Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 448 posts

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

#411

Post by EasyMark »

whycome wrote: post #192
dylan604 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question. Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of random peo…

The most infuriating thing is that an article can take absolutely any stance on an issue simply by cherry picking tweets to go along with it. News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the funny thing about this payment arrangement that publishers want is that they are not paying any of those tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves curating the info.

If I see tweets in any article other than tweets from the people that the article is about, I will throw that news site in the dust bin. Using tweets as evidence or as anything important tells me that news site is definitely in a death spiral. I think the only place I put up with it is on the local news and even then I'm gritting my teeth.

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

#412

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

NYT mobile app is busted with ad blocking. It tries to spam refresh the ad and freezes the whole app for multiple seconds every time it tries to show one. I already pay for a subscription, why should I be forced to see ads?

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

#413

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

Half of those are opinion pieces which are never on the front page.

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

#414

Post by HDThoreaun »

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.

It used to be. Now they focus on identity politics of journalistic integrity. Only really high quality news program at this point is PBS NewsHour.

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

#415

Post by HDThoreaun »

izacus wrote: post #221
ninkendo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point someone is actually doing journalism though (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements which pay money for the information. You could reasonably argue that google should be doing the same, right?

Whoever is doing journalism, it's not those sites that now want a governmental tax handout to continue being bad.

It often is though. Many of these sites are employing the journalists who are uncovering the original story.

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

#416

Post by HDThoreaun »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #91

Seems weird that if someone links to a news site, that the news site gets to double-dip advertising revenue, since it gets to advertise on its own site, and also get a cut of the advertising revenue of someone that linked to them. It will either mean everyone will want to classify themselves as news sites, or, people that link to them will no longer want to drive revenue via ads.

The issue is that most of the time the link doesnt get clicked on because the aggregators have summarized the content. facebook especially disincentivizes clicking the link.

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

#417

Post by HDThoreaun »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #30

Copyright laws are already strict enough in favor of the rights holders. Don't we all agree on that? Bills like this are like copyright law on steroids, making copyright holders even more powerful than they already are.

Journalism will cease to exist if everyone just reads the aggregator summaries instead of clicking the link and at least giving the news org some ad revenue. The reality is that the government has to do something if we want a free press to continue as vanishingly few are willing to pay anything. I dont think this is the best solution but Im not sure its worse than the status quo of "no one in journalism except NYT makes any money"

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

#418

Post by shombaboor »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #416
wewtyflakes wrote: post #91

Seems weird that if someone links to a news site, that the news site gets to double-dip advertising revenue, since it gets to advertise on its own site, and also get a cut of the advertising revenue of someone that linked to them. It will either mean everyone will want to classify themselves as news sites, or, people that link to them will no longer want to drive revenue via ads.

The issue is that most of the time the link doesnt get clicked on because the aggregators have summarized the content. facebook especially disincentivizes clicking the link.

Reminds me of this "Report: We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The Fucking Link". The aggregators sucked a lot of the juice out from the properties themselves.

https://www.theonion.com/report-we-don-t-make-any-money-if-y...

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

#419

Post by alistairSH »

bawolff wrote: post #214
alistairSH wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$40/year for the WaPo and you can pay with PayPal or Apple. You don’t give them any more money than any other online vendor.

That price point seems high. For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.

That’s the plan with ads. If you don’t want to sit through annoying ads, it’s $180/year.

Either way, producing quality journalism costs money. And I’m ok paying a reasonable fee for it. :shrug:

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

#420

Post by rayiner »

doctor_eval wrote: post #386
rayiner wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

The other subcategories on the left are “establishment liberals,” “democratic mainstays,” and “outsider left.” Those other categories include my dad, who votes Democrat but thinks CNN is “Democrat propaganda.” Then there’s the 42% of democrats who are even further to the right and watch Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-democrats-key-demo. None of those folks are saying the NYT is too far to the right.

The folks who got Bennett fired were indeed part of a very small minority of the left, which doesn’t even carry a majority within mainstream left-leaning organizations like the NYT. They’re just effective at weaponizing rhetoric to beat establishment liberals into submission.

Post reply on HN