We Never Paid for Journalism • Hacker News Board

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#101

Post by 3xblah » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:20 AM UTC

"At the end of the day, the price that you and I pay, whether it is for the print copy or digital, it is only a very small part of the revenue. The price paid for the printed copy was by no means sustaining the newspaper business. It was advertisers all along. And they paid the price for the privilege of having as many eyeballs the newspaper could expose their ads to."

Is it possible to keep a newspaper in business by purchasing subscriptions. Think about that the next time someone suggests subscribing to some popular newspaper to counter the effects of declining journalism.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#102

Post by friendlybus » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:40 AM UTC

sacrificedcapon wrote: post #81

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 hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam". It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need. Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The e…

How do you find the stuff you need then? Go to the big product box in the sky?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#103

Post by Thorrez » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:06 AM 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.

That reminds me of this post which touches on that idea.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#104

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:38 AM UTC

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…

Also solved the issue of people walking off with a giant stack of newspapers and throwing them in a gutter, as occurred with some completely free papers.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#105

Post by shard972 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:45 AM UTC

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #71

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 qui…

I guess that whole Jeff Zucker leak from CNN just didn't happen.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#106

Post by moksly » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 5:48 AM 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?…

It’s anecdotal but the advertisements that work best on me are the ones hanging around public transportation hubs (I’m Scandinavian). I would never go to the movies if those spots didn’t inform me there was a new movie running.

No one is gathering that information though.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#107

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:12 AM UTC

friendlybus wrote: post #102

sacrificedcapon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam". It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need. Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The e…

How do you find the stuff you need then? Go to the big product box in the sky?

Consumer Reports and Octopart

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#108

Post by 1998 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:16 AM 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?…

Newspapers had a local monopoly on publishing to their circulation. If you want to communicate with 100,000+ people in your city tomorrow you had to pay. News, sports, comics, the content is bait to drive the circulation.

Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers.

Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#109

Post by tastroder » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #98

musicale wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think Instagram has nailed this, personally. Their ads get seamlessly placed in your feed, they're usually interesting to look at with high quality graphics and videos, and if I don't want to see them, it's trivial to scroll past them. But the ads have definitely snagged me to make a few impulse purchases this year.

Interesting, I often find the ad selection on Instagram especially abysmal. It might be that my non-US geolocation has a negative effect on this. Most of the ads I get are either generic products for my gender and age range, local industry companies wasting budget on stuff I'm interested in but don't need at scale and won't ever buy through Instagram links, useless recruiting startups aimed at what I assume would be me 15 years ago (and even then I was not interested in this form factor), and of course a wide range of scams from personal finance to Kickstarter products.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#110

Post by bonestamp2 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #32

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…

My wife and her brother made pretty decent money as 11-14 year olds delivering papers in their neighborhood. About 80% of houses got at least the Sunday edition.

When I was 11-13, I did the same. I made about $15/hr in 1990, which was pretty baller for a 6th grader. Hell, there are people who wish they were making that today. I eventually took a pay cut to hire my older brother so I could sleep in on weekends. I blew most of my money on gadgets in the radio shack catalog and I don't regret a minute of it.