It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google

> For too long, journalists have given away their stories for free in exchange for distribution by the duopoly.

The news industry does not "give" their stories to Facebook or Google. It allows the placement of links to the stories on those sites. (I use the term "allow" loosely, since in many jurisdictions they do not have the right to restrict in-linking.)

The news industry is free to try to prevent in-linking. The technical capability already exists in the form of robots.txt and the referer header. Although I can tell you right now what will happen. People will read less news, and read more of other stuff that is still distributed on Facebook or Google. They won't stop using Facebook or Google.

Honestly, it would probably be better for the world. People are reading too much news and it is contributing to polarization. Won't help the news industry's bottom line, though. Won't hurt Google or Facebook's.

Towards the end of the post we find out why they want to block news links from Facebook and Google, they are setting up a competing platform.

“That’s why we’re building Forth, a news-first platform that pays journalists for their work and offers the audience concise updates with context -- from the reporters they trust. All revenue generated on Forth is shared with our news partners.

We only allow trusted and credible journalists (vetted by our editorial team) to publish to the platform. It's a one-stop shop for accurate information about what's happening right now.”

Legislative force in Australia is driving this change. The government is at odds with public broadcasters. Initially they excluded them from receiving revenue from linkage. They backtracked, but I fear for the consequence: I believe they will use this to introduce cost saving de-funding of public broadcasting.

Its "be careful what you wish for" stuff.

Also, we have a fight with a union-pension-fund backed news outlet being possibly responsible for (same government) legislative changes to prevent pension funds from investing in news (one word change to require their spend to be for members financial benefit, not just "members benefit" which permitted this investment)

Also Also we have huge dominance of print media and non-public news outlet by "News Ltd" which is Rupert Murdoch which is a cancer on the world of disinterested, bipartisan news (the leader writers and editorial panel of News in Australia are futher to the right than the Koch brothers, and have gone feral on anything even vaguely to the left of Reaganite views of pollution, green energy, public sector finance...) -The pay for links thing, is designed to get money to News Ltd which has suffered massive declines in revenue.

News hoovered up all the small independent newspapers in Australia. Its a public disgrace, of equal dimensions to the predation of news by Google and the Facebooks of the globe.

This is such a hilariously stupid take.

If news companies don't want Facebook and Google to use their content then all they need to do is add a * Disallow to their robots.txt file.

But of course the truth is that they entirely depend on them for traffic.

How does Google or Facebook differ from Reddit? Are the stories so short that the heading contains all relevant info the the full article?

>newsrooms have willingly handed over billions of dollars in ad revenue to the tech giants that threaten their very existence.

As in newspapers are buying ads? Why?

>is the Co-Founder of Forth Wait, so it's an ad for a new news platform? But where is it? How can I use this new platform?

> We only allow trusted and credible journalists (vetted by our editorial team) to publish to the platform.

"Vetted by our editorial team" sounds insanely slow, which will be an excuse when biased Forth staff don't want to approve writers they don't personally like.

Facebook and Google provide more of a benefit to individual news organizations than vice versa. If everyone uses FB / Google already, you’re not doing them a favor by posting your content to those platforms, they’re doing you a favor by allowing more eyes to see the content. Of course in aggregate if all news publishers stopped publishing content then maybe less people would use FB / Google, which could harm them.

Ben Thompson explains more about this in an article here: https://stratechery.com/2020/media-regulators-and-big-tech-i...

It's a tight rope arguing who deserves what when a lot of business are built on this chain of platforms (like a supply chain). News agencies have many channels, probably some of the largest being FB and G (hence this post) and now they're looking to cut out the middle man because they believe it doesn't provide them value and apparently detracts from it. However, note that there's an inversion of power at some point when a platform becomes much bigger than its customers. News agencies will pretty much die out without G and FB (if they are indeed by far the largest channels) because someone will just post the news from their platform onto G and FB obfuscated enough to bypass copyright because people want news on G and FB.

It stopped being about "I want news, oh cool G and FB have it!" And started being about "I read news on G and FB. What is this WSJ you are talking about" a long time ago.

Platform inversion of power taken to its extreme, some might even say perhaps Google and Facebook should demand revenue share from ISPs and computer/mobile manufacturers for incentivizing people to buy plans and devices to get on the internet?

Way back I remember when everyone knew newspapers were dying. Some people thought it was new competition with tv news. Other people thought bullshit sales tactics by newspapers pushed people away.

Then I saw the aggregated news feeds of google. I learnt exactly why journalism was dying. They outright publish known lies. https://twitter.com/DylanByers/status/794617569823064068

Anyone who has ever been in the news will tell you that the news always gets the story wrong. The scale of the news is vast. if you analyze every instance of journalism you will find it's entirely false. Whether or not this is intentional is unclear. Hanlon's razor suggests that journalists are probably just stupid. Which is quite true.

You might ask, why is journalism so bad in the last 10 years? STEM. We have pulled talent out of social sciences leaving the bottom of the barrel in journalism.

It's a trap.

Not for the reader, or Google/Facebook. For Nillium.

No news company that I am aware of has learned how to have both credible editorial oversight and profit in the digital age. It seems that every news source, even the legacy new organizations, have an inherent strong bias, either explicitly in the narrative they espouse, or implicitly in the stories they don't report.

It's maddening.

Nillium touts their editorial board. Who are they? What is their experience? What is their approach to ensuring the news they release is based in facts, with follow up and naming of sources, explores both sides of a discussion and respects the privacy of those in the story? Importantly, do they eschew partisan framing and narratives and truly seek to be unbiased?

I don't get the argument that Facebook and Google are exploiting the news industry. Wouldn't people go to the site afterward? They are only reading the headline on Facebook or maybe a small summarized snippet on Google.

Does the author of this piece believe that Hacker News is exploiting her? Evidently not, as she posted it here. Like news organizations tend to do on Facebook or use AMP on Google.

The obvious result of this will be that news is less accessible and "news" is more accessible. Am I missing something?

Besides the obvious conflicts of interested pointed out a really serious consequence of removing news would be that users would go directly to their news sources and as a result would be in an even bigger/stronger echo chamber.

e: Is there a way to flag a user or domain?

People aren't going to pay for news because the news doesn't provide anything of immediate value for most people. At best, it provides some momentary entertainment. This can be easily replaced by any number of free sources. Mostly it provides negative value in the form of stressing people out about things they have little control over.

In the aggregate, the news does provide value to society (theoretically) by informing the populace about things the government and large corporations are doing. But this value is not immediately useful to an individual.

My own proposal is that the news should have a time-limited paywall. Say, pay to have the news as soon as it's available, then after a day or a week make it freely available to anyone. If knowing about a political scandal or corporate merger is actually important to the day-to-day business of your life, you will probably pay to have access to that information asap. If not, you can learn about it later with plenty of time for it to still inform your voting or consumer decisions.

https://tiltingatwindmills.dev/lets-fix-the-news/

Continuing the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25259370

Ultimately I agree, but this is one hell of a slippery slope with a pit of spikes at the bottom.

Forget Facebook, I won’t defend it.

But I don’t see how google removes revenue from news agencies. They are free to put up pay walls and get deindexed. Or do the hybrid paywall thing that nyt and wsj does where they show up in the searches but people have to login/pay.

The problem is newspapers haven’t figured out how to make people pay online. This isn’t a google problem. It might be a Facebook opportunity/problem though.

From my perspective as a news consumer, the modern newspapers online are too expensive by far. I have a wsj article I want to read. But I’d have to buy a (no doubt hard to cancel) subscription to view it. Ditto the economist - they’re the worst I had a sub and I didn’t want to call them and deal with their hard sell desubscribe, so I had my credit card block them.

If this was the real world, and I saw that interesting wsj article, I’d fork over my $0.25 or $0.50 or whatever for the issue and walk away with it. Rather than entering a lifetime data relationship with some entity that wants to exploit me for more money.

That’s why people don’t pay for news: you can’t on a casual basis.

What the governments need to do is just ban news content from social media, period.

This won’t work. It’s fantastically easy for a low-quality site to summarise paywalled news articles (and it happens already).

Unfortunately newspapers made a massive mistake giving their news away for free in the early 00s. That set a precedent that has been impossible to reverse for all but a few large well-funded papers.

Local journalism has practically evaporated. It wasn’t really because Facebook stole the news. It was because Facebook stole their ad revenue, and the classified pages (a major revenue source for local journalism) have been swallowed by Craigslist and others.

Edit: the decade

> The news industry as a whole needs to come together and demand to be fairly compensated for their contributions.

Society as a whole needs to come together and demand an end to monopoly compensation for shoddy work. End imaginary property laws.

You should just incentivize publishers to use Substack, which actually has the backing and has a good option (publishers can choose to publish for free or by inducing for-profit viewership) and writers don't have to pay. This is a much better option than another no-name entity.