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L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

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Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#401
post #386

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA T…

People pay $1200/yr for cable tv but don't want pay a couple hundred dollars a year for news. Thats the real problem, people don't value quality journalism.

People always value quality, but don't view quality the same way.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#402
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or information is treated as a public good and publicly supported through taxes and an independent entity. https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-media...

Then it would be indirectly controlled by Government in power,In effect WORSE than current state.

Hence an independent entity.

The history is complex. Presently the press are ruled by advertisers.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#403
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised. I'd think online news would be one of the industries benefitting from this crisis. Is the revenue tied to lack of conversions on online ads?

It's tied to lack of ad spending. This is global across the entire advertising industry. Companies are spending less because of the pending recession and in particular they're spending a lot less on advertising, because people are not buying much right now (they often aren't even going anywhere for days at a time).

This, 100%. My institution advertises with local news agencies and newspapers. The local television CEO contacted our President to thank him personally for keeping up with the ad buys. They've had a 90% drop in ads being purchased.

Apparently it's us (community college), the state, and grocery stores still buying ads.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve had more documented covid-19 deaths in ~6 weeks than we usually have murders in an entire year and it hasn’t even peaked yet. We have no clue how many cases there even are because we’ve utterly failed to do mass testing. Serious question: do you have any family, friends, or even acquaintances that you would prefer not to have 3-6 weeks of terror and complete misery with a non-trivial chance of permanent disabil…

Do you understand that millions of people are now out of work and won't be able to support their families, businesses are collapsing, calls to suicide lines are up massively, and society is general is not functioning? This is a complex issue. Using hyperbolic emotional appeals to drown out discussion is not the right move.

Even if we are willing to accept a certain number of deaths in order for the economy (and many families) to survive, the problem is that our hospitals can't handle the number of sick people that will result.

You will have bodies abandoned in the streets, like in Ecuador.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#405
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And currently backtracking on.

A couple links to support the parent comment. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1268263/sweden-coronavi... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8212365/Swedish-PM-...

What new measures are they actually imposing? Neither of those articles has anything concrete.

The data both articles present for Sweden's death and infection rates also seem to suggest new measures might not be necessary (though admittedly the data seems pretty noisy; the recent drop in new deaths/infections could just be a fluke).

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good thing is we’ll see in the end. Lots of predictions. It’s almost as if you can’t be criticized for being too cautious. Sure, but the good will won’t last forever. The US accepts 22k deaths a year without blinking due to flu. That’s just the flu. What’s the magic number we’re willing to accept? 50k? 100? There has to be a percentage of the population we are willing to accept as casualty because we already do,…

Let’s not talk abstractly. How many deaths within your family and circle of friends are you willing to accept?

Good question. How many deaths within your family and circle of friends are you willing to accept from political instability resulting from lockdowns?

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#407
post #370

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA T…

>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get…

Wow! That's commendable. What is the total tab for all your subscriptions?

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#408
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not funny, it's just tired and repetitious, and HN discourages joking around anyway because it leads to low quality conversations and contests over who can be funnier instead of who can contribute the most meaningfully to a conversation.

If you think a comment is inappropriate, flag it. Don't complain about it -- the guidelines ask you not to. Just flag it. I found that guideline when looking for the 'discourage joking' guideline. I never found the joking one, though. I don't think that it exists. I sort of get what you mean that it's discouraged, but I don't think it's something as broad as 'joking', more like "Jokes require substance and relatabili…

It's also not 100% a joke, if you really think about what that post was saying. I'm betting most people on this site don't get the 'regular' user experience, because we are more likely to use alternate search sites and ad blockers than standard users. Honestly, had the original poster not pointed out the change in ad placements, I never would've known.

And that now has me thinking about what kind of ads people like my parents are seeing, and how that informs their worldview.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#409

Is there a good news site worth paying for today that actually has ALL news. It infuriates me that when I go to CNN.com's "news" site, there are ads at the bottom with things like "Before you review Amazon Prime, read this" and "America's #1 Stock Picker: 'Must buy now'" How can anyone be okay with this? This is like picking up an astronomy journal that has ads in the back for psychics.

CNN used to be my preferred news site but its turned into garbage as you mentioned. I tried to read a lost this morning about antibody tests and gave up when I faced 2 ads, 2 stock pictures, and an image of the author before I had made it to the 4th sentence. Would gladly pay a reasonable amount of money for a news site.

You might enjoy http://lite.cnn.com Gets rid of all the cruft on the site and just shows you article text.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are so few cases in California because of the measures that have been taken This is probably true, but other countries haven't locked down hard and aren't seeing a big spread. Our options aren't binary. It's not as if the only choice is "Nuke everything" or "Surrender". The US is not a very densely populated country, and density seems to have the biggest impact on the spread of this thing. We probably could d…

Hmm. One of the traits of this virus that makes it so different from past potential epidemics is that it's able to spread rapidly through a population for up to two weeks before it starts becoming "visible" (symptoms start to arrive in large enough numbers to become alarming). At the tail end of those two weeks, the infection may have spread enough to become very difficult to control. So, if we took some kind of midd…

Another complication and I'm sure the task force is wrestling with this. If you undo the restrictions you're never going to be able to put them back in place and have the adherence you did the first time. I just don't believe the people will accept being on lock-down for weeks, then getting a taste of getting back to work and then being asked to go back on lock-down. I also didn't believe people in the US would follow the lock-down rules anywhere near to the degree they have so :shrug: who knows?
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