Denver Post Rebels Against Its Hedge-Fund Ownership

"Facebook ’s failings are now famous and so far include but are perhaps not limited to misusing, sharing and scraping of private user data, selling space to Russian propagandists in the 2016 campaign, playing games with political content, starving journalism of ad revenues, increasing polarization, and turning eager users into the unknowing product. The signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical expertise by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness. Beyond that, what a shallow and banal figure. He too appears to have difficulties coming to terms with who he is. Perhaps he hopes to keep you, too, from coming to terms with it, by literally dressing as a child, in T-shirts, hoodies and jeans—soft clothes, the kind 5-year-olds favor.

His public reputation is now damaged, and about this he is very concerned. Next week he will appear before Congress. The Onion recently headlined that he was preparing for his questioning by studying up on the private data of congressmen. The comic Albert Brooks tweeted: “I sent Mark Zuckerberg my entire medical history just to save him some time.”

Tim Cook of Apple, in an impressive and sober interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, said last week something startling, almost revolutionary: “Privacy to us is a human right.” This was stunning because it was the exact opposite of what Silicon Valley has been telling us since social media’s inception, which is: Privacy is dead. Get over it. Some variation on that statement has been made over and over by Silicon Valley’s pioneers, and they say it blithely, cavalierly, with no apparent sense of tragedy.

Because they don’t do tragedy. They do children’s clothes."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-adults-wont-grow-up-nobody-w...

  syphoning off profits

The concept reminds me of the story arc in "The Sopranos" where the mob looted the sporting goods chain to collect on the gambling debts of its owner.

Interesting statement... Do you mean this in the sense that "it is/was obvious that they'd be hit hard by social media etc" or do you believe there was somehow too much news being produced?

I agree with this sentiment, but I don't know that I've seen another model demonstrated that works much better. State-run media like the CBC or BBC are still incentivized by advertisers, and also beholden to government - this still sets an implicit bias, as viewpoints that would have the government reduce funding to the state-run media aren't likely to be heavily popularized on there (go figure), the same way viewpoints that are counter to what advertisers want their products associated with aren't going to be seeing much if any airtime.

> Another model is the news associations, such as the AP

What you have there is a media cartel, something that provides far too powerful of a megaphone. Just like that recent Sinclair clip that was going around last week with multiple newscasters reading the same script in sync, the AP has the power to set the tone and message for thousands of newspapers. I think the massive resulting feedback waves that come from such loud voices is damaging; it sets into play social oscillations so strong they can tear people apart.

If anything, I'd like to see a model that pushes for more decentralization, that puts more competition into the game, that makes the individual players smaller. Give me a reason to want to read one paper over another other than my own confirmation bias.

Of course every model has its pros and cons.

They already have print syndication but it's backwards format in digital era. Instead of users determining what to read, editors pick news from the print syndication to republish.

I can think of a few reasons why -

a) Local papers have gotten much of their revenue from subscriptions for a long time; their customers are used to this model.

b) Their ads are local, targeting perhaps a few thousand people at most. That makes a paper (with high penetration and trust in the target audience) a viable alternative to Google ads.

c) They provide news which doesn’t have a lot of alternative sources, while still being of interest to the readers. This encourages readers to keep subscribing (providing stable income), and the continuing subscriptions encourages advertisers to keep spending their ad dollars (or kroner, as it were) on the local paper.

Nah. What has happened is that newspapers have lost their monopoly.

In most markets, there was one newspaper and that newspaper could charge advertisers far in excess of their costs.

Might as well been printing money with the presses.

Now, their monopoly rents have gone away. Now, they have to earn their money!

Earning money is hard compared to having a monopoly.