What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake? | Hacker News Reader

What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

politico.com

121 pointswalterbell160 comments

The conclusion that a drop in readership is proof that moving to the web was a mistake is extraordinarily shallow.

"Readers continue to leave print newspapers, but they’re not migrating to the online editions."

Because they have more options.

Print products were often monopolies, especially in the early to mid 90s, a hey day for newspapers. There was often a single publication per DMA.

What happened then is newspaper readers increasingly became web users throughout the 90s and 00s and left the print product. In 2000, if you wanted semi-local or regional news on the web, you went to ... your newspaper web site! In 2016, you have a plethora of choices, many of them unsaddled by the constraints of a typical newspaper organizational structure (for better or worse). So you have web sites and publications producing/sharing/clickbaiting 10x the content than your local newspaper does. This leads to a spreading of readership.

What's happened is a diaspora. Sticking with the print product over the web would not have prevented this. It may have slowed the decline of print circulation, but I have serious doubts about that. The challenge newspapers have is competing with decidedly non-journalistic approaches to news; ones that give readers what they want even if it isn't done "right." Competing with platforms and sites that can churn out "content" at an unfettered rate means fundamentally changing what a newspaper does.

There's no easy answer - newspapers can accept that people will largely go to other sites to get less reliable information faster, or that their content will be repurposed on other platforms without any compensation. That will likely mean a slow constriction or demise. Alternately, they can compete in that space, which a lot are doing now. That means sacrificing the ideals of journalism.

My plumber isn't allowed to call himself a plumber unless he follows the rules for plumbing. Same for my accountant, doctor, electrician, and lock pick.

I get the "free speech" argument, but I still cannot understand why we don't have rules about who can and cannot call themselves a journalist.

Coming up with these rules might be tricky, but shouldn't we try? Or have we and I'm just uninformed?

Where do you draw the line on what constitutes journalism? Are politics bloggers journalists? Are bloggers who occasionally talk about politics journalists? Are people who livetweet a news event that they're involved in acting as journalists?

How do you safeguard the political independence of the licensing of journalists? How do you ensure that a future government doesn't abuse the licensing regulations to suppress political criticism?

In the US, how do you reconcile this with the first amendment? How can you justify silencing people because they lack the 'correct' qualifications? If the only restriction is on the title 'journalist', what stops people from calling themselves a blogger while doing exactly the same things that a journalist does?

good questions.

I think the methods applied are what needs accredited, not the results themselves. If an organization calls itself news or whatever nomenclature we agree to, they are claiming to follow accredited guidelines that we collectively trust.

At the end of the day, it comes down to heuristics around trust. It's not the message I want to validate, it's the means of preparation that bother me more. I can draw my own conclusions if I can trust the method.

Looking at it this way, would that resolve some of your concerns? Open auditing and accrediting do not need to involve censorship at all. You never lose the ability to say what you want, just to call yourself a "certified whatever". I dunno.

What is it about journalism that requires standards like plumbers, doctors, and accountants? More to the point, if you look at the reasons why plumbers, doctors, and locksmiths are held to standards, which ones apply to journalism?

Note also that journalism is the only one of your mentioned professions that is specifically called out for protection in the Constitution.

> More to the point, if you look at the reasons why plumbers, doctors, and locksmiths are held to standards, which ones apply to journalism?

Which ones don't?

The freedom of the press is the same thing as free speech, it applies to all of us. Correct me if you are referring to something else and I'm misunderstanding.

There are best practices in journalism, no? Disclosure, ethics, etc. How can I know if someone I rely on for information follows these rules. That's all I'm asking.

Doesn't canada do this? Aren't there requirements for calling yourself a news agency?

Which ones don't?

I contend that none of them do.

In your opinion, why is it ok to regulate lock pickers? What are the reasons that you think don't apply?

> Are politics bloggers journalists? Are bloggers who occasionally talk about politics journalists? Are people who livetweet a news event that they're involved in acting as journalists?

No. They are respectively a blogger, a blogger, and a Twitter user.

Then what's a "journalist"? Someone who gets paid to go do the research? "Journalist" is derived from "journal" (duh, but important) - bloggers are nothing more than online journalists. The fact that they are called "bloggers" is only because society has elected to stick with the term "blog" for an online journal.

And yet if they're at the same event I'm quite likely getting something that, in combination, is much closer to what I'd call journalism.

> If the only restriction is on the title 'journalist', what stops people from calling themselves a blogger while doing exactly the same things that a journalist does?

I don't think that anyone would be proposing restricting speech in this way, but on the same note, papers such as Weekly World News maybe couldn't pump out more stories about Bat Boy while attempting to call themselves journalists...

Do WWN writers call themselves journalists? There's something to be said for what readers call journalism. It isn't the same for everybody. So, is it the journalist's responsibility to hold to a standard, or is it the audience's fault for thinking that a particular writer is a journalist?

This raises the question: can the term "journalist" even be controlled?

It can't.

Because once your government is the arbiter of "journalism", anyone who disagrees will be marginalized?

Even the threat of it can affect what is / is not covered.

Once the government has significant power over journalism, you end up with Russian state sponsored journalism.

It's not perfect over here, and needs much improvement. Access is contingent on certain rules. It can get much worse.

Because once your government is the arbiter of "plumbing", anyone who can squeeze a pipe together but doesn't need to qualify to work with gas will be marginalised (and unemployed)?

Because once your government is the arbiter of "electrician", anyone who thinks the rules are ridiculous (they are frequently way over the top) will be marginalised (and unemployed)?

Because once your government is the arbiter of "programmer", anyone who can hack a few lines together but is only 12 and not permitted to license will be marginalised (and uneducated)?

It is getting much worse. Not only is little freedom left but it's been taken away under the guise of the exact opposite, and the façade is widely, and often violently, believed.

Skilled trades dont have a political bias in terms of skill application. There is no isis way of plumbing or dark art of wiring.

On the contrary.

Absolutely there's an ISIS of plumbling and a dark art of wiring but it comes from the opposite side to that which we expect.

I've mostly plumbed, entirely wired and partially built my own house. I can see better ways to do what I did, of course, and much much worse ways to do what I did. The boiler installer I hired was, thankfully, top notch (I am ridiculously careful with gas).

Oh and I also installed the fibre, installed an ethernet and wifi router, protected it all with a firewall and integrated a server and VPN.

And I grow about ⅔ of my food.

I do all of this without being qualified to do any more than make a coffee and people who are actually 'qualified' (or, more realistically, licensed) have mostly congratulated me on my work.

Should I have done none of these thing because Whitehall thinks erroneously that I'm too stupid? Fuck those cunts. My daughter is safe, has good friends, is well fed and well educated despite their bureaucracy, not because of it.

If anyone thinks I should not have done the plumbing or the electrification, despite being unlicensed, explain why growing my own food and configuring my own internet are OK. Or try and convince my that I should sacrifice my router to my government. And if you attempt (and you will fail utterly) to do that, prepare to be told to fuck right off.

In America, you are 100% allowed to do these things to your own house because you have to live with the consequences.

The trades are here to protect other people from me asserting my skill in electrician-ining, when I have no such skill but represent to others that I do.

Who is the ISIS of plumbing? I'm confused by that assertion.

Your pretty skilled at DIY. Your average person ime has incredible difficulty hooking up a surround sound audio system or setting up a router.

If you screw up a router install you have no internet. Screw up a diy plumbing job...

>why we don't have rules about who can and cannot call themselves a journalist.

>Coming up with these rules might be tricky, but shouldn't we try?

Russia has basically done it. Any web resource with more than 3000 monthly visitors gets the "mass media" status with additional rules and restrictions and related punishments. I'd not say that this is a good thing to say the least.

What?

I agree, but change journalist to "software developer" and see what kind of reaction you get around here.

> I agree, but change journalist to "software developer

Even better- "software engineer"

Hey, it is a protected term in Canada.

Don't got your iron ring? Not an Engineer.

I've read that this is only true for the term "Professional Engineer." Do you know of a source that backs up your claim?

For things we absolutely depend on, (like information in order to make rational choices), then hell yeah!

The thought of firmware or software in my body at some point scares the bejesus out of me, and it would bring me peace of mind to know there are accredited and audited standards for developing my pacemaker warez

I don't think that contemporary journalists are any more virtuous than a blogger. Journalism quality is terrible, and it's not because amateurs are dragging down the mean: almost everybody lives down there.

In my opinion, one of the main things that contributed to the reduction in the quality of journalism in america is the removal of what used to be called the Fairness Doctrine[0].

It was so strange to see Reagan feted as he was upon his death. One could argue that, other than Nixon, he did more to accelerate the downfall of America than any other president.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

Journalists attempt to tell the truth, gets second sources, endures fact checking, and correct any mistakes made.

Pundits are just loud mouths. Truthiness is irrelevant.

Propagandists knowingly lie, distort, omit, whatever.

Journalists also focus on facts - who, what, when - and avoid bias. Something that we've seen has gone out the window at what used to be legitimate news sources.

I have no problem with opinion pieces or punditry, but don't try to disguise it as journalism.

That would not really help, since at the high end of information newspapers die by a thousand cuts. A journalist simply can not compete with Schneier's or DJB's blog on cryptography, he can not compete with Carrol on theoretical physics etc. So it is not only that newspapers do not have a good business model for the internet, it is also that the internet gives you better alternatives for those topics you are actually interested in.

Fantastic idea. It's a profession, and actually there are rules on who can write for newspapers - it's just that the owners of newspapers piss in the soup so much with their biases that it loses any value. So maybe fewer journalists and fewer newspapers - some form of public service guarantee otherwise you canny t be a newspaper just an entertainment magazine

Perhaps we should have strict rules about who can call himself an engineer?

I don't agree with the parent about journalists (or that software developers should be licensed in general). But I would point out that, especially for engineers involved in signing off on certain things from a regulatory perspective, there is a Professional Engineer license that's required for certain jobs. I took and passed an Engineer-in-Training exam at one point because had I continued in my then job path I'd have wanted to become a PE once I'd the requisite amount of time.

We don't always need to apply an idea in the abstract to everything in the world. There is a big difference between someone who makes CRUD apps for a living, and someone who writes firmware for a pacemaker. No need to paint with such broad strokes.

Add to that , journalists may get fired but dont go to jail for spreading lies.

There is a law on the books for that, though I don't know of any journalists who have been prosecuted:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements

Such rules already exist and are widely ignored.

We do in Canada.

Names are only protected if there is an associated license or certification process. These processes are generally in place to insure that your doctor/lawyer/electrician is competent enough to do their job, there are major ramifications if they fail to do their job correctly and they can be punished by the system, take away their license, if they fail to meet accepted standards. The way I see journalism is your sources and reputation is what gives you credibility in place of a license, do a bad job and people are less likely to listen to what you have to say.

Cynically, I think it's because the constitution implies journalists freedoms that certain public figures would prefer the general citizenry not have.

Sacrificing the ideals of journalism sounds like a bad deal for democracy. But then again, if people would rather be entertained by whatever is in their filter bubble for five minutes, than be challenged, I guess that's the kind of news world we get.

> Sacrificing the ideals of journalism sounds like a bad deal for democracy

We should not romanticize journalism of the past too much either. The "old news" subreddit gives some perspective (obviously, it's biased towards funny or unusual stories) https://www.reddit.com/r/OldNews

I have recorded one year of imagery in a 1970 newspaper (as a start). Speaking from firsthand experience with comparisons from the last few years, media has taken a huge leap backwards and prejudice and nastiness has increased considerably. This is in spite of most people who haven't compared saying the opposite of what I have observed ("oh, you want to go back to how it was 50 years ago when men were all sexist?"). I could write a novel on that fallacious mindset alone!

This may not be what you meant about romanticising, but modern newspapers have deteriorated significantly.

Part of this deterioration is because of competition in journalism (click bait, a race to the bottom). Part of it is a perverse sense of and fundamental abuse of the term Equality. The abuse of the term equality has then lead to unprecedented gender bullying and some extreme revisionist history that largely remains unchallenged. If you pick up a reasonable paper from 1970, you will realise how sexist we have become! The issue today is that you won't find a reasonable (eg. non sexist) newspaper - there is no choice! Sexism and gender bullying ARE the norm.

Newspapers needed to compete with the Internet. In this respect, the article was fundamentally wrong. Failure to embrace the Internet would have allowed others to fill the void (even if you went online but charged money). More people are now used to digesting news electronically and the Internet makes the content dynamic and interactive.

People will pay good money for good news, but it needs to be good quality. That eliminates most of the market.

Think of games. You can still sell the occasional blockbuster (GTA 5 made a billion dollars worth of sales!!). However, most games on iTunes hover below a few $ and many end up free. Compare this to games 30 years ago where there was a small cheap-end market. Or, CDs. Sales have fallen through the floor, but, a 99c track sells well on iTunes. News isn't quite the same, but you can see that a paradigm shift was inevitable for newspapers with the advent of the Internet.

If there was one thing the papers got wrong, it was the increase in nastiness and prejudice. I believe society is much worse today than it has been in a long time. The caring element is what we've lost. We need a new generation of pioneers to undo the carnage.

And go back to 1900 and you'll find completely biased newpapers (The Arizona Republic used to be called The Arizona Republican: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arizona_Republic ---that's not the only example either) and over the top reporting that would give newspapers (and TV) a run for their money today (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism). Was it better in the 1970s? Or was the bias better hidden at the time?

I remember my print edition, it was mostly schlock, but every now and then they would do some real investigative local reporting, and that was invaluable. No local source has broken a major, deep, sprawling complex story in years, they're basically just bloggers now, they've got a handful of daily beats they cover, and they don't go much deeper than that. Powerful local organizations operate unchecked.

This. Local (non-sports) news in my paper is mostly city council stuff and the police blotter. A particularly salacious crime gets a few extra column inches.

Other than that, the paper is wire stories and advertisements.

I've noticed neighborhood groups on Facebook starting to fill this vacuum. It would be interesting if online journalism could embrace the model of geographic news.

I feel that the local newspaper, or even the common worldview of the major newspapers were/are quite the bubble themselves. Imagine HN without a comment section!

Content algorithms seem to be putting the occasional annoying thing into my feed to keep it fresh, and I keep finding gems of brilliance out of the scope of traditional journalism.

This may not be the news world we need

But this is the news world we deserve :)

I think your comment is very apt. If you don't pay for the news, you being manipulated is the product. You have to support people who inform for our actual benefit.

I subscribe to a couple digital periodicals. My last paper subscription lapsed about four months ago.

Paying doesn't help. It always galled me that I was paying for the privilege of getting ads.

My paper subscription lapsed years ago. The local paper is actually pretty good, but I find I don't miss it much anymore.

Perhaps you should find some news sites that don't have ads then? Something that only exists on readership support? Some stories only eventually break into 'mainstream media' (ugh, I used that phrase, I'm sorry) through these sites.

This is a false dichotomy. Please present evidence that shows that paying for news means you are not being manipulated. I counter your lack of evidence with an opinion that states the opposite: News being written by people, almost all news has some form of bias. Sometimes it's barely there, sometimes it's in-your-face.

Spurting out 'false dichotomy' and stating that I haven't provided the necessary treatise of evidence is kind of ridiculous. I hope you can see how pretentious that sounds.

If a news organization only exists because the Koch brothers own it and it operates at a loss, its primary purpose isn't to serve unbiased news, but propaganda.

Contrast that to a news agency or journalist whose existence is funded only through subscriptions, with zero advertising. These type of agencies are not subservient to a Murdoch, a pharma company, or anybody. They only have to interest their readership sufficiently.

Of course there is still bias. But now you have multiple viewpoints. If the only news you're getting is from papers owned by billionaires or heavily moderated forums owned by billionaires, then good luck.

I would agree with you that sending money to Fox News isn't going to help with the bias much.

He was right, you implied paying for the news removes the manipulation, which is a ridiculous notion.

That's not what I said. I said that if you don't pay for the news, then you being manipulated is the product. That's not the same thing as simply forking over money magically removing bias. The latter is a ridiculous notion and that equates to your straw-man argument.

Do you really think a trusted news source with corporate overlords is able operate with unlimited autonomy? I would have no issue if there was a large diversity of ownership with conflicting issues. But I don't really see sufficient conflict in corporate America.

Even if you do pay for news, you being manipulated is still the product - the barrier to entrance just ensures you're a higher-quality, more attentive product. Paid newspapers have always had ads, always been subsidised by newspaper barons with their own interests at heart. Here in the UK, the newspaper chain most aggressive about online paywalls is also the one that openly brags about influencing elections. "It's the Sun wot won it", and you can't get the Sun for free.

Now I'm curious. Are we actually measuring how well people are informed in general? Is informedness declining? That would be interesting, since the web is supposed to bring us information, not take it away.

The media has always had a vested interest in what it tells you. Look up William Randolph Hearst as an example.

However, today, you see a lot more blatant manipulation in the media. People are conditioned to it, which is scary.

Take a subtle example, Ars Technica almost never says Chairman, it says Chairperson, but it will say Chairwoman (which also shows their ignorance of the origin of Chairman). Ars has played all sorts of games like this. It started around the time of Casey Johnson and the introduction of strong gender stereotyping. This was from a once brilliant (and well balanced) site that has never recovered.

Today, very few people will tell you how to think, they will tell you what to think, who to vote for, etc.

True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s."

The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s (when FEW men had the right to vote, let alone women - which is always overlooked for the sake of propaganda). This is an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years, without challenge.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Wom...

There are many areas today where people don't bother to do any fact checking. What's worse are those that purposely manipulate history. They insult and disgrace our grandmothers and grandfathers. Yet, most of us would say that our grandmothers were not wallflowers and our grandfathers not anything like modern media portrays!!!

So, in short, yes. The Internet goes a long way to hiding and misrepresenting information. The signal to noise ratio is a big part of the problem, but special interest groups and political correctness have also contributed significantly.

> Take a subtle example, Ars Technica almost never says Chairman, it says Chairperson, but it will say Chairwoman (which also shows their ignorance of the origin of Chairman).

Where is your evidence for that claim?

Chairwoman - About 272 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairwoman+site%3Aar...

Chairperson - About 179 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairperson+site%3Aa...

Chairman - About 2,960 results: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chairman+site%3Aarst...

> True of False (taken from Wikipedia): "Limited voting rights were gained by some women in Sweden, Britain, and some western U.S. states in the 1860s."

> The answer of course is False. We have voting records from the UK (as one example) showing quite a few women on independent means voting in the 1830s

How does that make it false? It doesn't state that no woman voted in the 1830s, it states that some women gained voting rights in the 1860s. The only way it's false is if no women received voting rights in the 1860s.

It's not "an example of a stream of calculated deceit that has flourished in the last 20 years", it's simply an example of nobody who edited that page being aware that some women voted in the 1830s.

If you have legitimate sources demonstrating they did (your link states 1843, BTW, not 1830s) then edit the Wikipedia page and add/correct that info. That's how Wikipedia works.

Also , ease of access. If newspapers did not publish online, people would OCR and pirate their articles.

> if a newspaper company wanted to make a real splash on the Web, it would be better off inventing an original website—the next Business Insider or BuzzFeed—and not remodel its newspaper copy.

I have to disagree with Chyi here—"create the next BuzzFeed" is not a strategy; it's extremely hard, competitive and they don't have the skills to even attempt it.

That said, I think there's a strong argument for having never put anything online, or at least behind a strong paywall with no trials. That way they could have maintained an air of premium information instead of going head to head with a gazillion clickbait factory paying peanuts to underemployed college grads.

Of course the problem is this is all hypothetical, and if someone had made this bet they'd be getting hung out to dry based on the declining revenues even if they wouldn't have been as bad as they ended up being in our current reality. In other words, it was just too risky a bet to not try to "win the web" even though it is a race to the bottom newspapers are ill-equipped to compete in.

The problem with paywalling the news is 1) news can not be copyrighted. You can keep people from copying your story word-for-word, but you can't keep them from repeating the news in different words and 2) nobody will ever see your news because it doesn't show up on Google. You have a chicken and egg problem - without subscribers you won't get a reputation for a quality product, but if you paywall everything nobody will know you exist.

But according to the article 82% of revenue still comes from the print edition, so it's not a chicken or egg problem it's a lose-lose. That's why I'm suggesting a strategy where you maintain the perceived value of the print content could be more successful long-term.

But you can't really talk about revenue in the absence of expenses. It costs money to print and distribute newspapers. If it costs you a dollar to print a newspaper and you have a million subscribers, you have have a million dollars in revenue even if they're only paying seventy five cents for a paper.

She's made a compelling argument that news organizations are having a lot of trouble making money online. But it's not at all clear they can make money off the print edition either.

Newspapers are in a vicious cycle - they have fewer subscribers so they cut costs, which makes the paper less compelling, which leads to fewer subscribers...

News organizations aren't moving to the web because they want to. They're moving because their old business model was destroyed (by craigslist, mostly). I haven't read him in awhile, but Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine.com) used to be a good read on the subject.

To continue the speculation, the hard-copy + pay wall approach would have culled a lot of the lowest quality newspapers. Bad for the broader industry, but great for the reader.

Having worked for a newspaper and, later, it's larger media conglomerate (late aughts), I can say that newspapers have intentionally created a terrible web presence. It's tough to tell whether the company thought it was a fad that would die off and not worth the investment, or if they believed that a terrible web site would drive people back to the physical paper. Either way, the move from print to online was a failure driven by upper management.

As one anecdote, the paper ran an advertising campaign telling people not to use the website on Sundays. Ironically, the commercial ended with a URL for a website with a coupon for the Sunday paper.

> As one anecdote, the paper ran an advertising campaign telling people not to use the website on Sundays.

... but why? What did they hope to achieve by that?

I don't know for sure, but Sunday newspapers are typically filled with ads and coupons for local businesses. It's probably the day that is most profitable for newspaper and ad sales together.

Why they choose Sunday to stack in ads and coupons, I don't know. Might be related to Church services, I wonder if it's the same for newspapers in other countries?

Almost definitely this. Our local paper has actually tried to literally give away the Sunday edition. ie, a Sunday-only subscription at no cost. Not sure how many takers they got - I didn't sign up.

Sunday is the most widely read and profitable day for newspapers.

It also helps to remember that newspaper readers are not the source of revenue for newspapers. Advertisers are the actual customers. With that in mind, a campaign promoting the best day for advertising makes more sense.

Traditionally people didn't work on Sunday and would do the shopping.

Thursday is the other big day, especially for car ads.

"Online editions offer a 'less-than-satisfactory' reading experience, she writes, cluttered with intrusive ads and hampered by poor design."

Our local newspaper's Web site is terrible. It's not just lack of investment; they rolled out a new HTML5 Web site that demonstrates to me that bad HTML5 is the worst-yet flavor of bad HTML.

But this doesn't mean that the strategic error was digital news; it means the strategic error was making a terrible Web site.

So what is bad about it? It sounds strange thing to say htnl5 has anything to do with it...

If your website is bad, and you create a new one that keeps the same core ideas but has new, fancy features from HTML5, you now most likely have a site that is both bad and baroque. Very few websites are bad because they were lacking the features HTML5 adds — they're bad because their creators want to do the wrong thing.

I think you don't understand what html5 is. I understand your frustration about changes the sites do, but it has nothing to do with html5 per se.

I think you're either being needlessly pedantic or seeing more blame directed toward HTML5 than there actually is.

HTML5 just gives you lots of scope to overcomplicate the UI with animations and effects.

I'm talking about this: http://www.courier-journal.com/ News stories are displayed in internal pop-up windows—unless they don't. Why are there arrows at the side to navigate to News or Opinion sections? I actively avoid trying to get my news through this site.

The crisis is not one of content. But one of distribution.

The internet has destroyed the lock on distribution relied on by; Publishers, MPAA, RIAA, newspapers, governments and even people who expect hard to access (look up in county courts files) means effectively "private".

There is vastly more supply of "attention" than there is demand for "attention". Combined with the ease of distribution/search and picking and choosing tiny bits from each "supplier" means it's extremely hard to monetize or even convince your consumers that you provide any value at all. i.e. I can pay/endure ads from you or I can go to the fify other sources/aggregators of same information.

> The crisis is not one of content. But one of distribution.

This is undoubtedly the key aspect of the networked world. Papers have, in the past, tried to do various forms of syndication and distribution bundling deals to establish a viable business model but to my knowledge these have all been abject failures. Compound this with the loss of monopoly income from local classified ads and we have implosion.

My suggestion to the industry is to not syndicate content, rather syndicate subscription. I only want to have a single "news" subscription - and it's not going to be on "your" site. So the industry should find a way for me to pay for content wherever I may find it with a single subscription, and without anyone "owning" my account. There may be a business model that works there.

Better (yet scarier) would be curated content. I would love for someone to filter the firehose of information, but I don't want to live in an echo chamber. I don't want a feed that tries to hide opinions or facts I disagree with. Provide me the basic arguments and rationale from multiple sides, not strawman arguments. Provide fact checking (with context). Today, this function would best be performed by people.

Yes, this is just another example of the classic and ongoing disintermediation enabled by internet technologies.

Once I had access to the raw news feeds available to journalists (Reuters, AP, AFP, etc), it became clear that the novel content of local newspapers was vanishingly small. With the rise of special interest blogs of every sort, there was simply no reason to endure the mangled versions of the news feeds offered by local newspapers.

This article appears to neglect the impact of craigslist and similar services on classified ad revenue. With that revenue gone newspapers are in trouble, mistake or not.

Ever have to place a obituary lately? Nearly $1k! For a medium size market!

I think I see a way to save print news, but it won't be pretty...

Some of the more dynamic content from the NYT is coming the closest to what I would want to pay a subscription for, but still far from my threshold to pay. Static word content that we once paid handsomely for (in terms of ad space and subscription fees) is regurgitated at far lower cost everywhere now.

But I've yet to see widespread adoption of content with active models to work with, even download and run for yourself, for example. Connected to databases holding the raw data that the story is about. With side-commentary, Torah-like (the Torah has a tradition of recording significant interpretations and amplifications made by past rabbis), possibly by multiple competing editors, summarizing swathes of comments into concise, cogent chunks that add to/update the original piece. Organized not just by time, but through/over time: so not presented only as a "this is what happened this hour/day/week" narrative, but in a Wikipedia-related fashion describing "this event that happened is placed in this context in our overall knowledge".

Well they're doing quite a lot in data-journalism. The Upshot (NYT) and 538 have git organizations. Others are trying the "timeless" content you're describing – I'd say Vox's "cards" come close (but are horribly boring tbh)

Problem is – besides politics not always being easy to capture numerically – that the economics of such a model probably wouldn't work. It'd probably increase costs by factor of at least 5, and I strongly doubt that the market could support it.

It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. I currently don't pay for any subscriptions, even though I've avoided the cynicism and the conspiracy theories frequently invoked against journalists. I think they're excellent – so much so in fact that can't imagine getting tied to any single publication.

But, if nobody buys them anymore, we'll get to see what it's like without newspapers. I fear many people don't realize how much of what's going on originates with a handful of organizations. Unfortunately, just as power isn't created in the plug, no news are created on twitter (well, nowadays some are, but you get my point).

If the publishing market is destined to stay bifurcated, then it is a sad commentary on the descent of the Net down the same well-trodden path that television took to mediocrity and unfulfilled promise.

There is a market for such data- and analytically-heavy publishing at the very high end. Actionable-oriented industry-specific analysis selling for $10K USD per year and magnitudes higher are purchased in very small quantities by trading firms, for example. Back in the BBS days, I was hopeful that the then-nascent Net would make it easier and less expensive to share, collate and test ideas and data on a larger scale, and evolve publishing to a more live- and continuously-curated ideas marketplace, so to speak. But I suspect you might be correct, and the ad-driven, entertainment-oriented content will crowd out what I had hoped for in a re-proving of Gresham's law for mass consumption content.

For the typical newspaper, the online experience is horrible. The LA Times heats up my laptop. SF Gate is a heap of latency. My local paper is one Media General sold to Buffett: it's slow, buries the lead, wants me to sign in when I want to read the news and the front page is historically enthusiastic about Classmates.com.

The web has made newspapers so bad that even the New York Times lies to me about ten articles a month without batting an eye if I haven't recently deleted cookies. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times tell me I must subscribe...except when I click on a link from a Google search.

Newspapers are in a no win situation, so every move they have made since the late 90s has been a mistake, because there is no way out. Digital is free. We can all read free journalism until doomsday. A couple business publications (WSJ, FT) can erect a paywall and succeed -- most can't. Print readership is aging and shrinking as it dies. It is not the future. Print will become a luxury good, and newspapers will produce rare objects for a higher price to be enjoyed by a smaller audience of connoisseurs. The days of massive print readership are dwindling rapidly, even if print remains (decreasingly) profitable.

As an-ex journalist who recently left the industry to become a programmer, I'd say one of the issues is the short-sightedness of senior management. When I started teaching myself to code last year, I told my editor as well as a couple of other senior staff members (including the chief exec) about my ambitions to combine coding and journalism.

My editor was all for it but there was little she could do besides telling her boss about what I was doing and hoping that would lead to meetings for me with our in-house dev team based in London (I was at a regional paper owned by one of the biggest regional newspaper owners in the UK).

In the end I left because nothing happened. I appreciate senior staff members are busy with other stuff but I'd have thought somebody would have taken more of an active interest in what I was trying to do. One of the issues is that developers working for news firms are creating tools based on briefs from people who do not use those systems on a daily basis, so you end up with products with a poor UX for both readers and journalists.

I was a journalist for only 4 years (I was fortunate to get a job straight out of uni) but my sense is that we are spending too much time thinking about the content and not thinking deeply enough about the platforms serving that content. By that I don't mean building the next Facebook etc but starting creating platforms which will be one of the places we serve our content and possibly bring other sources of revenue. I imagine this would work better on a local/regional level because you could be more specific with your audience.

It's probably too late to do that now but I think the journalists who will be more successful in the future will be those building media firms which serve niche audiences but don't rely on content being their #1 source of income.

A fascinating story, and I hope you have a blog somewhere. Please post its URL if you do. As an aside you mentioned that you hoped a boss would recognize what you were doing and take an active interest in it. One thing I learned too late in my professional life is that you must actively sell yourself. People have so many things to do these days that even a good boss may not notice you. Have you noticed how there are people in your company who succeeded who are not as smart as you? It's because they put in the shoe leather selling themselves. I started my own successful company and no longer have that problem, but I cringe when I think about the things I could have got done at places like Microsoft had I been a better self-promoter.

Funnily enough, I'm not much of a blogger. I enjoy writing but am not the stage were I want to blog. My coding journey so far definitely taught me a lot about self-starting and selling yourself. I did not stay and try to sell myself because I was not enjoying the working conditions. We were expected to do more with fewer resources and the only reason we produced a good product is because we went beyond what the job description stipulated. What kind of company do you run? I'd like to start something in the future so I'm learning as much as I can about everything now.

Yes I agree with your last point. You could package up apps, community, meetups, tutorials, shopping and content around a particular niche. People are much more used to paying to support their hobbies and interests. It would be a premium product that people actually want to buy.

I think the magazine and tv industry are much closer to this than newspapers. Just look at some of the BBC titles that have TV, web, magazines and even live shows.

Another thing media companies are failing to do is providing an API for their content. I think the Guardian, NYTimes and USA Today are the only big international papers with a decent API system. Journalists have so many skills in the area of research, investigation, storytelling etc which I feel we are not exploiting enough. I think the BBC is not the best example to use in the sense that they are not competing commercially. However, I agree they have created products which would work well if packaged up separately.

I had high hopes for Everyblock, the hyper-local social network (almost a geographic form of Facebook). Besides user-generated content, it aggregated much public information (permit applications, police reports, etc.). It was initially developed through a grant as open source software. I was convinced that newspapers would latch onto the platform. But, that never really seemed to happen. NBC News bought it and shut it down in 2008. They attempted a re-launch, but I haven't followed it since then.

In the UK we had a company which started out as an investigative journalism agency and then pivoted to selling data on company insolvency (http://www.exaronews.com/insolvency-index). Sadly, they could not make it work but I think more journalists need to be exploring models like that. ProPublica seem to be doing a good job of it at https://www.propublica.org/datastore

Advertising left the newspapers.

Look for example at used car ads. Sellers had a choice between paying the newspaper to run your two-line car ad for a few days for $20 or post it free to craigslist where you can attach photos, a lengthy description, etc.

And once sellers started posting there, buyers stopped looking in the paper for used cars.

I know a used car dealer that continued to run print ads in the newspaper for a while — but only for "old man cars" like Buick sedans, etc.

Their biggest mistake was reducing the quality and increasing the price of their product simultaneously while facing greater competition.

Upon introspection, i totally agree.

I used to get 5 newspapers a week (daily Sunday)

Once email became free my time on AOL decreased but time online increased. That's where I found news.

Then, the newspapers increased price and also the delivery changes.

I didn't renew all but one. Eventually that was too much.

So I would go to the library and read. But they also stopped some papers too.

I miss the ads the most. Hard to believe, but true. There is no one place now that I can read an ad for a newly opened store or restaurant.

It appears unlikely that, as the general consensus seems to be, a group as diverse as all journalists world-wide would collectively be any more stupid than any other profession. So it may be unjust to call what happened to them "mistakes". There's no indication that an offline-only or paywalled distribution would have had better chances (the few that did were without exception rather special publications focusing on high-value niches).

They were simply mauled by the same market forces that killed travel agencies or fax repairmen.

Unfortunately, while we're all quite happy to book our own flights, journalism is still vital. Sure, news is cheap, you can get the same stuff everywhere. But if you trace it back to it's origin, you'll end up at the NYT or WP or the Guardian more often than not.

There's simply no way that hobbyists could ever fill the void that would remain if any of the few high-quality publications were to fail.

Basically, just like booksellers and other vendors, the move to online caused Newspapers to compete in a global marketplace, where the unit is the story. And the more outlets, the bigger the competition.

This is the result of all that. They are now all chasing a fixed advertising pie, but the barrier to publishing has been greatly lowered

I suppose the same could be said of the printing press getting more available with time. But it was hard to obtain the mass distribution network that the internet gives nearly for free.

>They are now all chasing a fixed advertising pie, but the barrier to publishing has been greatly lowered

Possibly shrinking advertising pie.

Before papers made lots of money selling classified ads locally. Ads for cars, houses, and random junk may have sold for $20 each, but they had hundreds of them. And each market was different leading people to pay double or triple market boundaries (say places with more than one large paper).

Then comes Craigslist and a few other services (even Ebay is a good example for junk not getting posted to the paper). These places allowed lots of people that used to pay, to post for free. Others profit after the sale is completed, leading to little risk to the poster.

Let's say that between these hundreds of papers the combined amount of money coming in was $10,000,000 (this is completely made up, I'm sure I could get realistic numbers if I put a lot of time into it). Each one was making enough money to stay alive. Now, with the new online selling services charging very little, the combined online services made only $1,000,000 a week. But because of their low cost distribution model they still profited hansom. There was a theoretical contraction of $9 million a week in advertising revenues among all the papers, which means a huge number of them had to consolidate or go under. With people not reading the paper for those ads (which I still remember being highly popular in the 80s and 90s) distributions fell even further.

Simply put, nothing could save the papers as they were. It had nothing to do with the contents inside of them, but how they were funded.

The selection of books will generally be the same everywhere in the western world, news isn't.

I agree... Who really cares. If something important happens locally someone will tell you about it.

It seems like we've seen a shift away from people caring about local news in favor of national news. That seems bad for the country.

Many local news papers were bought up and started carrying mostly syndicated AP content with little local content.

Another problem was the rise of the 24 hour national news network that pushed everything as a 'breaking alert' or 'emergency right now'. In general your local news is going to be slow, most places don't have a lot going on. The national news is instead a 24 hour stream of 'news drugs'.

I'm a young guy, and I get multiple newspapers, and a few news magazines delivered. I don't like new media like reddit and "social news aggregators", because you're replacing professional editors w/ unpaid volunteers and "votes".

Instead of crowd-sourcing what gets published/visible, trust some anonymous individuals at a newspaper? Who has only one agenda instead of a mixture of many voices and ideals? That's got its downside too. The bubble is created there by what tiny number of voices are included in the subscription list.

> Who has only one agenda instead of a mixture of many voices and ideals?

I think you've nailed the value proposition of newspapers and other hand-curated services here. When dealing with a single editorial voice their biases and a agenda are at least knowable and mostly consistent. Compare to "crowdsourcing" where the agenda and bias you get may change day to day based on bots, advertisers, scammers, and online mobs gaming the system. Likewise "deep learning" makes decisions based on an algorithm unlike that of any human and is not easily easily pinned down to a consistent agenda either.

I think a look at reddit shows that you can trust crowdsourced news much less than say, the NYT or WaPo.

Twitter's a bit different, there are good reporters on the ground who tweet a lot, but Twitter is terrible at actual aggregation.

Honestly, a dedicated newsroom is better.

"some anonymous individuals at a newspaper" ...you mean professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise?

"professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise"

The world is full of domain experts who all know the journalists get everything wrong about their specialty, but out of misguided charity think its just an odd mistake and journalists in general know everything about every OTHER specialty and can't wait to read those stories.

I'd love to read tech journalism from someone who has run a compiler on source code they themselves wrote. Its out there, but not at mainstream prestigious sites where all that matters is class rank at Columbia.

The problem with newspapers is we have more than about 3. Back when they printed and delivered paper scaling meant we have 1000 substandard local papers all of which equally suck. Someday we'll have like 3 and they'll actually be worth reading. But a lot of jobs have to go away first.

That's going to have interesting effect on journalism schools. Can you even run one, if there's only three small employers? May go back to the days when most journalists have a degree in something else.

Maybe a journalist is an expert on whatever it is that they are covering, and maybe they are not. Regardless, they are over-worked, spread-thin and the most erudite probably not universally syndicated.

I've certainly experienced the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect myself (for years!), but each bump up against the practice of modern journalism makes me a little bit more disillusioned (and sad, because it is surely an important function.)

The UK press are spectacularly partisan. Brexit is their greatest achievement.

The US press are more subtly handicapped by believing that the midpoint between partisans is "balanced". The Trump campaign is showing how ridiculous this can become.

> .you mean professional journalists who actually report on subjects of their expertise?

Go read the IT section of your local paper and see if you still think that.

No I mean editors who determine what makes it on to the printed page.

Editors aren't also professionals who work with the journalists? What you're advocating for is a lot of amateur voices with limited resources in comparison and a plethora of personal agendas. It's more democratic than having a few professional curators. But is that better?

Its varied. That's the point.

Right. So, professional journalists with experience, and who are anything but anonymous.

Except when they are, like with the Economist.

Anyway, they're single voices, not a variety. So bubble.

Reddit is crowd-sourced for things like cat gifs and porn. For news, it's heavily curated by people with agendas and biases. It's as "fair and balanced" as Fox News.

i read another article mentioning that one of the main consequences of this is the lack of quality local news and political coverage, which is still something only local newspapers can provide. there is plenty of online coverage about the latest stupid thing trump said or far off world events, not so much coverage of local politicians and things in your community that actually could affect you.

Local news isn't going to be pushed at you front and center, at least not until Google knows most people's home town (or most relevant town). However, when I google $hometown+news, I get a pretty decent listing.

Not sure if this works well for cities that are large enough to cause world news themselves. And, if you did this for San Francisco, I imagine that you would simply be directed back to HN ;)

Back when I was still buying local newspapers they had very little local coverage anyway, it was mostly regurgitated national news. And lets face it, there isn't enough local news to justify a daily.

The national outlets should team up with local newspapers to syndicate articles and provide a cut of the ad/subscription revenue.

e.g. NYT would team up with SmallTown, Ohio newspaper so that a user can subscribe to both his local newspaper and NYT and see articles on the same page.

> the tech-heavy Web strategy pursued by most papers has been a bust

This can be true, without implying that continuing to focus on print over digital was the correct strategy.

This article confuses the strategy for the newspaper industry as a whole with the strategy for any particular newspaper. If zero newspapers were online, then the first paper to go online would have a huge advantage. Every newspaper staying offline is not a Nash equilibrium, unless there's some compact to enforce it (which might violate antitrust laws).

Um, news aggregators need something to aggregate. That content comes from newspapers. The links still send readers to the newspaper's website. The aggregators are not replacing the function of the newspapers, they're just making it easier for readers to find the stories.

Netflix for newspapers.

If you could pay a small monthly fee and be able to read from a collection of newspapers.

Blendle comes to mind, although it's pay per article.

I'm starting to think distraction is the root of many problems. There's little hope for most people trying to read an in-depth article on their mobile devices. The article about deep work on the front page has made me realize just how long it takes me to take care of the stuff that is severely hampered by distraction.

I think a big hurdle will be removing distractions like chat or noise/interruptions from coworkers without creating problems. It would be nice to just sign off/hide away for extended periods but that's bound to go overly poorly in our collaboration enthusiastic world.

I'm starting to think distraction is the root of many problems.

This is one of the two reasons that I subscribed to a dead-trees paper again. It is much easier to read in-depth articles in a newspaper in a format where there are no other distractions.

The other reason is that blue light is bad for sleep patterns and reading the newspaper at night has the opposite effect of reading from a smartphone or tablet: it makes me tired (in a good way). Of course, it helps that I am reading a newspaper which is not in my native or second language :).

The ability to manage distraction is going to be the key skill for the rest of our lives.

Theres enough sources here to warrent a deeper look into the subject but here are my first thoughts

1) online is more convienient than paper. If paper is on a daily route, its convienient.

2) online is often cheaper than paper. There is probably some uncanny valley but paper distribution costs much more than electronic. And paper production is at best analogous to server scalability.

3) online has more tools available in regards to presentation and linking to bibliography/other stories.

4) online has more advertisement opportunity

What paper really represents is brand pressence. Would you trust a no name blog or a locally distributed paper + an online pressence

I think the problem is a simple assumption - people will leave the print version of My Local Journal and go to mylocaljournal.com when in fact they go from My Local Journal to Buzzfeed or the Yahoo! homepage or Google News or Twitter or Facebook or RSS of their 10 favorite blogs etc...

For example, I don't have a newspaper. I also don't check the local newspaper website. My wife, friends, relatives don't seem to either. The entirety of local news is mostly ignored.

And yet, we are fine. So, is all of that news necessary or important to our lives? As it turns out, no.

The problem with that is that well-informed citizen are necessary for the functioning of a democracy. You can't make decisions without information.

Let's revisit this thread on January 20, 2017!

> So, is all of that news necessary or important to our lives? As it turns out, no.

Or not yet, anyway.

The only problem with printed news is the vast amount of garbage that it generates: I mean the paper itself. It's not very environmentally friendly.

Growing trees to cut them down and bury them in landfills is carbon sequestration. /s (but only partly)

In many ways the "newspaper" is its own ecosystem. Editors/reporters, printers/delivery, academia,pollsters, others rely on this ecosystem to earn and prosper.

Except readers.

This ecosystem is morphing under their feet. But the large number of humans living off this ecosystem means it just won't go away quickly. Holding on to the fifth estate oversight gives newspaper people strength.

For the sake of all earning a living, I hope mid career changes are not forced on those that entered their ecosystem.

A colossal mistake... from which point of view? Never had we available such a huge source of fresh news. Maybe that's not the best for newspaper industry, but as far at it lasts (and no serious signs of disruptions have shown up), let's enjoy it!

It looks a bit like software development: Microsoft educated users to ship crap (people think that having to reboot is fine!) and we ended up having to maintain crap.

It's fresh news, but it is shallow. Quality reporting requires dedication and resources, something some news organizations had under one roof. It's hard to see how that very necessary element in our society will be kept around in the longer term. The 5th estate has a very important function and without it our societies will no doubt be poorer.

You might be interested to know that Buzzfeed seems to be doing investigative reporting now

I just checked out their homepage, let's just say that isn't exactly evident from the content there.

I'm going to assume your comment was sarcastic unless there is some proof to the contrary.

Some samples:

Oh, boy.

34 of the best products from shark tank.

23 texts that will make you laugh way harder than they should.

How much do you actually know about drugs?

Find awesome gifts for friends and family.

27 Ingenious Hacks Every College Student Needs To Know (food, laundry and pooping).

Any of those links qualify as investigative reporting?

They did indeed have an investigative unit, but it was recently poached by CNN: http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/10/cnn-hires-away-b...

e: I don't recall any of their articles specifically, but I do recall reading a few solid articles via Instapaper and then being surprised to see that they were from BuzzFeed.

Buzzfeed, who are way up my shit list for clickbait crap, have nonetheless done some phenomenally good reporting on the TPP and ISDS issue, including multi-part deep coverage.

You've got to dig for the good stuff, but it actually is there.

That report was alarmist, factually wrong in some places, and draw some ridiculous conclusions.

How, specifically?

Pooping hacks you say?

No, they say.

Newspapers should sell subscriptions to the latest news, and provide slightly old news for free, like 8 to 12 hours behind.

and sell subscriptions to old news ?

Strikes me the key is to control more of the news supply chain and become their own aggregators. I think it's similar to the way Hulu is owned by some networks and some studios.

The trouble is then competing with the ones who do stay online.

The BBC gets a lot more Wikipedia refs these days than the completely-paywalled Times.

A few thoughts and references.

Hamilton Holt: A 1909 account, "Commercialism and Journalism", describes something of the inverse of our current dilemma: how the press would establish its independence given the tremendous boom in advertising, and advertisers who Had Money and Had an Interest in What Was or Wasn't Published. Holt's account starts with a statistical overview of the previous half-century of the industry and the growing role of advertising (a new phenomenon, at least at that scale, in 1909). It's quite revealing.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

I.F. "Izzy" Stone, speaking in 1974, is commenting at the zenith of the power of major city and national dailies. The Washington Post and The New York Times had just toppled a President of the United States. Stone credits the broad scope (a point Holt had made) of major city papers as giving them a great deal of independence -- local and small-city papers had no such advantages. Advertising remained a huge influence on the press.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g

Chomsky, Mander, and Postman: Three among many critics of the modern press, both print and broadcast. If you're not familiar with them, read.

Tronc: I've been spending time in the Chicago area, and have had the experience of reading what's left of the Chicago Tribune. John Oliver's criticisms were very well deserved. We're currently in Sportsball Season, which means that the front page, front section, editorial page, business section (mostly obituaries, with the added bonus of a list of recently dead people on the back pages), real estate, and entertainment sections, as well as the sports section, are covering the Cubs, Bears, Bulls, and/or Blackhawks.

Actual news is limited to a one page "Nation & World" and "News Briefing" page. Columnists largely discuss their gardens.

Every month or two there's a piece of accidental good journalism. Often a historical review (one in particular was the obit of a former Trib reporter).

The Monday paper is little more than a paste-up of solicited filler.

The simple truth is that the Trib doesn't cover news of significanc, covers its own backyard poorly, expresses the schizoid remnants of its Republic Party Paper tradition (though the paper's been notably less straight-ticket of late), and has taken unpardonable positions as regards free speech and the press, most notably its editorial against a pardon for Edward Snowden.

I find far more informative, useful, and relevant content online. Mostly I simply ignore the current news -- I'm poking around the Internet Archive's early 20th century, or 19th or 18th century collections. Or I'm digging into primary sources, largely academic and journal articles or books (and those often via Sci-Hub or LibGen).

I'm also coming to believe strongly that the "news is bad for you" view has strong merits. I'm not completely shut out (and am much less so than the typical person), but I absolutely refuse to let my information sources be ruled by commercial interests, shock and awe, outrage, or irrelevance.

Where the news media have misstepped most severely is in trying to serve entertainment rather than information. This affects not only what's left of newspapers, or magazines (I saw Time Magazine for the first time in years and felt like I'd just run into a friend in the end stages of cancer: gaunt, dull, no substance, and all signs pointing to a rapidly fading life-force): they've gutted themselves of any meaningful content. There are exceptions, including upstart and principled media: The Guardian does well. The Economist and Financial Times are generally strong. The Wall Street Journal, though cheap and slanted, remains a strikingly better paper than Tronc, er, the Trib. I've been impressed by online ventures, including The Intercept, Pro Publica, and a few others, though the outrage engines, even those nominally from viewpoints I agree with, are tiresome.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

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