Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets • Hacker News Board

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#381

Post by waveBidder » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:03 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #263

asow92 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news o…

RE: 4, NPR seems to do OK, same with the BBC. You're choosing to implement all of these terrible things by continuing your employment, so you "not wanting them" is kind of moot. Find a different job if you genuinely don't agree with what you're building. I'm a firm believer that companies would stop doing this kind of crap if we, collectively as tech workers (even better as a union!), stopped implementing it .

NPR stopped being government funded years ago. they're closer to a donation and syndication based NYT than they are to the BBC. https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#382

Post by dhfbshfbu4u3 » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:07 PM UTC

Enacting antitrust protections for a select group of companies to pursue collective action against a single player seems a tad unconstitutional and anticompetitive.

Wouldn’t publishers stand to gain more by locking down their content from third parties and creating their own shared distribution platforms (e.g. search engines, aggregators)? As it stands today, Alphabet and Meta make far more money selling actionable data to advertisers than anything else.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#383

Post by leereeves » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:09 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #355

leereeves wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you missed the op-ed written by a senior NPR editor recently. He admitted that NPR suppressed stories because they might help Trump and pursued poorly sourced (and ultimately false) stories because they would hurt Trump. https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...

What more could NPR say about those slap fights (Hunter Biden, COVID-19) that wasn't already beaten to death by the credulous corporate media? Is every news outlet required to be subsumed by the right-wing noise machine's narrative? Uri turning to Bari to air his grievances is pretty much all any one needs to know about his POV.

"But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming."

That's no slap fight, those were serious allegations and the fact that they were false is equally important.

NPR happily participated in spreading those left wing falsehoods, but was unwilling to spread the truth with equal vigor.

I agree it's a shame that Uri had to turn outside NPR to discuss this. But you know as well as I do that NPR would not have published this.

And while COVID-19 was certainly a controversial topic, it was no "slap fight" either. It was the most important issue in the nation for two years or more.

You're dismissing important issues as "slap fights" and dismissing serious discussion because you suspect someone has a different point of view. Does that tell us all we need to know about you?

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#384

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

cush wrote: post #252

notatoad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wal…

> The games have no ads

I’m pretty sure I wait through/ignore/click past an ad every time I play Connections.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#385

Post by tipsydoo » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

scarab92 wrote: post #328

valleyer wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality. Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now : The Troubling Trend in…

Unfortunately the more news-worthy stories also suffer from a severe lack of viewpoint diversity. Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.

These complaints are always funny to me, because the "viewpoint diversity" referred to is usually right-wing rhetoric which not only already has a voice in NYT, but also has several dedicated outlets that are elevated to "paper of record" sources among conservatives. What doesn't get much play is, say, PoC and lower class youth perspectives on topics like foreign affairs and economics. There a plenty of eloquent voices among that cohort (that you should have to be eloquent to be heard), but that would disrupt the manufactured consensus around what government and private enterprise do here and abroad.

If that's what you're arguing we should be hearing more of from the NYT, though, I'm all for it. Not, say, another half-baked article about "crime waves" so that the NYPD can get another billion in overtime or whatever. Or, on the hysterically liberal side, not another article about "Biden wiping out student loan debt [which he was obligated to do under already existing statute]."

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#386

Post by doctor_eval » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #358

spondylosaurus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which "ideological narratives"? This is such a vague description that you could interpret it to mean anything, especially since the NYT has been getting blasted from all directions lately. Conservatives think it's left-leaning drivel, and progressives think it capitulates too much to viewpoints on the right.

Progressives are 6% of the population: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-... . The NYT could be very left leaning and still get criticism from a small percentage of the population that’s even further left. One example: the NYT fired its opinion page editor for publishing an article by Tom Cotton calling to suppress the George Floyd riots with the National Guard. For context, calling in the M…

Your link is to “progressive left”, a subcategory that makes your claim of 6% extremely misleading. A much broader picture can be seen at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#387

Post by rayiner » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

tipsydoo wrote: post #385

scarab92 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the more news-worthy stories also suffer from a severe lack of viewpoint diversity. Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.

These complaints are always funny to me, because the "viewpoint diversity" referred to is usually right-wing rhetoric which not only already has a voice in NYT, but also has several dedicated outlets that are elevated to "paper of record" sources among conservatives. What doesn't get much play is, say, PoC and lower class youth perspectives on topics like foreign affairs and economics. There a plenty of eloquent voic…

Would you recognize a “PoC” viewpoint if you read it? I mean the term itself is a fake label that is basically only used by white people and elite non-whites who must navigate white spaces and institutions. My whole family is non-white immigrants, and I never even heard the term “PoC” until I went to graduate school and encountered far left white people. I think you probably have to be in the leftmost 10-15% of the political spectrum to use “PoC” unironically.

The funny thing is that, insofar as you’re talking about what the US is doing “abroad,” I’m very plugged into that political sentiment, since my home country was on the receiving end of some stupid American foreign policy choices, and my dad works in international development. I know lots of Nigerians, Palestinians, etc., but nobody would call themselves “PoC.” It’s an utterly non-sensical and reductive label.

The NYT certainly platforms self-identified “PoC,” but as far as I can tell, their viewpoints are limited to ones that flatter white liberal NYT readers. Would the NYT ever platform all the Bangladeshis I know that begrudgingly credit Trump for pulling out of Afghanistan or opposing the war in Ukraine? Would they publish my parents, who think affirmative action is a threat to Asians and want the state department to stop flying pride flags in Muslim countries? And would you even recognize that as a genuine “PoC” view if you read it?

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#388

Post by cout » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #279

wustangdan wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism You know that with Substack all these actual journalists are having no issue getting paid very well. I'm not sure why we'd want to expand NPR or make more NPR's. We need less of their low-quality and biased journalism IMO, not more.

NPR is pretty high quality. You just don’t like what they publish.

I'm not educated enough in journalism to distinguish high quality from low quality, but as a listener/reader, some of NPR feels like good, original journalism (my ears perk up whenever I hear Eleanor Beardsley, for example); other content feels like it is just parroting the NY Times (which itself is a weird mixture of thought-provoking articles and clickbait headlines).

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#389

Post by HWR_14 » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:42 PM UTC

valleyer wrote: post #324

cush wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wal…

> NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality. Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now : The Troubling Trend in…

It's disingenuous to claim those are "front page" stories. The NYT main webpage has the first pages of the different paper sections as you scroll down. The "front page", or most important news of the news site , is at the top, which is exclusively (right now) dealing with US politics, an Australian attack, the Middle East and Chinese/Indian foreign policy. Meanwhile, to get to the hangnail article you have to scroll 75-80% of the way down. Past the other news, the op-eds, the sports, all the way to the lifestyle section and right before the cooking section.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#390

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 1:55 PM UTC

cout wrote: post #379

bionhoward wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is unreasonable about not wanting your news organization to be ripped off for free? What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?” Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, a…

I agree; moreover, I don't even understand why there's any controversy. A set of weights for a network trained using a particular document is a derivative work.

When I attended college and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, that didn’t make all my future design output a derivative work (legally).

I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)