Hacker News Reader

Comment by skewart | Hacker News Reader

What’s more, the NY Times has a strong business interest in convincing advertisers not to advertise on Facebook. I’m a bit skeptical of anything they publish these days about Facebook, Google, and other companies that could potentially threaten their access to clicks, just given their financial incentives to weaken these companies as much as possible.

View on HN

My thoughts exactly, they have a clear conflict of interest when covering this story. Although, to be honest, all of mainstream journalism seems way more biased and blatantly slanted than I recall from 20-30 years ago. Perhaps I am just better at noticing it now?

You are not just better at noticing it. It really is more slanted.

Journalism 20-30 years ago was mostly funded on a subscription model. In this model they work hard to maintain their reputation, so that people will trust them as an accurate source of news.

Journalism today is mostly funded per click. Which means that the most important thing is a headline that grabs people's attention and causes them to click. The incentive is for the most outrageous and attention grabbing headline possible. With no incentive for being accurate - by the time you realize that the article is junk they've been paid and are looking for another sucker.

If you're interested in a book length exposition of how this change in dynamics has changed the news landscape, I recommend https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulato.... The trends that it discusses have played out for another decade since it was written, but played out along the direction that it described.

The NYT operates on an online subscription model, no?

They do, and they therefore have an incentive to do better than other news organizations. But the general media landscape has become more biased and less reliable. Furthermore the fact that the public expects news to be delivered more quickly means that they have less room than they used to to hold a story for fact checking.

The result is that the NYT today is better than CNN is today, but they do not meet the same standard that they did 25 years ago. In fact they might not be better today than CNN was 25 years ago.

But I think the problem is that a lot of news publications have slowly become more and more biased, and they have cultivated specific audiences. Maybe because of the biases of their journalists, maybe because they are trying to cater to the outspoken, who might only be a small minority, maybe for some other reason. Thus the subscription model starts to fall apart when the people who want to support it shrinks, so you still might be engaged in clickbait and ragebait to try and grab people and bring them in to subscribe, or keep the people that like the type of clickbait and ragebait they publish. Unfortunately, you are likely getting more and more of one specific group.

I think this is a losing proposition because as you target a smaller and smaller part of the population, if you step out of line by publishing something that is against their world view, they will unsubscribe and take their money elsewhere. Look at what happened with the Tom Cotton oped in the NYT. The editor that approved that quit because of the outrage, and I wonder how many subscriptions they lost. If you think that oped was horrible, then why not post a rebuttal? Why is the mere act of publishing the opinion of a senator such a crime? I think this shows that the subscription model is not protecting against the degradation of the NYT in quality. If you had a wider user base, and appeal to a wide range of people, you could lose some subscriptions when putting out some controversial article, but it wouldn't cripple you.

Last quarter advertising made up about 27% of their total revenue (digital advertising was 13% of total), according numbers in this recent article - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...

yes, but saying otherwise would hurt the narrative that only tech can critique tech.

How much of a percentage of revenue is that subscription model vs ads, and how does that hold up to the historical split?

i heard somewhere it was 60% subscription 40% ad, though I'm not sure.

Good to see more people calling out the sensationalism and manipulation tactics that publishers deploy...not just the Times either.

I've gotten to a point where if my spidey sense is tingling, I won't even click on link or read the content, the time to reward that behavior has passed.

And not only is that strong business interest, its also mixed with strong political agenda that's pushed on Facebook despite recent pointers* that FB internally moderates in favour of Democrats already.

* https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/12756067933271736...

That's kind of a skepticism conundrum. If media can't be trusted about media...

I mean, I agree with you. They're vested. Even if it wasn't financial, journalists must have an insider's set of opinions about good & evil in the media industry.

Yeah, it is a bit of a conundrum, but I don't think I'd say they can't be trusted entirely. I mean, I doubt they're printing outright lies - unlike some media outlets. I think the bias would creep in more in the fact that they run this story at all (while potentially interesting, it's hardly world-changing news), and also in descriptive words used here and there. As long as one is aware of their inherent motivations I think it's possible to get worthwhile info from their stories on their competitors. Of course, who knows what stories about media they're choosing not to cover.

>the NY Times has a strong business interest in convincing advertisers not to advertise on Facebook.

How so?

For one thing, Facebook competes with the NYT for advertising dollars. If Facebook and Instagram are less appealing places to run adds for a company then maybe that company will spend more of its advertising budget on NYT ads instead.

More broadly though, they have an incentive to weaken companies like Facebook and Google, which are effectively gatekeepers for a lot of traffic to NYT articles. Clicking on an article shared on Facebook, or clicking through to an article in a Google search result are very common ways for people to land on the NYT website. Not only is this traffic valuable to the NYT for ad revenue it's also very valuable for selling subscriptions - people are more likely to subscribe if they have been seeing and reading free articles. I think it's safe to assume the people running the NYT are aware of this dependency on search and social media platforms and are eager to do anything they can to minimize it. I have no idea how much bias, if any, actually creeps into reporting - hopefully it's none! But the business incentives are enough to make me approach any article from almost any media company about Google or FB with a dose of healthy skepticism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com