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Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

The title may be slightly confusing. They aren't suspending shipments to customers, they are suspending shipments to Amazon from vendors (Fulfillment by Amazon vendors, who ship to Amazon and then Amazon handles everything from there).

The suspension covers non-essential supplies as mentioned in the title.

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Surprised, but not surprised, that Business Insider would run an ambiguous, panicky headline in a time like this. Imagine if web journalism wasn't funded by clicks and precision of headline/reporting was the metric that mattered.

Their headline, which was probably too long for HN, is entirely accurate.

It would be useful if people stopped blaming the media without verifying first.

Sure, their headline is accurate, but the way it is written creates ambiguity by relegating the factual turn to the end. Headlines are often skimmed and propagated. Unless every viewer reads the headline in full and every aggregator replicates it exactly, the headline may be misleading.

Journalists aim for clarity in communication, an ethos that is infringed on increasingly more as web-only publications live or die off clicks.

I agree that we shouldn't "blame the media", but we can blame Business Insider for playing with ambiguity in this headline's structure.

How would you word it? Other than medical supplies to its warehouses suspending all shipments Amazon is amid coronavirus crisis?

This is absurdly demanding. The headline is clear. The article is clear. But because someone can draw the wrong conclusion you blame the media? Give me a break.

And I'll take All The Downvotes -- this current trend of blaming media for everything is absolute horseshit. Yesterday I watched everyone claim the media caused the run on masks and hand sanitizer...by reporting on the shortage after the fact. And the run on grocery stores...by reporting on the runs after the fact.

People love blaming the messenger. People love believing that correlation=causation.

The media reports that the DJIA dropped = clearly the media made it drop (and not the enormous number of indicators pointing to bad times ahead).

And it would be harmless -- if incredibly stupid -- but in this spirit of blaming the media for everything there exists a vacuum in which actual liars and exploiters fill the void. See: The Trump administration. MAGA. Absolute vile human beings like Limbaugh. This is what "Hurr the media isn't saying what I want in exactly the way I want" creates.

So not only are we not expecting people to read the articles, we have to also expect them not to read to the end of the headline?

If the average reader doesn't even have the reading comprehension and attention span to read to the end of the headline, I don't think any amount of baby fooding of information is going to make any difference.

Imagine if people were willing to pay for journalism that prioritized accuracy over sensationalism.

Which one disappeared first? An audience willing to pay for quality journalism or quality journalism? I suspect quality journalism declined first, and it declined to the point where it made customers skeptical of journalism in general. That then shrunk the audience, and it circled back around again in a continuing cycle.

I am consistently impressed by the rationales people develop for not being willing to pay for the product they say they want.

Yeah, sure, the fact that many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage are all the fault of their readers, the Internet or maybe "capitalism". But not the journalists themselves.

Only on HN (or, I suppose, The_Donald) -- comment claiming that "many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage" (about headline that is 100% accurate) sits high. My comment disagreeing is flagged.

Sad!

The fact that it's a positive feedback cycle doesn't mean you're not partially responsible for making it worse by not paying for news, even if it didn't necessarily start with you. Sometimes you have to pay for it even if it isn't perfect, if you want any hope of making it better.

High-quality and low-quality journalism have always existed, regardless of business model.

The difference is, when told to put their money where their mouths are, people on the internet like to pretend that high-quality journalism doesn't still exist so they can keep their wallets closed.

So far, the only journalism I've found worth paying for is Monocle. Had subscriptions to The Economist and The Information for awhile before canceling them.

What would be nice is a pay per article approach. I find Monocle quality enough for an annual subscription, and sometimes The Economist is worth getting for a weekly here and there.

Also, another thing keeping me from having many subscriptions to different rags is how much information is free online (even things like the HN comments section have a wealth of information).

To summarize your post:

"I should pay to support quality journalism, but since there's stuff free online, I won't, and it will die."

to some extent it's probably a vicious cycle: previously paying eyeballs get drawn away to sensationalism (innately more interesting) over time, journalism funding goes down, less resources to put out journalism, more efforts at sensationalism to get a cut of the eyeballs, to where we are now.

OTOH FT/economist haven't shut down as far as i'm aware. not sure they're bastions of accuracy (or journalism) but pay to play may work for high quality content.

It seems like that will fairly quickly lead to suspended shipments to customers if Amazon doesn't have the inventory.

Changed above. Thanks!

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