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…
We Never Paid for Journalism
111–120 of 129 posts
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#112I 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…
As laid out in Manufacturing Consent, the understanding is implicit, not explicit. I would classify this as ideological, not conspiratorial.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#113I 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?
I also recommend Adam Curtis’s four part documentary “The Century of the Self”, the first episode of which is here: https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04
The first episode deals exclusively with Bernays, and the following three episodes follow a political narrative of impact.
I believe Curtis’s “Hypernormalisation” would be more salient to the narrative here, which discusses the funding of misinformation as an alternative to traditional authoritarian power structures like censorship: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#114As an unrelated note to the author if he reads this, it helps readability a lot to not write large amounts with all digits ($3,260,060,000) but abbreviated ($3.26bn). Think what you would do with file sizes.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#115Earlier 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…
I was buying computer magazines in the 90s as much for the ads than for the content. That was the printed version of newegg/ebuyer in some way. I still do browse on those occasionally even when I don’t want to buy anything just to see what’s new and where prices are. And that was a time when clock frequencies were changing month on month!
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#116Former 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?…
The old joke was "We know 50% of our ad buy money is wasted in newspapers, we just don't know which 50%." Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher. This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard. Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles…
I wonder also how much of this ad money isn’t insurance against being treated too harshly by the newspaper.
There are ads in newspapers where I just can’t think of any other reason. Like an ad for EADS (don’t remember if it was EADS or an equivalent). I ain’t going to buy an Airbus airliner in my next sunday shopping! And I doubt airlines make decisions based on ads.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#117Journalism 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 think what you are looking for is news agencies (Reuters, AFP, AP, etc), or perhaps financial news which tend to be less politicised (WSJ).
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The question is: where did this pattern come from? Why buy too many ads in the first place? Corporations are supposed to be maximizing profits, and yet we hear they are wasting tons of money on ads. Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders? Some thoughts: - A recent comment regarding a travel agency reflected that execs would check the stats on the most popular travel agency…
Another thought: advertising advertises itself. So on one side, you have data saying you're buying too much ads. On the other, you have advertisers telling you they'll increase your profits if only you pay them. I have a feeling that the advertiser side usually wins.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#119Former 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…
> 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.
I disagree with your assessment. For one, if you base reliability on monetary costs, then it's trivial for a fly-by-night scam to work around it. You just have to get more money. A loan could work. Or VC investment - such companies have plenty of money to burn on advertising, and it in no way reflects the quality of their work.
Two, reputation. I don't think reputation matters much to anyone anymore. Think of all the corporate scandals that are featured essentially weekly on HN. Or, closer to the topic, think of all the bullshit newspaper publish that gets thoroughly debunked in discussion threads around HN or topical subreddits. And yet both those corporations and those papers are still happily chugging along, no worse for the wear. If reputation of news publications mattered at all, nobody would post anything from Bloomberg here ever since the Supermicro fiasco.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#120Earlier 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…
This, like so many extreme opinions, is just wrong. An advertisement that happens to reach someone who has a problem that your product solves isn't a scam. It is a way to get that person to know about your solution.
And this is just motte and bailey. Yes, there are some advertisements like you describe. No, vast majority of them aren't like that.
It's like a city was proposing to limit car movement through the center to improve air quality, and you countered with "but some cars are electric and don't pollute!". Yeah, right. Wake me up when most of them are.