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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

#121

Post by mfer »

dralley wrote: post #92
alex_young wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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…

And the shift from local news to national news (cable and the internet), and news conglomerates created by private equity buying up local papers and gutting their staff, has largely not broken down any geographical monopolies, it has for the most part simply removed local news from existence. And no, Twitter and Facebook are not suitable replacements.

> removed local news from existence

Removing local news has created a hyper focus on national news. People forget about their local communities where a ton is happening.

This isn't good for local communities.

We need more focus on the local. Not everything is national.

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

#122

Post by namdnay »

kragen wrote: post #73

This was predicted in the EPIC 2014 video in 02004. If you haven't seen it, it's a very thought-provoking look at the future of news. The original requires Flash, of course. It got a few things wrong. It doesn't mention filter bubbles and algorithmic radicalization, for instance.

Ohhhh was that the one with “Googlezon”? I remember that video doing the rounds

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

#123

Post by MR4D »

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…

> local news will always...

"local news" and "local news media" are not the same. I may pay attention to local news through google, facebook, etc, but never read the local paper or watch local TV news.

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

#124

Post by threatofrain »

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.

1. News isn't worth paying for when the race-to-the-bottom has already occurred. How do you persuade people to buy things which are basically free and can be viewed even without ads?

2. For many events, it's not the writing I care about but the information. IMO Google realizes the difference and bets on information over writing, whereas NYT still wants to sell writing. All publications which are trying to stop Google from scraping their information are basically insisting that their copyrightable storytelling is being ruined by Google's information extraction.

3. For general news, I often don't know what I want to know. This is where news aggregation is way better than individual outlets, at least most of the time, with exceptions going to specific domains like food or games. If WION gets the exclusive interview, then WION is where I want to go and everyone else is just re-reporting. News aggregation also allows you to take in a sense of inter-rater reliability on a per-story level. But this is all playing into Google's strengths.

Given this, I don't understand people saying this or that outlet sucks; for example, does Buzzfeed News suck? Just the name alone makes it sound like celebrity news gossip. But then once and awhile Buzzfeed News gets an exclusive interview (such as on Palantir matters), and guess what, I want them to show up on my aggregators.

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

#126

Post by ribosometronome »

anonAndOn wrote: post #108
kaesar14 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are $35,000. I suspect they hope to have a broader audience than folk who regularly drop 35k on a single night's event.

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

#127

Post by hash872 »

pyrale wrote: post #100
hash872 wrote: post #19

I'd imagine these lawsuits' chance of success will very strongly hinge on where they are impaneled. A jury in a conservative, working class or populist area will probably be pretty sympathetic to striking back at Big Tech, regardless of how weak the merits of the case are. An appeals court may later throw the verdict out. To my understanding, the US is the only developed democracy to still use juries for civil matter…

> regardless of how weak the merits of the case are. Why would you think the case is weak? Documents recently disclosed by state AGs [1] strongly hinted at widespread fraud on AdX, Google's ad exchange. It was the top thread here about a month ago. It's absolutely not surprising that in the light of these revelations, the primary victims of this fraudulent system seek reparation. [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.co…

According to the Axios article, the lawsuits are about antitrust, not alleged fraud. As I detailed, the reason newspapers are in a precarious financial position is because they previously held a geographic monopoly on classifieds advertising in their cities, but now the Internet (starting with Craigslist) destroyed their monopoly & greatly lowered classified rates by its sheer size. This would have happened, and indeed already did, without Google or Facebook existing

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

#128

Post by varenc »

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…

My interpretation is people just care about local news far less than they used to? I’m in a semi-major city and the local news is only a small part of my news consumption.

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

#129

Post by charcircuit »

mfer wrote: post #121
dralley wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the shift from local news to national news (cable and the internet), and news conglomerates created by private equity buying up local papers and gutting their staff, has largely not broken down any geographical monopolies, it has for the most part simply removed local news from existence. And no, Twitter and Facebook are not suitable replacements.

> removed local news from existence Removing local news has created a hyper focus on national news. People forget about their local communities where a ton is happening. This isn't good for local communities. We need more focus on the local. Not everything is national.

In the age of the internet local doesn't matter anymore. I'm now part of a community that spans the globe.

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

#130

Post by jdavis703 »

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.

USA Today is deliberately written at a 10th grade reading level, so it’s doubtful how relevant it is for university students.

But if you found only one relevant article in the NY Times then either you were consuming radio/TV news, or just don’t care about current events.

Which is fine, it just means you weren’t the target audience.

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