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Comment by tastroder | Hacker News Reader

I really wish traditional news media, aka those people that are supposed to dissaminate the news, would get a grip and stop breaking the internet and their core business altogether one of these days. If you lose revenue because google shows a few sentences of the introduction your content is not worth it to readers. But no, instead of better content and easier ways to consume it, we get more clickbait and whining about fake news.

At least on the level of local newspapers in Germany it's a complete disaster for me personally. It's not even that I wouldn't want to pay people that go out and report on local happenings, it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim that's actually relevant content and not some made up outrage or simply agency content.

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Is it possible that a sufficient number of people aren’t willing to pay for information if it’s available for free with zero friction, and that is why journalism is having a tough time?

Or is it an entire field of people being lazy and wanting easy money that caused it to go down the drain?

There exist “journalists” that write clickbait and content that wastes time. There are also journalists that risk their life and limb to gather and disseminate important information for society.

Clearly, it’s a difficult problem to address. The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad. The journalists need a steady source of income to feed their families, and to incentivize people to become journalists. There’s a myriad of other issues as well, but it’s not a simple “the entire news media field is a bunch of bad actors”. They’re not paid well as it is, and I don’t see many people clamoring to take on the risks that real journalists do for the money they do it for, so there must be an issue on the revenue side as well.

It’s really just a simple supply and demand curve. A certain number of people have a demand for particular publications at a price of $0, and a significantly smaller groups of people have a demand for those publications at any price greater than $0.

> The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad.

This just sounds mightily smug to me. People like things that you don’t think they should like, but if only they were as educated as you are, they would share your correct tastes and world view?

Bad journalism is reporting false data, unverified data, misleading statistics, etc.

It’s not about tastes. For example, in subjects requiring data analysis, I don’t see why the thoughts of someone who doesn’t understand math and statistics would be as valid as someone who does.

There’s all sorts of bad journalism. Tabloid and click bait journalism are incredibly popular. When it comes to what’s misleading, false or unverified, that’s a topic open to endless debate. There’s nothing about your tastes or opinions that are universally correct, and to say that if only people were educated properly that they’d have the same tastes and opinions as you is most certainly arrogant and smug.

I didn't want to imply your last paragraph and I'm certainly one of those willing to pay for journalism. My critique lies solely with publishing houses and companies behind journalists that don't keep up with the times. I don't think it's simple either but if we can agree on that I'd suggest it's not as simple as a general "there's free content now, let's screw journalists over" attitude either. In all honesty I feel like journalism and journalists are almost an afterthought when I look at most of the news I'm offered these days and if that's the case why would I blame anybody to take the free option?

> Is it possible that a sufficient number of people aren’t willing to pay for information if it’s available for free with zero friction, and that is why journalism is having a tough time?

While the short answer might be yes, I'm not sure how to argue against that point without whataboutism. The world, and especially how it's people consume information, changed in the last few decades, I don't see these companies adopting, most of them seem to be fine with a senseless defence of a status quo they would never be able to build up today. Business models come and go, an industry as large as mainstream news media can't get their act together and figure out a model that people are willing to pay for. Instead they cripple innovation by lobbying for legislation like the one discussed in the article.

tl;dr: If news outlets let themselves get killed by the inevitable death of print media I just don't see how that's the people's or the internet's fault. They have enough collective resources to come up with an alternative.

You don’t think journalists tried to “get their act together”? This very forum has people copy pasting entire articles from paywalled websites, not to mention the innumerable posters complaining about journalists asking for payment in the first place (I.e. complaining about paywalled websites).

I think it’s false to say “news outlets let themselves get killed”. If it’s that easy to say, then go ahead and put forth a business plan that can succeed even with people copy pasting your text to different websites for free consumption.

> If it’s that easy to say, then go ahead and put forth a business plan that can succeed even with people copy pasting your text to different websites for free consumption.

I think it would be worth to give the same way a try that effectively killed video and music piracy over the last decade. Content delivery across media, across devices, with less friction than it is now to visit some ad infested site or sign up for weird, non-obvious paywalls for each and every single outlet. Maybe give other players a chance, like Apple News or even the here mentioned Google News, and work with them instead of going down in their shadow. You'll always have piracy but if you give people convenience you can still turn a profit, especially on a website like HN copy&pasting articles wouldn't be a thing if people felt it was less ethical than just paying for a good service.

I don't want to suggest that it's easy or that I've got a business plan to save the news industry, I'm merely trying to express my frustration with how they currently handle it (but yes, I feel like at least part of that is self inflicted by the industry).

As for your first point, I'm sure journalists tried. We've even seen some nice initiatives in Germany where they tried to get people to sign up to purely journalist-driven services. Not sure what came out of that tbh. But that brings me back to the thing that my main grievance are not journalists, I honestly admire people that chose this profession, especially those who don't end up rewriting press releases or clickbait headlines for some blog to make a living.

> If you lose revenue because google shows a few sentences of the introduction your content is not worth it to readers

Arguably the very fact that Google finds it worth to display content on the search result proves the contents value. Why show it if it’s worthless ?

I agree on the pricing of subscription, but it doesn’t justify Google acting as a middleman.

It doesn’t have to, any website can opt out - but they don’t. And when they made it opt-in in Germany, the same publishers who pushed for the law, opted in anyway.

Why do you think it is?

Google uses snippets because they lead to more click throughs and more total page views. There are no ads on Google News so Google ONLY makes money when users click through to the publishers' page and are shown ads because, Google's monopoly on adversiting means that most on page ads involve paying Google)

> it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim

I've also been thinking about this, with all the paywalls I've been running into. I don't mind paying for quality news, but I'd prefer to pay one entity for a certain article/month limit for all (or at least most) paywalled news sources. The one entity could distribute my subscription money to the news providers pro rata, according to my consumption.

The current system of paying for one news source doesn't work for me, because I want to read articles from all over. I don't consume enough from one source to justify the subscription cost.

I gather that's how Brave browser and Patreon-like (though not Patreon I don't think) work - but of course the problem is exactly what you hint at:

> for all (or at least most) paywalled news sources

They only work where they work.

The only way I can ever see it happening is with an IETF standard that browsers pick up (perhaps using it as an opportunity to be the one entity you pay, and collect a fee) gradually convincing publishers to support this modern web standard.

Interesting. This probably exists already in one form or another, but it could also be good opportunity for a major startup. "Netflix for news" - premium access to the best articles from the best newspapers and news agencies, with sophisticated A.I. powered recommendation system, custom content subscriptions, instant access wherever you are.

Alternatively, some news organisations should get together and set up an independent non-profit organisation to do that before some corporation gets a monopoly and starts taking a 90% cut while implementing political bias and censorship as a compulsory extra.

This service exists, it is called Blendle.

I signed up to try it, but it really doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for.

The first problem is that they seem to have decided based on my IP that I only want to read news in the Dutch language. No setting to change that. They also seem to act as a portal that I need to go through to read the articles that they are suggesting to me.

There's a search function (only in the app, not on the website), but I'm not sure which news sources it searches. I can find articles from a big Flemish newspaper, but not the ones currently on that newspaper's homepage.

Paying for Blendle also doesn't seem to help me to get past the paywalls of bloomberg or the new york times.

I think it's only available in Netherlands. I checked it out now and I get the same, even though I'm in another country.

Stop breaking the internet how? This only affects newspapers. There was a time when the internet didn’t have newspapers. Maybe it shouldn’t

Honestly I’d rather google stopped with this knowledge base/metadata extraction and focused on search. They’re trying to be star trek but they’re more like a concierge for existing businesses, and they aren’t much help where there isn’t existing capital investment. It’s parasitic.

This isn't about paywalls vs free news, but ad money going to Google rather than content creators.

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