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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

Bah. I hardly read sponsored content. It's often marked and I find myself enjoying the piece less and instead hunting like an eagle for every clear indication of propaganda and attempted influence.

The author's main point I believe is correct: money in journalism is wildly misallocated, from overpaid mega-writers and editors, to inconsequential coverage. Things that can't hold forever won't, and that will allow new and necessary questions to be asked about journalism in this new era.

Every market goes through a rough patch and a transformation. If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history.

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If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history.

Okay, but how can it change? Where will the money come from?

I'm on the side of the dystopians (is that a word?) until someone can answer those questions for me. But I'm a techie, not a student of history, and I honestly don't know.

>Where will the money come from?

This is the $99gajillion question.

People won't pay for actual journalism while sponsored content is free and looks enough like the real thing.

Ad revenues are tanking across the board for everyone except the platforms. Ad expenditures are rising, though, so there's a suggestion that this will not continue forever and that one day ad-supported business models will become viable again.

But probably not soon enough, or at high enough levels, to support journalism as it used to be. That's dead and gone. All we're talking about now is what comes after.

The real sadness is investigative journalism, especially as a democratic tool. Without someone poking their nose where it's not wanted (and a mechanism for paying them to do that) our society is at a much greater danger of corruption.

I'm not a dystopian. There is a public appetite for actual journalism, so eventually there will be a business model to cater to that. What that looks like though... no idea

> Okay, but how can it change?

I'm pretty sure this is a "yellow journalism period" on the internet but it will get worse before it gets better since the common man needs to completely lose faith in these rags like they did with tabloids.

Clickbait is alot like the tabloids and yellow journalism of print media, honestly.

> Where will the money come from?

Subscriptions most likely. It'll be newspapers written to favor the desires/biases of the upper middle class who would consider dropping $100/year for such a thing.

When in history did newspapers ever survive on subscriptions?

I've seen and read about papers that survived on ads, and papers financed by causes. Never seen any successful paper on any other format.

Yes, the Internet makes new things possible, but how can you be that sure?

  When in history did newspapers ever survive on subscriptions?

The Economist makes ~60% of its revenues from subscribers.

Sources : http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-economist-is-winning-...

or if you prefer to delve into The Economist Group annual report you can find the 2014 edition here:

http://www.economistgroup.com/pdfs/Annual_report_2014_FINAL....

Granted, the publication is pretty much an exception in print journalism land, but it does prove that not all is lost.

Yes, ads and causes seem to be the two big sources of money. I cannot think of a third one.

We agree that ads are dead. That logically leaves us with causes.

The problem with causes are that they are inherently biased. However, there are usually sources for each side. Maybe we should embrace the bias? Instead of looking for objectivity and an ideal of journalism, we could try to balance biases.

Google started with Page Rank, which tries to calculate authority (and thus implicitly objectivity) into a single number. Maybe AI technology can identify all relevant causes for each topic, balance bias, and present a wealth of opinions and the facts they agree on? Sure, the "balance bias" step is the problematic one, because here a gatekeepers occurs.

In the 30s, business opposition to FDR and the New Deal programs ushered forth a wave of propaganda inciting distrust in government control of the economy while promoting the ability of American industry to raise living standards.

As a result, the Roosevelt Administration countered with a series of public service films informing the public of subversive private propaganda and demonstrating ways to detect hidden or covert biases.

At first I laughed when I heard about this. I couldn't imagine anyone putting that much effort into analyzing news. But using AI? You might be on to something...

Consumer Reports survives purely on subscriptions without any advertising, no? (Certainly the equivalent in my country, Which?, does - accepting any kind of advertising would compromise their independence, since by their very nature they review everything - and as a result they're significantly more expensive than comparable magazines, but enough people are willing to pay that to make it viable)

Here in Brazil, they all survived on ads money, what lead to all of them going out of business once this fact got published on the internet. We don't have any one left that I know of.

I didn't say no ads.

I'm talking about the clickbait, tabloid-quality reporting, sponsored content, etc. Aka the stuff directly embedded as an "article" on the site

The silence... is deafening.

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