: post #148

The irony is NY Times have probably paid Hacker News to promote this article here. Besides that, what makes you think news is more accurate if its paid for ?

You must be new here. Contrary to your ill-informed belief, Hacker News does not directly generate money for yCombinator.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#423

Post by webninja » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

kakarot wrote: post #143

The unfortunate reality is thus: The internet has created a zero-cost distribution platform, and "news" platforms which exploit irrational emotional responses in order to further an agenda will always exist. If quality news is gated by a paywall, there exists a cutoff with respect to salary beneath which quality news is inaccessible. Even if some could afford it and choose not to, there still exists an informational…

Make all required college textbooks free! /s

I like your post but free news at a high quality level isn’t sustainable. Even charities need donors.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#424

Post by drdeadringer » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

As a somewhat parallel to "fake news vs real news, pay for it", some folks involved in the production [and likely the distribution] of pornography have associated "ethical porn" with paying for porn. They derided the "tube sites" for obvious reasons. Personally, I've heard of this stance more from certain porn actors than production houses if that's of any consideration, but I'm not blind.

And no, I have no idea what "fake porn" might be, if such a thing exists.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#425

Post by culot » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

jccalhoun wrote: post #124

Want me to pay for real news? Be worth paying for. 90% of "news" (like everything else) is crap that isn't worth supporting. I am not inclined to subsidize the good things by paying for bad things. That being said, I do wish google or some other search engine would get better about favoring original sources rather than other sites that just take stories and rewrite them. I hate seeing a headline to a story only to fi…

I think most commenters here are missing the point of this op-ed: it's not to convince people to pay for news content, it is to promote legislation that allows the author's News Media Alliance to form a cartel that is exempted from anti-trust regulations, so they can try to force Facebook and Google to pay them directly. His organization spends of a lot of time over these past couple of years railing against Google and Facebook, and take note that the true target of this article is not consumers of news, but Facebook and Google.

The author of the article, David Chavern, since he took over the reins of the News Media Alliance, has argued that media cross-ownership rules are antiquated, that greater consolidation of news firms would be beneficial to citizens.

"A new op-ed from trade association News Media Alliance’s president and CEO David Chavern dismisses the contributions of leading tech services and argues publishers should form a cartel and extract rents by implementing controversial new regulations. In reality, though, leading tech services have taken great steps to empower publishers in the Internet Age, while the “cartel solution” would do little to bolster innovation."

link: https://springboardccia.com/2019/02/01/nmas-cartel-solution-...

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#426

Post by speeder » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

speeder wrote: post #212

NYT hired a person that is openly racist and tried to turn long form story about a Chinese woman in tech into family drama clickbait that risked making that woman get killed by the government. NYT can whine all they want, but until they stop producing fake news themselves no reason to pay... If all papers produce such low quality biased content, I prefer the free ones, at least there is more honesty there about what…

For the downvoters: why? Miss Jeong explicitly writes racist stuff on Twitter, and endangered the life of a Chinese person when she was working at Vice, it is a story that is not hidden, or controversial, the facts are easy to verify, so why the downvotes?

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#427

Post by planck01 » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

ysv2 wrote: post #388

bryanlarsen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would appreciate less emphasis on pretending to cover news from several angles. By doing so they imply that both sides are equally valid even when they're not. For instance I've seen them bring on a climate change denier to give the "other side" on a climate change story; anti vaxxers, et cetera. It's particularly bad when one side is willing to lie.

Yes, some "sides" of some issues are objectively false. But the problem is that even where facts are not in dispute, the mainstream press's strong left-bias influences the facts it chooses to emphasize and the narratives it promotes. Take the coverage of the Covington High School protest, for example. When the available facts seemed to support the narrative that white, male, MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-abortion Catholic s…

"suddenly that no longer serves a narrative the left wants to tell"

Except that that was also reported mostly everywhere. Also, one sided 'evil-looking' harassment is news that is more interesting to most people because it might signal some trend. No-one (left or right) would have found a word-fight between evenly-wrong grey characters very interesting if that was the story in the first place. Because it just isn't.

That doesn't make the mainstream press left-biased. I think it actually isn't.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#428

Post by kakarot » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

webninja wrote: post #423

kakarot wrote: post #143

The unfortunate reality is thus: The internet has created a zero-cost distribution platform, and "news" platforms which exploit irrational emotional responses in order to further an agenda will always exist. If quality news is gated by a paywall, there exists a cutoff with respect to salary beneath which quality news is inaccessible. Even if some could afford it and choose not to, there still exists an informational…

Make all required college textbooks free! /s I like your post but free news at a high quality level isn’t sustainable. Even charities need donors.

My point is that it has to be sustainable. We don't have another option. It must be independently funded and have alternative revenue streams.

A lot of people used to say Open Source wasn't sustainable. Red Hat, one of the most prominent and influential Open Source companies, has over 10k employees (many of them engineers who take the salary of 2-3 journalists) just got bought for $34 billion.

You're gonna have to back up your claim that free news at a high quality level isn't sustainable.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#429

Post by TarpitCarnivore » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #417

TarpitCarnivore wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either the boys surrounded and approached the old man to stand intimidatingly close as WaPo reported, or they did not The video clearly shows boys standing around a man, with one of them face to face with him. That is right in the video, clear as day. That is very much a clear fact. What you seem intent on breaking down is whether or not this was seen as some form of intimidation tactic and I'm trying to explain to…

> > Either the boys surrounded and approached the old man to stand intimidatingly close as WaPo reported, or they did not > The video clearly shows boys standing around a man, with one of them face to face with him. Did the boys surround and approach the old man to stand intimidatingly close as WaPo reported? Answer Y or N. > > You seem genuinely confused about the nature of reality. > how am I in a 'confused nature…

I honestly don't even know what you're arguing over anymore. You asked me questions, I answered them and offered context on my responses but yet you continue to tell me how I'm wrong.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#430

Post by presscast » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

tivert wrote: post #421

presscast wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full disclosure: as my handle implies, I'm one of the co-founders of presscast.io. Obviously, I have a horse in this race. I want to point out that advertising doesn't have to be intrusive. While this isn't appropriate for an independent journalistic institution like the NYT, the vast majority of for-profit publishers actually can continue with an ad-driven model without degrading their site's experience. One solutio…

> One solution is to accept paid contributions to articles by advertisers with actual expertise in the subject matter. For e.g. marketing or tech periodicals, this works quite well. Advertorials are an even worse solution than ads.

Agree. What I'm proposing here is something closer to "paid expert contributions", to an otherwise non-advertorial piece.

Obviously this needs to be properly disclosed, but the result is very different from an advertorial, i.e.: _actual_ expert commentary on a well-researched piece.