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Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

nationalpost.com

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Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#151

Post by kspacewalk2 »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #148
jeffbee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PostMedia is itself owned by Chatham Asset Management, an American private equity firm that also owns dozen of U.S. newspapers.

Ah, a perfect exemplar of the kind of independent journalism free from corporate influence as stated in the bill. > Act provides that any such agreements must not allow the freedom of expression and journalistic independence enjoyed by news outlets to be undermined by corporate influence. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...

Journalists, as well as "journalists", are going to get paid one way or another. If it's not subscriptions or ad revenue, it'll be in some other form.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#152

Post by jojobas »

bawolff wrote: post #18
fwlr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you analyze news as a product, it’s entirely reasonable for Facebook to refuse a price they don’t think is worth it. If you analyze news as something more like “a right to information” - “integral to the function of democracy”, as it was taught to me in school - then it does start to look unreasonable. The Canadian government is simply equivocating between these two analyses as it suits them (one could ask, if acc…

> If you analyze news as something more like “a right to information” - “integral to the function of democracy”, I don't get it - in this analysis would my local coffee shop have to buy and provide free newspapers to me? I'm all for access to free press being a fundamental right. Where you lose me is the part where a private corporation is supposed to subsidize the production of news for me.

There's this understanding of rights that implies that the government/some other entity has to provide everyone willing with the object of the right. Usually applied to healthcare, education and sometimes dwelling, errors out on right to bear arms.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#153

Post by cscurmudgeon »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #151
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, a perfect exemplar of the kind of independent journalism free from corporate influence as stated in the bill. > Act provides that any such agreements must not allow the freedom of expression and journalistic independence enjoyed by news outlets to be undermined by corporate influence. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...

Journalists, as well as "journalists", are going to get paid one way or another. If it's not subscriptions or ad revenue, it'll be in some other form.

Yep, even if that includes regulatory/gov capture like we see here in Canada.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#154

Post by mr_toad »

halifaxbeard wrote: post #56
grf27 wrote: post #45

Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…

My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here) CBC t…

Asking for payment for citations seems like a direction we don’t want to head in.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#155

Post by bobsmooth »

jszymborski wrote: post #35

I disagree with a lot of C-18 as-is, but I can't pretend like I'm not happy to see the fed gov't not spending ad dollars on Meta.

Specifically because it's meta, even though it's where a lot of people consume media? How else is the government supposed to inform people that don't watch TV or listen to radio?

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#156

Post by s1artibartfast »

dopidopHN wrote: post #147
s1artibartfast wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's like someone talking about coffee, because that's literally what they're doing, talking about the news. If people were actually consuming the news and reading articles, it wouldn't be an issue. Nobody wants to drink the nasty coffee, they just want to talk about how bad it is. If we want to be a hyperbolic about causality, both social media and news outlets should be paying the school shooters for creati…

Someone has to come up with that headline, the contractor in the Manitoba newsroom office is doing it. The shooter is usually dead, should be link to the victim’s obituary comment sections instead of a local news article ? But someone has to write those too? LLM to the rescue! Why is asking Fangs to give an obole to local news so insulting ? Until those articles are writing themself, they don’t.

Someone comes up with the headline, and gives it away for free. If they dont want to give it away for free, they dont have to. If they want to charge for the headline, that is fine too.

What they don't get to do is say, you must buy this headline from us, if you want it or not.

This is all beside the point because the object at issue here is links, which don't even necessarily contain content.

>Why is asking Fangs to give an obole to local news so insulting ?

It is insulting because if anything, local news should be paying FANG. They get much of their web traffic from social media and search.

They dont need the governments help to ask for money. They can simply stop letting their headlines and links be indexed. The fact is they don't want to do that because it benefits them. They could try to negotiate with GOOGLE/Meta, but GOOGLE/Meta would rather drop them than pay.

Nobody wants to pay for what they have so they have to resort to bills to force companies to buy something they would rather not have.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#157

Post by brightlancer »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #151
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, a perfect exemplar of the kind of independent journalism free from corporate influence as stated in the bill. > Act provides that any such agreements must not allow the freedom of expression and journalistic independence enjoyed by news outlets to be undermined by corporate influence. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...

Journalists, as well as "journalists", are going to get paid one way or another. If it's not subscriptions or ad revenue, it'll be in some other form.

> Journalists, as well as "journalists", are going to get paid one way or another.

Says who?

Lots of journalists have been laid off in the past decade because of media consolidation -- some of them found other jobs or went independent, but most had to find another field because _the money isn't there_.

The media companies will get paid one way or another, but the companies are not journalists.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#158

Post by fwlr »

jt2190 wrote: post #150
bparsons wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between 1949 and 1987, US private companies were forced to pay for and produce high quality news content under guidelines set by the federal government. One of the conditions of ABC, CBS and NBC being given access to the airwaves was that they had to produce and distribute high quality news broadcasts. News was considered a public good. From wikipedia: The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadca…

This is because the technology of the time severely limited the number of available channels. You’ve enumerated only three, but there weren’t many more than that. Clearly there are more than three points of view, so these laws helped balance things out until the technology for more channels arrived.

“The technology of that time severely limited the number of available channels (broadcast channels being six megahertz wide due to severe interference etc)” is actually very comparable to “the market forces of our time severely limits the number of available distributors (network effects mean everyone is on Facebook and Twitter)”. To a government this is genuinely a strong argument for fairness doctrines.

I personally don’t think the Canadian laws are like fairness doctrines, to me they are more like rent-seeking on valuable Canadian eyeballs, but if the Canadian government does see their laws as something like fairness doctrines, they have a pretty good case for it!

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#159

Post by stainablesteel »

the retaliation is a bit... 2010s. don't they know people have moved on from this kind of thing?

if you're advertising dollars are being wasted and this is just your political song and dance, that's one thing. but if this somehow drops revenue for ottawa in the long run then google and fb will forever use this as a pitchfork to milk cash from any other city

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#160

Post by [deleted] »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #153
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists, as well as "journalists", are going to get paid one way or another. If it's not subscriptions or ad revenue, it'll be in some other form.

Yep, even if that includes regulatory/gov capture like we see here in Canada.

[deleted]
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