121–130 of 141 posts
That is unrealistic and not sustainable without an ad model or being funded by a company doing over a billion dollars in revenue already. Starting the timer and will stop it when they become non-free or switch to a paid model.
What is that based on?
2. Bloomberg LP.
Growing up several decades ago it seemed like the news was more focused on reporting the facts of current events. Now I know this is naive and there have always biases, but I do miss the way it was delivered in an almost boring way without all of the additional commentary and sensationalism. But you know rose colored glasses and all that.
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Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.
The incentives are perverse. It's not just about selling razors, but about getting attention. From Enlightenment 2.0: "You can blame the media, but obviously the media is just a part of a much broader trend. The problem is that, in the competition for attention, being rude (or vulgar) is a way of getting noticed. In order for it to work, however, you need to be ruder than everyone else. Everyone else, of course, is n…
fell off a cliff
discrimination against themselves
depressed en masse
mental health issues on an astonishing scale
institutions at a rapid rate
All in one paragraph. I don't even know this author, but the breathless panic induction makes sure, I'll avoid him in the future.
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There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests? Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible. This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your wor…
Maybe what I really want is a paper heavily biased towards multiple academic perspectives, and less towards populist coverage.
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Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio). The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues. A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is p…
The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax. The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.
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There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests? Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.
I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a…
What I want is this theoretical set of educated perspectives that claim to represent a broad range of views; when an actual broad range of views is more likely to include pizzagate than Burkian conservatism..
Maybe thefp.com would be a good starting point to ask - why is that not what you’re looking for? If you squint your eyes it provides a balanced perspective.
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There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you…
It's not like the one comment is the only newsworthy thing that day. It's a big complicated world with so many important things happening that we can't possibly keep up. It'd be easy to fill up the news with a tiny fraction of them, instead of picking one or two facts and spouting lots of opinions about them. Doing the latter is just a choice they've made.