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We Never Paid for Journalism

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Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#71

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

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.

That's a somewhat conspiratorial take. While there are publishers that heavy-handedly tell their newsrooms what to write (i. e. Murdoch), the vast majority does not.

Many publishers are typical corporations, with a large number of shareholders, none of which get to even talk to the journalists.

Even among those owned by individual billionaires, the evidence is lacking. The Washington Post, for example, has broken quite a few (often negative) stories about Amazon. The Seattle Times recently broke much of the 737-MAX scandal, even though they are faily dependent on Boeing. The New York Times doesn't even write much about Mexico, let alone topics related to Carlos Slim's financial interests.

The motivation to own these reputable papers seems to be far easier to explain as a status thing. Kinda like NFL teams, but for the more intellectual billionaires.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#72

Post by catalogia »

Nextgrid wrote: post #33
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?…

As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy. No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake. This means I…

One of the advantages of print newspapers is accountability. Print newspapers can be (and generally are) archived by public libraries. My local library has archives of local papers going back decades. When corrections to previously published articles become necessary, the corrections are published in such a way that both the original article and the correction are archived.

Of course there are projects that seek to archive online newspapers too (archive.org is awesome!), but online newspapers are able to thwart archiving either through technical means or policy (robots.txt.) Furthermore even when they aren't maliciously attacking archival efforts, online publications can swap out headlines or even the full content of articles, sometimes before the original has been archived. That sort of undisclosed on-the-fly revision simply isn't possible with print newspapers.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#73

Post by nostrademons »

notahacker wrote: post #44
Nextgrid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy. No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake. This means I…

I think the theory behind the legitimacy is better than the practice. Sure, you can't buy ads in national publications for a fly-by-night level scam the way you can buy social ads. But outright scams can be as big as Enron, and people running scam ICOs/MLM companies etc can definitely afford the ad bill if they don't find the sucker ratio higher through more targeted digital channels...

Binance is charging a million dollars to list your token on the exchange. If anything there's an adverse selection effect: the more willing you are to fork over a million dollars to get your token listed, the more likely you are to be a scam. Crypto projects with the most real adoption and genuine development (like MakerDAO) didn't even ICO at all, they just airdropped tokens to get the ecosystem started and let the quality of the product take it from there.

IIRC there was a similar phenomena with the dot-com boom: companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising did so because they weren't selling anything useful, while the actual survivors spent zero on advertising and grew virally from word of mouth. Google and Facebook make money by selling ads, not by buying them: Google's first ad didn't run until 2010.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#74

Post by ip26 »

The model I've wished for is a large micropayment network covering many to most online news sources charging, I don't know, a penny or two per article. Maybe no charge if you close the page after two seconds. Ad views are worth less than that, and I can easily afford ten or twenty cents a day to read the news across a variety of sources.

I want to pay for news. But I don't have the budget to pay $20/mo each to six great newspapers all equally worthy of my attention, and nor do most other people.

Ten or twenty cents a day is lower than the fifty cents for a paper copy- but the marginal overhead is also zero.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#75

Post by catalogia »

musicale wrote: post #59
ghaff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.

People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing expe…

Modern consumers still actively seek out and consume advertisements (in some contexts). Movie trailers on youtube rack up millions of views. Industry promotional events like E3 receive huge amounts of eager attention from video game consumers. "I watch the Super Bowl for the ads" is a sentiment so common it's basically a meme.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#76

Post by ip26 »

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…

Don't forget newspapers are broadcast instead of point to point. You deliver the same paper to everyone.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#77

Post by xtracto »

Reedx wrote: post #40

Journalism is in such a disastrous state, I feel like/hope there's a growing appetite for a source that is of genuinely high quality and has an uncompromising approach. No ads, no clickbait, no partisan nonsense, no dark patterns, no hit pieces, no mixing of news and opinion. Just uncompromisingly focused fact-based journalism (of course there will always be some bias and mistakes, but there's a lot you can do to mit…

I remember my dad paying subscription for Time magazine since I was a very little (Mexican living in Mexico). I always felt their journalism quality was very good. Are they still doing print?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#79

Post by jldugger »

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?…

> 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.

AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_.

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

You're not wrong, but I wouldn't discount the power of inertia. There's a story Steven Levitt tells on his Freakonomics podcast about a retailer who wanted to measure the impact of print ads. He suggested not running print ads for a duration in order to measure impact, and was met with incredulity: "Are you crazy? We can't just do that. We'll get fired like Jordan was. Dude was so unorganized that he forgot to order ads for the northeastern market for his entire summer internship."

After analyzing the data from that mishap, there was no measurable impact, and yet they refused to run the trial for longer. 'We can't not just buy ads' was the argument, even though the data suggested you totally could. I guess if your department buys ads, until you have an alternative, arguing for a budget cut is arguing your department should all be laid off.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#80

Post by ggggtez »

ninth_ant wrote: post #67
blueyes wrote: post #31

While the 50 cents per edition that newspapers charged was not enough to cover their costs, it sent a signal to advertisers that they were getting a certain type of eyeball. An eyeball that had 50 disposable cents per day to buy packaged news in a local market. That 50 cents was an important signal. Newspapers would find other ways of getting those same eyeballs, by striking deals with hotels and airlines and essenti…

Is that the 50c really signalling disposable income? Or just that it signalled that the newspapers were being read by humans and not just sitting in a pile somewhere? To my intuition 50c per day doesn’t signal a useful amount of disposable income even in 2006 dollars.

This is more than a Netflix subscription. And people still share their subscriptions with friends and family to reduce costs.

$0.50 a day is real money, even today.

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