News Websites Are Dumpster Fires
bradleytaunt.com
bradleytaunt.com
Someone is going to mention politics, I know it. Let me beat you to it. What have you done same day when a politician you hated did something? Of consequence of course. Angry twating on twitter doesn’t count.
Newspapers are fucking awesome. Easy to read. Easy as hell to skim. Headlines are 95% accurate to their article. Ads don’t track you and in truth, aren’t that lame in the paper compared to online. Granted I mostly read WSJ and sometimes NYTimes. But never online. Only reason I check CNN online is to see if there’s a catastrophe. Like when Notre Dame became an unholy gate to hell. Other than that, the news is pretty useless to begin with.
Your idea assumes that people know what they want to see before they see it, which seems pretty incompatible with reporting most of the news. That said, I think that's a cool project.
Another way to look at it would be to call it a news-room where people decide what they put into the news paper. I don't know how this works in real news papers, but maybe they hold a meeting and then the journalists decide what stories they pick up. People could get involved into that by voting for topics.
Choice in our news consumption is allowing people to believe that vaccines cause autism, that there's a "deep state" cabal of leaders secretly pulling the levers of power, that Russia didn't really interfere in the 2016 election. We no longer have to confront difficult truths, we can simply believe the version that we want to believe and ignore everything else.
Choice in our news consumption is giving rise to incompatible versions of what's going on, and it's setting a pretty terrifying precedent. How can you give people a choice of what they want to see while maintaining a standard of quality that rises above propaganda?
So I imagine if say 1000 people make a wish to get a story covered and they even fund the wish, and the wish is "make a very short summary of this... including the following points..." then they can earn money by delivering on that. The result might be a very short article where people spend only 10 seconds and with a boring title, but they would still earn money with that.
There's already a solution to this problem though: subscriptions. The issue there is that people just don't want to pay for something that they're used to getting for free.
Your idea sounds like a service where people can request content on a given topic for a fee, without really knowing who's creating the content. What are the quality controls there? Who gets to write the content? How do I, the user, know that I'm getting a fair representation of what's going on?
If someone is willing to pay for news content, why not just buy a newspaper subscription and get the email newsletter from a company that knows how to create news content?
I'm just another internet rando, but I've worked for news organizations so I have some operational background here. Frankly, I just don't quite see the value in the service you're imagining, based on my interpretation. I'd have a really hard time trusting content written by a stranger catered specifically to my preferences if they weren't a bona fide journalist with experience at a reputable news organization. And I certainly wouldn't pay for it. Such a system would be super vulnerable to malicious influential behavior like we saw in the 2016 election.
If you hate online ads in your news so much, do you currently pay for any of your news right now? If not, then how painful is this problem for you?
We can't convince the public to spend on their news content the same way they spend on Netflix. That kinda sums it up right there.
But again, relying purely on the community to verify quality is a major liability when it comes to information geared towards the public interest.
I highly recommend you read up on the fake political groups that the Russians created on Facebook and Twitter that generated hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of engagements. People just didn’t realize that they were fake groups while sharing their content/tweets. The mueller report covered this operation in great detail, it’s worth the read if you’re serious about building products like this.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...
Personally, I’ve resorted to email newsletters like Quartz. They aren’t allowed to use JavaScript, and it is often a day late just like the newspaper so it doesn’t feed addiction, nor does it have to resort to psychology tricks like clickbait (well, not as often at least).
I quit caring about what happened today, and instead I get my news a week later. I take the magazine (only one, I browse the other over the week) to a coffee shop on Saturday morning, have a couple coffees and read that weeks magazine. By not constantly being 'up to date' outside of occasionally using Twitter, I've found I'm a lot less stressed. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone.
- Clickbait headings with misleading information
Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking?
- Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present
What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for?
- Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts
Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users?
- Taking massive performance hits (specifically on mobile due to huge JavaScript blocks)
Maybe getting closer to what users actually care about
- Pop-up ads
Again - any evidence this puts normal internet users off so much they'd stop using a site? There must be a reason MEDIUM.COM and every single recipe blog pops up their newsletter subscription as intrusively as possible.
- Fixed headers or footers which leads to harder readability / accidental element interactions
Here's again an actual deterrent - if someone physically can't use a site, they might actually give up.
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I'm not saying news sites are not dumpster fires, but I'm a techie and love a good boycott.
I'd question the premise of this article - it seems to be very much from a techie privacy-active (not just concerned, but actually willing to take action) perspective which I suspect does not represent the majority of the internet.
I suspect that if people are actually using news sites less, it's because of much simpler reasons...like that Google intercepts a user's attempt to read news linking to their favourite publications.
> Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking?
I don't know, but I certainly know that there are news (mostly tech news) websites I have all but entirely stopped engaging with because any time I go to them, I read one headline ("This Spotify-feature has been wanted for years!", "Do you see what HP has done here?", "See what Dell has done", something like that) and just close out the tab again.
Maybe it puts of "just" 10% of people, but 10% is a fairly big chunk, isn't it?
> - Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present
> What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for?
A random article saying it's 40% on laptops, 15% on mobile: https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-...
Another article saying it's 22% of people in the UK, 32% of people in germany, etc: https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018
Those were just the two first results on Google for the query "what percentage of users are using ad blockers".
I don't know how many people just leave when a page asks them to disable their ad blockers, but I have to imagine it's a fairly big chunk of people who use ad blockers, which, as shown above, is a fairly big chunk of internet users.
> - Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts
> Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users?
I don't know, I'm fairly sure the issue with pervasive tracking is relatively well known even among non-"techies". How many regular users haven't been told to use an ad blocker by a tech-literate friend, with third-party tracking being one of the reasons cited?
The vast majority of people may not avoid a website just because of invisible trackers (except maybe due to the massive performance hits from all the javascript), but I imagine the knowledge of such tracking scripts at least affects the percentage of people who are willing to disable their ad blockers when a page asks.
Maybe your local news 5 or something small market like that is a dumpster fire, but publications that have shifted to the online subscription model are absolutely fine as they bank on their quality alone (unless my ad blocking has hid all this from me).
Are you f*ing kidding? Sponsored articles are ads. The ad industry-driven conflation of editorial and ads is a major reason the media industry is suffering. Many publishers have become indistinguishable from one another thanks to their reliance on ad tech content – "native content" in Facebook parlance and the false hope of social media-driven traffic. In so doing, they've helped empower Google and Facebook and surrendered their own brand power, becoming purveyors of generic sponsored slurry.
The original poster is not wrong about the problems with tracker-laden news sites. But he hasn't given much thought to solutions.
"I don’t have a fix all band-aid to replace current revenue streams for news websites..."
Do let us know when you figure it out. A lot of people have been trying to do so without success.
Subscriptions...great for the publishers with huge audiences, not so much for smaller news sites. How many news subscriptions will people pay for after they sign on for the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal? There's a limit to the monthly bleed people will tolerate.
And users donations are a bandage not a business model. People rely on donations for unexpected medical expenses in the US – that's a sign of system failure not a model for sustainability.
If an answer is found, it will probably have to do with weaning people off social media. Or we'll just have to enjoy our cat videos while investigative journalism withers.
I think I have a somewhat lasting solution but people here especially are not going to like it. I think bezos buying the Washington Post and structure like that build the best version of journalism available to us right now. Structures like NPR and others which have large endowments are another, but basically news runs best when you divorce pure profit models and can run the thing at some kind of operational loss and keep it out of market forces as much as possible.
Well, does there need to be more than three? I'm not sure where the assumption came from that news is broken if we're not all consuming 15 different outlets every day. In the past it was normal for people to subscribe to just one news outlet! Three is pretty good going, and not going to break the bank for many readers.
For example: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal...
But AFAIK some feeds are chronologically ordered with a small "published @" stamp at the bottom of each card. Others are not. I think it depends on how they feed the channel, and otherwise the channel is a little agnostic.
I only work with the premium content (bundled magazine issues — an entire issue is published at once) so I can't speak for the free content directly, but I know our free content is published to the channels when published to web, so they should be chronological, I think. Other outlets may have a different workflow.
The "Today" page is curated as well as listing popular articles, so it might vary. So is Spotlight.
We meet with Apple periodically so I'll keep that point in mind and ask them about it.
How many news subscriptions did people pay for when these publications were print-only?
Kinda, but not necessarily in a way that subverts the quality of the article. I used to work in media (and I'm thankfully out of it now), so I do have some inside perspective on this.
Sponsored articles (or more colloquially, "native advertising") don't mean "we write what the brand wants us to". It's usually "Oh, Samsung wants non-display advertising for the Galaxy S10, so they cut a deal with us where we'll write a series of 10 human interest stories about things related to how peoples' lives are improved by mobile technology, and it'll be prominently brought to you by the Samsung Galaxy S10". The story isn't about Samsung's product. It's more about attaching the product and brand name to a topically-related story than it is about shilling a particular brand or product - at least when it's done right. The brand shouldn't have any editorial control over the article, other than a high-level agreement as to the topic. When it's done well, your ad department sells the contract, editorial gets their story series topic, and then there's a hard line between editorial and advertising that isn't breached.
It's obviously still advertising, but it doesn't _have_ to be integrity-free shilling.
Given the massive hemorrhaging of display advertising revenue, the utter collapse of video-based advertising, and the disappointing returns on donation and paywall models, well-disclosed, editorially-independent native advertising often turns out to be the most reliable (and maybe even most stomachable) revenue stream for a lot of outfits.
Of course, the temptation is obviously "well, just let us see the article before you run it..." which slips into editorial control, and then you are just straight-up shilling. That happens, it's ugly, and it is just naked advertising. But it isn't necessarily that bad.
The only other news I really care about is local, and I'm lucky to have local news sites that are pretty much plain text.
'News' has always been problematic because the publishing business exists to sell advertising, track you and push the news organization owner agendas.
Finding trustworthy reliable information has never been more difficult despite the tsunamai of information at our fingertips online
That's still a lot more writers than your regular newspaper in terms of consumers:writers ratio.
Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society.
This costs a lot of time and money. The government can't fund newspapers without the perception of state bias. Where should the resources necessary to achieve the above goal come from?
The government itself can not do this, but it could demand that there is a neutral news organisation which is allowed to collect the necessary money to function from its citizen, like the public broadcasting system in several countries. This would help as a somewhat trusted ground source, IMHO.
In a poll by Ipsos Mori, 59% of respondents named the BBC as the one news source they trust the most. That level of trust remains consistent across the political spectrum, with readers of the right-leaning Daily Mail and the left-leaning Guardian both reporting high levels of trust in the BBC.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/58001/b...
Also, a US government news organization would have to contend with laws which would make it difficult for them to function .
The paranoia that it would be abused is very rational given that mere Whitehouse Access has been abused as a carrot/stick to influence reporting.
The BBC news.bbc.co.uk and theguardian.co.uk
are both examples of well funded, non biased news sources.
The BBC makes some effort to be unbiased - by giving air time based on e.g. based on success at the ballot, but inevitably reflects the metropolitan position of most of it's employees.
I still find some quality reporting in The Guardian, but it too is clearly facing the same financial pressures as other newspapers.
The Guardian are pretty open about their's, the BBC claim to be non-biased while giving people like Nigel Fromage, pro-brexit right-wingers, climate change deniers an easy ride.
On other hand, this bias thing is not inherent. ABC survives somehow in Australia, even though current clowns in the shitshow in Canberra work hard to kill it.
Maybe their owners and managers generally seek to maximise profits. Maybe those which have an overriding mission (NYT? WSJ? The Guardian? The Economist?) are exceptions.
In the limit, the newspaper that follows "maximize profits" route look like Breitbart.
The corporations that [in some cases, once and no longer] held the media properties that are suffering sought those kinds of gains—in more recent years it seems to be left to either companies or "benefactors" who want the outlets to persist who buy them up and inject money into them rather than taking exponential profits.
Sadly, many things that look like efforts to maximize profits are more desperate efforts to keep the lights on. In fact the numbers I hear talked about with any fervor the most are readership and awards.
Side note: the actual money-making business for the publisher I've been working with is their custom-content business. Basically arranging, design, and print/digital distribution of advertisements and catalogs for other businesses. This is completely distinct from any editorial products.
Right now we're get some money from businesses advertising on our sites, but it's small money because it's small businesses in small towns. Just enough to keep the lights on, with a little left over for reinvestment into the company's mission. None of the founders have taken even a single paycheck. And taking business's money makes me nervous because I feel pressure on every article we write to make sure we're business-friendly to not scare away advertisers, which is not a good pressure for a news company to have.
And in towns of 5k-10k residents, your audience is limited to the point where referral ads or Google ads are pointless. Probably half of our company meetings have some kind of "where are we going to get money" conversations.
What part of the world do you operate in?
The company is called Citieo [2]. We're based out of Michigan. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere.
Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. We see a lot of NIMBY-ism and fear propagated on social media and in outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, and we want to foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face.
We still have a lot of work to do (a lot of work) but we're a pretty small organization working as hard as we can with not a lot of money.
I'm curious about Citieo and Soli; I'll send an email to the support address on your website, if that's alright.
Newspapers really mostly cost time - it is just that people can't spare the time - much less with the relevant abilities.
I am not sure if there is one without problems in some way. Even independent funding can always be corrupted. I sadly must question the historic effectiveness of the newspapers at the first goal.
In the past they were really /even worse/. Kent State was initially greeted with a "the damn kids had it coming" reaction and the Winter Soldier testimonies of War Crimes committed or witnessed in Vietnam were outright ignored on the east coast. We remember Woodward and Bernstein well for their role in the Pentagon Papers but they were outliers and even they relied upon covert betrayals showing the ineffectiveness of the news institutions at being effective oversight under those circumstances when there was an entire additional secret and illegal undeclared war in Cambodia.
Internet reporting can be better at least for breaking big stories as anyone can post bombshells - but anyone can also post absolute crap.
Unfortunately, it's proven to be a hard problem to look at your $500 profit and refuse an additional $500 profit to run a scummy ad next to the valued story. Ethics and long-term-value decisions are just not easy to optimize for - and I don't think the government is very good at that either; they just optimize for the next election instead of profits, which doesn't seem any better.
One of the main reason behind government-imposed taxes is precisely because things that benefit society are not perceived as worthwhile to pay for by individuals, even if said individuals get direct benefit from it. The mission of news platform looks like something perfectly aligned with public funding... except for the risk of government influence on published content.
As a result, big publishers sometimes purchases the second local newspaper and make it an empty shell that republishes generic content from syndicated sources, and use the ownership of the second local newspaper cash in from the free lunch. Instead of helping the small publishers, the subsidies go to the biggest creating an even worse competitive situation for small publishers.
Real world Example: Sweden's media giant Bonnier News is also the LARGEST receiver of subsidies.
https://www.etc.se/ekonomi/bonniers-dominans-okar-i-mediesve...
That sounds like Sinclair. Seems the U.S. ended up in the same place.
Are they? Have they ever been?
The Daily Mail has been promoting a specific political stance since its inception. Fact and relevance are secondary. One Lord Rothermere was a bit keen on fascism in the 1930s so ran the front page feature "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" praising their good, sound conservative ideas.
W Randolph Hearst just about created the US gutter press promoting sensationalism over fact, sales over fact, etc. Pulitzer and Hearst spent decades trying to out-sensationalise each other. Yet after WW1 he leaned conservative and started promoting US isolationism. One thing he wasn't was consistent.
There's a big irony to the Pulitzer prize, established some time after his death promoting values that Pulitzer himself never did.
That most traditional newspapers have been funded by the wealthy has tended to bias them as you might expect.
They never ever meant to be that. They always meant to do one thing and one thing only - influence opinions. So it's hard to figure out an honest way of paying for news, because that would mean paying for newspapers that advance your interests, but reach and try to influence other people with different interests. This is also the reason why bias is not really a problem, biased news is just news as they meant to be. You just call them biased when you don't like who is trying to influence you, but nevertheless influence is always there and is what news are about.
In general big news publishers are bad for society, since they concentrate too much influence over significant parts of it.
By disclaiming profit you're ditching both the measuring tool, and also the motivation.
With profit motive gone, the "long term greedy" investors who wants to build out wide & stable business over decades, to ensure safe retirement & good future for children go elsewhere, and instead replaced by vultures circling the last few scraps of value.
With profit motive gone, the well prepared, diligent, and knowledgeable journalists go elsewhere, and their roles get filled in with inexperienced, energetic activists, who get "paid" with access to audience to perform activism on.
Which is exactly what we see presently among the big names in online news.
It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming difficult.
It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume.
Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect finally wearing off:
The question is, what do consumers need and how do we get it to them? The news web sites can go ahead and flame all the dumpsters they want. They're entertainment, and might as well be superhero movies or Angry Birds. "News" is just the hook for novelty.
It's consumer behavior that has become quite terrible. Some of it is the realization that most news doesn't matter. It's far away and of little direct meaning to you. That's why the news sites need to dress it up to make it seem interesting. There are things that might be relevant, but they don't happen every 24 hours, and they require a lot of background to understand correctly.
The politics are relevant in that you do in fact get to make a choice, though our politics have become more about tribalism than good choices. Voters have never been good about absorbing news and deciding, but mass media have made them easier than ever to distract and derail.
We'd like to think a good news site would fix that, but you can't force the horse to drink. Consumers don't want it. And I'd say that doesn't even matter, except that they're making some terrible choices based on it. The best I can think of is for each of us to model better behavior, which means shunning bad news and thoughtfully discussing real news, but I don't honestly believe that will succeed. I would love a better answer.
That's exactly why I believe small local news is far more important than national or world news. It's important to know what's going on in the broader world, but in terms of actual impact to your daily life, a road closure in your neighborhood is more impactful than (and I'm just taking a headline from the front of CNN.com right now) "Former Belgian king submits DNA in paternity case". For politics, your local city council voting to allow or ban AirBnb or Uber or marijuana businesses has more direct meaning for you than (another CNN.com headline) "Analysis: Trump and Biden escalate their fight".
Especially when it comes to crime reporting... you should know about shootings in your area, or car crashes or kidnappings etc. Things that could actually happen to you or impact your life. But me sitting in Michigan reading about stabbings in Japan or a sheriff's deputy being shot in Texas, or a 4 year old boy attacked by a mountain lion in San Diego... what do I do with that information? What is the expected outcome of me reading that story? When I am done reading it, what should I do about it?
It's feartainment, fear as an entertainment. I don't need to know it, but when I read it I become afraid and over time I become addicted to fear, and so I check CNN more to see if there is more things I need to be afraid of. It overflows into our local life too, we become addicted to fear and we know others are addicted to fear too, so if we share the most fear-inducing stories we become more popular as people become addicted to the fear we're spreading.
Nope, I'd wage they will double-down on it even if they start losing money. That's a well known spiral: don't expect anyone but the most useless employees to remain until the end.
"Modern browsers". A pejorative term.
The outlets that do not depend heavily on government contract handouts utilize all the tactics criticised in the article. Few more "prestigious" or "independent" publications try the donation and subscription models with limited success.
This time the democracy suffers heavily, government accountability is no more.
Some try to do some journalism without stepping on government's toes too much, others are pure propaganda.
The outlets that are functioning like government propaganda channels have very low ratings, so they are not very good at directing public opinion so they updated the business model to include unvoluntary ad purchases on the absolutely pro-gov media, i.e. if you do not buy ads from these publications they make your life harder even in the private sector. Someone at a popular Turkish social media platform tried to compile a list of companies that advertise on these extremely pro-gov media outlets, the list was taken down by a court order.
Turkey sunk deep in the democracy and press freedom indexes. That's what happens when you cannot have a profitable media business.
"Local" online news in a lot of the UK has all but died a death. We have a couple of big news outlets that basically publish a little local news in practically no depth and then fill the rest with clickbait "news" items of no value other than to generate clicks. There seem to be practically no real journalists and readers are "invited to send in their pictures" - without payment of course. Hopefully these dumpster files will die out soon..
Newsquest is another. Poorly written journalism which usually looks as if it hasn't been proof-read.
My feeling is that it wont be a tweak in the business model but more in the way news is offered. One often talked about ideal case is that ads become so relevant that they are not intrusive, but that is yet to take scale, and is costly even for the ones who try to do it.
There are good websites which get enough money to live on donation and do produce the content worthy of it. Then there are different ways of consuming news which have worked. Like Inshorts - news in 60 words, mostly a jist without clickbait - which works really well in India, and can survive on ad model around relevant content.
Last thing I feel is bringing an offline model online, which for some reason these websites did away with. Newspapers mostly worked because everyone had an opinion after reading the news. News sites dont like community and moderation and prefer to have them on social media, but that is where the opportunity lies. Make room for discussion, get users engaged, let the author explain his point, and then you dont have to show too many ads on the user's first visit. Maybe this is an extension of twitter, or maybe it gets dirty (hence moderation), I think it will work given how it works now on reddit and even whatsapp groups.
The design of the site is a dumpster fire. You shouldn't have to zoom to 67% just to make the article actually readable.
Hyperbole can be used to good effect sometimes, but this isn't one of them.
This is a decently-designed blog which loads quickly but has text that's a little too large. It is not a dumpster fire, especially compared to the news sites the blog post was calling out.
Both sides (media and consumers) are in denial. The media deny that most of them produce shit content which is not worth a penny and the world would be better without them. The consumers deny the addiction.
I personally don't want to be on either side of this market.
* Gooole News Initiative https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com
* Google Digital News Fund https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/
* Google News Lab (2017) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
* Subscribe with Google (2018) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
* The Google News Initiative, One Year In (2019) https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...
[1] "Google announces a $300M ‘Google News Initiative’ (though this isn’t about giving out grants directly to newsrooms, like it does in Europe)" https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-announces-a-300m-go...
Unless humanity is certain that's what it wants to happen, it's probably prudent to save this potentially critical leg from decay. Google has the means and if it's in everyone's interest for the greater good, this is a way to keep one of its leg from falling off until market forces have time to sort the mess out, something new emerges, and everyone has time to transition. In the old days, the government would supply the subsidy to buy the time to transition, but now market forces have aligned. Private industry has evolved and has the means -- it's willing and able. Maybe this is how a healthy, well-functioning system is supposed to work. Maybe this is a glimpse of capitalism at its finest. Maybe it's progress, maybe it's not.
Who knows how this will play out? It's uncharted territory. A new chapter in the American experiment. Whatever happens, we will see.
Very deliberately didn't include anything I personally found annoying (I'm pretty easy to annoy with bad UX)
Absolutely despise chonky sticky headers/footers.
The problem is, these kinds of measures work. As in, if I put a footer that pops up as you scroll down reminding readers to share or subscribe, I'd have more of both. (I can dig up the evidence if required. Off the top of my head there's a presentation from someone like buzzfeed or upworthy that showed double digit percentage improvements with mildly annoying practices.)
I disagree with the author's contention that using those methods mean you fail. Publishers use them because they work.
The chrome extension I use is one button that blocks JS on the current domain. The page reloads in a flash and is replaced by an easy-to-read block of text. Other websites are unaffected.
I am by no means a JS hater; I even tend to like SPAs on the web. It's just that these news sites seem to want us to run with JS disabled. It's really a better browsing experience.
Maybe, but _most users_ are using a browser that will not be blocking ads by default anytime soon.
That reminds me of the whole situation where Radiohead sold an album online direct to users.
Someone wrote an article about how other bands could do the same: Step 1: Be Radiohead.
>Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user experience of course)
I have trouble understanding how that isn't an equally or worse idea when compared to the existing problems.
My soon to be niece-in-law (she's engaged to my nephew) has a journalism degree from a well-known university in that field. She's now a news producer for a large television station.
Last week, I caught her on camera reviewing dog toys with her dog and the best blenders during the morning news.
Things have stooped to that level.
You know what happens when you pay for subscriptions? They still hit you with ads and perpetual reminders to turn ad blockers off. I'm a paying user of about 10 different sites, and most all of them still remind me to turn off my ad blocker (or don't work with an ad blocker running) even after I've signed in.
News websites are dumpster fires because it's a race to the bottom. Let's say NYT is a good news source... they'll still lose eyesballs to DIPSHITPOST who doesn't spend time validating their stories before publishing them. And so you say DIPSHITPOST will go under? That's fine, there's always another IDIOTDAILYTIMES out there.
Tools like Facebook and Reddit and HackerNews are the sources we all go to to find the content, some are curated better than others, but at the end of the the day whoever gets to market first tends to be the winner. And NYT and other "good" sources will inevitably fail because fast, good, or cheap -- pick at most 2.
Not to be deterred by this, though, the piece suggests a couple of shopworn ideas anyway:
> Switch over to a monthly subscription plan
For this to work you have to put up a paywall, and according to HN conventional wisdom the only thing worse than ads are paywalls, otherwise known as History’s Greatest Monster.
> Partner with brands to create sponsored articles
Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.”
> Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions
So, pledge drives! Hope you like tote bags. Public broadcasting already does this, of course; it doesn’t come near to covering all their expenses.
Look, here’s the thing. It’s true, news websites are dumpster fires! But they’re dumpster fires for a reason, namely that nobody has yet come up with a reliable business model that allows them to not be dumpster fires. They’re dumpster fires because that’s what happens when the only choices available are all bad ones.
If you’ve got an actual way to cut this knot, lots of people in the news business would be very interested in hearing it. But just telling them to stop sucking so hard, man isn’t particularly helpful.
> Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into marketing.”
I disagree. No one said to have everything be sponsored and when the content is good (and clearly marked up as sponsored) it can be fine.
Surprised to see it so highly voted on Hacker News.
Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies) give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads, and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data, and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based blocking) already blocked 42% of the website's content. Not to mention a plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators.
And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20% blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to call "the stage before clickbait" - the ones addressing the user directly, presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest ("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and wonderful again").
Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once in a while.
One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful, traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by bothering me with paywalls.
- Clickbait headings ...
Acknowledged the hypocrisy and closed the tab.
This much is obvious and the paywall model these people are using is obviously terrible as a result. It will never work because a website is not the same as a print newspaper. Case in point: i have a subscription to several print newspapers (the FT and the Economist). But i don't read either online, even though i could, because the experience is too painful. I am not going to dig around for separate credentials for each online publication i want to read.
The solution is obvious, and has already been employed to great effect by streaming media companies. A media bundle company offers access to 50 or 60 news sites. You get one login; you pay $8 a month or thereabouts. In return you can read the Washington Post, WSJ etc., and each media company gets a payout based on impressions (or better yet, as a share of total consumption, e.g. if i read 2 WSJ and 10 ny times, WSJ gets $6 * 2/12 and NYT gets $6 * 10/12.
This gives me what i want: freedom to browse without having to negotiate each link i click. It gives the media companies a revenue stream from satisfied readers. The media pass company gets a fee for a valuable service. Win win win.
All that is required is for someone (hint, hint, HN) to successfully negotiate a content agreement for their media pass with a few big players. If you got WSJ, WP, NYT to sign up that would probably make this fly.
Subscriptions are a solid business model, and I think it's important for fund serious newspapers / investigative journalism. However, by putting them behind a paywall, these important stories may no longer have the impact they once did.
The print edition is losing money for them and business decided to start giving them away for free to increase brand awareness.
The paywalled stuff is making them modest revenue, definitely not enough to make a living for now but they're still experimenting with the model.
The ads and user tracking is where the real money is. The bidding ad network stuff is okayish, but it seems the big money is in the sponsored articles and in skins (custom stylesheet designed for a specific brand). The former two seem to make even seven digit figures per contract for them.
Looking at the backlog and their style of organizing work you can obviously tell that the users actually visiting the site are treated as second hand citizens while their partners are kings.
This leads me to the conclusion that this is what people might not really want, but it's what they got used to. Finding a sustainable high quality news media business model is an interesting problem worthy of a startup I'd say.
You could say something quite similar about capitalism as a whole, in the sense that it looks like those practices are what any industry within that particular economic system ends up devolving into, for the sake of monetary growth and under the pretext of "being competitive" or "cost-effective." I guess it would also apply to economic liberalism in general.
Here's my opinion: news outlets are not necessary. Their content is mostly irrelevant, biased, and dependent on a very harmful revenue model--advertisements. Uncensorable, decentralized platforms, on the other hand, could provide communities with a means to inform others, express opinions and denounce any issue at hand, if well-designed.
If that were true, they had 2 decades to fail and they didn't. People like to read the news.
The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.
The revenue graph here gives a good overview of how the industry has declined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Crisis
The problem is that the ad-supported Internet model hollowed out American journalism, turning it into a howling wasteland of listicles and tracking pixels, and the industry is simply hanging on for dear life at this point. If the OP had some recommendations for a better user experience that wouldn’t essentially kill what remains of the non-top-shelf (NYT, WSJ) or hyper-focused (TPM, Axios) journalism market, I’m all ears, but there’s nothing there that’s helpful.
The majority of sites are like those cheesy carnival games trying to get people to "step right up" and are just as rigged as the games to try and keep you around, blasting your face with ads.
> I could write up an entire essay about all the shady practices that most news sites are guilty of, but here are just a few top level issues:
Proceeds with a random list of complaints you could apply to most sites in general.
> using archaic ads
I don't know about you, but archaic ads didn't track me, use up many resources, and were just fine.
> Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user experience of course)
Article writer then offers a suggestion that has been tried in the past, and something people frequently complain about news companies doing.
> Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions
Promotions? What are "promotions?" Promoting a product? You want news agencies to place a larger emphasis on advertising?
And all three suggestions literally fly in the face of:
> Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present
All these things are "advertising" so the user would be blocked from reading.
> News outlets should not be spamming their main revenue supply (the users) or misleading people with false information.
Like you did? Your headline is as much a lie as many of the headlines you seem to hate on news sites.