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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

In general, as someone who consulted on the NYT front page, and several other higher profile news products in 2009 on...

The major change is simply economic: that the product stopped being the publication and started being the article. The public turning point for this granularization was when Gawker decided to play per click in March 2008. As this motivation was generally adopted industry wide, it separated a writers incentives from that of a the publication as a product.

We no longer had a quality bar set by brands, and instead a race to the bottom set by individual writers competition. You can see it everything from click-bait headlines to inflamatory articles, all the way to its final form: Fake news written only for views at the price of all other qualities.

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The only way I can see to fix this is if there was more economic incentive for advertisers to care about the quality of the articles where their ads are placed.

There must have been attempts to do this.

I wonder what's been tried that didn't work.

This is a major reason, though certainly not the only reason, that the NYT has moved toward a primarily subscription-based business model for their online offerings. It's actually been very successful to date, and I think it's a good move for resisting the urge of clickbait. (https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/)

They don't really have a choice. I don't think you can simultaneously offer a quality product and still compete for advertising dollars with the Buzzfeeds of the world. The Times had a huge advantage in that they had a solid pre-internet brand. I wonder if it's even possible to start a company like that today without sinking hundreds of millions into getting it off the ground.

In this space, I'm very curious to see how the English version (just launched) of decorrespondent.nl will fare. This is a Dutch-language high quality news platform started only about 3 years ago, and the model is yearly paid subscription. I think this would be an example of what you're referring to. To be fair though, the editor who started it came from a well-respected traditional media newspaper.

I think it is almost impossible for a newspaper but I see successful magazines out there. They put part (or none) of their content online and sell the complete physical version.

As an example, in Spain, Jot Down. Web: http://www.jotdown.es/ and store: http://www.jotdown.es/store

Who did Gawker decide to pay per click in March 2008, advertisers or writers?

Why would Gawker pay advertisers?

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