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Comment by toddmorey | Hacker News Reader

Been realizing how the global pandemic is exposing what a complete and utter disaster advertising supported journalism has become on the web. It's really now a race to the bottom--even the largest media brands basically exist to make you click fake articles. (It's bad even without considering astroturfing comments, entirely fake news sites, etc.)

Newspapers had their yellow journalism days and have always been adverting supported, but it's never been this bad. The internet solved the information availability problem, now we have a huge trustworthiness / curation problem. My hope is a marked return to subscriptions, the way the NYT has done. I just loathe any hybrid where you subscribe and _still_ get ads. I want to leave that crappy model way behind.

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>but it's never been this bad

I would argue that the true low point of American news media was during the WWI wartime period where good reporting was illegal, and as a result impossible to find even if you sifted through all of the chaff.

Right, the time when the political parties literally owned the newspapers. Now its just the media companies which want favors from the political parties.

Of course, bringing a healthy online-subscription model back into the mainstream is definitely ideal for journalism. Even more than that, I do wish there was a quick/easy/safe way to purchase individual articles (or even whole issues could work if needed) for a few bucks. Back in the old days, if you were curious about a hot running story, you just went to the news-stand and bought a copy, not a whole year's subscription then and there.

The ability to participate à la carte would certainly help paying customers like me.

The problem with a story-by-story payment model is that it incentivizes publishers to focus on the headlines. It's also a bit tricky because people will only click on things that reflect what they want to hear. So even if an article is really well done, if it says something the majority of the population does not want to hear, good journalism will still die.

For an example, consider the Boston Globe's reporting of the child abuse cases in the Catholic Church [1]. There are many who violently disagree with the premise, so much so that they actively refuse to read or inform themselves about it. And you're expecting them to pay for it?

I'm also curious if there are any lessons learned from iTunes / Apple when they first started making individual songs in an album available for sale. Why buy an album of 12-15 songs for 10.99 when you can buy just those two good songs for 99c each? Do those artists still receive more sales? Is the overall effect more income for the music industry, or less?

[1]: http://archive.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/betrayal/for...

One thing which could also help would be a "Netflix for news" given the pain points for payment and economies of scale. The tech scale mixing is beautiful in that way in that big providers and small can both be provided to the end user and revenue apportioned based on usage.

Of course the newspapers have been in need of reform for a long time now on many levels. Not helping is Associated Press recycling of stories across many different papers which leads to trying to compete as distributors instead of content providers. Consolidation of conglomerates seem to have only doubled down on lack of quality.

Apple News+ already exists.

After I read your comment, I checked my Feedly because I have a folder there that contains about 80 active news sources, mostly journalism and news sites covering a broad range of politics and perspectives. The amazing thing about this particular folder is that it seems like every time I open Feedly to check the news, the counter is maxed out at well above 1000 new updates. It takes very little time for stories to accumulate at that level.

What this makes me realise is that so many of these updates are complete unnecessary, blown-up and exaggerated "news" (even when legit) and often just clickbait. What you say is rather depressing when I think about it.

I agree, though sites like CNN do work really hard to make the ads look just like their other articles. It's similar to how advertising on search has become so much less distinct from organic results (if you even get any on the page now).

CNN is now just a distributed chumbox.

They can still have control but it makes them less money. Ironically the ones with more control tend to be less trustworthy in many cases as their sponsor often brings in more bias or effective astroturf.

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