The Future of News

Like other fading industries, the established news media industry realized their core business was screwed after the newspaper circulation gravy train left the station. The only advantage the news industry has is that their product ('news') carries more persistent demand from consumers to produce it - i.e. in an abstract sense, people want to receive the information and utility that news provides.

News publishers that relied on newspaper circulations for the vast majority of revenue have still not found a sustainable solution to deal with the changed landscape and the "death and rebirth" of the industry.

Imagine the evolution of the newsroom:

- Changing from designing printed stories with the reader/subscriber in mind to designing digital content with the internet in mind.

- The workflow of writing and producing news pieces has changed; more focus on staying in-house to produce more.

- The barrier to entry is much lower for competition without the need for newspapers. Almost anyone could turn a Wordpress site into a "news site".

- It's harder to maintain a competitive edge when content is easily accessible; it's trivial to re-post content somewhere else, read about the content in comments, or get around paywalls.

- The mindset of the industry has changed from [the Times] "does not soil the breakfast cloth" to "move fast and break things" to meet 24hr uptime.

The news industry today is going through a similar phase as the Penny presses in the late 1800s. There's an abundance of supply to meet demand, and the value of a single piece of content is quite low on average. The ARR is also less reliable, which means it's an unstable employment prospect. This leads to "innovations" not very far from muckraking and yellow journalism. While it may look like a temporary solution, it's unsustainable in the mass market. Over time, there is much less of an incentive for consumers to pay for BS or rehashed material than useful information.