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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when you spend decades demonizing journalism. Instead of giving us insightful articles, the New York times is competing against Facebook and Twitter to grab your attention immediately. I have a feeling most people don't read an entire New York times article, the entire point is just to create headlines you can share on Facebook or Twitter, keep those clicks and kpis flowing!

In a way this is fantastic, we shouldn't have two or three newspaper owners running almost all media under the vestedge of prestige.

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'Demonizing journalism' and having to adapt content in the wake of Facebook and Twitter are two separate things.

Mainstream journalism has been maligned for centuries (muckraking, yellow journalism, etc) and it seems to me that the main driver changing journalism today is the social media landscape. I just don't see the connection between demonizing newspapers and the change in how they write.

I agree. Centralized media equals a controlled narrative. Gone are the days of investigating prestige and bi-partisan reporting. Maybe it never really existing though...

It's clear that the majority of reporters lean center to far left politically. When it comes to topics that will make their "side" look bad, there's usually a lack of intellectual curiosity for the truth. This happens on both sides, of course, but the frequency and instances are much greater on the left-leaning reporting.

There's daily examples of where political narratives override digging in the truth. Project Veritas covers a lot examples of this: https://www.projectveritas.com/search/videos/?query=new%20yo...

No matter what you believe in, the publisher should be honest about their viewpoint instead of pretending they are not biased. Ben Shapiro is a good example of this. You know who he is and he clearly lays out the framework of evaluation. If you know where someone is coming from, you can then properly evaluate their points at a rational level rather than an emotional level.

Wikipedia says Project Veritas is a far right activists group, you could have honestly mentioned that.

They're a far right activist group according to the leftists who write that definition, yes. It's all so tiring, it's straight out of 1984. Isn't it interesting that you'll never once ever read the phrase "far left activist group"? Why does it only go one way?

> Isn't it interesting that you'll never once ever read the phrase "far left activist group"? Why does it only go one way?

I hear that phrase a lot, but then I'm probably more sensitive to that.

The problem with Project Veritas is the extreme dishonesty in what they publish, not their political lean or goals.

Dumb rule of thumb but it works: if something has "truth" in its name, it's unscientific right wing propaganda.

Of course this does not apply all the time, and you should evaluate the content and make a proper judgment. But I see this pattern way too often, that those who want to push some point will just invoke "the Truth" to give it more impact - after all, who can deny the truth?

I'm hoping this is satire. Project Veritas is infamous for amateurish hitjobs and misleading editing that quite frankly only fools would fall for. Ben Shapiro is not a good example of pretending to not be biased. He'll conveniently forget to disclose that he's funded by fracking billionaires while dunking on environmentalists.

Of course, Project Veritas isn't honest. People pretend they are but know they aren't, and then assume "the other side" must be just as bad.

Wonder if one wrote articles that contradict themselves (conclusion contradicts the initial thesis) how many people would have read to the end to discover that the end invalidates the initial idea.

Who exactly forced the NYT to support the Bush administrations preposterous claims about WMD?

If journalists want to be lionized instead of demonized they should perhaps stand up to power, and not only when their friends don't like the people in power.

News is dying because they whored themselves out decades ago. Facebook and google are excuses for the final stages of the decline, but they weren't there in the 90s when quality started to slide and papers were being bought out.

What is most jarring is reading about a given topic in a paper like NYT. You will start to have all sorts of deja vu before you realize that they sometimes self plagiarize entire paragraphs to fill in the meat of these articles. Then it becomes apparent the entire piece was written by someone stressed out who must have had 10 minutes to put it out.

I want news to return to the local level. Local news I am willing to pay for, because the information, and thus confidence in it, is closer to home and more identifiable.

Reminds me of a book by John Grisham{1} about a young journalist who buys a small southern newspaper, and turns it around by focusing on actual news.

{1}. The Last Juror

I don't think you're willing to pay what it would actually cost. Not calling you a liar, just noting that a truly local news source, operating at the level that they did 20 years ago, would cost so much more today.

The revenue for a local paper used to come primarily from advertising that doesn't exist anymore. Movie theater listings, classified ads, auto dealership sections. The Real Estate "section".

Each of those have been picked off by apps and websites. Craigslist, IMDB, Redfin/Zillow, etc.

And it's a spiral. With each reduction in circulation, the attractiveness for advertisers drops. Any attempt to make up the shortfall with higher subscription rates just accelerates the downfall.

So we get conglomerates that try to manage costs by being "local" in name only. They can't afford to employ reporters in every town with 75,000 residents. You instead get local papers that are just a reskin of a common wire feed. A few easy articles that could be GPT'd from the police blotter. Maybe a blogger or two.

I live in a fairly small town (7,000 people). A long time ago now, we had a sort of labor of love local paper that ended up shutting down. (The publisher fell ill.) The only remaining paper option was a "local" from one of the conglomerates. Pretty lousy overall and it mostly covered what was going on in a local small city and some bigger towns. Wouldn't have been worth subscribing to. Facebook and NextDoor is about the best I can do although even those aren't very active.

This is ignoring the traditional economics though.

Newspapers would charge for a subscription and sell advertising. The subscription fee would essentially just pay for printing and distribution of the physical newspaper, and then advertising provided the margin.

Now advertising is in the dumps but the internet has removed the capital and operating costs of a printing press and physically delivering dead tree pages to doorsteps.

Traditional newspaper subscriptions were something like $10/month. If you have 50,000 local subscribers and negligible printing costs, that's $6,000,000/year. You can fit a full staff of journalists into that budget.

Or you can go it alone, charge the same $10/month and be making $120,000/year with 1000 subscribers.

But how many newspapers/magazines can get a critical mass of people to spend $100/year? The NYT, WSJ, Economist, maybe New Yorker?

What's a critical mass? You sell subscriptions and hire journalists in proportion to how many people subscribe.

The "critical mass" to hire the first journalist is like 1000 people.

Huge publications like that only exist because of the historical capital cost of a printing press. Using traditional numbers, e.g. a city of 500k people 10% of whom subscribe to the local outlet, you can fund ~50 full-time local journalists. Which is the same whether they all work for one publication or they all work for themselves.

"Publications" will probably become subscription aggregators. So instead of 50,000 people each paying $10/month to one of 50 independent journalists such that they each have 1000 subscribers, all 50,000 people pay $10/month to the aggregator and then get access to the work of all 50 journalists.

So how easy do you think it is for one journalist to produce content that 1000 people will pay $100/year for? (And that number is probably too low because you probably have significant marketing expenses if nothing else.)

I mean, there are a lot of people already doing it on Substack.

The common marketing mechanism seems to be to make many of the articles available to non-subscribers (or do this after a time delay), and then they get spread around on social media which acts as promotion for the author.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some substack newsletters that make that kind of money, especially if people brought a large audience from elsewhere. I doubt many of them are covering local news which is what this sub-thread was about. Personally, I doubt I'd pay $100/year for a newsletter unless it were making me money or really delved into some niche topic of significant interest not well-covered elsewhere. But I'm glad if some people are making a living off it.

I think you have to go non-ad funded for real journalism.

I like https://substack.com/, but there are plenty of other like sources available.

Not exactly sure what you mean by "decades demonizing journalism"? Who is doing the demonizing? Decades?

Paper journalism's death has been exacerbated by the Internet, but it was dying long before the WWW was a thing. Radio, cinema, and television all played a role in killing off paper journalism. At the height of their popularity newspapers weren't just a method of conveying cold hard facts, they were a form of entertainment. It's not surprising that the least visually engaging medium is dying off when there are dozens of other more visually, and in turn emotionally engaging mediums, competing for eyeballs.

This theory doesn't work because the decline has nothing to do with print. Look at where cable news is now -- it's somehow, seemingly impossibly, even worse than the NYT. It's as if CNN and MSNBC looked at Fox News and reacted with a jealously-based compulsion to outmatch their pathology.

Or maybe they should just adapt to the times? Just get to the point, don’t write thousand word articles just because that’s tradition?

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