McClatchy Follows BuzzFeed, Vice, and Others in Cutting Staff
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miaminewtimes.com
The web media layoffs remind us that there is no money in virtue signaling. Major media will get back to real news. The ‘fakeout’ caused by companies like Vice and Buzzfeed will retract and the CBS/ABC/NBCs of the world will realize ‘woke’ culture and uber-progressivism won’t pay the bills. People want the news, not preaching. Companies like Buzzfeed (hungry for a merger) are still upside down on cost structure and will go bankrupt. Startups, such as Gawker’s latest iteration, actually have a risk of imploding on their own smug, before they prove they’re not viable businesses, either. More 20-somethings will realize that their calling of ‘speaking truth to power’ (by trying to usurp power itself) is a distant second to operating profit. No operating profit, no whining about the benefits of socialism, sorry.
reference: http://martinshkreli.com/uncategorized/1-26-2019/
The reality is that these news outlets abandoned their stakeholders and instead decided to push an agenda for a myopic few. The reality is that these news outlets should be seeking truth and not pushing an agenda. Truth will always build you wider coalition and thus profits will ensue.
Sure they can exist, but they shouldn't occupy the entire mainstream landscape unless the entire population is on board with those convictions.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...
The claim that news can be unbiased is silly as all news has to be reported through a lens. The claim that news media has a "liberal bias" is a long standing conservative talking point going back to the 1970s where news media was listed as slightly liberal and then everyone ignored the follow that showed that media had self corrected based on the report.
Claiming that there's a "liberal news problem" just points out that conservatives don't like that "their President" is getting "unfairly attacked" by the media. This completely ignores that conservative media frequently runs literal conspiracy theories that have led to real life shootings with little regard to the outcome.
The point being that claiming that there's some grand liberal conspiracy ignores the fact that most of the news organizations OP cited will actually issue corrections. Fox news rarely issues them and most other mainstream conservative commentators never do because they claim they are "infotainment".
You’re plenty spot on within the entire media world.
There are currently backs accross the board, but on the outside it's hard to say if those are seasonal or not.
Another posted suggested that they have hired at disproportionally large numbers. Seems like a plausible explanation, if true.
May be it related to some political changes.
Or, may be, there is an unseen 'consolidation' that will commence (layoffs in tech industry, often precedes takeovers).
Just speculating, though.
I definitely feel, that people will not pay for opinion pieces, but will pay for investigative journalism.
However, investigative journalism, in my view, lacks economic model.
It is quite resource intensive, but there is no 'story origination fee' of some sort. So it has to live of donations, which could make it very biased.
- it's the start of a new year. New budgets. Plus laying people off just before the holidays is a baaaad look.
- it's a lot easier to do this when lots of other outlets are doing it too, because you'll get less attention
- all these companies rely on advertising for revenue, often from the exact same sources. So any softening in ad prices would affect a lot of people at once.
- this is actually the latest in a long, long line of media layoffs and redundancies
I think video functions as a much better format for investigative reporting though - it is much more engaging, slightly more trustworthy (because you don’t have to e.g. trust the journalist’s description of tone / body language, although selective editing can still be done), and harder for other media outlets that haven’t done the investigative legwork to just copy and redistribute.
First: I'm sure there are "good free bloggers" out there, but there's far, far fewer that aren't associated with new media companies now than there were a decade ago. Making money as an independent blogger is exceedingly difficult in 2019 in a way that just wasn't as true in 2009.
Second: McClatchy, BuzzFeed, and Vice are all known for investigative journalism, not opinion pieces. McClatchy was once considered one of the best newspaper companies in the business, primarily based on investigative work; while Vice and BuzzFeed certainly are known for clickbait material, they've both been funding serious news stories for years. "Free bloggers" just aren't competition in this space.
Third: You know that BuzzFeed in particular is in the straits that they're in because they tried to pivot to video, right? Mashable is nearly out of business because of their attempt to do so. Also, investigative journalism tends to rely on, well, investigation, not "descriptions of tone and body language."
Fourth: there is, in fact, a really good way to support investigative journalism. It's--you know what I'm going to say, right?--paying for it. It turns out that an awful lot of newspapers, magazines, and journalism web sites have mechanisms set up that enable you to give them money, often on a recurring basis!
I want to see good quality reporting, and I don't want them to try to inject their selective editing/political agenda in it.
But, of course, it's funny how this complaint truly surfaces when those biases are ones that the complainant does not like. It's interesting how biases that do not challenge the majority intersection of "affluent, white, male" get so much leash in places like HN.
Want more evidence that this is total bullshit? My comment below calling this out was flagged. Yours, which originated the flamebait topic, was not.
Tell me again how much "leash" the affluent white male bias gets on this board.
What's funny is your obliviousness.
Chic fa la has now just gotten in trouble for not letting someone use their bathroom.
Insert other witnesses or talk about 2nd parties in the story.
Chickfla is the group that came under contrivesery for supporting anti gay charities.
Look for that you'll see it in a lot of stories. I started noticing that when I saw the Milo stories on the BBC. They like to harp on something that he did (usually it's something that the writer doesn't like), they'll also inflate the second party members in the story [who was surrounding it] to their liking (we'll the SPLC said this and that), and then they'll try to bring a call back to something that'll make the person look bad and unrelated (i.e. prior controversy).
Like/dislike the guy, the selective journalism/editing and the unrelated call back is: unproductive, dishonest, and is propaganda.
> But, of course, it's funny how this complaint truly surfaces when those biases are ones that the complainant does not like. It's interesting how biases that do not challenge the majority intersection of "affluent, white, male" get so much leash in places like HN.
I think you should point that out if it's a legitimate concern. (I mean not concern trolling i.e. "well all the interviewed was white people" vs "from the people they interviewed were white and se engineers which is a concern when talking about COL")
No, it's context. You cannot reduce political action--and "political action" should be understood as any action between people or groups, there is no light switch to turn it off or on--to a single-shot prisoner's dilemma game. The game is infinite. Your history matters. The context of your actions in the body politic matters.
News organizations have a duty to place events into context, and...this is that context.
Different unrelated events aren't context.
Then I grew up, then I realized I was being shitty, and I stopped. And since I have made a point of standing up for the right things, instead, while not ducking that I too have been shitty.
That's more context, and that context, eventually and with hard work, does balance the scales.
It just isn't that complicated.
- kickstarter for investigative journalism. Get decent writers, get people that are willing to pay to hear about what they find, and hope they maintain ethics and integrity.
- a monthly news source, that is focused on "slow news". Sure, XYZ happened, 30 days later, what's relevant. 3 months later, what was the overall trend? It's not meta, but definitely "slow" and the goal is to focus on the moving average vs the noisy data.
That's been done multiple times, mostly recently with Civil, which combines freelance journalism with the blockchain! https://civil.co/
Almost all of them fail due to salary costs. https://www.coindesk.com/civil-startup-token-crypto-ethereum
There's nothing new under the sun. Well back to the drawing board...
That's a newspaper subscription
> a monthly news source, that is focused on "slow news"
That's a magazine
Sometimes the tech industry bubble produces hilarious comments...
The NYT is suuuuuuuper biased. I want liberal freedoms to be allowed to people, but they are pushing an agenda. Really strong.
I don't want to subsidize the stories I don't care about. That's the difference. Why should we?
The New Yorker is a little better, but it's still "people" focused. I want more macro views.
I tried WSJ and Financial Times. Both suffered a bit from "fluff" and I wasn't going to give them $300/yr to feel like I was paying for filler.
I'm sad that you think I'm incapable of appreciating newspapers or magazines. I just think that both of those concepts are failing. What's the future look like?
<3
> I don't want to subsidize the stories I don't care about.
You, as the chooser (or editor) of stories are introducing bias already, before any reporting is done.
Hm.
US:
- The Atlantic
- Harpers
- Wired still does great long form
- Bloomberg Businessweek does as well
- Help me out people...
Canada:
- Maclean’s
- the Walrus
- Taddle Creek
The concepts aren’t failing. They still inspire lengthy discussions and awareness on a wide range of subjects. And they’re available in multiple forms- paper, web, and other digital subscriptions like in house apps or Google or Apple News
Good reporting costs money. A lot of money.
Also, don't confuse our prevailing normative social biases with a 'lack of bias'.
- [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/huffington-post-shut...
It's been almost a decade since I last looked at HuffPost, but what original reporting do they do? Back in those days, it was all opinion pieces, or piggybacking on other's original reporting.
If they don't do any original reporting, then dropping the opinion section doesn't contradict anything.
Not to be too contrarian or tin-foil-y, but this is a bit simplistic view of modern advertising platforms.
These companies absolutely have troves of information about you, even if you've never interacted with them directly. Your social circle indirectly shares information about you, retailers share information about you, etc. Regardless of whether you use a platform like Facebook, it has a profile of who you are.
Saying you're not forced to use their services or devices is only trivially true: Sure, you're not forced to use it directly, but you might as well be given that they're collecting your information regardless.
And sure, you're not forced to buy from retailers who share your information or have acquaintances that use Gmail, but it's in the same way that you're not forced to buy produce that Monsanto has touched in some way - basically, good luck.
Hidden Brain had a good podcast episode on the costs of newspapers going out of business.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/675092808/starving-the-watchd...
Unless you're a shady person, then it's all good news :(
I assume their clickbait subsidizes their investigative journalism, a business model that gives me hope given the importance of investigative journalism. Unfortunately that hope is tempered by the recent round of layoffs.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations [1] https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news
[0] https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/business/buzzfeed-donald-...
[2] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/20/the-liber...
The main downside of first round is explaining why you were in the first round.
What the layoffs may mean for the future of journalism (McClatchy being a solid source of good journalism) doesn't give me a good feeling.
edit: I said "If I go by." I didn't say it was the case. It's a non-judgmental observation.
Did they? I haven't seen any statistics.
Do you routinely ask people to go and collect data for casual observations? I don't know why this one has people so up in arms when they happen all the time here at HN.