Publishing Is Back to the Future
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Publishing Is Back to the Future
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#2There’s some good here but to talk only of business models misses the point. News provides public goods too and in examples like nyt, politico etc. they’re evaporating in favour of elite news for the elites. Now, the Australian bill is almost certainly at the behest of the Murdoch press, and so is likely shit...but if society, expressed through govt., decides that it values the public good of news, then society is entitled to find ways to fund that public good.
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#3I'm struck by how much Ben's description of what the NYT is becoming - an opinionated, subscriber-focused institution - matches up with how I think about Substack and Patreon. I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run we basically end up with two types of news and media institutions: the advertising-focused ones who go for incredibly broad and often low-quality work, and the subscribed-focused ones who are more narrow.
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#4they got a sugar high with clubhouse and now they think they can scale their medium investor scam media up.
probably also motivated by /r/wsb latest forays.
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#5Today, Youtube suggested to me to watch a 15 s Hitler speech. Why? I have not the slightest idea. But I clicked out of curiosity, just to see once more how "good" ol' Hitler spoke. It was one of his better speeches. Comments disabled.
I'd say that's the problem of modern journalism. They have to compete with algorithms that maximize clicks and engagement, no matter what content. I hope I'm wrong but I see no way how this battle can be won in the long run. Maybe a bill to make big tech pay for the content they "appropriate" (or synthesize from sources with AI) would at least be a try.
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#6There’s some good here but to talk only of business models misses the point. News provides public goods too and in examples like nyt, politico etc. they’re evaporating in favour of elite news for the elites. Now, the Australian bill is almost certainly at the behest of the Murdoch press, and so is likely shit...but if society, expressed through govt., decides that it values the public good of news, then society is en…
I didn't think of publishing focusing on business models as something in opposition to the public good. I think, if anything, it demonstrates just how valuable and powerful and necessary these elements are for a well-functioning society. And as integral parts, it would likely need a stronger relationship with government to better ensure it serves the public good. And when, for many, sites like Facebook at the primary source of news, it means that govt has to address it as more than just a "private business".
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#7There’s some good here but to talk only of business models misses the point. News provides public goods too and in examples like nyt, politico etc. they’re evaporating in favour of elite news for the elites. Now, the Australian bill is almost certainly at the behest of the Murdoch press, and so is likely shit...but if society, expressed through govt., decides that it values the public good of news, then society is en…
Corporate media provides the opposite of public good. In the case of NYT, they lied about WMDs in Iraq which helped sell the war that killed thousands of people.
It's not obvious to me why they should be let off the hook for beating the blood-soaked war drums.
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#8This is the best part of Ben's article:
> I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet…the New York Times doesn’t have the truth, but then again, neither do I, and neither does Amazon.
This is the key insight in news today. You cannot rely on any one source for the full story. You must read multiple perspectives, ideally from different points in the political spectrum.
My father, and likely others who grew up pre-internet, knew this intuitively and always read multiple papers. We should do the same and stop expecting our favourite source to be the final word on a story.
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#9A shallow, one-sided take on what happened to the news business. I mean, here's a guy who quotes himself (!) saying,
"I’d go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet"
As his example of this, he appears to the New York Times as his exemplar of a company that's been relatively successful online. Relative to newspapers that have basically failed that is. Comparted to Breitbart, Fox News, and other non-fact based journalism, relatively, well, less successful.
Google is in a sense an aggregator but according to algorithms that it's careful to keep secret. Its main financial goal in doing this is to maximize ad revenue it can extract from the feed, and Google is more successful in that regard than any of the sources of the news it aggregates. Leaving other concerns aside, this does drain ever more revenue out of the business of creating news, since advertisers now choose between buying ads from the aggegator or ads from the source, and no, Google's work hasn't doubled marketing budgets of advertisers.
Facebook controls what people see -- it doesn't aggregate, it segregates. You see what Facebook has determined you want to see, and usually they're right (It would be much better for us as a community if they were wrong much more often and showed everyone things they don't want to see.) Facebook financial goal in choosing what to put in user feeds is maximizing ad revenue for Facebook. This has further drained ad revenue away from sources of content.
The piece claims, hey, the internet was making it harder on news sources before the ascendency of Facebook and Google, though as late as the 1990's newspapers were still a very profitable business. Yeah, Craig's List grabbed a huge share of the classified ad business which traditionally was a major part of newspaper revenue, and newspapers stupidly failed to mount any significant effort to get that revenue back. But Google and Facebook have vastly more effective methods of siphoning off revenue as they've dominated market share and therefore become indispensable for all news outlets.
It not only starves news sources of revenue but favors sources that tell people what they want to hear in a way that excites the audience. In other words, the current sorry state of our political world.
Re: Publishing Is Back to the Future
#10This is the best part of Ben's article: > I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet…the New York Times doesn’t have the truth, but then again, neither do I, and neither does Amazon. This is the key insight in news today. You cannot rely on any one source for the full story. You must read multiple perspec…
I remember my father used to listen to Dr. Laura every day on his commute. My father is every bit a Massachusetts progressive. He used to arrange his schedule to make sure he could hear things like Dr. Farrakhan's speech at the Million Man March. He'd read the Wall Street Journal and get frustrated.
I once asked why, and he said "It's important to know what other people think, even if they're wrong. Because every once in a while, you're the one who's wrong."