Google partners to fund new local media sites
axios.com
axios.com
(I’m from a former communist country and this almost feels like the collectivization: prevent people from running their own businesses and then be so kind as to let them work for the central government. Spoiler: it did not work.)
Being that many were bought up by conglomerates as a whole, the publishers have had to answer—indirectly—to shareholder demands. Those demands are usually that they want to see continual, even exponential, growth every quarter. When publishing doesn't deliver such exponential growth, their cut of the budget gets reduced and reduced and reduced.
They're not failing of their own merit. They're being strangled by several different hands.
More like Perdue Pharma came in with opioids and turned everyone into junkies that stopped traveling, so the horse drawn carriage companies lost their customers and started to fold.
The horse drawn carriage -> cars example suggests a poor mental model, since it makes it seem like all hardship caused by technological change seem like it's due to clear improvements in nearly every respect.
if the news publishers don't know how to make money then they should step aside or consolidate or a million other things.
For example Google has partnered with the New America Foundation which is a think tank that provides input on a wide range of issues through a variety of different groups. When the head of their Open Markets group endorsed and encouraged further government action against monopolistic behavior, following Google's being fined $2.7billion in Europe, they terminated the groups leader and closed the entire division. Google, now having plausible deniability since they were separated from the entity again through a 'partner' - as they now plan to do with the media, claimed they had nothing to do with it. [1]
This in many ways makes the "independent" partnerships even more disconcerting. It preemptively sets the stage for plausible deniability, while also working to distance themselves from a publication - even though there's every reason to doubt that distance actually exists in practice.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2017/08/30/google-funded-think-tank...
How likely was it that local news was going to survive the digital transition as is, when suddenly, people who never ventured more than 25 miles from where they are born, and mostly obtained news by paper delivery or local TV, can suddenly access the sum total of human knowledge and any news all over the world?
Suddenly your local paper, which had "default" access set almost like a default app on an OS, is no longer the default because the barrier to accessing everything else is way lower.
The writing was on the wall, in the same way that streaming killed optical media and optical media killed LPs. Or in the same way that e-commerce is killing retail once logistics gets cheap enough to make delivery cheaper than buying in store.
This was going to happen inevitably.
It’s very much unlike horses vs cars because in this analogy even if the buggie makers go out of business, people are still riding horses.
Why does the US celebrate rural living such that people think it’s their god given right to have all of the same amenities someone in a large metro area have with its higher density in an economically untenable context?
I’ll grant you it’s sad when small towns die, but why is it the responsibility of everyone else to insure these towns are viable? Things change, industries change, and often, people have to adapt as a result.
This is a completely different matter. Here you are giving examples of services getting replaced by a better competitor. How does Google or Facebook improve on local journalism? They have just destroyed an important public service with no viable replacement in sight. The situation has maybe improved for the advertisers, but the public has lost a big time.
In the same way that 500 cable channels and 24/7 news networks hurt local TV news.
When I grew up my TV reception could only turn into 3 TV stations, and we had one real paper: the Baltimore sun. There was no choice but to consume them by sheer convenience.
As soon as cable and internet virtually eliminated barriers due to geographic distance the dominance of local media with a guaranteed audience was ended.
Even without search, the internet put national And global newspapers at the touch of individuals. The idea that exposing your local outlet to the ease of accessing 1000 competitors wouldn’t have hurt them is dubious.
That’s the crux of the issue – there is fierce competition in the ad industry where almost everything is swallowed by the big players, but they don’t deliver the service the local media did. At all. I would love to be superseded by a better newspaper, but that’s not what’s happening.
That's not coming back. Any journalists who think the 'old world' is going to survive in the internet era are flat out delusional. You cannot undo time and technology, and you cannot try and freeze society at the turn of the millennium.
Hence the solution isn't to throw money at all these sites and publications, especially given they almost certainly won't be sustainable in today's economic climate. It's to find new ways of distributing information for a new generation, one that doesn't involve ads, subscriptions or newsrooms full of wriers.
We might laugh at BuzzFeedNews, but probably millions of people grew up on BuzzFeed, and for them it was probably more reputable than let's say the NYT.
That said, independent sources, cross-verification of information is going to be a big challenge, especially as fakes/faking become more important. (Eg in a war zone. Was it a false flag or not? Did that rocket attack happened at all?) Even though AI cannot [yet] understand it, it's perfect for looking for similarities and similar posts. (So if someone sets up a system that ingests the twitter + FB + YT firehose for example.)