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Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

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Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#101

Post by KarlKemp »

alex_young wrote: post #88
gerash wrote: post #47

The most important factor is that on the internet local news media lose their geographical monopoly. So everyone can subscribe to NYT or WSJ no matter where they live. This effectively creates a winner takes all situation like in many other industries which get closer to a free market. Add to that the fact that classified ads have been taken over by likes of ebay, LinkedIn, craigslist, etc. Basically the business mod…

> ...local news media lose their geographical monopoly I realize what you're saying, but really, local news will always have a geographical monopoly. Can the NYTimes or WSJ even think about covering local issues? How will investigative reporting function for say a local office holder or a local environmental problem? To my knowledge the real problem is that the traditional business model supporting reporting has drie…

Sure, the few remaining quality papers can (and do) introduce local editions for markets other than their "traditional" home base. Unfortunately, the economics aren't much different than they are for the regional paper that previously covered the area.

I say "not much" because there might be a chance that people would appreciate the combination of local news combined with the national and international coverage that would be shared among all these editions. But that, also, isn't exactly new: it's what these "newspaper chains" have been doing for at least 20 years.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#102

Post by KarlKemp »

gerash wrote: post #47

The most important factor is that on the internet local news media lose their geographical monopoly. So everyone can subscribe to NYT or WSJ no matter where they live. This effectively creates a winner takes all situation like in many other industries which get closer to a free market. Add to that the fact that classified ads have been taken over by likes of ebay, LinkedIn, craigslist, etc. Basically the business mod…

The NYT and WSJ were always available outside of their respective home markets. You would maybe get each day's issue a day late. But that still meant you got the same stories on the day the local paper reported on them.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#103

Post by thomasahle »

kmonsen wrote: post #94
knorker wrote: post #91

But what do they want? I mean aside from "make laws to force google to license our stuff, they must be forced to publish our stuff, and forced to pay for it", which is totally insane. Personally just fucking let me pay $1 per article for me to read. I will NEVER subscribe to a recurring thing, but i bet you I'll start paying a lot, as I want to read many articles per month. Paywall sure, but get the fucking subscript…

I think it needs to be less than $1, and really easy to do. And there needs to be trust that the card will only be used for that one article.

Something like $sqrt(n) per month for `n` articles would be interesting.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#104

Post by kaesar14 »

reaperducer wrote: post #98
jccalhoun wrote: post #78

I have long said the problem with paying for news is that it is rarely worth paying for. When I was in grad school there was a program that gave us "free" copies of the NYTimes and USA Today (I'm sure part of our tuition paid for it but all we had to do was swipe our student id to open the newspaper box). I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read.

I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read. Maybe the problem wasn't the paper. The New York Times' target audience isn't grad students. I don't think it's all that surprising that you weren't all that interested in it. As we get older, we change. We learn more. We become interested in more things. Depending on how long it's been since grad school, you may…

The New York Times target audience isn’t a highly educated young American? Maybe that’s the problem, as pointed out?

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#106

Post by freediver »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #95
freediver wrote: post #4

Newspapers allowed Google and Facebook to drag them to their territory of online ad-monetized business models in which they have no way of competing (because of tech discrepancy). This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money. It is a sad stat…

Slightly differing perspective: Newspapers and Google/Facebook (hereinafter "Big Tech") are not competitors, regarding the product of news. The former produces news, the later does not. Access to news can be sold. Readers will pay for it. The question is what exactly does Big Tech produce that is saleable. IOW, what does Big Tech produce that can be sold. What do they produce that people will pay for. With respect to…

The sellable product that Big Tech sells is aggregating and ranking billions of pages of content somebody else produced, so when you type a few characters into a search box, the most relevant results show up in few milliseconds. The ability to do that turns out to be more valuable than the actual content being read if measured by a typical ARPU of Big Tech vs ARPU of News co.

One of the problems of course is that Big Tech then does not actually sell this valuable product but chooses to monetize it with ads instead, which did democratize access to information, but also incentivized creation of huge quantities of low quality information and misinformation (again mostly for the purpose of monetization with ads). Whether we are better off as a society is another question.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#107

Post by knorker »

kmonsen wrote: post #94
knorker wrote: post #91

But what do they want? I mean aside from "make laws to force google to license our stuff, they must be forced to publish our stuff, and forced to pay for it", which is totally insane. Personally just fucking let me pay $1 per article for me to read. I will NEVER subscribe to a recurring thing, but i bet you I'll start paying a lot, as I want to read many articles per month. Paywall sure, but get the fucking subscript…

I think it needs to be less than $1, and really easy to do. And there needs to be trust that the card will only be used for that one article.

Sure. I may be showing my money privilege. I would pay, but that doesn't mean it's the best price. Just an example.

Yes: fast, easy, and safe. But those are implementation details, and solvable ones.

But seems to me they're not onboard with any of it. They want an account, and a bunch of BS.

I was once so tempted that i was FIVE screens into one paper's registration process when I went "fuck this" and closed the tab. Apparently they don't want my money.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#108

Post by anonAndOn »

kaesar14 wrote: post #104
reaperducer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read. Maybe the problem wasn't the paper. The New York Times' target audience isn't grad students. I don't think it's all that surprising that you weren't all that interested in it. As we get older, we change. We learn more. We become interested in more things. Depending on how long it's been since grad school, you may…

The New York Times target audience isn’t a highly educated young American? Maybe that’s the problem, as pointed out?

> young

No. Middle-career and beyond because you probably can't afford tickets to the Met gala if you're <35.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#109

Post by Enginerrrd »

knorker wrote: post #91

But what do they want? I mean aside from "make laws to force google to license our stuff, they must be forced to publish our stuff, and forced to pay for it", which is totally insane. Personally just fucking let me pay $1 per article for me to read. I will NEVER subscribe to a recurring thing, but i bet you I'll start paying a lot, as I want to read many articles per month. Paywall sure, but get the fucking subscript…

Totally agree, although $1 is too much. But $0.25 sounds about right.

To be honest, just give me the price you charge advertisers to advertise to me and let me read it with no advertisements. I'd be immensely satisfied with that solution, but no way in hell am I paying $15-$30/month for every single separately affiliated site. It's ridiculous honestly when they're otherwise perfectly happy to serve me ads instead for a fraction of that price.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#110

Post by kungito »

hairytrog wrote: post #105

“IF YOU DON’T READ THE NEWSPAPER, YOU’RE UNINFORMED. IF YOU DO, YOU’RE MISINFORMED.” - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

It was actually Denzel Washington who said that: https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain-if-you-don...
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