Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
reuters.com
reuters.com
Discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053
Also lol:
> A Reuters spokeswoman declined to comment on the investment figure.
Reuters journalist contacting a Reuters spokesperson to get a statement.
To: communications-office@reuters.com
Title: Request for comment
Body: Hi Bob. I'm writing a piece on the paywall. Do you have a quote for me? Best, see you at the cafeteria later. - John
Reuters has been running a distance second to Bloomberg in both financial news and data for well over a decade. It is a much older organization, and got its start when the British had an empire. You could say it covered the empire that covered the world.
I doubt that it has gone from "gold standard" to opinionated journalism in the last 2-3 years. In fact, the quality and veracity of its copy and reporting always varied from topic to topic, country to country.
This narrative of media decay is a weird euphoric recall for better days that did not exist. The press was always flawed. But now we attack it more amid the information chaos of social media.
Right now they got (guess) 20m(?) readers per day, and they know nothing about majority of them. With this, they cut our all the slackers/freeloaders (such as myself) and they get to focus on the 5m? 1m? 500k? To which they know are not freeloaders and they can go on to sell other services.
Edit: this is my interpretation of this move, a nice way to create the sweet spot on the pricing structure, and increase vertical sales.
They'll have to compete with AP News, which remains free at https://apnews.com, and has a much nicer site.
Anyone execs here working at AWS, Azure or GCP? Can we get AP News some decent hosting, yall?
Edit: Apparently, they're adtech: https://www.ap.org/en-us/services/advertise-with-us
You can also see AP’s bias in their stylebook and guidelines on how to describe certain events - for example when do they use the word “riot” instead of “protest” or when should they label something as a “crisis”. The creeping bias at AP has been covered a few different times by other news outlets - here’s a random article I pulled from Google on the same: https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/aps-orwellian-push-to-change-t...
Aljazeera English on the other hand has almost the same content than Reuters (like literally, exact same articles), has RSS feed, and also has interesting news about Africa, Asia and Middle East.
I’ve never seen an ad on Reuters. I’d call uBo and uMatrix pretty major.
I'll be paying. I don't like it, but I like a world without Reuters even less.
So even if it isn’t the whole solution, it may help in part, and for that I’ll subscribe and support it if they stay true to the sacred role of neutral journalism.
It's simply not feasible for me to subscribe to every quality publication I see online for reading a few articles here and there.
(Note that such a system could presumably be gamed and would need oversight, curation and responsible use.)
So what do they do if they want to be a news organisation instead of a PR outfit?
I understand Reuters' need to make money, but with all the quality journalism and news costing money per view, we should expect further problems arising from disinformation.
And people have made it clear they don't value this.
I don't know how to solve it, but it's a genuine problem. If we value this kind of work, we absolutely must find some means to make it pay adequately.
People use as blockers, etc, and the industry is just bleeding out. It's hurting all of us.
I guess I was younger when I first read it used, and only associated it with fruit
Yeah, how do they know you viewed 5 stories? Block cookies or clear cookies on exit and they have basically no way of knowing. Use an VPN to the EU and they have to comply with GDPR as well so they can't fingerprint you.
(Or use AMP if they offer it. Sometimes that helps circumvent paywalls.)
Require a login to view the server-rendered page? Use browser fingerprinting?
There are ways beyond clients clearing cookies to have the server render a page.
Maybe it's because the move into the public cloud is more costly and decision makers are incapable to admit they made a mistake.
I am not willing to share this data with media agencies.
Reputable news platforms are moving behind paywalls, while propaganda/quasi-propaganda networks remain free.
This is bad for society, for politics, and in the long term for our way of life.
It is not reasonable to expect the average person to validate the news they see on low quality news platforms by cross checking with other sources, even if quality sources were free, which they are increasingly not.
I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the budget.
As the Trump years have shown, misinformation and the distortion of facts can have real life, hard consequences. Trump owes his 2016 victory to 80,000 votes in three states. How likely is it that his democratic opponent would have won had the social media storm of combined conservative-Russian propaganda been a degree or two lower? Extremely likely.
Four years later, half a million Americans have died because of Covid-19. This would not be the case if the 2016 election had turned out differently.
To circle back to the original topic. The paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
Even paper newspapers had to be paid for though. And who’s going to pay for those quality journalists writing the quality journalism?
2: A benevolent wealthy individual taking profits out of his private investments, like Bezos is paying for Blue Origin, his rocket company.
The former is by far preferable.
Remember when they lied about WMDs in Iraq? What about when they lied about Russia hacking critical US energy infrastructure? What about when they lied about Russia placing a "hit bounty" on the heads of US soldiers?
For those not paying attention, Reuters was also engaged in propaganda around the time of the Turkey coup, which was assuredly backed by US intelligence. Reuters falsely reported that Erdogan had fled during the coup and tried to seek asylum in Europe -- which was US intelligence propaganda and false.
HN's audience will hate the idea, but such things already exist in most developed nations, like the BBC in the UK or the ABC in Australia. They're generally the best news sources with little opinion dressed up as news and much less clickbait and are freely accessible to all in a variety of forms.
It's like socialized medicine, it just works better.
ABC corrects mistakes in a month on a good day (worst case 2.5 months).
Contrasted with the private sector, Fairfax and News Corp both issued retractions to my complaints in a timely fashion, at 3 days for Fairfax and 15 minutes(!) for News Corp.
ABC simply doesn't care about journalism, why else would they have such lazy policies that ensure incorrect information is distributed as widely as possible?
But on the bright side, that's how I knew Bloomberg News was bullshit and that despite HN's frothy comments about how they always knew SMCI was backdooring chips I just grabbed some long options on the cheap and partied it up.
They lie so blatantly that it's like they don't care that you know they're lying.
ABC is actually worse, despite being propped up by government money. It's stunning how you can manage to be worse than corporate news media.
I no longer consume media other than for business and tech news.
This is very easily seen already in the existing public news and media organizations that have been formed.
It's not an employer vs employee situation.
In societies with rule of law you can endow public entities/broadcasters with rights that protect them from such influence.
This, with a well-defined duty to inform and culture of journalistic integrity should go a long way.
As for journalistic integrity: take America as an example again, where integrity has been overridden across the board in favor of party line messaging. Very little journalistic work is now done, public or private. And indeed, again, the public entity would have even less incentive to poke the bees' nest that makes its honey.
The only sustainable solution is to abolish copyrights. Stupidest fucking laws on the planet. It's intellectual slavery—restricting people from peacefully sharing and building on information between each other. Propped up by billions of lies pitched daily by industry. It's the big dirty secret propping up big tech, the media, et cetera.
While Bill Gates had access to the world's best information growing up attending elite institutions, a significant number of Americans weren't even able to vote or attend their local libraries, or outside the country you had places like South Africa with apartheid preventing access to education. The charity work of these assholes is a fucking farce, as long as they are pushing #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. You want to improve the world BG—stop preventing people from educating themselves! (I pick on BG just b/c he's the most famous, but really goes for all these tech assholes who don't realize the #IdeaPrivilege they had, which they deny to others via their support of copyrights and patents, and whose outlier wealth is dependent on these laws which put chains on people and ideas).
I'm sorry, I veered horribly off topic in that comment. Hard to edit on a phone.
The only sustainable solution to fix journalism is to abolish copyright. That's it. That's the only thing we can do to fix journalism.
For some context, journalism has not signicantly improved in roughly 150 years, perhaps longer. Perhaps it some slight areas it has gotten better, in others it has regressed. You can test this for yourself. There's a book available right now used on Amazon for $3.51, called "New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2009" ^0. Get that book, read some of the front pages from ~170 years ago, and compare to today's paper. It's a toss up which is better.
So I will conclude in part from that the field of journalism has plateaud for at least the past 100 years. This is surprising, as technology has improved dramatically. You'd expect the quality of the news should have gone up.
What else has happened in the past century? Well we know governments dramatically extended copyright laws. So now our prior should be that increasing copyright has not improved journalism at all, and probably has had a significant negative effect, enough to offset the improvement we'd expect from better technology.
Why would moving away from copyright lead to better journalism?
Let's talk about 3 parameters that will change.
First, collaboration will go up. Lots of people who are now prevented from seamlessly collaborating to improve the news would now be free to do so. Articles will be developed on git. Instead of constantly sucking everyone's attention to show frivolous novelty covered in ads, more important long term stories will be iterated upon.
Second, trust will go up. If one paper starts lying and someone knows the truth, they can fork that article/paper and offer the better version. Over time sources that prioritize truth will win gravity from tabloids. Every article will be backed by git (or similar) and the chance history and authors will be visible at every step of the way.
Finally, distribution will be improved in myriad ways. Starting a publisher will be easy for everyone, and you'll see a resurgence in regional and topic specific publishers. You'll have lots of innovation around customizing content for specific kinds of devices and readers.
So collaboration will increase and the cost of doing great journalism will fall dramatically, trust and auditability will increase, and distribution will increase.
It will be a dramatic win for journalism, and journalism in 10 years (or 100, if it takes society longer to wake up to the obvious), will be a big delta different compared to the delta in the previous century.
Thanks for getting my thoughts back on track!
0: https://www.amazon.com/New-York-Times-Complete-1851-2009/dp/... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The overgrown mutant NPR that centrists imagine government's media department would, under your nightmare Trump administration, become the Trump Network, operated by a bunch of smirking Faucis so much better than the system that feeds them and they help run. NPR gets all of its money from giant investment funds, extractive industries, agribusiness, military contractors, and foundations named after families of multigenerational wealth acquired by doing terrible things. It was editorially destroyed during the first Bush administration out of simple Republican vengeance, even though they weren't even getting a majority of their financing from the government.
A lot of times when I hear this take, NPR and the BBC are the models. I don't think they're good ones.
We all have jobs because people pay for things.
(I should have worded this differently. I did not mean it to be aggressive. I'm just wondering what news source is worth a monthly subscription at this point in history? And no on The Economist. My question is for every HN'er.)