Warren Buffett Sees Most Newspapers as ‘Toast’ After Ad Decline
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...
And it's one that requires money to solve, because to cover local politics well, you need someone who sits through the local city council meetings, with their hours of discussion of things like 'sign ordinances' to write up a summary, or maybe bring attention to something that they're spending a lot of money on.
Facebook, Twitter, Snap, etc are all too saturated with content that's scoped so globally that local content has a tough time penetrating through. Nextdoor on the other hand is built for local and has the perfect geographic and privacy model to take things really really local in a way that others can't.
They'll be able to make money in a way that independent local newspapers can't, but they'll also hopefully be able to drive demand enough to incentivize local journalists, reporters and even super engaged citizens.
Nextdoor doesn't fill this use-case super well today, but I think they can pull it off if they choose to focus on it. They certainly have all the right ingredients.
Recently our city council was proposing a special assessment against each property in our neighborhood of about 100 houses to rebuild our roads. The project was estimated to cost each tax payer $50,000 in a neighborhood of houses where the values range from $150,000-$250,000. Yes, they wanted to take $50,000 from each home, in addition to normal property taxes that should pay for infrastructure, to rebuild our road.
One of the councilman’s wife (someone that most would think is informed) was posting on Nextdoor claiming the special assessment was something the residents of the neighborhood would vote on and that residents should vote yes on the special assessment to beautify their neighborhood and that anyone who votes no clearly doesn’t care about their neighborhood. The problem with this is the special assessment clauses in the city ordinances do not provide a mechanism for residents to vote. It’s purely a vote of city council members. So here we have a city councilman’s spouse spreading falsehoods about how city government works. I reported the posts and countered them both with citations of ordinances and recorded questions about the process at city council hearings but because she has a large following and more ‘influence’ in the Nextdoor sphere I was labeled a liar and crazy person that doesn’t care about his neighborhood. Nextdoor did nothing to stop the dis-information.
I’m aware it’s only one anecdote but I find it hard to believe that Nextdoor can become any reliable source of local news when it’s so easy to post and spread straight up falsehoods on the platform.
most of these american exurban developments of 50 - 250 homes, with no other meaningful town or tax base, down winding side roads and cul-de-sacs, got built starting in the 80s and really ramping up in the 90s. they are all 40 - 60 year infrastructure financial time bombs.
the math never worked, it was just built on a long enough horizon that everybody got to assume it would be someone elses problem.
It's exactly this kind of assertion, combined with followup attacks which is degrading public discourse in 2019.
I reported the posts and countered them both with citations of ordinances and recorded questions about the process at city council hearings but because she has a large following and more ‘influence’ in the Nextdoor sphere I was labeled a liar and crazy person that doesn’t care about his neighborhood.
Fits the general pattern to a T. Might makes right. I have the most followers, therefore I am right. I have control of the forum, therefore I am right. How is it the general population doesn't have a basic grasp of epistemology? In 2019, it seems like fully half of the population thinks might makes right is intellectually worthy!
What if you wrote up a pamphlet and started talking to people in person?
As of now the plan is to put out a millage for vote across the whole city to cover several city infrastructure projects.
The real problem is that Nextdoor has no incentive to fix it, in fact they have a disincentive. Their business model seeks posts that spread like wildfire, pitchfork-ism and the like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734501
I guess if Nextdoor wanted to get in on that, they could hire journalists, but it is a reasonable outlay of money if you want to scale it, and something they don't currently do. Journalists need editors, and people to manage them who know how to hire the good ones, and probably other stuff that someone like me unfamiliar with the industry isn't even thinking of.
This is not something that can be 'crowdsourced'. Any citizen that sits through some portion of a city council meeting is probably there because they're interested in - and opinionated about - some local issue. This makes them less than ideal 'reporters'.
About the only thing I've found with Nextdoor is that many of my neighbors are scared of strangers and everybody hates how everybody else drives.
An interesting twist is that they seem to be involved with senior-citizen organizations. Maybe older folks are more likely to get involved?
As much as I dislike this German cloning model, and find it sad as there's a lot of real creativity in Berlin, I think a service like this might stand a better chance in a country with strong laws around privacy and slander.
[0]: https://nebenan.de/about (in German)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet#Controversy
[2]: https://www.ksta.de/wirtschaft/nebenan-de-und-wirnachbarn-co...
[Edit: link formatting]
Newspapers can do fine when people read them. Ad sales, sponsorships, etc provide more than enough revenue for a local paper that has a at least a moderate readership. The reason newspapers are failing is because they aren't finding that moderate readership - people aren't reading them. And this is the exact same reason that ad sales/revenue are declining. So it's not like if you externally fund a newspaper, you fix the problem. You simply end up with a well funded paper that nobody reads.
And ultimately I see no way to save newspapers. Why would I read one handful of journalists' takes on events that happened 24+ hours ago, when I could instead see the views of not only countless journalists but even real people and specialists takes on issues, as they unfold? And as the article mentions the times of finding jobs or local sales in the newspaper is completely gone as well. To a degree this will also lead to a paradoxical decline of online outlets. They, like local papers, need loyal viewers to survive. But there's no inherent reason to offer loyalty to any given news outlet in era of the internet. This is, in my opinion, why most media has gone full-on partisan and op-ed type stuff. It tries to turn the news into entertainment to draw a recurring audience like a weekday sitcom in times past. Suffice to say this is not a viable long term strategy - fanaticism invariably destroys itself in the long run.
There's usually not much value in knowing about what's going on right now outside of your locality, and breaking news is too bent on emotional manipulation and being first, even if it means being inaccurate. Junk food for your brain.
City council meetings can be lived-streamed, auto-transcribed, and their agenda can be posted. People will still of course offer their opinions on the subject on their social medias. We don't need newspapers to do this.
And most importantly they follow up. The meeting is the start. Ihe rest is follow through. If the council are approving a special zoning permit, they go out and talk to neighbors, or the contractors previous special work, etc.
To say that you can just get some text is a bit like suggesting that wget is a good replacement for a web browser. Sure it does some of the stuff, but it isn't the real deal.
One of the most important functions of the news is to pick and chose which information is important and relevant and to present that information in an understandable way. To fulfill that function they do not even have to go digging for extra information (though that certainly helps and can also, crucially, help in actually picking what’s important and relevant).
I think somehow dreaming up a local newspaper that does the same in-depth reporting as, say, the New York Times is just dumb and and doesn’t really help someone arguing in favor of local journalism.
Just summarizing the most important points that were discussed during a council meeting is actually plenty good enough. You could do better, but even just that provides quite a lot of value.
A number of years back, my town had a very good local newspaper that was sort of someone's labor of love but they became ill and, now, no newspaper. I basically have no knowledge of what's going on in town unless it rises to the level of importance where it gets coverage beyond the town lines. To be sure, I'm not really interested in most of what goes on but it would be nice to know.
What I need is an accurate and neutral summary of the things I should care about so when it comes time to vote in a couple years I can decide if I want to keep the current government or not.
Accurate and neutral is hard. Nobody is unbiased. The decision to cover/not cover something is both important and biased. Every project has pros-cons. The very first one is cost vs value: if you don't do the project you don't spend some money and taxes go down leaving more money for residents to do their own thing with, but they don't get the benefit of the project.
Most of what I see online is a quote - probably taken out of context - that makes the someone person look bad. I don't care if a politician is a good speaker, I care if the ultimate policy is good and this is a complex question.
Interestingly Eye is very slim and only published fortnightly, which reflects the work involved in doing the job properly. And they are very seldom wrong.
Or that didn't happen and mismanagement goes unnoticed for much longer.
Some of that is budgetary, but a lot of it is that a lot of politicians don't actually have an interest in being held accountable, so you need someone to go down there and do it.
Besides, how many people are going to read a full meeting transcript every month? Very few, and typically only those motivated and thus biased by what's going on. You need a summary for a broad audience and you certainly can't trust those running the meetings to make one.
Want to cast the goings on, all of them, of your local council meetings into darkness? Have them do exactly what you just described without any journalists around to catch it.
This is absolutely the number 1 reason the major news organizations don't want to bundle up, and in the case of the top 5 (NYT, WaPo, FT, Guardian), works. Interestingly the second reason is brand. Nobody wants brand dilution from being considered in a "pool" with other publications, because it will reduce their power to charge more for their product in ads and subscription. While small publications actually do want solutions like this, generally the large publications with readership are even more upset to be lumped in with the small publications than they are to be lumped in with their competitors.
One solution which I saw but wasn't worth my company's time to explore was finding a bundle of niche publications willing to work together on a shared content-for-pay solution and had a loyal readership willing to pay, and growing outwards from that seed. But that's a very uphill battle.
It's not a new idea and has been tried 100s of times. We tried it just a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820
Changing behavior is possible but will require major cooperation and money to do so, at the scale of both Facebook and Google working together to change things. Maybe that'll happen someday but I just don't see it.
So it goes two ways, citizens can wish for the news/content they want to see and content creators don't have to guess anymore what the people want to see.
I made it a bit like a social network where every user has an individual wish page so good reporters can build up a good reputation.
Feedback would be great, what do you think? Is there anything you would like to see on the platform?
They have a couple of titles. They really need to link up with the large local networks though.
But in the end, big companies who own the smartphone experience, such as Apple and Google will probably own the biggest news/content platforms.
But something like that will only happen when attractiveness for publications is maximised, which requires, amongst other things, that the platform avoids consumer facing lock-in or even just branding, because that would make publications (rightly) fear that they hand over whatever pre-existing digital subscriptions they already have to an exploitative intermediary. This in turn pretty much rules out the VC model for starting the platform, since eventually becoming exploitative is a required ingredient of the risk equation. But I see no reason why this could not work as a cooperative, because all the platform marketing would be directed at potential members. Consumer marketing, something in which a cooperative would tend to be inferior to a metrics-driven VC project (by a wide margin I suspect), would be left entirely to publications, who subsequently get to "own" the subscriptions they pulled in. Important design parameters would be the ratio between pooled and unpooled fees and the exact rules about weigh and how much content member publications would be allowed to keep exclusive to their direct subscribers. Outside of implementation, the biggest challenge would be to convince publications that few people would ever subscribe directly to multiple channels (how many people had now than one daily newspaper?) and that therefore, the content made available to subscribers of their peers would not cannibalize potential direct subscriptions very much.
Would also need to devise some way to get out of the coop, or structure it so that the members feel confident that it won't paint them into a terrible corner.
I'm not the right person to build this, it's mostly a BD problem (and I have a very long to-do list anyway), but I hope someone takes a stab at doing it right. Seems like various people have tried to do it as a more traditional startup, but I think the danger to the publications is probably too great with that structure, which would make it much harder to get buy in.
I feel like setting this up to watch your local government (provided they post the minutes online, which maybe should be required now) would only take a few lines of shell script.
Sometimes I think that the arrangement of local governments makes more sense for the days of horses and telegrams than it does today.
You just reinvented journalists, because it doesn't really matter if they're in the room or not. It's the picking through hours and hours of meetings and making something meaningful from those pickings, and maybe talking to some people outside the room too.
And as nice as it is to think that technology is the answer, it already isn't. All meetings could be livestreamed online very cheaply but very few are. It's going to be a long time before automatic transcription technology has any kind of impact. At least part of this is because many politicians don't want to be held accountable, so they're not about to help these efforts.
The big problem at the moment, as I understood things, actually is that opposition is not doing its job by publicly calling out BS when it sees it at the local governance level.
We may want a human in there to verify and edit but it would reduce costs significantly.
Do you, though? Can't a computer do that better than a human, what with machine learning and the like?
There are various element of it in various countries. Like national offices of statistic. There are stuff like the BBC and variety of EU initiative to inform about various processes. Democratic government keep complete record and have public service already make analysis and summary for ministers to work with. So it's not like it is out of the realm of the achievable. Maybe an official rating could be created based on a service like politifact that independant newspaper must display on their frontpage like the food safety rating for restaurants. Teach the kid at school that anything not rated is basically fiction and that will take care of the majority of the population.
There is the risk of it becoming a propaganda arm of the government, sure, but you can have the same argument with every branch of the government. There is no intrinsic reason to trust the judiciary, the military or the police, except a tradition of being trustworthy which is really what maintain the whole system running: a lot of honest people everywhere. In any case, that's a moot point since the journalism it replaces is dying, and we know the new media that is killing it is not even pretending to have any kind of integrity.
The judiciary is nominated by the executive, which I can’t see working well for this. Presidents from both parties would universally opt to staff the branch with journalists that were soft on government and politicians in general.
Same problem if they get appointed by congress.
As for elections, yea what could go wrong there? America is pretty level headed. We would never elect some kind of partisan maniac to an important position like this.
All the branches of government are inherently political.
But if they did, one option would be to hire an editorial board from nationally esteemed people from outside the political system. You know, draw the membership from Nobel prize winning scientists and authors, Olympic medal winners, people like that. They would then hire and oversee journalists who knew how to journalism.
If you're worried that would lead to olympic medals becoming politically biased, you could have the committee appoint their own replacements.
"Entirely unbiased" may be impossible, but "relatively less biased than Fox News or The Guardian" sounds achievable.
In theory or in practice, because what we have now (and what many would argue we have always had) is not very independent.
The quality is mostly good, but it isn't sufficient to be really informed.
The services for rating accuracy of news isn't really a solution in my opinion, since they only shift the problem, even if they slow down the news cycle a little bit. They will also be wrong at some point, like any news outlet.
You cannot really have free independant journalism and put heaps of regulations upon them.
> There is the risk of it becoming a propaganda arm of the government
It is inevitable. If there are honest people everywhere, we can keep governmental involvement to a minimum. The real problem is monetization and education. Even renowned outlets use clickbait in this day and age.
I also do think that a lot of "new media" will vanish again.
edit: They also tend to develop into expensive behemoths which quickly develop their own interests.
* which includes classical censorship.
Lots of people scream they are pro-left/pro-right (often without evidence) but I think if you look at their history what they are is pro-whoever is in power.
They know who writes the cheques.
Worse than their bias, though, was the defunding for investigative reporting. These days the front page is covered with lazy reporting, clickbait and reprinted press releases.
Right now there's this story on the front page - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-47884273 - which appears to be original investigative reporting into a Tory MP.
What are you basing your opinion on?
Removing all political influence is hard. I also am certain there was a case of some politician calling an editor, but don't remember the details beyond the politician getting booted because of it. But that sounds like bullshit or at least highly exaggerated. I'd like a source on that.
I think there is some value in having a network like this, however, in that it adds to the diversity of networks in that it's not just "yet another privately owned network".
I find it interesting, however, that Channel 4 is state owned yet they (maybe I just mean Jon Snow in particular) seem to have an easier time being more critical of the government. It is likely that this is because it's not totally dependent on any one form of revenue given that it also has adverts on its main channels, but also it probably sees less pressure because of its smaller viewership and I suppose generally less serious tone of programmes.
Both the BBC and CBC have a history of government influence in their reporting - this is not a civil society function I can trust to government.
Citation absolutely required. The BBC have always sought to be impartial - which brings its own, occasionally absurd, biases. Their charter has always required they separate from government and impartial.
They've managed to piss off almost every government, of every colour, in almost equal measure.
Do you have a link for this? The govt can’t tamper with the editorial output of the BBC, that’s not how it works.
First D notices apply to all media, second they are a voluntary "government request" to not publish. Various outlets, including the BBC, have plenty of history ignoring these. Some are actioned. Essentially the media body has to be convinced there is a national security case to follow the request. They're not mandatory and not following one results in no government or court action. Just words.
Cameron emptily threatened to bring in tougher measures to restrict all media, not just the BBC, during Snowden.
And private media, controlled by unaccountable billionaire capitalists and funded by corporate advertising, can be trusted?
With publicly funded media, there can be far more scrutiny, openness and criticism. I mean, look at the UK and compare the BBC, which has its flaws, to the absolutely repulsive, dishonest and dogmatically right-wing private press.
Ah, yes. Maybe we could call it The Ministry of Thought.
40 years ago, there were several nationally recognized publications (NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc.), and all of them had a bias. NYT editorial leaned left, WSJ editorial leaned right, and everyone knew this. The political leaning was baked into brand of the publication.
This all changed in the internet era. The collapse of print advertising decimated the industry. Publications became more incentivized to publish questionable reporting because clickbaity headlines brought more ad traffic. The Trump campaign was covered ad nauseum because having his name in a headline significantly increased traffic to an article, and thus revenue.
The online advertising model is fundamentally incompatible with the kind of journalism you're looking for, but we as a society are hooked on it because it means we don't have to pay for the content.
This is a big problem, because no one else sits through those hours of local meetings that mean so much to our cities in terms of transportation, housing, schools and so on.
https://www.marylandmatters.org/
Maryland Public Television sends three reporters, plus an anchor and all the associated production staff, to cover the Maryland General Assembly each year. They sit through the hours of debates. They interview lawmakers.
The newspaper never was the only source of local news, and now more than ever there are places to get local news if people bother to look.
But also, you're talking about state-level reporting in a state with 6 million people.
I'm talking local papers in towns of 10K, 50K, 100K, 200K. They used to exist, and now they're going away, and we're worse off because of it.
In fact, I think it's almost impossible to write an unopinionated news story as choosing to write a story is an opinion of itself - the clearer we can isolate these opinions the better.
As I said, it's a hard problem. I like the discussion on trying to find an answer though!
That's a bit like saying scientists are biased in favour of anthropic climate change: it's a rational bias based on 200 years of evidence.
>That's a bit like saying scientists are biased in favour of anthropic climate change: it's a rational bias based on 200 years of evidence.
The economics profession is biased in favour of that because the think tank money, sourced from corporate wealth, wants that.
It's a pretty irrational bias which has led to, among other things, the mainstream of the profession being completely blindsided by the financial crisis (famously called out by the normally apolitical Queen) as well as the meteoric rise of China via highly managed trade (an anti free market policy treated by most economists in the 90s/early 00s as largely self defeating).
The FT has come out and said that if most of the economics literature was in favour of Brexit, they would have been too, but it wasn't, so they weren't.
There was a lot of concern with Nikkei's investment in the FT that that would no longer be the case and that it would kowtow to it's corporate owners - if proved not to be the case.
Stick to what people did, what they said, and let people draw their own conclusions.
Story selection is also a form of bias.
<<The usual tensions between reporters and government representatives have escalated to extreme levels in the Trump age, due largely to the President's near-daily attacks against the media. His portrayal of the people who cover him as his "enemy" and the "enemy of the people" has been denounced by historians, press freedom advocates and politicians in both parties.>>
Lots of entities have enough capital to get a news company going, the problem is profitability and long-term sustainability. Not to mention running an actual news agency. Just because a company is profitable in one area doesn't mean they're guaranteed success in another.
How are companies like Facebook supposed to solve this problem? Where is the money to pay for these journalists going to come from? The ad revenue generated by that wing of their company? If it was that easy, then existing media companies wouldn't be struggling.
If you're counting on there being synergy between their existing userbase then I don't think it's worth it because there's so many risks. If a company starts pushing a certain type of news, their credibility and their brand would be so closely tied together with their news branch that either the news would be very bland and have a n agenda while also potentially alienating a large portion of users. This could very well lead to killing their main product.
Companies like google are already under fire for being partial. Add in them actively writing about things like politics and it'd be like adding a barrel of oil.
Not to mention the anti-trust laws involved. Companies like the ones you mentioned are already overpowered let alone giving them the keys to present actual news.
No, it's not. All of those companies are extremely averse to putting boots on the ground, preferring software solutions instead.
Proper journalism worthy of the name (e.g. stuff beyond formulaic reporting like sports scores and financial prices), can't be done by software.
I know they won't, because they don't care about the quality of content on their platform. But there's no reason they couldn't hire actual journalists to do actual reporting for their platform, except that nobody is demanding it of them.
A journalist (creator), produces a product (manufacturer), a newspaper/magazine distributed it (distribution) and a publisher creates the allure that makes you want to trust that brand (marketing). All that stuff was hard and expensive 15 years ago and consumers didn't have the tools to find the creator and the creator didn't have the tools to distribute.
A bunch of bundled industries are falling apart with the unbundling but in almost all cases there remains a creator that the mass population is now "capable" of finding. And the tools that allow for cheap distribution are basically free.
What's lacking is the arbitrage of the distribution platform's earning power to pay steady wages to journalists.
The worst thing that happened to journalism was no-paywall outlets. It convinced people that content is free. It's as if we buy toothpaste at CVS for $3 and on Amazon it's free just because it's on the internet. At a certain point you start to devalue ALL toothpaste rather than just devaluing crap toothpaste because Amazon makes it easier for you to buy toothpaste you like.
Today I can follow a journalist's work. I can follow a specific topic. But I have yet to figure out that doing that work costs money. So no matter the paywall model, it's gonne be hard for consumers to fund it.
I don't think that is true with local news.
At our city council meetings, you see two news outlets:
* The local paper had a reporter who would sit through the whole damn thing.
* The local TV news, who would show up, get some clips of the meeting, a few sound bites with different people, and then pack up and leave in order to get the segment produced for the 10 o'clock news.
Now, the paper is going through bankruptcy and the person doing the city council beat has left.
I'm not sure anyone will sit through the whole meeting to cover it all.
Gaffin was an early "tech" industry reporter, IIRC, and involved pretty early in the Internet. He invested many years in building a hyperlocal news following, and apparently now makes a modest living off of ads and donations.
Gaffin's is impressive for a one-person operation, but of course his coverage isn't complete, and a major city really needs at least tens of sharp journalists covering the basics. Unfortunately, although the two main local papers (Boston Globe, Boston Herald) are soldiering on thus far, they're in financial trouble, and have been sold and under new management since their heydays.
Almost all of the musicians I know that were able to make a living without a major label, before 2000, all could no longer make a living. It really hurt the independent artist and only made musicians more reliant on big labels.
The same thing would have happened to the software, but many companies moved to SAAS.
Just to verify, your assertion is that no major label musicians could make a living after 2000, but some (what amount approximately?) that were with non-major labels (or does this mean independent artist run endeavors?) were able to make a living?
If not please clarify specifically identifying and ranking each group with references.
Thank you very much in advance my friend.
I missed a word there. I meant no independent artist I know could make a living on their music after 2000 (I'm not even talking about getting rich..just being able to make their rent). After Napster, many people either demanded that it was free or would just download it and not pay the artist. Since they aren't signed with a big label, making money at live shows was pretty much non-existent.
Piracy isn't about stealing a car. It's about destroying value in an entire product/piece of art. Far worse than stealing a physical item.
"Thank you very much in advance my friend."
Just look at things like Spotify: Most artists are getting fractions of pennies per/play and only the very famous ones are actually making anything. There have been many articles on HN about this. You can find them yourself.
In other words, many newspapers still do get more or less same eyeballs as before but the price that advertisers are willing to pay for them has taken nose dive. So it’s not about circulation but ad revenue generated per subscriber.
So newspapers have a smaller market share and a much older demographics.
It's more than "ad revenue generated per subscriber", it's also operating cost to generate revenue. Most newspapers are unionized and salaries, benefits, costs, etc have increased while revenue stagnated. That's why newspapers have to constantly lay people off. If costs stayed stagnant along with revenue, then newspapers theoretically could be fine. But inflation doesn't allow that.
Due to legacy ( essentially what advertisers know and are comfortable with ), advertisers spend more for each pair of eyeballs on print, tv, etc. Since digital is new, advertisers spend less per pair of eyeballs. That's can't last forever as digital gets more established. It's why large newspapers are moving quickly onto social media and the internet. It's where eyeballs and ad spending is going to be.
Also, local and mid tier newspapers are facing digital headwinds as social media focuses on boosting "trusted authoritative sources". So the big boys - The NYTimes, WSJ, Bloomberg, etc are going to thrive as they eat the smaller newspapers' lunch with the help of google, facebook, apple, etc.
What we are seeing is a form of stealth media consolidation. Smaller newspapers are being bought up by larger newspapers. Sadly, it's happening in every industry. More consolidation, less competition.
The reality is that individuals often don't think in terms of a big enough picture to support abstract public goods with private donations. Capitalism would say "good, people apparently don't want those things, let them die". But "people don't think about it" and "it doesn't have value" are very different things.
The market is a race to the bottom; public entities have their goals stated expressly, and there will always be some idealists who genuinely care about living up to those. Either way it comes down to people just deciding to do the right thing; there's no way around that. But capitalism gives otherwise-good people the excuse to do the wrong thing without feeling bad about it, because it's "just business".
Incentives are a decent guide.
The public sector has motives as well, like money (continued funding), political pressure, etc.
You’re just exchanging one motive for another and not really solving the problem.
http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2019/article/capita...
Wrong answer!
Here's the correct answer: Newspapers used to have a monopoly on advertising. They could extract enormous sums of money from advertisers due to this.
Most towns had a single newspaper, because the nature of the newspaper business generally led to a natural monopoly. Big cities had maybe had two or three newspapers.
Newspaper owners lost their monopoly. No more overpriced classifieds!
No more money gushing in!
The tech monopolies is a separate topic.
Advertising has competed with radio, TV, direct mail -- you name it -- for decades on decades.
What matters is that classifieds got gutted. That was the true river of gold.
Newspapers got a cut of thousands upon thousands of transactions every single week, whether or not those transactions even occurred. Every potential hiring, every name change, every car for sale, every house on the market, pretty much all of commerce from petty to grand: the newspaper gets its cut.
The income:cost ratio is fantastically high, especially since the cost of printing is subsidised (though not typically fully covered) by the cover price.
The internet allows hyper-targetting individuals - that's why money flows to the web. Advertising efficiency.
Pace or quality of news was never a factor - hell, if you want quality traditional media's websites are still the go-to. Distribution is really the only eroded moat of value.
Ads.
I can't block advertisements in any of those three formats, but I can on the web. I no longer consume television, newspapers, or FM radio other than CBC (public radio, mostly news and issues, no ads).
I think the internet has overshot our attention carrying capacity and we're in for a crash as the pendulum swings back.
A bigger concern is the shameles willingness of video-based news media to publish anything in order to tickle more eyeballs.
Less sources of information is bad. Misinformation is worse.
Currently, most places, the news is funded by ads, subscriptions or gov funded agency. So this idea would replace above with voters. Done via a change to the government system to have two people in same seat; politician and shadow politician (SP). Both paid positions but SP wouldn't have any power.
Pros:
- SP doesn't need to go back to full time job and wait for next election cycle.
- SP will continue to represent the leftover voters and question the politician. (Its beyond me why election systems do not allow representation for miniority voters. Ie win with 51% of vote, 49% voters are NOT represented by anyone??)
- Not biased towards companies, ad revenue, subscriptions.
Cons:
- Need to pay SP.
- Biased to getting elected.
Second idea: government site where anyone with ID can post news.
Pros:
- Free for citizens.
- Ideally, government won't take dowm articles. Just because anyone can post, doesn't mean no consequences.
- Historical archive.
- Local news in one place.
Cons:
- Government need to pay for hosting and support.
- News Corp.
Many election systems do. The systems used in the US and certain other poorly-representative democracies don't, and those states score poorly in terms of popular satisfaction with government compared to democracies with systems where minorities within constituencies aren't systematically excluded from representation by the structure of the electoral system.
I’m probably more of a contrarian in that I think it’s no bad thing if ‘viewspapers’ which exist to make people mad, make false equivalencies and write ‘People are saying’ type stories go to the wall.
It turns out the direct link between a paying customer and the provider of news is actually an important one and that once you sever that link and treat the reader as ‘eyeballs’ the quality does suffer.
WaPo or FT are just not going to cover local issues like they need to be covered to keep an informed electorate.
I do believe it's solid and factual though. If you treat every article is an opinion and analysis piece rather than neutral news reporting (because that's what they are), then it's quite a pleasant and informative read.
The death of online targeted ads is going to be sad for this. I can't think of a cheaper way to pay for stuff. It's the only way I was able to see so many incredible videos or pictures or articles.
My kids and I will be fine because I have money now but previous me would have trouble in the coming all-paywall universe. We're going to be better informed than anyone else and reinforce the positive feedback loop of wealth begetting wealth.
Good luck to everyone else.
The trouble with this model is that publishers like to have editorial rights over ads. A left-leaning publisher, for e.g, will want to be associated with ads for an oil company or to generalize, not publisher wants to be associated with any outrage-of-the-day brand.
I was a paperboy and have fond memories of it. I also like to read things on physical media.
On the upside, it's got to be good for the earth to not print papers every day then trash them immediately after.
In the absence of centralized journalistic outlets, we could have open access to data/information and a reputation system that rewards objective, consistent analysis.
Let the old systems die, so new ones can be developed. We should stop subsidizing legacy systems.
This is unlikely. We will get a reputation system that rewards sensationalism, and polarization of viewpoints.
This is already happening in the newspaper industry, where they try to combat it as best they can.
It's magical thinking to believe that technology and a laissez faire approach will do anything but accelerate the decline.
Instead, imagine a service built on blockchain where publishers (users who generate content) were rewarded by readers (consumers of content) with tokens that were spent by betting on the validity of said content.
If that content was later proven false, the user would lose their bet. If proven true, the user would win the bet and have the ability to bet again.
Publishers with the most won bets would be ranked highest in terms of reputation.
Who would decide if an article is 'proven true'? Some kind of majority vote?
In the jim crow era lots of people would have 'proven' some very unsavory facts about a certain population of people.
Any substantive piece of journalism—beyond simple facts—can't be proven true, because it's trafficking in viewpoints that can't be proven true in a binary sense.
However from a reputable paper, that viewpoint is supported by at least two independent sources, and argued fairly and in good faith.
Unfalsifiable information would not (and should not) be apart of the system. It is wholly irrelevant for public consumption. Opinions would be relegated to Facebook and Twitter.
Then that's not human discourse. We are people, not robots.
News is meant to be objective reporting of facts. Facts must be falsifiable.
Hedging language would be discouraged by a system that rewards factual reporting.
I disagree, or at least that's not the only part of news. News should also include presenting the information that is on hand and the situation as it's currently understood even if the details are too murky to raise to the level of "fact". In addition I actually do want analysis from my journalists. I don't want them to just tell me that congress passed the XYZ bill and a link to the text (objective facts), and want them to tell me what effects they believe the bill is likely to have (opinion).
I'm even OK with activism by journalists as long as they're up front with what they're doing, keep it separate from their overall reporting, and don't let it get in the way of telling the truth.
I have no idea what this means, nor do I know why newspapers apparently need to die to make it possible?
In any case, existing media is pretty close to a functioning “reputation system”.
They don't need to die. But if we stop subsidizing them, new systems would have the room to grow.
The media is far from a functional reputation system. The "Paper of Record", the New York Times, regularly publishes outright falsehoods or extremely biased reporting that paints truth in the worst possible light. There are all sorts of subtle manipulations that they use from word choices, ordering of information, image choices, etc. to manipulate people into believing one thing or another.
You also failed to elaborate how any system of trust would work in the absence of the reputational system that is mediated by such branding as those you list. Instead, you’re just offering the tired and cynic the-media-is-terrible conspiratorial drivel.
These are just the ones they admit to. Who knows how many unnamed sources don't actually exist or other factual errors pass unretracted.
Do you mean a monthly paid service (e.g. $10) that would provide infinite or finite number of articles (e.g. 200 articles for $10, or 1000 articles for $20)?
I see a problem in that area. How would a company get paid? The <insert title of serious newspaper> will want to price their articles more thatn the <insert title of trashy gossip newspaper>. It would be a mess to figure this out.
And who will be hosting all these articles?
This is an interesting point to discuss/develop.
Very few content producers make anywhere near a full-time salary and many have to do extra things like merchandise to augment income.
That is an interesting point and true for Newspapers. The opposite is true for online newspapers.
How do you figure? Money is money and every organization needs it.
Everyone seems to equally hate online ads. They don’t provide much value to the consumer.
It’s working OK on the national level. NYTimes, Washington Post, WSJ, the obvious examples. They are either operating at scale, writing about national issues that a huge cross-section of the population cares about, or they are providing important business information.
Where is it working on the local level? I grew up near Peoria, and, well, I’m not sure this will play in Peoria. Is there really a subscriber base for a ~400,000 person metro area? I am doubtful. My elderly parents still subscribe to the actual physical newspaper (at a shockingly high price), but I swear they are in it for the obituaries. Once the over 70 crowd dies off...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spend...
The fate of the ad industry is directly tied to the overall economy, says Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group. That means when GDP falls, advertising falls in unison; it's neither a leading indicator before a downturn nor lagging indicator trailing the overall economy's performance, he says. "All of a sudden, a crisis is a good time to reassess all your behavior," Wieser says. "Advertisers scrutinize their budgets much more than they did in the past."
From this article: https://adage.com/article/tech/industry-executives-report-up...
Thanks for spurring me to dig into this a bit more.
Here's some countries that have publicly funded broadcasting networks, and still rank above the US on the 2018 Press Freedom Index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index):
- France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_24 - UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC - Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlandse_Publieke_Omroep_(o... - South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Broadcasting_System - Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...
It seems like it is viable to establish a publicly funded institution dedicated to national-local news. There is the Post Office and the DMV, so couldn't there also exist small offices of reporters and journalists to broadcast and publish news that is funded from taxes and public grants? Even if it is not as granular as the Post Office, there would at least be an agency responsible for the information and entertainment broadcast by the media network.
Additionally, there could exist public-private relationships similar to how the BBC operates BBC Studios, so there is still some incentive to run certain programs "like a business", so to speak.
Some kind of national media agency could also help disseminate government data to the public that is already being distilled and published by private news corporations. For example, a lot of "newsworthy" information or background comes from government sources, such as census data, economic data, and weather data. Journalists read and distill openly published government information to make it accessible to the public, and the government could do the same thing to put more effort into the 'public presentation' side of the information they produced.
There's no guarantee this would be 100% perfect; whether the news comes from the government or a corporation there's always uncertainty in bias and truth. Having a public news agency doesn't stop corporations from existing, it's just another network but with a public safety net. If people want the news, then deciding to use their tax dollars to fund public news is an available option.
The current state of public broadcasting in the US is pretty weak and detached: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting#United_Sta...
Other than NPR and PBS, how often is public broadcasting (tv, internet, audio) actually watched or listened to in the US? It seems pretty low.
Public broadcasting networks like the BBC and CBC could be nit-picked, but overall they still produce some solid content that draws large audiences. BBC One and BBC Radio 1 are consistently good and interesting, even for a non-Brit.
That golden time is coming to an end I fear. More and more users are blocking ads, which has driven site operators to use more aggressive and more blocking-resistant advertising. I can see a time coming soon where ads are so intertwined with content it's effectively impossible to block them without crippling your browsing experience.
To use Mr. Buffett as an example. His current net worth is 86.3 billion. If he took 1 billion of that and created a fund to support independent journalism, it could employ ~500 full-time journalists at $60,000 each (all-in cost) purely on the interest (3% annual return.) Not to mention the fact that he would likely receive donations and support from the public at large.
For comparison, The NY Times employs about 3,800 people. So, for a miniscule amount of his net worth (of which the principal is unaffected), Mr. Buffett could create an organization 1/8 the size of one of the largest newspapers in the world.
So again, why do we give people like this a pass when they very clearly have the ability to make a difference? Especially when they are publicly complaining about the issue.
You have to pay for an annual license. It's about £150 a year I think, so in the ball park of Netflix or amazon. Just like Netflix et Al, if you don't want it you don't have to pay for it (unlike taxes)
It’s a great idea. Nobody will do it though because money.