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Comment by wrsh07 | Hacker News Reader

I tend to think that the business model of a cable news room is pretty fundamentally broken.

Insofar as you value investigative journalism or pieces with some depth, you will be disappointed by organizations that host ESPN style shout fests, but they're produced for exactly the same reasons.

It's cheap to make garbage filler content. When you see that all of the channels are deeply flawed, it's because they're incentivized to be flawed in exactly the way that they are.

Curiously, John Oliver (say what you will about his biases) has found a way to fund real investigative journalism. This marks an interesting counterpoint to the 24 hour news room which extends what comedy central (daily show etc) had begun

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John Oliver is also focused on a sub-segment and is also at least misleading at times.

There are no sources of information that are credible with more than 45-55% of US Gen pop. We really need a source that can at least be relied upon as accurate source by 70-80% to avoid total collapse of democratic order in US.

Find a business model that works for independent journalism, then.

Advertising pays more with more controversy. Patronage (having a rich person pay the journalists) comes with strings. Consumers appear willing to pay for journalism only when it supports their political beliefs.

Yeah, the solution isn't to find a single fount of truth we can all sup from. We are where we are because that mid-century model was fragile. Not to mention it allowed Americans to overlook any wrongs that didn't blip on the radar of the NorthEast intellectual hegemony.

The real solution is a healthy ecosystem of independent news.

We're trying! https://blog.nillium.com/why-were-building-forth/

Interesting! What business model are you going for?

Think of it sort of Twitter-meets-Substack.

It's still advertising/freemium, but with some big differences. We syndicate out the internal updates that reporters are already writing within their own newsroom, so while they work on their current formats, we just piggyback off of existing work. Then we revenue share from those ads/subscriptions back to support the reporters and news orgs doing the reporting.

There is money being spent on ads now, its just going to the wrong people. We're trying to fix that -- and align the incentives back so that everyone -- readers, reporters, us -- succeeds when we have good journalism, not clickbait.

That's interesting. I used to run a newspaper a couple of years ago and have spent a lot of time thinking about business models for it since.

The main problem with advertising is it monetises engagement, which means that it massively favours controversial or emotional content. How are you going to avoid this? If you have a good journalist writing great journalism, and a hack writing clickbait, how are you going to avoid the hack getting more ad revenue?

Because we aren't monetizing the views, per se.

Since we're posting _updates_ rather than full articles, it's more like Twitter. We can display ads in between the updates -- something print newspapers used to (and still) do all the time. Then we just take the revenue share from any specific market, divide it up by the number of updates contributed, and go from there. It's not perfect, and we may still want to tweak, but the hope is that we can then incentivize lots of hard news reporting, and not "5 celebrities without makeup."

OK, yeah I get it. That's interesting, I look forward to seeing how it pans out :) good luck with it :)

I signed up for Forth - you guys need to learn that zip codes only work in the USA, us foreigners have different things ;)

Nillium looks really interesting, too. I get the need. Slack is utterly useless for this, yet seems to be the default for some reason.

Thank you!

We're launching in the US initially -- but I get the issue. Still, any newsrooms outside of the US who might be interested should still get in touch. https://www.nillium.com/schedule-demo/

> upon as accurate source by 70-80% to avoid total collapse of democratic order in US.

The current news stations are reporting from the same, truthful, reality. It's the spin, slant, and selective omission when they're presented that is different. Having some true source, that dryly presents this reality, will be devoid of these biases, but they'll still picked up and presented in an almost certainly more entertaining, vastly more popular, biased way as they are now.

I think the problem is, and always has been, that people fundamentally prefer similar viewpoint rather than raw presentation of facts. I also assume this is why there are exactly 0, for profit, widely watched, media outlets that present information in this relatively boring way.

> There are no sources of information that are credible with more than 45-55% of US Gen pop

I completely agree

I also agree that John Oliver has a liberal bias! What I don't think, however, is that his bias is required by his business model.

(Curiously, as we discuss the daily show hosts, my very conservative parents both really like Trevor Noah. However, I don't think comedy central is to be our information salvation)

John Oliver? are you kidding me? he purposely takes things out of context, cartoonizes and dehumanizes the opposition, uses comedy as a shield to make substantial counter points, etc etc. His goal is less about engagement (like a news media) and more abut driving a deeper wedge between people.

John Oliver is a curse upon humanity, he makes this world worse.

“A curse upon humanity”? Aren’t you getting a bit carried away? You may not like the contents of the show but fact is he presents a lot of really complex issues in an easily digestible, shareable format, for people who only follow the 24/7 (shallow) news cycle and get their understanding from sound bites. Not to mention the hyperbole of “all of humanity” - his audience is not even all of America :)

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