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Comment by Dwolb | Hacker News Reader

That’s just insane.

This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.

NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever.

If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding.

This would confirm most of the newspapers out there are indeed running failed business models with zero opportunity for success.

The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less ‘diversity’ in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5.

Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the consensus.

In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.

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That extrapolates to $84,000,000 profit per year. As a comparison, NYT made $397,536,000 in net income in 2000.

https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...

$259,753,000 per year net income in 2005: https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...

That comparison puts it into perspective for me. Until I looked up the comparison, I thought $84M a year profit sounded fantastic.

What was the profit in 2000?

Net income = profit

Jesus, they went from close to 400 million on 3.6 billion revenue to 96 on 1.6 billion revenue, and it's a success?

Really puts into perspective how tumultuous the last 15 years has been for even the biggest newspapers.

> and it's a success?

Compared to going out of business in a changing landscape, absolutely it's a success. The music industry went through something similar. The book industry (textbooks in particular) are about to go through it also.

What do you mean in regards to textbooks? Online rentals, digital textbooks, or something else?

I ask only as someone (of many) who deeply resents textbook price gouging.

I'm also curious about what might change.

Textbooks are obviously open to the same digitization and free-access issues as other media, but their sales model fundamentally different because it's one giant principal-agent problem.

In public schools, digitization won't touch textbook profits any time soon because they're bought in bulk, and because multi-year use keeps costs reasonable. Giving out digital copies isn't a major edge if you can get 5-10 years out of a book. As for college students, there's just very little incentive to care about costs. Example: for many of my classes, buying and reselling textbooks, renting them, and getting digital-only access mysteriously converged on the same price - just like you'd predict in a market with no real competition. So the only real question is whether sellers can control piracy or other covert cost reductions like buying international versions and older editions.

So far, they seem to be doing pretty well at it. Altering problems in foreign and new additions doesn't stop everyone, but it deters many students. Mandatory online courseware with in-book CD keys is a masterstroke, since it not only kills piracy but forces students to buy $100 books they might have forgone altogether - no more using library copies if you're hard up for money!

I've only seen two hints of change. One is outreach to agents (i.e. professors) on quality; there are now mix-and-match services that will sell combined chapters from a variety of books, which might someday drive more competition among writers and professor awareness of book choice. The second is the existence of student rebellion in specific majors (i.e. Computer Science) where students are very likely to have digital, pirated, or nonexistent textbooks, to the point where things like "open book exams" are considered outrageous.

Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5

That's pretty what we already have actually. The amount of original reporting done on a major news story is far, far lower than the number of newspapers out there.

This study from 2010 is useful:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/the-googlechina-hacking-cas...

Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 percent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently.

Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China).

The story being studied had an international dimension which bumped up the number of outlets doing original reporting, as it was impactful to both the USA and China. Most stories that are only relevant to one country would have far fewer.

This is one of the reasons why the newspaper industry is shrinking - the internet makes it clear for the first time how little original reporting there really is, and how much duplication of that little original reporting goes on.

As for picking teams, gaslighting etc ... US media is experiencing a surge in profits right now, and as far as I can tell the reason is that they've more or less openly abandoned any pretence of political neutrality. They've become anti-Trump cheerleaders that are more in the business of helping their readers feel superior than in the business of real news. It's hard to blame them because this appears to be a more profitable business to be in than trying to be neutral and it's caused a surge in trust amongst democrats only. But of course it makes them vulnerable, even in a country with the first amendment. The USA doesn't have a president who hates the media for no reason.

Trump hated "the Media" long before he became president. The idea that "the Media" are anti-Trump cheerleaders need some corrobating evidence because otherwise it is bullshit.

That's because Trump is a conservative and conservatives have been losing trust in the media for a long time.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/219824/democrats-confidence-mas...

Do you really need evidence US media is anti-Trump? Can you name any large, well known newspapers that endorsed him? From what I recall they all went for Hillary, there was even one paper (the USA Today?) that had never endorsed a candidate before and they went for Hillary.

==That's because Trump is a conservative==

Based on what criteria?

==Do you really need evidence US media is anti-Trump? Can you name any large, well known newspapers that endorsed him?==

Is the second part actually evidence of the first part or does it simply reinforce your prior belief? Can you name any candidate in history who was gifted more free screen-time or print-space by US media?

Hmm. Are you arguing Trump is not a conservative? He ran under a Republican banner and has many classically conservative policies.

As for the latter paragraph, are you implying news outlets simply sell screen-time and print-space? How can the media "gift" coverage? Their job is to report what's happening and things said and done by a presidential candidate is clearly news. And yes of course the abundance of newspapers openly stating they wanted his opponent to win is evidence of being anti-Trump: that's basic logic.

==and has many classically conservative policies.==

Please expand on this statement. From my perspective, I see someone who supports tariffs, closed borders, increased debt, increased spending, handouts for specific industries ("picking winners and losers"), vilification of law enforcement, and more. These all go directly against traditionally "conservative" principles.

==are you implying news outlets simply sell screen-time and print-space==

How do you think the media makes money as a business? They are called advertisements, typically one must pay for them. In Trump's case, they covered him non-stop free of charge, essentially gifting him free advertising.

==And yes of course the abundance of newspapers openly stating they wanted his opponent to win is evidence of being anti-Trump==

Endorsements are done by editorial boards, which are distinct from journalists. The TV journalists gave Trump air time by not only showing all of his rallies, but showing the empty podium before the rallies. Meanwhile the rallies of Hillary Clinton were not covered in the same breathless way. The Washington Post wrote an entire article about it and estimated it at $2 billion[1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/03/1...

I would argue that Trump is an opportunist. For evidence: see his extensive dealings with the Clintons and Democrats in the 90s and early 2000s.

Yes I need evidence. Especially since you claim it is obvious that "the Media" is anti-Trump it shouldn't be hard for you to bring forward that evidence.

> Can you name any large, well known newspapers that endorsed him?

No! You are not allowed to turn the tables on me. You are the one that should show that "the Media" is anti-Trump, I shouldn't have to prove that it isn't.

I think the newspaper endorsements line was meant to be evidence, but I'll flesh it out a little.

Of the 100 largest-circulation newspapers in the US, 57 endorsed Clinton while only 2 endorsed Trump. Of the top 50 papers, two gave no endorsement, two endorsed "not Trump", and one endorsed Johnson. The other 45 directly endorsed Clinton, with zero endorsing Trump. So: when traditional journalists and editors at major newspapers took explicit positions on the election, they almost all opposed Trump.

This is obviously a different question than "is the media conservative or liberal?", "is the non-editorial coverage at major news organizations generally anti-Trump?", or "are news organizations employing a partisan agenda in their decisions about how to cover Trump?

The first one of those questions is relatively easy to answer: according to an Indiana University survey of 1080 journalists in broadly 'traditional' roles, 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats. The number identifying as Republicans has also been falling faster than the number identifying as Democrats in equivalent prior surveys.

The second one is more open ended, but I think we can at least sketch the outlines of an answer.

Intuitively, I would propose that cable television leans left with one obvious exception, while local news and television stations are much more scattered - and less dependent on the views of their journalists, since they often have purchased content and partisan owners like Sinclair.

Factually, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard finds that in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, news coverage of Trump was 80% negative. They find that CNN and NBC were most negative, while even Fox was 52% negative.

The third is so open-ended that I can't imagine discussing it without agreeing on a bunch of specific standards for evidence and discussion, because it requires deciding where objective coverage of badness stops and partisanship starts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...

http://archive.news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/2013-ame...

https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

I think the newspaper endorsements line was meant to be evidence, but I'll flesh it out a little.

Of the 100 largest-circulation newspapers in the US, 57 endorsed Clinton while only 2 endorsed Trump. Of the top 50 papers, five gave no endorsement, three endorsed "not Trump", and one endorsed Johnson. The rest directly endorsed Clinton, with zero endorsing Trump. So: when traditional journalists and editors at major newspapers took explicit positions on the election, they almost all opposed Trump.

The second one is more open ended, but I think we can at least sketch the outlines of an answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...

http://archive.news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/2013-ame...

https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

From a cursory glance, about half of all American newspapers endorsed Obama in 2012 and the other half endorsed Romney. Were half of all newspapers anti-Obama?

> 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats

The problem with these kind of stats is that they never reveal what kind of journalists we are talking about. It's irrelevant (to the question of bias in media) whether journalists reviewing books and movies likes Republicans or Democrats. Only journalists reporting on political and economical topics biases matters.

The negative reporting from the 100 first days I believe is at least partially because there were a lot of turmoil that were hard to spin in a positive light. The Russia collusion investigation, Muslim travel ban, repeal of Obamacare and so on. The reporting about the tax cuts have probably been more positive.

But I don't doubt that most journalists dislike Trump and that probably affects their reporting about him. Given his antics which involves calling them all liars and banning journalists from newspapers he particularly hates, I don't find that strange at all. Given that Trump is an "anti-Media" president I think the reporting about him has been very fair.

If you now think I'm moving the goal post, let me define "anti-$President." If you can show that media's reporting about Trump is just as slanted as Fox News' reporting was about Obama, then I would concede that media is anti-Trump.

> they've more or less openly abandoned any pretence of political neutrality

There's an enormous federal investigation into the political operatives of only one party. The counts of corruption are far higher for one party.

When news comes out about indictments and criminal trials of those in only one party, it's not because the media outlet has abandoned neutrality.

It is true that when there is more news about one party then there needs to be more reporting on that party, but I'm not sure it really negates what the parent was saying. I do get the feeling there are outlets that have become either biased in their reporting. (Of course, I also see ones that haven't.) As an example, check out this segment [1] that I was watching from CNN just yesterday. The anchor is trying very, very hard to persuade the viewer of what they assess to be a fact, not that differently from how Fox News sometimes seems to. It does not seem like the kind of unbiased, professional, arm's-length fact-reporting that I seem to (hopefully correctly?) remember being the norm. On top of that, it doesn't help that their words are more casual/informal than what I remember to be usual news reporting. (e.g.: look at the word choice, intonation, and body language where she says: "Right..?? He said it was 'cause of Russia to /NBC news/, and another time he said it was 'cause the deputy attorney general told him to /do/ it... this is a president who changes his story"... it does not make the storytelling come across as unbiased.)

This is not to say I don't understand why they're infuriated with Trump (I likely would be too), or that I somehow think they're spreading fake news, or anything like that. But the thing is, some outlets (like CNN, but it's not the only one) do at least appear to have become less neutral and more hostile to Trump (even if justifiably so). It's by no means anything close to all of them, but the effect unfortunately does seem apparent for some of them, and it does almost seem like they don't really notice or mind it.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/08/08/donald-trump-...

> as far as I can tell the reason is that they've more or less openly abandoned any pretence of political neutrality. They've become anti-Trump cheerleaders that are more in the business of helping their readers feel superior than in the business of real news... The USA doesn't have a president who hates the media for no reason.

Comically absurd. Trump injects himself into media headlines on a daily basis, more often than not because he's picking a fight on twitter with someone over something petty. He has nobody but himself to blame for his unfavorable coverage. Pretending he's a victim here is a cookie cutter case of amoral tribalism and rank partisanship.

There's just too many vital services that can't function with just ad financing. It's so obvious, that I have a slight hope we'll see new business models to accommodate for that. The problem is that I don't read a hundred articles a month by the NYT, I read maybe 5. And then 5 others on 30 different sites, each.

What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a massive amount of content for a reasonable monthly fee and divides it among members by what you use most or something. Flat-rate pricing is the way to go on the internet, it is for premium video streaming (Netflix), for music (Spotify) and games will probably follow soon (it seems Nintendo is switching the Virtual Console to being part of their subscription model, for example). I could see it for premium newspapers. It fixes this paralyzing decision of which subscription you pay for.

"Because that’s not how we use the web. People don’t visit a single site to seek out content. They search then nimbly hop from link to link building knowledge from an amalgamation of sources. The entire web is one big site."

"Given these usage patterns, paywalls fail miserably. The typical consumer would have to sign up to hundreds of properties, costing thousands of dollars per month. If they consumed every bit of content at the New York Times, the $25/month could be fair. But they don’t, leaving them with a glut of extremely underutilized and over-priced subscriptions."

https://artplusmarketing.com/paywall-not-paywalls-8474092276...

> What I can imagine is a "digital pass"

this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.

The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the BBC itself (in reality outsourced).

Though in the end there is absolutely no difference.

In Sweden we are abandoning that concept because it is an unfair system and lots of people have switched to the internet for the same content (and don't even have a TV).

It's just semantics, sure, but it does mean the UK's largest broadcaster is not state-owned and has independence. That's important.

It does not. Politicians have absolute power over funding regardless. They decide exactly how much BBC can collect and in what circumstances (or they give BBC the mandate to do it themselves, but they can revoke or change that at will).

It is just one, insignificant, layer of indirection.

Who mandates the license fee? The government. So, it's a tax, and the BBC is both the state agency collecting the tax and the state agency funded by the tax.

The BBC is obliged to collect it (through their contractor) but the government chooses how much is collected and how to spend the money. Some even goes to what you probably think of as privately owned local newspapers. When money was tight at Channel 4 (a publicly owned company that runs a TV channel with advertising and a very different remit from the BBC - the BBC's mission is to educate, while C4 is more about pushing boundaries, so that amazing wildlife documentary is from the BBC but the first soap opera to have a gay Muslim couple get married is probably C4) C4 were going to take some of the license fee money too.

This works on a national level. Switzerland does it too. But I don't want to read only Swiss Newspapers, I wanna read the NYT and The Times etc. as well. I do think that the digital pass idea is worth thinking about more.

That doesn't solve it. It ensures you have people calling themselves journalists who get paid, but journalism is in decline because (a) trust in journalism is in decline and (b) a lot of it is duplicated.

The BBC specifically has a trust issue in the UK. Even one of its own long term journalists wrote a book called "Can we trust the BBC?" (spoiler warning: the given answer is no).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Trust-BBC-Robin-Aitken/dp/08264...

Tax-funded institutions that are not accountable to the people paying the tax is corrosive. Resentment builds and has nowhere to go. For now at least if you're willing to disconnect from broadcast television entirely, you can avoid paying the license fee. But similar license fees in other countries have been adapted to include the internet; it's hard to know if the same will happen in the UK.

My favourite recent example of ridiculous tabloid-level BBC journalism is "Brexit threat to sandwiches":

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44960293

Staying in the EU for a bit longer would keep the chiller cabinet full of sandwiches - but it would doubtless raise the political temperature.

The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.

This is hardly an isolated example. Consider what sort of journalistic process led to this story being written, edited, reviewed and approved for publication. Is it one citizens should be forced to fund? What does that sort of thing do long term? Is it any wonder that trust in the press is in long term decline in the UK?

>The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.

That is not what the article is about at all, "sandwiches" are just the hook. In fact the word sandwich only appears in the first sentence and the last. The article is about whether Brexit would lead to supply chain issues with food, which could result in food shortages.

No, sandwiches are referred to in the headline, the first paragraph, the second paragraph and the third paragraph ("the space between two pieces of bread"), and the final paragraph.

Regardless of how you prefer to interpret the story, absurd clickbait "hooks" are the sort of thing that drives distrust in the media.

I imagine it would be difficult to get such members of a group to agree on the value they bring to the table. NYT probably thinks they'd deserve more than the LAT, and certainly way more than USA Today. Can't imagine these groups cooperating. It's winner takes all and then some niches for Breitbart and the like.

Cable channels would likely have the same disagreements, as would netflix series. So it's not impossible. (We'd have a lot less value on AP stories, though.)

Somewhat related, though not a flat price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

> divides it among members by what you use most

The problem with this is that it assumes the value is proportionate to how much time you spend on something.

The value of good reporting is independent of the amount of time you spend reading the reporting.

That's why subscriptions make sense; you are supporting the company in a predictable fashion, which lets them have predictable amounts of resources, which ultimately supports the reporters doing the job.

I subscribe to the New York Times; and I'm happy to pay the same amount whether I read ten articles a month or one hundred. Why? Because I want to support the work they're doing. It's the same reason I subscribe to the Washington Post. It's also the same reason people should subscribe to their local newspapers. If nobody is reporting on local issues, then who is going to be keeping local government accountable?

Is 100M$ a year profit, not revenue but profit, a low amount for a newspaper to make? that seems to me like a fair amount to be at the top.

If other newspapers make a tenth of the profit, that should still be an acceptable market? no?

Edit: with 3700 employes (per Wikipedia) that's put their profit to be about 27000$ per employee. That's 4 times as much as walmart. From what I can tell it's also more then IBM and probably higher then most non-tech, non-oil businesses

The tech bubble really skewed the perception field of many people.

> tech bubble

I think OP misread the quarterly figure as an annual one. “Tech bubble” usually applies to companies with much less than $100 million of profits.

I think the idea of comparing to the tech bubble is that it has skewed our perceptions of how much a company should make per employee, and how fast it should grow. Indeed many bubble companies are making little or no profits, but they don't have 3700 employees to pay every month + printing presses, buildings etc. The ROI is very different

> The ROI is very different

If you’re making “little or no profits” you have no ROI.

The idea being that you plan to make massive profits down the line. No VC is expecting their startups to cruise comfortably at 3700 employees and 80M yearly profit

> only turn 24M a quarter,

That's $24 million left unspent after salaries, benefits, travel and accommodation, equipment purchases, AP and Bloomberg fees, client entertainment, interest repayment, rents, board jollies...

I don't see what's unhealthily low about that profit.

It depends on what the ROI and risks are. If you spend $100M a year to earn $1M in net profit, and your business is completely dependent on advertising and/or has declining subscription revenues then that’s terrible. There are much better ROIs to be had, so an investor would be better off investing elsewhere.

Also, reporting faces heavy legal, travel, lodging, equipment, and food expenses and those don’t end up in the asset column in case of a sale. I guess the articles and copyright would help, but it doesn’t seem to be worth much.

Why wouldn't equipment end up in asset column in case of a sale? Equipment is a fixed asset so it'll just be a transfer of asset at book value with gain/loss recorded in the sellers income statement.

EDIT: When you talk about "asset column" I'm assuming you mean the asset column in the books of accounts of the buyer.

It would, I was just assuming a good portion of a news agency's equipment isn't as valuable in re-sale like personal computers, office equipment, etc.

In the long run of a decade, it's risky to bet on sustainable growth after the Trump era ends. Doubly so if he doesn't get re-elected.

This is just my opinion, but things change. Change is not necessarily bad.

If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT).

Given the dismal quality of many small publications--possibly caused by the need to bring people via search engines--I welcome replacing them with independent content creators. Independent content creators often make even a lot of money via Patreon because people like their content and support them, and often the quality and level of knowledge is 100 times better than small publications that are only interested in clicks.

For instance, see the coverage of solar roadways, Hyperloop and many other science-related topics by specialized publications vs. the debunking videos made by youtuber Thunderf00t. While those publications will just have interns write copycat articles to bring in clicks, he's an actual scientist that looks into/debunks the topics at hand with a unique point of view, and actually covers the news critically. I'd much rather give him $5/mo. to keep producing good content then the "professional" newspaper $0.50/mo. to read their crappy content or even worse be bombarded by ads if I visit their website.

Of course, independent content creators will not take a plane to go cover a war or cannot afford to spend 2 years without publishing an article to do investigative journalism, but I think those publications that provide that value gets recognized by people and those will rightfully stay alive.

Nor will independent content creators for the most part go to a lot of boring town and city meetings to find out what's going on--or develop relationships with the various low level officials/administrators. A number of years back my town had a local newspaper that was basically someone's labor of love. It no longer has one so I have essentially no source of information about any town issues I might want to be aware of. That doesn't matter to me for the most part but it would be nice to know about happenings/votes/etc. that affect me.

> that doesn't matter to me for the most part

I think that's key. When people really care they are the ones who ask the product/project/service how they can support them.

The truth might be that people don't value reading most articles. I know that starting a newspaper is a huge investment, but I guess people just don't care. It might be because we don't have time to read, we get "news" from Facebook, no idea--but that much seems to be true.

“If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT).”

I don’t think so. What happens is that the price would be too low to overcome the mental barrier of whipping out a wallet to pay for yet another recurring service, something people are only willing to do for larger websites.

We currently do not have a good solution for this. It’s weird to see so many HNers act like it’s a good thing that only large websites like NYT have a real business model once ads completely die. Or how Reddit will outlive individual forums because nobody is going to pay per forum.

But unless something changes, that’s going to be the reality soon.

> I don’t think so. What happens is that the price would be too low to overcome the mental barrier of whipping out a wallet to pay for yet another recurring service, something people are only willing to do for larger websites.

Why does the price have to be low? You can pay yearly, for instance.

However, the main point I was trying to make is that with Patreon people voluntarily contribute $1, $5 or whatever. It hasn't been a problem and it's done every day.

If you're not willing to put up with "whipping out a wallet for yet another recurring service", it means you don't value the product.

Again, I don't even think it's the size of the website because many community-supported projects are 1 solo content creator.

Newspapers were never valued for their ability of generating profits, but more as tools that can shape or sway the public opinion.

Having "few" and "consolidated" reporting entities basically reflects the status-quo pre-internet, where at a local/national level you would have a handful of newspapers (or TV channels), each having often a fairly evident slant or clearly lobbying for a particular political party or social group.

But while we shouldn't view the past in an excessively positive way, it's hard to consider an improvement what we are moving towards, a situation where there are far and far more numerous and uncontrolled sources of infomation, amplified by social media.

At least (most) traditional newspapers always had the obligation of fact-checking, a burden that a spurious blog or forum post or twitter message doesn't have...

Newspapers in the US were absolutely valued for their ability to generate profits. Local classified advertising revenue alone was enough that throughout the 80s and early 90s it was a very lucrative business to be in.

They're also tools that can shape or sway the public opinion. And not all markets have been profitable: in the UK, for example, the desire for political influence generated so many competing national newspapers that most of them lost money.

I disagree, the number of reporters and the diversity of them has increased greatly in the Twitter/YouTube universe. I'd much rather get my news from a 3 hour Joe Rogan podcast with a subject matter expert than a hot take from yet another person from the same small group of universities who have been manufacturing our reporters for generations.

OTOH news has been replaced by social media, which is cheaper. I do not see this demise as a bad thing. Diversity is a goal better achieved by individuals, not by a big number of large newspapers.

Also newspapers have been for a long time a business not particularly profitable on its sales, but on how its used to leverage other businesses. Failing Newspapers always find investors even if the biz is bad.

Social media? So just anyone with no credibility, oversight, quality control, resources, connections, or training?

It’s great that individuals can funnel up stories that would otherwise be buried — but that’s no replacement for true journalism. Journalism hardly perfect, but does have a much, much higher bar.

Depends on the type of social media. I got more real news (supported by multiple corroborating facts and folks who experienced events) on the Syria Civil war from the reddit Syrian Civil war forum than the continuous propaganda published/broadcasted by the American MSM. Whenever folks published videos that were countervailing to the established narrative, Ex: modern NATO weapons in ISIS hands being used to shell civilians or the 'moderate' rebels keeping and chaining female slaves, it was just a matter of hours before the video was reported and taken down. I spent a fair amount of time verifying information. It truly opened my eyes to what 'narrative' based Journalism means. I no longer trust any of the MSM channels.

And how do you know the sources of any of such videos? That they themselves aren’t propaganda being put out by another state actor?

That’s the role of journalists.. to find such videos and verify them. To put people on the ground in Syria, fact finding and interviewing.

It’s not like America is the only country with free as in speech journalism online — go read other papers if you believe the American ones are so distorted. My guess is you won’t find basic facts so challenged.

HN is really the wrong place for this discussion. My apologies. I have followed the civil war closely for nearly six years and in that time my opinion changed from one end of the spectrum (supporting the US against the tyrant Assad) to the very other end - realising the US was the primary cause of the war lasting so long and causing so many deaths by arming all and sundry against Assad.

I have talked via chat to folks in Aleppo when they were getting shelled indiscriminately by rebels (whenever they intermittently had power/signal). I have spoken with English speaking Kurds. No-one liked Assad, but he is a secular leader and the best of a whole bunch of terrible options.

Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. Some very few media outlets like the UK's telegraph/independent went against the grain and confirmed several such stories independently. When the Battle of Aleppo was reaching its heights, Syrian civilians were being shelled by NATO weapons. All such claims were dismissed by the Obama administration at the time. Now they are slowly getting revealed:

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-war-bosnia-saudi-...

Amnesty International came up with several reports of the 'moderate' rebels committing severe crimes. Some of these reports were quite heavily sanitised.

There was no celebration of non-Islamic festivals allowed until Dec 2016. Only after the Syrian Army won back Aleppo did Christians get back their voice. The heavy, spontaneous door-to-door celebrations on the street were never reported. All videos showing such celebrations were taken down in a few hours from youtube.

What I find amusing is nearly all of your vaunted, reputed American journalists took most of their stories word for word from the Syrian observatory for Human rights run by one guy in Coventry, UK and heavily funded by the government. On the ground Syrians weren't considered reliable sources for the Western propaganda machine. Most journalists were too afraid to go into 'moderate rebel' held territory. And any Western journalist reporting from Assad territory was considered suspect and mostly ignored.

The Syrian War was an expensive gambit sponsored by Western governments (with Saudi Arabian support) for regime change that failed in all its objectives, causing over a million deaths and destroyed the Syrian quality of life. I have nothing but utter contempt for the journalists who kept pushing propaganda and are still calling for war.

Meanwhile, UK/US/German weapons are being merrily dropped in Yemen and hundreds of Yemeni adults and children dying, but you don't hear a peep in the MSM, do you ?

It has a higher bar, but its also way more expensive, and lots of people dont want to pay for it, so they much rather have a 10s vine with someone talking about it.

Not to mention that real journalists also have become a thing on social media, without having to respond to editors in a newspaper.

Their stock dropped 5% because the market perceived ‘slowing digital subscriber growth’. So not all good news even for NYT.

It’s worry some that people have shifted their focus to unedited and often fairly anonymous sources for news. HN is honestly a good example as well.

I’ve written numerous upvoted posts sharing information about the Scandinavian public sector and tech-management, but I’m not a vetted source. I mean, you can’t even tell if I’m Scandinavian from HN.

My squabbling is relatively harmless of course, but it’s not always like this. If I was a different person I could’ve spent my time writing anti-vaccination stuff on another media, and people would have put the same sort of trust in my words. Not HN users, at least I’d like to think so, but a lot of people would have.

That’s insanely dangerous to a free society, because we rely on truth, and right now there really isn’t a lot of it going around.

True. I think ppl think the Russians or who ever have to create content farms to spread fud. All bad actors have to do is find lunatics with fringe views and keep upvoting.

Media and social media are trained like lab rats to pick up anything that is getting views and amplify it. The underlying architecture has to change. The feedback mechanisms that drive this must be slowed down or removed.

> All bad actors have to do is find lunatics with fringe views and keep upvoting.

Or just get bots / click farmers to do all the work. The crackpots will latch on eventually...

Instead of 50 professional reports, we'll have millions of independent journalists that aren't tangled in a web of multi-national conglomerate corporations.

We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system.

Trust in humanity's ability to adapt.

That's not what's happening right now, though. What's happening right now is that people are turning to less credible news sources and are growing increasingly misinformed. It means a guy like Alex Jones can't be run out of town even if what he's saying is complete nonsense, because he can always turn to the internet.

Plus, trolls funded by very well endowed state actors can now pretend to be among those "independent journalists" and completely muddy the waters.

Humanity doesn't always evolve for the better. The developed world lives in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity, but don't make the mistake of believing that progress is the norm or that we've reached the end of history. It's possible to throw it all away with stupidity, propaganda, greed and infighting, and I have no doubt humanity is fully capable of reverting to that. In fact, given a long enough timeframe it's probably inevitable.

> We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system.

Oh yeah, so the blockchain will somehow save this? (cough)

The best "consensus" system we've got for social media / forums is the upvote / downvote and that is a horrible indicator of truthfulness / factfullness / quality of something. Upvote / downvote is only an indicator of the prevailing groupthink on any given forum -- it is not a substitute for a reality check.

I wouldn't worry about the profit itself. It's important to NYT and their investors but not necessarily indicative of industry viability.

More important (IMO) is the number of subscribers, at total revenue, the total amount of money paid to NYT by subscribers. This is how much money is available to run NYT sustainably.

They had 3.8m subscribers, with 2.9m digital only. Revenue is/was $415m for the quarter (1.65bn annualized). $100m (25%) of that was from digital subscriptions. They make more from ads.

So... for the industry... I don't think this means much. It's an existence proof for paid subscriptions, as an important revenue source. It is not an existence proof for a paper funded primarily via subscriptions.

A remarkable (maybe even exciting to some journalists) is that this represents a digital version of the print business model. It's a good thing in the sense that this promotes good content, and less hyperbole and clickbait.

IDK how I feel about the desire to revive the print subcription model. The ability to share, read articles wherever they happen to be published, search the web for articles... paywalls break these. Maybe we need to go back to go forward, but this step feels like a regression... to me.

> That’s just insane.

It really isn't. It's why wall street is selling on the news.

> This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.

It really isn't. It's why their share price dropped nearly 7% on the news. Their subscriber growth declined. That's not a good thing.

> NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever.

NYT "switch" isn't even the most public or well-executed in their own industry. I'd give that nod to news corp and their properties - not that they are doing much better. NYT is playing catch-up.

> In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.

That's true. But the NYT is just as bought as any forum and gaslights as much as any politician. After all the NYT was created by a politician and a banker. It's in their DNA.

I do agree that fewer media entities will be detrimental to the republic. Unfortunately, the NYT along with CNN/WaPo is at the forefront of taking out smaller independent media entities.

Throw away account.

If News Corp is the standard we're holding news companies to, we have a serious issue. It's totally disorganized, has no idea what it's trying to achieve and more focused on political outcomes than it is building actual value for shareholders. There is zero leadership, and that leadership there is gets sent to unrelated (but related) companies like Fox.

If it wasn't for a few golden gooses that News Corp acquired decades again, there is no way they could fund their cash burning newspapers.

NYT producing any positive revenue is amazing, i hope they continue to build upon this.

I think he's referring to cases like the Times of London, which went totally paywalled and became profitable in 2014 for the first time since 2001:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/02/tim...

(gotta link to the Guardian for that story because, of course, the Times' own coverage is paywalled)

Yeah fair enough. Having said that, News UK is very much in a completely different landscape. They've for sure made progress in many other ways, but that's significantly in part due to the fact that they're actually much better run businesses (until recently, the last few years have been messy), and not suffering from the kind of competition that they suffer from in the North American market.

I have no personal plans to buy their stock, but I'm not giving investment advice.

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