Comment by damnencryption | Hacker News Reader

Comment by damnencryption | Hacker News Reader

I have a simpler explanation for media failure.

Huge job cuts. Many journalists are now doing work of multiple positions in many places especially online media. New York Times has reduced the number of their total editors in the last 10 years for example. Every major online media had layoffs comparable to 10% of their total workforce in the last 5 years. It affects mid level journalists the most so there are more interns now.

Most of the jobs have been concentrated geographically. Whatever people say, environment changes how they act and what they believe in the most, likely to report.

There isn't enough exclusive content. Any big announcement or what rich people say can be read on social media by directly following their account. Why buy a NYT subscription for that?

There are thousands of big YouTubers reading the latest news from NYT to their subscribers and taking NYT's cut if they actually do something exclusive and costly.

News has become an entertainment commodity for people. The vast explosion of content means fewer people are willing to pay for less but greatly researched content compared to more content and noise.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/20/u-s-newsroo...

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...

Did you read the story? NYT newsroom is bigger than ever, it has more cash than ever and has increased it's amount of subscribers several-fold

https://www.statista.com/statistics/192848/revenue-of-the-ne...

It doesn't have more revenue than it did a decade and half ago.

That's mostly losses related to ad revenue. Subscription revenue has increased steadily over the last decade. https://investors.nytco.com/news-and-events/press-releases/n...

That hasn't come close to replacing lost ad revenue.

In 2000, total revenue was $3B+ [1]

In 2019, total revenue was $1.8B [2]

[1] https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2020/06/2000_Annual_Report.... [2] https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2020/04/Final-2019-Annual-R...

Helps explain why they dislike Google/FB so much.

While the newspaper does run ads, NYT's ad revenue is in large part driven by their 'native advertising' business (T Brand Studio).

It's a fundamentally different approach to advertising compared to what Google and FB are doing.

I think the problem is more that it's harder to quantify a carefully crafted brand campaign, and easier for middle-managers to look at a chart of click-through return rates and make decisions based on that.

I see this as the ability to test and measure beating out a better method that is less quantifiable. Basically the same thinking that leaves us with policies like No Child Left Behind where education has shifted from learning to test taking yet people are still under the impression they are the same thing.

It's NewsCorp that hates Google.

It will be interesting to see how they do once Trump is gone. As the article mentions, Trump's presidency was very good for their subscriptions.

I often wonder if they suspected a Trump victory would boost their subscriptions and let that influence their behavior in 2016.

While that seems intiutive that NYT is being sidestepped by free sources, they are in fact doing very well as a business and reporting record profits. They have no debt, in fact through cash on hand and lines of credit they have access to over a billion dollars. They bought out their headquarters in midtown manhattan. Their stock price is near all time highs.

People pay for quality. It's why people still pay for services like HBO instead of watching free content on youtube.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-t...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/192848/revenue-of-the-ne...

That's only for digital which is well expected to grow. They still have to catch up to their historical revenue.

> instead of watching free content on youtube

or in addition to

I agree with your analysis. Watching the last season of The Wire it really struck home the incentive structures, and how News organizations are ultimately businesses that are beholden to financial interests.

A business that unfortunately has lost its viability, which is how we've ended up in this current predicament.

Yup.

A buddy was a photographer for a very well respected newspaper. In a grand cost-cutting measure the newspaper simply bought all the reporters iPhones and fired all the photographers.

The reporters are now expected to take photos for their own articles "Because iPhones make that really easy".

That was the Chicago Sun-Times in 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-su...

At Tronc, they had an all hands shortly after buying the NY Daily News. A staffer on the call said “we’re ‘New York’s picture paper’ but our equipment is all old. When can we get new cameras?” On the call, the execs said NYDN is losing money, so it will have to get profitable first. Then a few months later, they fired all photographers and social media people.

https://petapixel.com/2018/07/26/ny-daily-news-cuts-all-phot...

Did you read the article? The Times now employs more people than it ever has and is doing better financially than ever.

Yes I did. It didn't mention anything about more employees (mostly policies to encourage more POC). Although it does mention the expansion of their digital media. That seems fine to me but what about total employees from both digital and paper?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times...

From the article:

"It has hired hundreds of journalists to staff a newsroom that is now 1,700 people strong — bigger than ever. Its stock has risen fourfold since Trump took office, and the Times has consolidated its Trump bump into a business that includes Serial Productions, the podcast juggernaut; Audm, the audio-translation business; and a TV show based on the Times series “Modern Love” that was filming its second season this summer, until a COVID-19 false positive on-set forced it to halt shooting. More than a million people subscribe to its Crossword and Cooking apps alone, and the company has been able to weather the pandemic in part because it now has more cash on hand—$800 million—than at any point in its history."

You obviously didn't read it very carefully then.

NYT revenues were over $3 billion/year in 2005. It’s under $2 billion now: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times...

It occurs to me that as we become more and more connected globally the less there will be a need for the media. Hear me out: let’s take this to the limit of our ability to communicate. Let’s say that we develop a direct interface between the brain and the Internet via some sort of implantable chip. Any information you want to know becomes instantly knowable in your brain. Moreover, you can request info about certain topics a la a curated Twitter feed. If an earthquake happens in Japan or new Oscar nominees are announced, you know about it soon as you think about it or think about “I wonder what has been happening today?” And of course all the information is gathered in aggregators that automatically verify that multiple people did witness the particular event to verify authenticity.

Under these conditions it becomes unnecessary for someone to do the basic legwork of seeking out stories and curating them, no? Interpreting the stories of course does require someone’s time and energy, but for example there would be no need to go and investigate what is happening with the earthquake rescue because the first responders could effortlessly share their thoughts/experiences, the person in charge could instantly add their voice to the info stream telling everyone what the clean up/rescue plans are, etc. What role would a newspaper play in a setup like this?

Now, we aren’t there yet. We are not a hive mind and sharing what we are witnessing takes time and effort. A first responder isn’t going to stop and tweet about what’s going on. And the even bigger hurdle is consuming this much information. That problem hasn’t been solved yet. But we are closer to that than not: Twitter and Reddit allow regular people to share what they are seeing: earthquakes, protests, awards ceremonies, graduations. Curation will only get better. Whereas before only the select few had a voice because it was expensive, now almost anyone can broadcast to a huge swath of humanity.

> And of course all the information is gathered in aggregators that automatically verify that multiple people did witness the particular event to verify authenticity.

In other words, "and then a miracle occurs". I don't see how this requirement could ever be met in general. For particular cases (like first responders at an emergency being able to directly feed what they are seeing and doing), perhaps.

> aggregators that automatically verify that multiple people did witness the particular event to verify authenticity.

The name of this aggregator is journalist.

I think it could be quite simple actually. If Paxos can do it, so can we :). I also definitely got a chuckle that you thought this part was impossible, not the brain interface.

People disagree very strongly about what they witness.

Take - for example - the question:

"Did Trump ask the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton in 2016".

The direct quote is this:

"Russia, if you are listening I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."[1].

That led to "Russian officials began to target email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices “on or around” the same day Donald Trump called on Russia to find emails that were missing from her personal server"[2]

Turns out that people disagree very strongly about what that means[3].

[1] https://youtu.be/-b71f2eYdTc?t=20

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-asked-russia-to-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029828

> I also definitely got a chuckle that you thought this part was impossible, not the brain interface.

That's because brain interfaces in the same general category already exist. Much less sophisticated, of course, but as the saying goes, that's just an implementation detail. :-)

I'm dying to know what you think is close.

Most of the big successes have been involved "reading" brain signals and using them to control things like the modular prosthetic limb or speech synthesis.

In contrast, it seems like most of the "write" stuff has been comparatively crude (e.g., phosphenes in visual areas), though the somatosensory stuff (also for the modular limb) is pretty neat. Have I missed something?

giving everyone a platform is a noble goal from some perspectives, but is it also what makes up the worse parts of platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube. suddenly every crackpot and grifter has been given room to spread their garbage opinions and views. just look at the massive disinformation and radicalization pipelines that have popped up. letting people beam info right into their heads would only make this issue worse.

I'm am not trying to say gatekeeping information platforms would solve this or is even morally correct - I am just trying to demonstrate the downsides of such a system that lets the floodgates open to content creation with lax moderation. if you want some semblance of truth and accuracy in the media people consume, it doesn't hurt to have some bounds on what is an acceptable source of news (again with caveats)

I don’t think there is anything noble about this setup. It would be incredibly messy and lead to more crap like what we just went through with having no leadership in the US whatsoever. It would likely be the beginning of the end of us, if climate change doesn’t get us first.

I imagine that having some sort of reputation system might eventually be the answer. After all “is john@example.com a liar?” would also be instantly accessible information. But again we know there are lots of powerfully people today who are dishonest and yet there is little consequence for them because enough people like the lies to prop them up. I don’t see that changing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com