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Comment by valar_m | Hacker News Reader

I have no evidence to support it, but this article feels like bought and paid for PR.

Indeed. We will be switching away from google to an internal tile server for reasons I won't go into detail for now. Our account manager told us that the pricing of the new Google maps will change with their newly announced platform changes and our current usage would cost us now even less than before. When we asked for an offer from mapbox about a year ago, it was already much more expensive than google. I assume it's going to be even harder for them now to win against google now.

On Google I/O day, no less. It's targeted to ride the search trends.

Paul Graham's essay on the topic:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Because it's in Forbes?

Native advertising.

forbes.com/sites might as well be wordpress.com, it's just some blog.

Pretty amazing how little such a big brand is actually worth.

Did you miss "This story appears in the May 31, 2018 issue of Forbes" below the byline of this article?

Note that the author is actually a Forbes Staff member. It's not _just_ a blog post.

But in general, definitely look closely at the forbes.com/sites articles.

All media is bought and paid for PR. The only question is who's paying for it and why. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. It's just the way it is.

Huh? Plenty of media is created and sold as a commodity. Your average movie is not PR. Nor is your average news story from a reputable news source.

I wouldn't say that all media is PR specifically, but it's true that all media is bought and paid for by somebody. It might be a giant corporation paying a mechanical turk to write what they want. It might be somebody with the luxury of taking their own time to write. It might be a professional journalist working for a publication that sells ad space to pay its bills, and which doesn't want to piss off ad buyers.

That is the truth.

I know directly of at least one recent instance where a local news company was not allowed to interview a professional directly related to a story it was airing...because one of their big advertisers wouldn't allow anyone in that field to be interviewed unless it was an affiliate of theirs.

I'm being purposely vague there, but even the reporter was really upset about it.

Indeed. Very carefully omits any mention of OpenStreetMap, too.

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