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Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

nytimes.com

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Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#171

Post by smsm42 »

Tomte wrote: post #166
smsm42 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You think the other parts are important because you don't like the tail. Thanks for a case study. That's exactly what the press does - describe only the tail and call everyone who objects tail-phobes. No, I'm not going to pay for such baloney. If they find advertisers gullible enough to pay for it - good for them. Otherwise, good riddance. > It's perfectly legitimate to focus on the interesting parts. Of course. It…

"I don't care about it" is a fundamentally different thing than "they are biased". Sure, don't pay for it. I don't pay for Magic: The Gathering cards. But I also don't troll message boards how WotC deserve to die because they neglect XBox games, thus showing their bias towards Collectible Card Games.

> "I don't care about it" is a fundamentally different thing than "they are biased".

If they describe only what they care for, and only in a way they care for, it's the definition of biased. I challenge you to provide a definition of this word that would not be equivalent to this.

> But I also don't troll message boards how WotC deserve to die because they neglect XBox games

I don't care if they survive on their own - but they are whining that unless people start en masse paying for them, they'd die. I say - in that case good riddance, just as you would say if somebody asked you to pay for local MtG tournament because otherwise they can't survive. If they want my money - they have to provide quality content and do decent work. If they want to prostitute themselves to partisan politics and clickbait - ok, that's a way to make a living too, but I won't pay for it.

Oh, and another thing: I don't think any MtG club ever driven anybody to suicide or ruined somebody's life or career. Media does it all the time (Gawker, finally and deservedly resting in peace, pretty much was built for it). For example: https://quillette.com/2019/01/30/the-death-of-a-dreamer/ And then they want my sympathy. How about "no"?

P.S. you don't have to like my arguments or agree with it, but calling me "troll" just because you disagree with me is rude. Just so you know.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#172

Post by blablabla123 »

Fake news is nothing that emerged with Facebook, it's much older, oftentimes the yellow press has been accused of doing it. Sometimes even established media outlets involuntarily produce fake news by not doing enough research.

So eventually I started reading a lot of non-mainstream media (that was not alt-right ;)) and I found it to be very well researched and it happened to be for free. For specific topics there are also good blogs and websites of political advocacy and research organizations.

Sorry NYT, but your content is not that life important and awesome. I might be biased because I'm not from the U.S.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#173

Post by harry8 »

mikekchar wrote: post #153
RhysU wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WSJ pleasantly keeps its editorial content on the editorial pages. The NYT thinks all pages are editorial pages. Note this is different from choosing what to print. Both papers do that.

A very long time ago, I used to enjoy reading The Times (British newspaper) for exactly that reason. It was a very thin newspaper with 1 page of editorials and virtually no fluff sections (like leisure, travel,etc). Just news. I haven't seen the print paper in a very long time, but I go to their website and see the following headlines: Sunday Times journalist was murdered by Assad, Bitter split on assisted dying hits…

Exactly the same thing that happened to the WSJ. It became wholly owned by Fox News.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#174

Post by zorked »

phreack wrote: post #129

Didn't the NYT have the dark pattern of being one-click subscribe, yet made you fill forms and emails and physically call them to unsubscribe? (At least up until a few months ago, last I heard) Stuff like that is an absolute deal breaker and turns lots of users away from subscriptions entirely, before even talking about article/content quality.

That is indeed a huge problem. I would happily pay hundreds of monetary units a month for journalism, but I want to be able to stop when I want.

There's also the awful "1,99 a month!" line of advertising that only tells you it's actually 39,99 after you click. I might actually be willing to pay that price, but not after being made a fool.

Also, if you work in media, sell me a completely frictionless day pass. Without the need to create an account. Sometimes I just want to read that one series that I found interesting, and it's not worth 29,95 and the hassle of maintaining another account and unsubscribing later.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#175

Post by Lio »

Tomte wrote: post #144
scottLobster wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly non-US sources incur the bias of however said source feels about the US. I've seen the BBC home page highlight more random shootings than the actual US mainstream media. And in my experience they'll keep them on the front page longer than CNN when reporting on the same one. It could just be the page I'm being presented via cookie-stored history or whatever, but that seems unlikely as I hardly ever click on said…

And what makes you so sure that the BBC's handling of those stories isn't the correct one? Your personal bias, of course. We see in this thread many people who condemn newspapers because they report differently than they themselves would, and then have the gall to call that "bias".

The BBC is a special case, they clearly are biased because their funding is based around them implementing Sharon White’s political agenda.

Sharon White is the unelected, former civil servant and former journalist that runs OFCOM.

They are under specific instructions from Dame Patricia Hodgson and Sharon White from OFCOM to drop impartiality and implement a social justice agenda.

It would be an interesting idea to do analysis on the headlines in the BBC News page to see how the editorial policy has followed edicts from OFCOM. Both are publicly available.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#176

Post by cotelletta »

aggronn wrote: post #24
jayalpha wrote: post #8

"The impact on journalism has been clear. Just within the past week, we have seen over 1,000 planned layoffs at Gannett, BuzzFeed and HuffPost" I had never considered the click-bait outlet "HuffPost" as "quality journalism". "We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism." Well, paid journalism is not a guarantee either: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-r…

I'm just incredibly baffled by what you're proposing the solution is if its not a cultural shift towards paying for content? In an exclusively programmatic ad based market, the only long term winning strategy is to write click-bait and fake news. We should all be extremely concerned about what the writer is getting at. If you're going to call it whining, and say they need to change their business model, what should t…

It's easy: better, and less, content.

The internet makes it that they don't need to fill pages and pages every day just to be tossed into the trash bin. A year old article can still be valuable, and it can be augmented with additional sides and updates. It just takes diligence and work, not to mention setting up publishing and formatting abilities way beyond the average cookie cutter CMS. Investing in their own production processes and technology, in other words.

But nobody's doing that. They're just making the churn more efficient. At most they'll link to some previous articles, forcing you to do the sifting yourself, and only linking one way.

By the time a newsworthy event reaches mainstream level, it's already been going for a while. That's the point at which I'd want to read a brief one pager of backstory, before diving into current events, surrounded by more context. Take the conflict in Syria: it might just be me not paying attention and being too busy with other stuff, but I genuinely missed when that started. When it did enter my radar, everyone was talking about it like we all knew how it happened. Well, if you take a random person on the street, someone who was upset at the (staged?) pictures of a dead kid... How many can tell you what that conflict is about and get close to the truth? I bet it's incredibly low, the only difference is I'm being honest about my ignorance instead of doing the stupid primate thing of pretending to be in the know in fear of looking foolish (and, I guess, western propaganda being just that when it comes to these subjects).

There's your hole in the market. That's what people want to pay for: not being the person who can't join in on interesting conversations. Well, are our current journalists up to that task? I very much doubt it, cos most have no ability beyond being a newsperson, jacks of no trade at all. Instead of letting experts do the talking, we're letting self important pretenders do it, and then, mostly to push an agenda.

The Quillette expose linked here about the geneticist bullied into suicide should lead us all to ask: why are we letting these morons tell us anything? They just want to enter industries and scenes they don't know, mine them for brief moments of relevance, and leave behind a wreck of human dignity. All over a ten minute talk they couldn't be bothered to understand, because bullying a sperg was more useful to them.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#177

Post by [deleted] »

dman wrote: post #131

I do pay for news, however one request I have for news providers is a greater emphasis on presenting news from all sides. Over the last 4-5 years most news providers have picked a political side (to a much greater extent than I recall in the past). This is true in both countries for which I follow news (India and the US). Given an event I can predict the coverage that venues will give it. This is troubling to me, and…

[deleted]

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#178

Post by clappski »

Lio wrote: post #175
Tomte wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what makes you so sure that the BBC's handling of those stories isn't the correct one? Your personal bias, of course. We see in this thread many people who condemn newspapers because they report differently than they themselves would, and then have the gall to call that "bias".

The BBC is a special case, they clearly are biased because their funding is based around them implementing Sharon White’s political agenda. Sharon White is the unelected, former civil servant and former journalist that runs OFCOM. They are under specific instructions from Dame Patricia Hodgson and Sharon White from OFCOM to drop impartiality and implement a social justice agenda. It would be an interesting idea to do…

Do you have any sources for what you’re saying? Specifically for your third paragraph.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#179

Post by TheOperator »

WalterBright wrote: post #99
RickSanchez2600 wrote: post #2

I paid for a newspaper and the only thing factual was the cartoons. Fake news has been around longer than the Internet. Look at Supermarket tabloids. Look at all of the journalists being fired now. Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well. Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningit…

I was involved with a news event that the local news covered once. They got pretty much every fact wrong. It wasn't due to bias (for example, they described the building as a "warehouse" when it was an obvious office building), it was just sloppiness and failure to check any facts. It made me skeptical of news ever since.

You don't really understand how accurate the media is until they report on something you know a lot about. Journalists are generalist laymen with strong incentives to be sensationalist and alarmist. Well researched journalism made by somebody who spent long enough on the story to understand what the hell they're talking about is legitimately rare. Uncommon would be an exaggeration.

One of the things that irks me is the rhetoric that Trump-era distrust of the media is somehow undermining democracy or whatever. If you aren't distrustful of the media you are a naive and dangerous fool. I remember the overwhelming majority of US mainstream media pushing the Iraq war with stories that relied on bias and bogus sources. Interviews with officals & experts that had skin in the game. Blind faith in the media is even more dangerous than the also dangerous posture of not paying any heed to what they have to say.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#180

Post by throwaway9d0291 »

dman wrote: post #131

I do pay for news, however one request I have for news providers is a greater emphasis on presenting news from all sides. Over the last 4-5 years most news providers have picked a political side (to a much greater extent than I recall in the past). This is true in both countries for which I follow news (India and the US). Given an event I can predict the coverage that venues will give it. This is troubling to me, and…

I'm living in Switzerland at the moment and I really appreciate swissinfo.ch (don't know much about the other sources because I only speak English).

For example take a look at the news for their upcoming vote: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-depth/vote-february-10--2019

They have numerous articles on the issue (urban sprawl) and unmodified opinion pieces from people on both sides of the issue.

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