We Never Paid for Journalism • Hacker News Board

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#21

Post by vkou » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.

As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't.

For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web.

> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.

Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#22

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

vearwhershuh wrote: post #6

I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.

Propaganda, possibly Public Relations, or a different book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Publications

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#23

Post by senko » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

sudosteph wrote: post #9

> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…

A local press publisher in Croatia (Tisak) did just that: leveraged their distribution network for overnight package delivery.

The system works better for packages than post, since you send and pick up the parcel at their newsstands (there's always one nearby) at your leisure, avoiding the annoying "delivery failed, pick up at the post office" notices you'd get from the postman attempting delivery while you are at work.

It was also helped by the fact that the national postal service here is notoriously slow and not exactly reliable.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#24

Post by brm » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #11

vearwhershuh wrote: post #6

I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.

Interesting, could you share a link?

These are the best three I found with a quick search:

http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-...

https://books.google.com/books?id=3De8nd_B_C8C&printsec=fron...

http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#25

Post by sudosteph » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

jagged-chisel wrote: post #14

sudosteph wrote: post #9

> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…

The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, wei…

That's true, but I also feel like the "real-time" aspect is what made it so remarkable. Sure Amazon was useful when it just used standard mail for books, but it really became addictive when 2-day prime shipping became available.

Thinking about it though, I do think there's another big difference in that the stealing newspapers and reselling them isn't very profitable to potential criminals. Also, missing a paper delivery due to delivery error isn't the end of the world either.

So it seems like for Newspapers to really make any use of this network, they'd have to stick to delivering stuff that didn't majorly change their format or value, preferably that they could print on-demand themselves.

I guess the Sunday coupon print-outs could be considered an example of branching out a bit then?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#26

Post by CrazyStat » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

excalibur wrote: post #7

> Today, the advertisers see's exactly how many times their ads have been viewed, and pay accordingly. The rise of Ad blockers did not improve the situation. I eschewed ad blockers until around 2016, when the (relatively mainstream) sites I was frequenting started getting hit with a lot of malicious ads. I'm happy to support content I enjoy, but not at the expense of my own security.

I started strongly encouraging my family and friends to use adblockers around the same time, when nytimes.com was hit by a malvertising campaign.

I understand the economic model of free access with advertising, but I'm not going to put my computer and data at risk for it. Allowing ads to include executable code was idiotic.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#27

Post by Torwald » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #21

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't. For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web.…

> As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is.

Of course! Scientific advertising was published in the 1920s! It's just that Madison Avenue could make a hell of a lot more money by being shy about it. So, nobody was talking.

Until the internet made it too obvious…

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#28

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #4

I was going to buy a physical newspaper recently thinking it would make for cheap packing material, only to find that the Sunday edition of the NY Times is like $6 now. It's not as fat as it used to be either it seems.

Inflation makes up a good part of that.

The Sunday Times ran $0.30 in 1969, which is $2.10 in 2019 dollars:

https://goodmorninggloucester.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/wo...

Price of the Sunday edition was raised to $0.20 in 1952, or $1.92 in 2019 dollars. 1974's $1 Sunday paper would be $5.21 today:

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/29/archives/times-to-increas...

The $0.01 daily paper cost of 1898 would (based on 1913 dollars) today be about $0.26. The US dollar actually depreciated generally through about 1900, though at a fairly gradual rate.

On September 13, 1987, the Sunday Times reached its maximum extent: 12 pounds (5.4 kg), 1,612 pages.

https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-the-new-york-...

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#29

Post by tathings » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

Also, certain news stories will naturally attract more eyeballs and today's news has optimized for those stories - hence the torrential outpour of sensationalized clickbait. Today's headlines and stories aim to elicit an instinctive, visceral System 1 reaction, while System 2 articles that take a bit more thought are relegated to the back pages.

I run Thinking About Things [1], an email newsletter with one interesting link every day. Popular ideas and clickbait content always gets more views and clickthroughs, and I see the temptation that newspapers face to include only that content.

[1] https://www.thinking-about-things.com

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#30

Post by jagged-chisel » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

sudosteph wrote: post #25

jagged-chisel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, wei…

That's true, but I also feel like the "real-time" aspect is what made it so remarkable. Sure Amazon was useful when it just used standard mail for books, but it really became addictive when 2-day prime shipping became available. Thinking about it though, I do think there's another big difference in that the stealing newspapers and reselling them isn't very profitable to potential criminals. Also, missing a paper deli…

I do recall that The Sunday Paper came with a [figurative] metric !@#$ ton of coupons inserted. I'd guess 'branching out' was really just selling slightly different advertising/marketing on Sundays.