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Comment by cleandreams | Hacker News Reader

I subscribe to the paper version of my local paper because it is so much easier to actually get information from. It's so well designed. I think the reason people have gravitated to online news is herd mentality. What I like about paper news: my focus is more under my control. I can evaluate and skim whole articles at once. I am not constrained by what if visible in the window. Also, no distractions. Every time I open my computer or phone I am waylaid by distractions. I am a software / AI engineer and I think we have created a dystopia.

One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.

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Yea, pretty much 100% the web is destroying news. Everyone wants a free ad supported product now and the only way that model works is if you get enough page views. So news websites have to prioritize content that generates views, rather than good reporting. Which is slowly killing journalism.

This has always been the case in physical news as well. You live and die by your readership (views). Real money always came from ads.

Yeah, but the market effect is very different when readers view articles individually verse having to buy the entire paper.

If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.

With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks.

This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.

> If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.

This also depends on how much competition you have. If there are maybe half a dozen competing newspapers, outrageous gossipy headlines and perhaps the promise of a nude woman on page 3 will sell an entire newspaper to a specific target market towards which you can tailor your advertising. Another newspaper can make lots of money by targeting a different market segment.

This is how clickbait works, too. Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Brietbart, and the Daily Mail could have all been paper newspapers that someone would buy in a competitive enough newspaper market. One of them is!

I'm torn because unbundling also allows for niche publications to get the readers who are interested in reading a few articles but not enough to pay for a full subscription to a publication they may or may not like. I guess another solution to that would be the heavily-discounted "intro" period offer or x-free articles per month. For me there are a few magazines I enjoy reading the occasional article from but don't want to pay for a subscription because the costs would quickly get out of hand.

But I acknowledge that paying per article could hurt the "subsidies" within a paper, for example the revenue from sports section readers helping pay for investigative journalism, leading to a race to the bottom as you point out.

This is ignores that when a niche is saturated, you have to do something different to avoid losing to the strongest competitor.

> Real money always came from ads

This could still be the case, but it should work more like craigslist.

Craigslist has completely dominated the old market for classified ads, and it did it without having to keep a vestigial newspaper attached.

Back in the day a very significant percentage of revenue came from the classifieds.

Craigslist killed the newspaper.

Yes, the advertising section.

I have heard this. Does anyone have numbers to back it up?

The San Jose Mercury-News used to be hugely profitable for exactly this reason. They had the biggest classified section of any paper in the country. The Monday edition was maybe 4X as thick as its modern equivalent.

This is a massive oversimplification.

The old paper journalism business "prioritize[d] content that generates views, rather than good reporting" all the time. It was called "yellow journalism", it incited the Spanish-American War, and it was the business model of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In other words, if you are an excellent journalist, you get a prize named after the guy who founded and ran the Gilded Age equivalent of Buzzfeed.

Each US city used to have maybe dozens of newspapers of varying quality and bias. (This is similar to the UK newspaper landscape--in fact, the lower end of that landscape includes the Daily Mail, which translated its tabloid journalism model rather seamlessly to the era of clickbait.) What started killing print journalism was radio and later TV journalism, which were far less substantial (because they lacked the information density of the written word) but far more appealing (because of the ease of consumption and the stimulation of sound and video). This is what culled the vast newspaper markets down to the city-wide monopoly or duopoly system. And because the remaining newspaper readership consisted of the more literate and invested members of the population, print journalism briefly had more journalistic value.

Then cable news disrupted the broadcast networks, talk radio disrupted the editorial oligopoly of the major newspapers and TV news, and finally the internet broke the whole thing wide open. Including the glorious period of time when "blogs" were considered a serious threat to "legitimate journalism".

In your theory, why did literate and engaged people abandon print journalism for Internet but not TV?

Because this theory gets the timeline right but the value judgements wrong. The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away.

People who were previously “engaged” with local newspapers are now the commenters on news sites.

> The people who stuck with print were people who preferred to read the news rather than watch or listen. You can call this “literate” but the trope that reading is some higher form of media needs to go away.

Sorry, but it is. Functionally literate people can read and comprehend many more WPM than are typical for human speech. As a consequence, written media are fundamentally capable of much higher information density than visual or audial media, with the exception of certain types of visual or spacial information which can still be printed or included with the written word.

And that would matter if the goal of writing was maximizing information density. Surely you wouldn't say that gzip is the highest form of the written word.

This is a good point. Communication, across various mediums, propogates ideas. Information density is interesting, but this style of thinking overlooks persuasive impact.

I don't watch videos online if I can help it, because they're too slow. If I do, because there's no transcript available, I crank up the speed to x2 or x4 to mitigate the frustration.

Any "persuasive" impact from video is lost on me because I'm bored and frustrated after about 30s of watching (and that's after skipping the first 30s of "welcome to my youtube channel, today we'll be doing what the title says we'll be doing, as you know because that's why you clicked on this link" waste of time).

That’s such a fatuous analogy that I have to conclude that you are deliberately missing the point.

IIRC, media studies consistently showed a weak positive effect of print news (the more consumed, the more people learned) on knowledge of current events and a stronger negative impact of both radio and TV news (the more of such “news” was consumed, the less people knew about actual events.) The idea that print is, in practice, a higher form of media with regard to news is pretty strongly substantiated.

Audio and, especially video are great for conveying emotion, but except for very specific kinds of information aren't a great vehicle for conveying complex information.

> The idea that print is, in practice, a higher form of media

Is proven by causation, not correlation. There's a difference between "the consumption of media" and "media consumers".

Correlation when controlled for other explanatory factors is as strong as evidence gets for causation; real “proof” of material facts is never incontrovertible the way mathematical/logical proofs can be.

Because the written word is more sophisticated and information-dense than the spoken word, which means print had to be displaced by another written medium.

Plus Craigslist.

Reuters and the WSJ are old proofs that people ARE willing to just pay for quality news.

Note also that national news is fine; it's local news that's in trouble.

I just use an RSS reader.

This. At a minimum RSS keeps you off bloated sites for headline/article browsing. Some sites like Arstechnica give you full text RSS feeds with their subscription.

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