Hacker News Reader

Comment by h0nd | Hacker News Reader

What is news?

Does facebook publish news? I am on facebook for 13 years and I can not remember seeing any news on facebook. Ok, there are people sharing links to news articles (and facebook makes a preview containing title, image, and maybe parts of the lead). There might be people copy-pasting the text of a whole article into facebook, but that is definitely not the default situation. Overall, in order to receive news, I am forced to leave facebook (also applies to google)

I just dont get it. In my opinion the news creators should be grateful to facebook (or google etc.), bringing them interested visitors, potential customers. Shouldn't facebook rather be paid for that instead of convicted?

The same applies to google, a search engine. Why would a news creator NOT desire to be found in the internet in order to attract visitors? The news creators I know, they are that keen on gaining attraction: they even give the full content of pay-walled articles to google (and therefore to everybody) in order to be found.

If they dont want to be found and listed, there are ways to do so.

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> What is news?

That's a good question. A slightly different question that might help you to understand what is happening in Australia with this legislation is "What was news?"

Facebook and Google between them receive more than 80% of all digital advertising dollars spent in Australia. [1]

This advertising revenue used to be known as "rivers of gold" when it flowed 80% to newspapers and television, in the decades before the internet existed. In those days, the advertising business was coupled to journalism, because journalism is how media businesses got their product into peoples homes and living rooms every day.

20 odd years ago, the Australian newspaper business began to be hollowed out by new competitors on the internet, such as Seek.com.au for job ads, Domain.com.au for property ads, carsales.com.au for automobile ads, eBay.com.au for the rest of the classified ads, and google and yahoo for display ads. The dozens of pages that used to make up classified ads in newspapers disappeared. As the rivers of gold dried up, the number of journalists employed in Australia declined dramatically.

Whilst you are correct that Facebook and Google don't actually publish news, they do receive the rivers of gold in advertising revenue that once funded journalists wages. This new legislation pretends to redress the imbalance that lead to the decline in journalism by diverting advertising revenue back to the old man who owns most of the newspapers in Australia. [2]

The old man's business doesn't employ half the number of journalists as it did twenty years ago, and the new legislation doesn't require him to hire any more.

[1] https://www.adnews.com.au/news/chart-google-and-facebook-s-s...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/20/very-australia...

I think that's a terrible argument.

Auto makers shouldn't have to pay a tribute to horse stables for putting them out of business. Refrigerator makers shouldn't have to pay a tribute to ice diggers. Uber shouldn't be required to pay a tax to licensed Taxis. E-learning sites shouldn't have to pay a tax to school tutors.

No business is entitled to a comfortable monopoly. The idea that Google should pay a tribute to traditional media where the amount is entirely at the discretion of media giants because the internet can do everything the old press did better just serves to maintain entrenched old interests.

I don't think the comment you replied to is arguing in favor of Australia's attempts to get Google/FB to pay the media companies

The comment author appears to be using the Govs argument in an attempt to facilitate debate, even though they themselves don't personally hold the position. In the "debate, not argument" school this is a good thing because it lets us move the debate forward in good faith. Likewise, the response is to the argument, not the person.

The assumption behind all of your examples is that the new version is a better replacement for the old version. However, social media sites and search engines typically do not do their own journalism. They provide an effective mechanism for distributing information, but that mechanism adds no value until there is some information worth distributing.

So, how much of the reward from people who ultimately receive and benefit from that information should be due to those who did the work to generate it, and how much should be due to those providing distribution services?

Historically, being the middleman in these situations has been very lucrative. Most book publishers still take huge cuts while authors receive only a tiny fraction of the cover price from each sale. It's a similar story for traditional record labels, film production companies, academic journals and so on.

The Internet has been a great equaliser when it comes to distribution of good quality content, allowing creators to reach their audiences more directly than ever before. The Internet has also shown how much easier it is for potentially interested consumers of new content to find it when it's available in well-known places, which shows that big marketplaces for content do still have value. The question here is really about balance, and whether middleman organisations should still be able to keep as much of the pie as they used to.

They shouldn't have to, but in West there is something called Corporate Socialism. I find it ironic that the Liberal Government which is a center-right political party enables this.

In my opinion, news media has been dead in Australia for a long time, which has done a terrible disservice to the Australian public. It time to drop the dead weight.

It's also ironic that the center-right government is picking which projects to fund in order to reduce carbon emissions, instead of a market-based emissions trading scheme

The idea that "centre right" has anything to do with economic policy preferences is a bit dated by now. "Centre right" means "ignore traditional values; be rude; promote the policies of large businesses which may not be profitable but at least have wads of cash to invest in lobbying". Perhaps that is an economic policy ("For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away") - but it is not an economic policy based on argument, but rather, might makes right.

I don’t think this is an argument. IT seems more like a quiet listing of the circumstances and a clear position on how its for the benefit of Rupert Murdoch, in other words corruption dressed up nicely.

Your argument doesn’t apply. Carmakers supplanted horses: that’s their objective. Consider the societal positive externalities that commercial news journalism has in society (yeah, I’d rather we had non-commercial news journalism too, but Google isn’t non-profit either).

Google and Facebook aren’t supplanting journalism - they benefit from it: while responsible citizens like you and me may prefer to read a news article rather than skim the headline or article preview and post a take on our timelines - I can assure you the majority of the “news”-consuming public definitely prefers the latter.

Yes, I’m fully aware AUS’ draft laws were Establishment (read: Murdoch) scummy bollocks, but we need to come to a reckoning of the need for a self-sufficient journalistic estate. For all the clickbait that Buzzfeed posts - they use the profits from that to fund real legitimate investigative reporting - that certainly isn’t cheap to run - and only profitable if it results in some politician getting fired. I’m arguing that it’s sucks that idealistic reporters and fact-finders have to sell shit (and shit is the word) to the public to support the good they do. I don’t think bowing, unquestionably, to the altar of the free-market is in any of our long-term interests.

There’s a reason I still pay my UK TV License fee despite being non-resident: quality-journalism is worth tenfold what we pay for it (well, that, and so I don’t feel guilty when I torrent new episodes of QI...)

> Consider the societal positive externalities that commercial news journalism has in society

Maybe I'm biased by the past ten years, but from where I'm sitting commercial news "journalism" has been mostly negative externalities, corrupting democracies in all sorts of ways while misinforming the public about many other things (the news stories I have personal knowledge of have all been grossly misleading).

If journalism is important, maybe the winning strategy is to have it be funded by taxpayers who have some control over what journalism exists. Because I wouldn't exactly call Murdoch's empire "good journalism" and that is where the "river of gold" would flow towards in this case.

"Journalism used to be funded by ads, ads are now being spent on Google/Facebook, therefore Google/Facebook must fund journalism" is bogus, IMO.

I was going to post a similar reply, but the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure that we're going to get the old sense of journalism back. I'm not sure what the future is, but I don't think it will look like the past.

> Google and Facebook aren’t supplanting journalism - they benefit from it: while responsible citizens like you and me may prefer to read a news article rather than skim the headline or article preview and post a take on our timelines - I can assure you the majority of the “news”-consuming public definitely prefers the latter.

Google and Facebook are, for the reason you point out at the end: people only read the headlines. You never actually leave Facebook or Google. Facebook and Google are your source of news. We've just accepted that "news" translates to "headlines republished on Google or Facebook". We're having an existential crisis in journalism because Google and Facebook are supplanting the news.

More than all of that, though, is that I don't think people actually care about the news anymore, or the news of old anymore. There's not enough demand for balanced investigative journalism anymore. People are pretty happy with the status quo of grassroots efforts and extremely hyperbolic reporting (on both sides, it's not a partisan effort). I strongly suspect that if I asked 100 people to pick their favorite newspaper or news program and then asked them how they decided, I would get 0 responses that say "because I looked into it and they have the shortest record of inaccurate reporting".

Or maybe I'm just getting jaded as I get older.

Journalism is going to have to fundamentally change. We can legislate revenue to these organizations, but that's not going to force people to read them. Which is the root issue in many ways; people aren't reading them. The Fourth Estate is still dead if they exist but nobody pays attention.

We need a new way to keep people informed. Something that can pull people's attention like clickbait, but with a better quality of information. Perhaps if we can figure out a way to film news events in VR, that will have enough novelty to bring people back for a while. News about rocket strikes in Syria would be a lot more attention-grabbing if the news could make you appear to actually be in the street when the rocket strikes. Although I guess then we have to deal with the fallout of that; not to be a luddite but I have to wonder how close we can get to actually putting people in violent situations before it starts having similar effects to actually having been there.

I strongly disagree as I personally flat out avoid the news. It’s simply not relevant that some school shooting happened somewhere yesterday or some pundits got upset over latest issue.

As far as the general public is concerned newspapers etc where and are simply another form of entertainment. As such, cat videos are just as much competition as whatever a famous person did yesterday. Becoming informed the week before an election is one thing, getting sucked in a year+ from an election is a waste.

Now direct sources like the National Weather Service and CDC are useful. However, channel X news isn’t funding that, tax payers are.

PS: I suspect many will have a strong options that I am wrong, but please post an objective justification for your viewpoint.

Punditry isn't news. It's editorializing.

As for shootings or other things that are news, they are critical for a functioning democracy. What's happening around you should be informing your decisions come election day.

> What's happening around you should be informing your decisions come election day.

Should it? Isn't that how we got into this mess where every single publication and topic is politicized? There's no chance this isn't why public trust in media is dropping aggressively.

Your proposed alternate is to ignore information to vote, which seem obviously worse?

Personally, no. You can easily look up actual crime statistics for example and become informed, watching the news doesn’t make you actually informed about anything particularly relevant.

Put another way, the news cycle is a thin slice of time and news organizations filter things based on what’s important to them in the moment. A mass shooting for example might only make the news because it happened to follow some other even larger mass shooting.

Reporting on shootings (and other things) is also punditry. There's an editorial decision being made about what deaths are important to report and what deaths are not.

If I was shot to death for no good reason of course I’d want people to tell other people about it so they can do something to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Bias is everywhere - but there is still a regression-to-mean for self-interest via societal progress.

That’s why we collect crime statistics and do police investigations etc. If I specifically get shot it’s only really relevant in a wider context or to people who know me. Having 1 million people hear about my death to then forget about it by next week isn’t really relevant to anyone. Meanwhile my friends don’t need to hear about it on the news.

The subtext of my reply was that I was advocating for gun control legislation. There won't be popular support for GC without the news media reporting on unnecessary deaths that could have been prevented with adequate GC.

Plenty of ways to influence popular option without relying on news organizations.

If you avoid the news you should have been happy with Facebook being forbidden from linking to news.

If the news is just "entertainment", why should Facebook get to use it for free?

I'm not the GP but I personally was happy with Facebook's decision to ban links to news.

You do not avoid the news, you are on Hacker News right now commenting on a news story.

>societal positive externalities

This argument walks on a very thin ice. In imaginary world journalists are accurate, and trurhful, and therefore societally positive, and should be exempted from normal market. In real empirically observed world journalists produce more inaccurate, and biased information then anything else. Also, it seems to be built around logical fallacy that we get news because of media, and if these poor guys will not get more coins we will be left uninformed. In fact, they are serving naturally existing demand (we are social animals) as any usual business does. With the internet competition increased, and this leads smaller profits, and some journalists being laid off. Which is ok. Neither of this creates any real societal dangers in a way which media biz tries to present it.

> In real empirically observed world journalists produce more inaccurate, and biased information then anything else.

That is just not true. If I go to google news right now the top story is Tiger Woods was in a crash. How is that inaccurate or biased? You're on Hacker News right now because you get some value out of the work of journalists. The exaggerated ideological attack on "the media" is what is inaccurate and biased.

Sorry, you cannot take one example to prove me wrong as I didn't make claims about all reporting.

Btw, you cannot be sure it's accurate unless it's your field - you may like to google for Knoll's law.

I worked in media-related project, and have very clear understanding how things constantly getting warped for clickbaiteness, and to fit main audience tastes.

>The ideological exagerated attack

You're projecting here. I mentioned no ideological labels, and made no distinction on that grounds. I wrote about business incentives essentially. I'm also not sure if my view that media industry is not exceptional among other industries constitute an "attack" in any reasonable meaning of the word.

Weird, I've always heard it called Gell Mann amnesia, not Knoll's law. Anyway, I think it's bullshit. I'm in tech and read tech news and most of the stuff I've read where I had personal experience has been accurate. Journalists generally are just people trying to do their jobs within the constraints they are given. The attacks on the media are ideologically driven by people that want to impose their view of the world on everyone else and don't want journalists ruining that.

>Journalists generally are just people trying to do their jobs within the constraints they are given.

And this is exactly what I wrote about.

>impose their view of the world on everyone else and don't want journalists ruining that

This assumes that journalists are not like us humans, and never want to impose their views. And never work for people who want to impose their views, of course. And their incentives/constraints never push them to publish incorrect, or doctored stuff.

> No business is entitled to a comfortable monopoly. The idea that Google should pay a tribute to traditional media where the amount is entirely at the discretion of media giants because the internet can do everything the old press did better just serves to maintain entrenched old interests.

That's a completely false dichotomy. It's not "the internet" that's benefitting from ad spent, but only Fb and Google, while everyone else goes bankrupt. And if there's a "comfortable monopoly" and "media giant", then it's Google and Fb, not the other way around. The AU case is special, though, because of the media concentration in a single hand.

I wish I could find this quote, but paraphrasing:

"There exists a curious belief that because a business has always made money a certain way, that it is somehow entitled to continue doing so, regardless of the changes in the market. This curious belief however is not borne of any specific law, rule, regulation or principle."

Redress what imbalance? News publications are entitled to a certain portion of add spend? That's news to me.

Why don't the news outlet simply build their own search engines and social medias? If they don't like the existing ones they are free to compete.

Google sure didn't get a "tax on Yahoo" law, Facebook didn't get legislators to force MySpace to share their revenue with them.

I imagine Google will welcome competitors as well as Microsoft welcomed competitors in the 90s, buying out anything that might divert revenue

> The old man's business doesn't employ half the number of journalists as it did twenty years ago, and the new legislation doesn't require him to hire any more.

Rest assured, he won't be hiring any more. These are the figures:

- news.com.au publishing (newspaper) revenues in 2019-2020: $1B. [0]

- Amount Google is reportedly paying news.com.au: $30m/year. [1]

- news.com.au decrease in revenue from 2019 to 2019: $119m. [0]

I'm not sure what the legislation is meant to be achieving, but with numbers like that the one thing you can be absolutely sure it won't be doing is saving newspapers, or journalists.

[0] https://newscorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/news-corp-20...

[1] https://theconversation.com/why-google-is-now-funnelling-mil...

I think you've got a much better grip on it than the news publishers.

Just to back that up with evidence as to who gets value from news links on FB. When FB blocked news links, the traffic to AU news sites dropped by from 7% to 9% (according to some estimates), directly affecting their ad businesses. The impact on FB was some bad PR.

I wouldn't call it bad PR to anyone who doesn't have vapor for brains. For examples of said vapor brains see Australian PMs.

Not sure about FB as I'm not a FB user. But for Google that's was not the case long time ago. In the past Google was sending visitors to the source link/original location but that practice now becomes showing the visitor a digest by default and diminished the original link in small grey text and thus most visitor can hardly spot the original link and and the page visiting the original site deserves is not going to happen any more.

How does such a digest look like? Does it allow to read news articles without leaving google?

> In my opinion the news creators should be grateful to facebook (or google etc.), bringing them interested visitors, potential customers.

I'm not a fan of Australia's policy in the least. But I understand why they made it and your comment is about as misguided as Australia's policy.

Yes, publishers benefit greatly from Facebook.

Facebook also benefits greatly from publishers and content providers content. Facebook is the forum, the news and articles people link is a good chunk of what draws people in to Facebook. If it wasn't for outside media, people would quickly blow through the pictures of their friends and family and be off the platform.

Baby pictures don't foster long debate and engagement, people look at them and move on. It's the media (aka news) which causes engagement (and debate). Engagement is where Facebook makes their money.

So Facebook needs the media, the media needs Facebook, no problem right?

Well not quite. The problem is, while they both "need" each other, there is a lot of competition for news, and Facebook is a monopoly. The end result is Facebook (and Google) sucks all the profit out of the room.

As I mentioned initially, Australia's policy is crappy. But the current situation isn't sustainable either.

How does Facebook have a monopoly over news discussion? Isn't that what we're doing here? And reddit, and twitter?

Where does the insane fallacy that "anything which uses your input in anyway entitles to 100% of the profits or else it is automatically theft" come from anyway? It is recognized as absurd to try to sue TV guide for listing your shows name yet it is the right thing to do with references towards news stories?

I’m not even sure how this post relates to what I said.

I didn’t suggest anyone was entitled to anything.

because most people dont consume news, they consume headlines

and if you only read the headline, whoever created the content does not get the ad revenue , customer engagement or any other benefit for having created the content

Well then let's start talking about headlines, not news. What is the value of a headline?

This seems to be the crux of the issue to me.

Merely linking to another site is clearly not something that should incur any responsibility or financial liability. Breaking this breaks the Web.

If most of the value in news reporting is truly in the headline/lede/photo, then there is an argument that linking to a news site but also scraping that content from them to display a much more detailed preview with the link is something that should be compensated. However, there are a couple of problems with this argument.

The first problem is that lots of news publishers voluntarily choose to serve their content with open graph metadata that was designed by Facebook for this exact purpose. If that isn't an acknowledgement that those news publishers are inviting sites linking to them to show those more detailed previews, what is?

The second problem is that the usual justification given for protecting established news media organisations through government intervention in the market is that they provide deep reporting and original investigative journalism that are valuable to society. If this is true, and if a headline attached to a link really is announcing an important news story backed by substantial research and deep analysis, then surely someone reading that preview is more likely to click through the original source and read further? On the other hand, if the problem is that people aren't clicking through clickbait headlines to tabloid fluff pieces as much as the tabloids would like and it's hurting their business model, is that really the type of journalism we should be intervening to protect?

I suspect both Facebook and the Australian and other watching governments will have learned a valuable lesson from this incident. Facebook has been reminded that there is a price to pay for arrogance and that governments around the world are still in charge if they want to be. At the same time, governments have been reminded that if a business is providing a useful service, you can't just impose unreasonable restrictions on it that create a hostile environment and expect no consequences to follow, and that includes transparent cash grabs that are suspiciously well aligned with the interests of your political sponsors.

Exactly. This is why, when someone sees the front page of a physical newspaper in a store, we detain then until they've paid 10 cents for the privilege.

Ah, I remember when newsstands were a thing and they would get MAD if you read the above-the-fold front page of a paper without buying it. So I guess unreasonable expectations in this regard are hardly a new thing..

> I just dont get it. In my opinion the news creators should be grateful to facebook (or google etc.), bringing them interested visitors, potential customers. Shouldn't facebook rather be paid for that instead of convicted?

Can't agree more, this law by the Australian government was the most asinine and ill considered thing since the GDPR which got us bloody cookie popups all over. Governments are entirely useless with regulating the internet.

The act defines it as: "Journalism about publicly significant issues; journalism that engages Australians in public debate and informs democratic decision making; and journalism relating to community and local events."

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