Thoughts on Business Insider | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Business Insider

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83 pointsdnetesn32 comments

Wait, BI is a click-bait content farm with little substance? I can't believe it, with such quality headlines currently on their front page:

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

* 'Even I would've helped her': Donald Trump rips Ted Cruz after Carly Fiorina falls off stage at event

* Intel admits Defeat

* A historically popular senator's approval ratings are tanking after blocking Obama's Supreme Court nominee

* Too many millennials are facing buyer's remorse over one of the most expensive purchases they'll ever make

edit: list format

Sadly, even "respectable" publications are playing this game.

If supermarket tabloids were about tech instead of celebrities they would have those same headlines.

To edit your list to make it more believable:

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

* Intel admits Defeat

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

* (some other articles)

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

For laughs I go to BI and scroll down just to see how many times an article is repeated. Because, you know, making a rule that an article only appears once on a webpage is hard.

They probably (hopefully) have the data that says showing a top performing article more than once in a scroll feed is a net positive for page views.

Every single news source I can think of these days that is free serves pure garbage to infuse traffic to get more money from Google ads (or any other).

I don't even click on BusinessInsider links on HN anymore. I prefer the reports to be more in depth and have more of the author in the report. If you are pressured to puke 5 of these a day, it will show in the content.

These journalism meltdowns are coming more and more now. I wish it will make a change.

If we don't have quality investigative journalism, were doomed

But as you rightly point out that costs money. I've been thinking about paying for some of the sites I use frequently but if you add up $5 a bunch of times you get to pretty big numbers per month. Also $5 for one website? That's 1/2 a Netflix subscription and for that I get an insane amount of content! There has to be a way to pool these fees in a sustainable manner so that I can buy many quality news sites at once.

Perhaps a few big mastheads who have decided to scrape the bottom of the barrel need to be allowed to die a natural death. It might signal that they aren't actually giving the market who will pay for stories what they want (quality journalism, not clickbait rubbish) and make at least one of the others significantly improve.

I can but hope...

Micropayments would be ideal. I'd be willing to pay $0.25 each time I wanted to read a WSJ article. I'd probably grumble that it "should" cost $0.05, but I'd pay anyway.

Blendle is pretty much this and it's amazing. Only quality news sources and pay by the article. It's my go to source now.

somebody wrote an api to allow you to read NY Times articles for micropayments in terms of satoshis [1]. You currently need a 21 Inc bitcoin computer to utilize the api but still neat to see someone is working on it. Unfortunately I can't link right to the app because it's not it's own page but search for NY times and it's written by a guy named Casey O'Neill. here's some example output

  Welcome to the New York Times Top Story!
  ------------------------------------------------
  home
  world
  national
  politics
  nyregion
  business
  opinion
  technology
  health
  sports
  arts
  fashion
  dining
  travel
  magazine
  realestate

  What section would you like to read?
  travel

  36 Hours in Savannah, Ga.:
  By INGRID K. WILLIAMS
  Yes, there are live oaks and elegant squares, but also  innovative cuisine, a lively bar scene and a lush 30-acre   park to stroll.
  
  Copy the following link to read the full story:
  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/travel/what-to-do-in-36-hours-in-savannah-georgia.html
  
  You just sent 5000 satoshis to:
  1JkFJmvm7cKg1ZwXyvF5vRGi9m5qXWu8Qn
  ------------------------------------------------
  Thank you for reading the New York Times today!
  ------------------------------------------------

[1]: https://21.co/mkt/

I suspect the real problem to be solved in that space is how to do that without the slightest hint of friction.

Their paywall is already friction. This would be a paywall that could be dismissed with a single click that costs $0.25.

Google Contributor allows for this with a scalable price discovery mechanism (auction, you vs. ads). I've gone from never paying for the NY Times or Washington Post to paying them $2.51 and $3.24, respectively over the last year.

http://contributor.google.com

>> But as you rightly point out that costs money.

I'm not sure. the main problem with the net isn't that you can't make enough for good writing using ads - but that it's extremely easy to copy someone else's hard work, maybe package with clickbait and make more money.

And i suspect that even when money would be involved, it may still make sense to create content using someone else's hard work.

I'd throw out that it seems like Pareto is ruling the journalism field these days. There are at least 5x too many outlets and not enough actual (traditional) news to report.

I'm going to risk the down votes to say that I sometimes appreciate what Business Insider does. Yes, it's all about quantity. But in practice I find it helpful to have a bunch of quick summaries of the day's news accessible for free.

Realistically, I cannot read the whole front page of the NYT every day. But I can keep up to date on Business Insider pieces because they're short and punchy. If I actually want to go into depth on something, there are plenty of places to read an in depth article.

Plus, all the quick articles subsidize the occasional in-depth one.

Also, one really shouldn't underestimate the effort and intelligence which goes into writing these articles. We might dismiss them as "clickbait" but it is in fact a skill to be able to quickly process and summarize information (as a former debater, I definitely appreciate it). Joe Weisenthal is one of the smartest and hardest working journalists out there.

Disclaimer: I used to work at BI.

You can extend this type of brinkmanship race to the bottom thinking to the practice of writing code. There was a time when LOC (volume) was deemed synonymous with quality and efficacy. That's clearly not the case for software.

I loved the way the writer admits to her personality requiring time and space to produce works of quality - she refused to churn out garbage (in her mind). She speaks about a middle ground but I'm afraid she's being too humble. There's no middle ground to quality.

Given that pretty much every time I have clicked on a Business Insider link from HN it has redirected me to 404, you can colour me unsurprised.

The reason this happens is - I'm from Australia and so OF COURSE I wouldn't be interested in U.S. content! Not at all. Evidently they assume I can't see past Australian issues, so they tend to redirect to a page in the Australian edition that should contain the article, but of course it's not published in Australia so no article for me!

> It took my mother, my boyfriend, and my therapist together to convince me to stick around until I found something new.

When you're crying every day and your closest people are forcing you to keep working... Something has to be wrong. And BI of all places...

It's a difficult situation for the family though: all they want is for you to be happy, but the core assumption is that you're happier with a crap but safe job, than with no runway left and no job at all.

How long till the journalist-AI that writes click bait news? Then the whole internet will be like Twitter: 99% written by robots & consumed by robots.

Already happening to some extent (though not for clickbaits, but financial data):

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-auto...

I ended up searching for AP Stylebook, and I'm very glad I did: https://twitter.com/APStylebook, http://www.apstylebook.com/

Plenty help if you want to be a journalist (or even better, write a journalist AI).

https://larseidnes.com/2015/10/13/auto-generating-clickbait-...

http://clickotron.com

It's already happening. You probably don't even know.

There's also the lesser extreme of AI which does a first pass on articles and then journalists go over it to make it sound better.

I am not a fan of clickbait content written to meet quotas, but this article strikes me as a bitter employee spewing up on their former employer.

Apparently she works for HuffPo now, aren't they in the same volume driven industry? Wondering how she feels about her current gig.

It may just be that BI is 5 articles per reporter per day, while HuffPo is overstaffed (5 reporters per story, say).

The article seems to be in response to discussion elsewhere (the CNN article and Tanzina Vega's tweets) and is pretty reasonable. It describes her experiences there, how the workplace culture affected her, and why she ultimately left. A sad employee who leaves isn't the same as a bitter one.

Besides, she's a journalist. If she wanted to rip into BI, she could have gone straight for the jugular. Here's my take on bitter for comparison:

Journalists are used to short deadlines and writing fast. We've been doing it ever since the daily newspaper became a thing, and we're used to the pressure. But BI takes that pressure to an entirely new level by focusing on clicks at the expense of good journalism. The end result is a bastardized parody of journalism. It doesn't inform society, it swindles it. As BI's reporters hammer away at their keyboards, pumping out article after article day in and day out, they slowly hammer away at the very ideals that first led them to fall in love with the written word. Morale is low, because the reporters know deep down that they're little more than monkeys striking keys at random. They don't matter, their stories don't matter, and their responsibility towards society doesn't matter. On the rare occasion that a halfway-decent article manages to slip onto the BI homepage, it's quickly buried under the weight of the meaningless drivel that's churned out while the reporter who wrote it is brutally berated by the editors. Quality is irrelevant. Only quantity matters. We are prostitutes, pimped out by BI to focus solely on manipulating readers into clicking our damnable titles.

The numbers are clear. BI represents the future of journalism. It's not a bright one. It's not a good one. But it's the one we deserve, as sad and disheartening as that may seem.

Now that's nice and bitter :D. Compare that to the linked article.

Interesting contrast to academic economists, where average output is probably less than 1 published paper per year.

Axel Springer invested in it. A sure sign of a shitty publication.

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