Facebook gives money to America’s biggest news organizations
washingtonmonthly.com
washingtonmonthly.com
It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?
The core conflict here isn't new, surely. Newspapers have taken advertising money from news-making companies since time immaterial. The question has always been whether that money affects coverage. And so far it seems like "no", or "not yet". And there's a very worthy debate to be had here, much as there always has been about advertising in news media, but the headline doesn't do that debate justice.
The Verge has historically been very favorable to Apple and Google. Why? They get exclusive interviews with Google and Apple executives. An interview with Sundar Pichai is worth millions in ad revenue, and if a blog is too critical of a company, they won't get interviews. Offering an interview to a news outlet is really not significantly different from cutting them a check.
Apple has been known for pretty much cutting out any site that dares to step out of line. I think whatever is left of Gizmodo is still banned from Apple events after Gizmodo reported about getting hands on a prototype iPhone.
There's a gigantic difference between tech blogs and the NYT or WaPo.
Nobody expects tech blogs to exercise journalistic independence/integrity.
People do with the NYT and WaPo, and loudly cancel their subscriptions when the believe that's violated.
For me neither of those newspapers have integrity at all.
Edit: there is ample evidence of both "newspapers" flat out lying; what I would call straight out propaganda as if they are part of an agenda. I doubt downvoters will want to debate me but if any of you have the guts please reach out. It'll be an easy win for me.
Nowadays, they mostly cancel their subscriptions when they get to read some opinion they don't like.
To this day, the only part of this that has been called a conspiracy theory by any mainstream publication is the idea that the whole thing could be an entirely technically unremarkable result of ordinary mass marketing emails for Trump hotels.
> the Times basically ended up apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again.
This did not happen. I'm assuming you're referring to this passage from an article two years later:
> The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.
> A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts. But the article’s tone and headline — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning.
> Democrats say that article pre-emptively exonerated Mr. Trump, dousing chances to raise questions about the campaign’s Russian ties before Election Day.
> Just as the F.B.I. has been criticized for its handling of the Trump investigation, so too has The Times.
This is not "apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again."
I agree that the term "conspiracy theory" is not used in a balanced way. Mainstream democrat theories that turn out to be without merit just stop being reported on (such as the Steele Dossier), whereas theories from either left or right fringe generally are called conspiracy theories.
Furthermore, while one might consider tech blogs a niche area, we consider Amazon, the world's largest retailer, a "tech company", so as "tech companies" start dominating major traditional verticals, "tech news" starts to just... be "news".
Industry news is different. We often expect blogs, authors, etc. to be openly pro- or anti- on certain subjects, to be given favorable treatment by companies, etc. We expect them to be "editorial". Such journalism can be openly one-sided.
Reporting on the war in Afghanistan is fundamentally different from a review of the Oculus Quest 2.
That isn't to say tech blogs can't report unbiased, hard-hitting news. They sometimes do, and that's wonderful.
But I do believe that our general societal expectation is that industry news sources are free to (and often expected to) editorialize without a hard wall between news and editorials, while independent objective news outlets are expected to maintain that hard wall.
Uh, say again?
Let's guess at a CPM of $10, and "millions" to be "2 million". That would be 200 million hits. You seriously think that an interview with a tech CEO whom few normal people will have heard of is going to have double the audience of the Superbowl?
I'd bet that in reality interviews with tech execs do horribly when it comes to generating traffic, but are done for the prestige of publishing something that looks like traditional journalism.
One of my favorite yet least controversial is: https://congressionaldish.com/
But it's not hard to find user funded media for all manner of topics.
Edit: Also https://reader.substack.com/inbox
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/16/was-there-a-cou...
The funny thing is that you can be openly pro coup without resorting to lies. John Bolton and his crudeness will be missed. Although a Yale law graduate he refused to use sophistry of The Economist etc. for violent regime changes and attempts.
John Bolton on a Fox TV interview talking the advantages of a coup in Venezuela and how to take over Venezuelan oil:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_yHo9efvO8
“We’re looking at the oil assets,” Bolton said. “That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that.”
“We’re in conversation with major American companies now,” he continued. “I think we’re trying to get to the same end result here.”
“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,” Bolton admitted.
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/us-coup-venezuela-oil-cor...
To offer a bit more nuance: consumers care about enough integrity; and powerful institutions (public or private), who stand to win or lose based on press narratives, care about enough "fairness" to their own perspectives (and interests).
Looking purely at realpolitik incentives, journalistic institutions can straddle that line and hit well over 50% on both fronts. Not to pick on the guy, but my poster child for this phenomenon is Daring Fireball's John Gruber: he's built a longstanding personal brand of integrity, covering Apple-centric tech for 20 years, and is frequently critical of the company and its products. And yet, he's frequently given preferential treatment by the company and its executives, because that same history has also signaled a (heartfelt) bias to being sympathetic to Apple's values and motives, meaning execs have a high confidence that reviews will be fair, interviews will be free of the scariest "gotcha" questions, etc.
The article also focuses heavily on the Times but mentions that FB has these deals with other publishers too. To the extent that there’s ire in the article, I think it would be better focused on Facebook.
The ad-supported business model of newspapers has always been problematic. In theory there’s a firewall between the business side and the journalists, but my faith that this is the case is reduced when orgs like the NYT get rid of their public editor.
The NDA between FB and the publishers is really gross. It shackles the NYT from covering itself and keeps the various orgs that have this deal from reporting about it on each other. It’s not a good sign when the NYT can’t hold the WSJ accountable. This part is weird tho:
> Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019. [...] The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year...
So the WSJ is reporting on the deal despite signing the NDA?
Proving the quid pro quo is hard, but just the knowledge that the money is there and can go away at the whim of a private actor will having a chilling effect on the sort of content you report on.
Journalistic entities have an incentive to project an image of an unbiased, principles institution untouched by the private business world, but as someone who was raised by two editors, that narrative is more mythos than reality.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/27/media/bloomberg-news-wells-...
Pharma ads as the #1 advertiser on major network news channels is purely to reign in negative press.
The very idea of consuming news wherein the primary funding comes from a third party is absurd, but it's what people are used to.
https://www.thewrap.com/harvey-weinstein-new-york-times-bill...
It's important to look at the news gathering side. Reporters don't take to being told to 'go easy on this group cos we have business ties' - that usually provides the opposite response.
Although on HN, the core message is "media bad, cos good" so I doubt that people will want to understand how media orgs actually work.
And if you can find a viable alternative to this, your company will be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars[1]. The internet has killed the classifieds business and commoditized news to the point that most people won't pay for it. Accepting advertising from potentially news-making companies is hugely important to keeping news organizations afloat. Vilifying it whenever it happens is potentially dangerous and we should really wait to level these accusations until there is actual evidence of wrongdoing.
[1] - https://www.axios.com/substack-andreessen-horowitz-newslette...
There are ways to do this effectually. This is not that way.
There is also danger involved in shaming the NYT for accepting ad money and in turn having them cut coverage in response to decreased revenue. There are plenty of examples of that.
I am more concerned with the danger we have evidence of rather than the one we don't.
Are we specifically talking about a news organization softening its coverage on a sponsor? There aren't any examples which spring directly to mind, but there are countless examples of other organizations doing this. Politicians being bought-out by businesses and lobbyists is nothing new. Platforms like YouTube have crafted and modified content policies specifically to appeal to their sponsors.
News organizations benefit from maintaining an appearance of trustworthiness. If they modified their content for the benefit of a sponsor, they would obviously try to be very discrete about it. Is it a stretch to imagine it has or could easily happen? Especially if people stop worrying out it? Other than reputation, is there anything else to counteract that motivation?
> If there is no evidence, why is this story specifically about the NYT and Facebook?
As for the NYT/Facebook thing in particular, it doesn't strike me as being inherently worse than any other sponsorship deal. I'm not worried about it in particular so much as I am generally concerned with how dependent news is on ad revenue in general. I'm not vouching for the credibility of this story, but I'm worried that your comment is too dismissive of the broader subject.
> There is also danger involved in shaming the NYT for accepting ad money and in turn having them cut coverage in response to decreased revenue. There are plenty of examples of that.
I don't know about this. I think whenever an organization is dependent on another for revenue, they risk appearing less impartial towards that organization. I see HN comments accusing Mozilla of appearing to be less impartial towards Google because of their relationship all the time, despite Mozilla directly competing with and regularly speaking out against Google.
News outlets benefit from an appearance of impartiality and revenue partnership they form with a third-party comes with a risk of damaging that appearance. It's up to the NYT to convince readers they can be trusted with the partnerships they've made. Frankly, I think they've probably built up enough of a reputation that this particular deal wont hurt them much, if not benefit them.
> I am more concerned with the danger we have evidence of rather than the one we don't.
I'm also more concerned with the dangers we have. That doesn't mean I can't keep an eye out for the dangers which could be. Even if this particular danger hasn't yet manifested, there is clear motivation for it and precedent for it in other markets.
This specifically is a great jumping off point to highlight why this is less of a problem in journalism. In politics, the person accepting the money is the same one who is acting. The politician shows up the oil industry fundraiser one day and is voting on climate change regulation the next. Bias will exist there even if it isn't conscious or intentional.
It works differently in journalism. From the outside we see the NYT as a single entity, but that isn't the case from the inside. There is a strict firewall between the business and editorial staffs at any reputable news org. The people who sell the ads or count the money are not the same people who choose what is covered or write the stories (this can change at smaller outlets and blogging changed some of this online, but the basic premise still holds). Anyone who has been to journalism schools has been taught the importance of this separation. Most journalists feel very strongly about this separation and they often speak out when it is violated.
But things are working for the Times not so much for regional players. How does this help us?
Where did that word "overwhelming" come from? I want us to wait until there is any proof rather than screaming "WOLF!" at a mere shadow. I will highlight this from the originally linked article:
>There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments.
If you are waiting for smoking gun evidence by the time that comes out we won't care. We will be conditioned to accept it as the norm by then. Now is the time to speak up.
Online most are just reprinting Reuters.
I would pay for insight that I can use and exclusive (relevant) news, sadly investigative journalism is too expensive.
Certainly there are some publications that fit the description, but we have many, many alternatives.
Everything makes sense except for this. The fact that a business model being broken has caused standards to slip isn't a reason not to point out slipped standards.
Also, the fallacy that there will always be some physical evidence of corruption has to die. Every single business or agency I have ever worked for has formal and informal policies about what can be spoken about in media that has a retention policy, especially if they were liable to FOIA requests. The only way you get evidence of that stuff is through making secret recordings (which is why people don't talk on the phone about this stuff either.)
It's the appearance of corruption that should be penalized, not the ephemeral evidence of it.
What "standards" are you referring to here? Is it standards of the quality of reporting? Has that actually slipped? Where is the evidence for that? If not, is it truly a problem if the standards of appearance have slipped while there is no actual change in the quality of the work?
>Also, the fallacy that there will always be some physical evidence of corruption has to die.
Who said the evidence needed to be physical? I don't need a smoking gun email or a covert recording. Verbal testimony is evidence too. Where are the anecdotes from former NYT journalists about being told to kill stories about corporate partners?
All the time. Using both direct bribes to journalists, friendly favors to the owners of the newspaper, and more often than not advertising money (which can be open from the company looking for favorable coverage itself, or through 1-2 layers of subsidies and shell companies which nobody can/will track).
The whole report is actually a bit odd. It talks about the "five core values of journalism" and claims only super-liberal people support all of them, but the list of values appears to be basically a list of left wing priorities and worldviews, e.g. the last two values are "giving voice to the less powerful" and "social criticism". Factualism is defined not as an absolute value but merely a tradeoff, given that "the truth is more than just the matter of adding facts and this emphasis on factualism can mask bias". So that would appear to be tautological - all they've done is ask a bunch of journalists what they feel is important, got a bunch of left wing priorities, discovered that only left wing people agree with the full list, and the only thing people across the spectrum agree in is that facts are important. Surely these findings are true, but so what? It's just a dozen different ways of telling people things that are already obvious, rephrased in terms of Haidt's moral foundations theory. US journalists are much more left wing than the population as a whole, that's a widely published result for many years already. The fact that the AP felt a need to do a research study to prove it is sort of indicative of why the media has such deep problems.
The final section is quite telling. They do an experiment where they take a test story and rewrite it to be less left-biased and contain more facts. They find the resulting story appeals more to everyone, not just conservatives. It's a sad indictment of the AP that this is actually presented as a novel finding.
Therefore it doesn't matter what the NYT does in terms of critique, what they think or what they want people to think. Or who they take cash from. Be it Facebook or anyone or anything else.
Thats what the AP study reinforces for me. The NYT and its critics and fan clubs overestimate greatly the value of the NYT or any other mainstream news org in the current info tsunami environment.
The only contribution or "value" left for news orgs in an info tsunami, is surfacing new data through their networks and that the AP study calls facts. This is what google search bots do when they scour the network. Beyond that news orgs play no role, but they haven't realized that yet. And that wastes everyones time.
They would be much more useful to society if they acted more like search engines or gathering points for info exchange on the network and shed all the other baggage.
Those two individuals are both Op-Ed writers. The Opinion section in a paper is not the same as regular news reporting and so not beholden to a newspaper's editorial policy.[1]
That said a lot of economics tends to make sense when examined through a lens of incentives. There has been an observable shift toward radicalization of news content since this article indicates FB began funding its news feature. Opinion pieces seem to often displace primary stories based on whether they suit a dominant hyperbolic narrative. Whether by FB design or simply a natural response to the soaring appeal of hyperbolic click bait favored by social news aggregation is anybody's guess.
I will say I am appalled by a lack of accountability the Times has had over the last year. For example regularly publishing summary statistics without acknowledging significant sampling problems, figures any self-respecting statistician would never consider submitting for academic review are still regularly passed off as fact. Moreover discourse regarding what constitutes effective policy, consideration of cost and benefit, or even determination of what society's goals are let alone whether they are realistic has been contemptuously derided as conspiracy and dogma of the Trumpian cult. Without rational discourse there is little hope for progress, and in that regard I arrived at my own foregone conclusions, that the hyperbolic nature of news media is one of the most significant barriers to positive change we face as a society.
On that note, if you find yourself buying into a fear of outsiders you might want to reconsider the fact most people share the same fundamental values and our differences between one another is often negligible. Believe it or not beyond the lazy opinions about issues scantly related to every day life, the average liberal and conservative have exactly the same amount of love for their friends and family. We often simply disagree regarding the means to similar ends. As a single global society we all face the same problems, but our biggest problem right now is spanning the distance we've created between coming together socially as friends and colleagues.
My question is: Do you really need to ask that? Human nature is human nature; there's little doubt that it's happening to some extent. Virtually impossible that it's not happening at all.
The problem to me seems quite similar to campaign contributions in politics. Yes, it's indirect, and all parties can say it's innocent, no strings attached, the elected representative is not "required" to do anything. Those are words that help people ignore the reality of human nature. Money is influence.
This isn't to invalidate your point completely, but to give some insight to those who are not aware of how this conflict of interest has been generally handled.
The case of Donald Trump is a perfect example. He had conflicts of interest galore, didn't even deny them, in fact he flouted them, and many people seemed to think everything was fine.
We need to be aware not only of the existence of conflicts of interest, but also of (1) how corrosive these conflicts are, and (2) the crucial importance of designing systems to minimize the bad incentives and effects that arise from conflicts of interest. Systems, in other words, that minimize the harm that -- because of human nature -- inevitably flows even from well-intentioned people when conflicts of interest are tolerated.
Yes, you really need to ask that. When accusing someone of misconduct you really do need to ask if it is really happening and not just hand wave about human nature and make judgements based on untested assumptions. You really really can’t just go along with whatever fits your biases.
On the other hand, regardless of intent, it does still make sense to say that the system is maladjusted, that the system is designed in such a way that even actors with good intentions are incentivized to do harmful things. And the question regarding the system really is clear: Does a recipient accepting money from an advertiser tend to create in them a more positive opinion regarding the advertiser than if the recipient received no money at all? To that, the answer is yes. It doesn't mean the recipient has committed "misconduct"; more likely it's just that the recipient is a well-intentioned actor in a maladjusted system.
If a person does something wrong but is not aware that what they did is wrong, the general reaction is not to "accuse them of misconduct", but rather to explain to them what it is about their action that's wrong, after which (if they in fact have good intent) they will no longer do that action.
It's also worth noting that quite a lot of broad crimes are strict liability these days, especially in America. For example money laundering is a strict liability crime, along with more obvious ones like speeding.
Misconduct though is not normally a criminal law term anyway. More like a code of conduct for an organisation.
Jimmy Carter put his struggling peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid the appearance of corruption. This has become a punchline today, but was standard at the time.
Frankly, the corruption of the Clintons, who generally took turns raking in cash while the other performed duties as a public servant, sent the dominos crashing here.
Because corruption is incredibly easy to hide and obscure, it is correct to cultivate a culture of transparency accountability when, for example, tens of millions of dollars change hands between powerful institutions for no apparent reason.
On the contrary, it does indeed and has been known to do so for many decades [0,1]
Indeed, in Citizens United, SCOTUS in the concurring opinion claimed the founders intent in the 1st amendment was to allow monied interests to own and influence media for political purposes.
The question is not whether distortion exists but how prevalent it is.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#News_media_and_pr...
I think what is happening is they are buying their ability to publish news. Once accomplished you will see plenty of those "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" I think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NetflixBestOf/comments/dob8pq/discu...
The problem for me is prior to all of that.
If the New York Times (say) lacks financial independence, then it will always be structurally indebted to whoever foots the bill. It's just a matter of fact built into the nature of the relationship between the two entities.
Facebook executives may not have established the relationship simply to "buy off" the Times. I imagine most of them have a real commitment to "fixing the news" in their hearts. But it doesn't matter.
If news agencies depend on organizations outside of themselves for the basic necessities of their existence and reproduction, then they aren't independent. They are dependent on those organizations, by definition. What they can report on now has conditions and limits. I want to emphasize that this is a restriction on what it is *possible* to report on. It might not ever produce a distinction that you could easily measure. This is a different, and worse, problem than Facebook purchasing some flattering reporting. Facebook now (obscurely, tacitly) sets the structural conditions (without having to explicitly state any rules or appear to be a bad guy in any way).
It's not hard to think of an example of reporting which could become impossible under these conditions. Imagine if the Times, due to some public outcry, or for whatever reason, took a major rhetorical turn toward combating digital surveillance, just like they did in the last year with racism and issues of cultural morality. A sudden "moral clarity" emerged around topics that the paper used to try to be neutral about.
Whether you like those developments or not, I imagine most people will agree that the employees of the New York Times, not executives at Facebook, or anybody else, should decide the course of the Times' reporting. An existential financial dependence will of course condition all reporting on the maintenance of that dependence.
The European media has also demanded payments, even though the value flows from sending traffic to news sites and not the other way around.
The media seems to believe it is entitled to be send traffic AND to be paid for it. Common story all over the world.
So, to reduce those demands in America, Facebook pays kickbacks to the biggest media orgs.
Here, the media publication is presenting it as a grant for favourable coverage. But the far more likely explanation is Facebook knows the media will shake it down for more money unless it gives them a payoff.
The complaint here doesn't seem to be that Facebook is handing out money, but rather that not everyone is getting a cut.
Nowhere does the article question why the media gets money for nothing. The article assumes it is the media’s right and the money should be increased and more widely distributed.
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
Of course, we don't live in the quaint old days. There's no distinction between news as journalism and news as business. Writers are measured not on how good their reporting is, but on how much "engagement" it gets, which is just a proxy for how profitable.
Is it a bribe or buyoff? Or just a failure of credibility? Newspapers used to have a position called the ombudsman to address just this scenario. The New York Times had a position called Public Editor. That position was eliminated in 2017[1]
https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
A real news business, one that publishes non-fiction content about current events that people want to read in exchange for subscriptions and advertiser dollars, is probably too fringe to be considered News at this point, because what most people really want is not what is officially approved as good for them. It's not official news unless it supports an establishment narrative, and somehow journalists and editors have come to believe they have official credentials unrelated to the truth and quality of their work that are deserving of some kind of recognition, and even deference.
I don't even see this question of whether the NYTimes and other publishers might be compromised by FB money and others as a point of contention. It's like everyone already knows, but they're wrestling with whether they can tell people themselves.
> As Doug Reynolds, the managing partner for the West Virginia newspapers suing Facebook and Google for damages, told me, “If the future of this industry is that we’re dependent on their goodwill, then we don’t have an independent press anymore.”
Indeed.
If you ask me which I trust more, 60 Minutes or Glenn Greenwald, I trust GG 1000x times more. I would even say I have a negative opinion of 60 minutes.
There's a reason Glenn Greenwald is making crazy money on substack - its because his reporting comes off as more authentic than many 'official' news sources.
You're so close that's it's annoying that at the last second you veered off into right field. There are two different things that you're confusing. There's capital-N news which is the purview of capital-J journalists; they create a verified bone dry account of events and statements made by those involved which is more historical record than something you might read with your morning coffee. You have always been able to find troves of this style of news but it's in the archives of news sites, not on the front page.
Then there's storytelling which is what people actually want. Someone takes all the news together and, adds some context both historical and cultural, and some basic production value to create a cohesive narrative. This is a good thing! We want this because it shows us how individual events are connected and the bigger picture.
It's the difference between reading police reports and local news articles and listening to a true crime podcasts -- the latter is waaaaaay more popular.
People (us) want what we can use, and sometimes indeed that's just a sense of actual shared community experience, but usually, it's more concrete. Like should I move my savings into a certain sector, my odds on finding a better job, should I sell my house now or wait, do I need to move to another state to get my kids a proper education, etc. This is what people use real reporting for. Journalists are not in posession of a bigger picture, and the ones who think they are believe so at the expense of their reporting.
Capital-M Media has become the inferior good, since as soon as people have alternatives, they switch away from it.
The CBC and Globe and Mail might be boring / establishment, but is that a bad thing?
This company is like a perforated colon that keeps leaking feces into the collective body of society. Pretty soon we'll go into septic shock.
I feel like there's basically no allowable nuance in this discussion because holding any opinion than "tracking is 100% bad with literally no upsides for anyone other than ad networks any business that claims to get any value whatsoever is being misled" is taken as a defense of the current state of internet advertising and is the digital equivalent of burying your head in the sand while everyone else continues like you don't exist.
If you can't understand and explain why the fence was put there then you'll get nowhere trying to argue that it should be torn down.
You forgot to add this part:
> At the expense of the consumer, and usually without their consent or knowledge.
Facebook is the particular bad guy here, because we usually need to rally around one target to get anything done (and they are by far the worst offender). But the goal is not to take down Facebook, it's to limit or eliminate tracking and other practices that violate and exploit the privacy of people.
Of course small businesses can benefit from doing what Facebook does, just like a homeless person can benefit by robbing a bank. That doesn't mean it's right.
Stronger privacy laws might kill small businesses that engage in that type of behavior, but it's not going to kill the economy. New business will be born, and the free market will fix itself.
Even if you were ok with tracking facebook is not the people I'd trust to do it ethically.
- You are reading this comment.
- You are likely highly or fairly paid.
- You don’t pay for your news (to a partisan substack doesn’t count)
Edit: Added likely to comment. Icing on the cake is if you consume almost all your news through Twitter / social media.
Maybe stop clicking and reacting and instead stop and reflect your role in all this?
Cold hard truth? We caused this problem, Facebook is a great scapegoat, and most here likely contributed to bigger issues with information distribution in one way or another through their employment.
Not everyone is from the US
With password managers, it’s not that much work to visit multiple websites.
The point is that with "Netfilx for news" you increase the number of people paying. Thus decreasing cost for the individuals.
> With password managers, it’s not that much work to visit multiple websites.
It is not just about managing logins. You also have to manage payments. And make the decisions about what you want to read months in advance. People hate making decisions. A lot of people end up jumping over the fence and not paying at all.
If they realize it or not.
most are taking stories that have already broken and adding their own spin on it, often to score points for whatever tribal team they represent
But... Why wouldn't a "partisan" substack count? What if I spend around 30 seconds a day on Google News, just to see what the different propaganda machines try to push for today, so it's not something I would like to pay for, but I value and trust some "Substack" journalists and opinion people.
In most cases, you are probably not paying for the reporting of “new” news and instead paying for a filter of existing news.
Substack is super great. Just paying for it is not the same as paying for a NYTimes subscription however people would like to spin it.
You're right, in a lot of cases substack writers can be more transparent about their conflicts of interest and aren't beholden to censors who kill stories that might upset NYT readers or writers.
I'm not debating that. Just saying it's different.
Maybe. I pay for The Mill [1] which is published on Substack. The founder of it has written an excellent piece, explaining why he created it [2]. It is a local paper, that you have to pay for; which means actual journalism. It's still small but now has an office and one full time employee. I'm hoping that one day this model works for cities all over the world; because advertising doesn't work for local journalism.
1. https://manchestermill.co.uk/
2. https://manchestermill.co.uk/p/the-case-for-a-new-newspaper-...
Canadaian and UK citizens reading this forum are actively paying for the CBC and BBC, respectively.
I have - well, not now, but a long time ago - and because of that, I pay for much of my news.
However it is not true, IMO, that "we caused the problem", because disorganized news consumers have less of a pull on what happens than organized, conscious forces like large companies involved in news media (well before Facebook, see my other comment).
PS - I'm not from the US.
Yeah, yeah. We should all recycle more and drive less too; smokers should stop smoking, and the anxious should stop having anxiety.
Users didn't create the system that exploits them, and it's very weird any time I see someone blaming them for it. Facebook isn't a scapegoat - they did exactly what they are accused of, and they should be accountable for it.
Say we disappeared Facebook off the planet, do you really think — boom! — problem solved?
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume the HN audience, of all audiences, is penny-pinching serious journalism out of existence. I bet we even have a fair number of WSJ subscribers among us.
That's bullshit. The current state of affairs came about due to Facebook and Google's actions and business practices over the past two decades. Both of these companies massive scale (obtained in large part due to anti-competitive practices and a total lack of regulation) and reach gives them complete control over what we consume and where.
It's a long history with a lot of different parts to it, but it's mostly the fault of these two companies. Consumers can't be blamed for seeking the most value in the market, it's just that the market is fucked because of these two powerful bad actors.
Furthermore why are media companies assumed blameless for failing to adjust their business model. "Millenials are killing X industry" was widely mocked because it was understood that it was undue entitlement to think their business model was sancrosanct and anything which went against it was guilty. How does the news differ?
It appears like a negative feedback loop to me. News orgs are bad because they optimize for clicks and "engagement" to drive ad revenue. News works rely on ad revenue because nobody will pay for them. Nobody will pay for them because they're bad.
Is there anyone who hasn't succumbed to this cycle which is worth my money?
My current strategy is to visit aggregators like HN to help filter out some of the better content. Aggregators are subject to the biases of the communities they foster so I have to be very careful of echo chambers, but they're better than nothing.
Ouch, that hurts. But, there really isn't any difference between secondary-source news outlets and a substack. The substack just allows me to know exactly what I'm getting. In a world where there is no such thing as neural or fair, the most we can do is promote those that are transparent and thoughtful.
> You don’t pay for your news
I do pay good journalistic outlets. ThePrint in India charges me $10 a month, but they routinely produce good quality Indian news. They also openly declare a 'economically liberal, socially liberal' for their editorials and it is rare to find that kind of openness.
I would've paid for the Economist if I read it more often. I would've had an opinion on WSJ if I read it at all. Reuters has deteriorated a bit, but they provide first sources which is indispensable for the entire industry. But those 3 would be the closest mainstream new outlets that I'd consider paying for.
With how blatantly partisan NYT, WaPo, Guardian and the likes have become, it is hard to justify giving them a single cent of my hard earned money. Especially when they hide behind a veneer of fairness, prestige and even-handedness.
What's free often proves most costly. Less fortunate people can't afford to pay and consume whatever is shoveled into them for free. Moneyed interests can afford to subsidize bullshit.
If you want to stereotype the typical HN user, then I'd be willing to bet money the average HN user is more aware about the dangers, problems and short-comings of social media than the average FB user.
Mostly because there are only a couple of million people reading HN, even fewer actually participating, while FB has billions of active users, the vast majority of which are complete laymen about tech. A rather big number of them see FB as synonymous with the web, as in a lot of developing countries FB struck deals with mobile-carriers so FB traffic won't count into the data caps.
Compared to that, the HN crowd is tiny and while they are more likely to be employed in the tech sector, it's a bit misleading trying to ascribe collective guilt to HN as if every single FB employee hangs out here to get inspiration. Case in point: I don't even work in tech, I work in healthcare.
In that context I really don't see how not even a handful of million people would be able to influence the behavior of billions of people on a completely different platform, the biggest platform of its kind, the platform that actually championed many of the things considered problematic with social media.
[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/330/819/e47...
Point me to a somewhat unbiased, affordable (no, anything more than $9 a month is not affordable and I've got other expenses), non-US centric news source and we have a deal.
NPR is now heavily compromised by endless donations from foundations but still implies its products are funded 'by people like you'. At least they say 'made possible by a grant from the Warbucks Oligarch foundation' along with a cute little advertising line about philanthropy, making the world a better place etc etc.
We need a lot more transparency. The Gates Foundation, which significantly funds the BBC, Guardian, NPR, and similar situations such as GMO bigPharma messaging, need to be made to publicly and prominently declare their interests and their agendas declared.
'Access' media is a huge problem because it purports to be unbiased when in actuality it is heavily agenda driven. In the case of Facebook & the NYT this is a very serious situation that further undermines what little is left of the NYT's credibility.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7640
Incendiary claims.
In general, the centralizing of communication and control over communication is dangerous. These are private companies and they are controlled by some of the richest oligarchs in the world. They are unaccountable. Without regulation, they can do as they please. National and otherwise local law is skirted, except when countries fight back, like Poland which placed speech on social media back under the protection of the law. This way, you can explicitly legislate and thus decide politically what sorts of things are protected and which are forbidden and punished according to civilized standards and the rule of law, not because despots like Dorsey or Zuck say so. Want to punish slanderous and dangerous rumor? Make this a legal matter with accountability and transparency.
https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&query=facebook&...
Just note what is "Opinion" and what is "News". Opinion will always blow different says, but the reported news stories will be critical as necessary.
So independent media (fifth estate) is locked-out again. Manufactured consent and sentiment for the benefit of corporations, by corporations. And, real journalism makes one a heretical dissident like Chris Hedges. Inverted totalitarianism at work.
And, I bet Bezos is paying Bezos at WaPo. The man is a genius.
Explain to me how Facebook is not considered a publisher again?
Sure you could say FB is republishing a work which would imply some level of endorsement but paying for use on behalf of their users seems totally different.
Section 230 was only a thing in the US because a vapor brained judge applied third party liability to a financial forum for not catching fraud with one hundred percent perfection when moderating.
The case in Australia was definitely the latter and based on the quality of NYT reporting on these issues I wouldn't be surprised if it's the case here too.
Press beholden to the interests of the advertisers is also not free. Granted, it is much less tightly controlled than when a few giant corporation funnel in most ad money, but still.
> The social media company is financially asphyxiating the news industry even as it gives oxygen to conspiracy theories and lies.
Well, the traditional press has also promoted conspiracy theory and lies: Most prominent in the last two decades, and in NYT specifically, have been Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction and Trump's supposed collusion with Russia. The difference is that, on Facebook, there is less control of which lies and conspiracy theories get promoted and which get suppressed. It seems the author of that column takes issue with this.
Having said that - I do agree with the thesis of Facebook (and perhaps Google?) being a significant source of revenue for a media outlet meaning it has a measure of control over that outlet. Unfortunately, in Capitalism (especially less-regulated Capitalism) this tends to happen all over.
> these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help.
Huh? The economy in general and mass media in particular have been driving smaller and local news outlets out of business for decades before Facebook was popular.
Ben Bagdikian famously wrote about the dangerous concentration of (news) media already in 1983, see coverage here:
https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0810/081003.html
Or check out the book on the Internet Archive:
Or, more precisely: "No, but we wanted to tantalize you into reading this piece, where we'll go through 15 paragraphs of innuendo and then decide that it doesn't quite add up."
Social media bubbles headlines and links up from a potluck of sources, so there's no central paper to subscribe to and support. The end result is ad blocking everything, ignoring paywalls, and subscribing or paying no one.
If I went to a paper's website instead of social media (HN, some curated reddits), I'd be inclined to subscribe, but none of them have great audience participation and discussion.
If there was a Spotify for news journals, I'd be happy to subscribe, but that doesn't solve the issue of clickbait garbage winning over real journalism and soaking up all the money. Nor does it supply enough revenue to feed all the journalists.
The solution, sadly, seems to be mass culling and centralization. The world is connected and nobody needs local newspapers anymore.
Edit: not sure why I'm at -3 for making an observation. I'm not defending Facebook. The news industry doesn't appear to be sustainable in the modern age.
If you don’t want the social aspect of news, you can get the AP stories through the AP News app or subscribe to rss feeds to major papers. The AP keeps papers from covering the same story from their own angle, you’ll usually see the same AP stories printed in papers across the country.
I agree it’s hard to filter the news on your own and quality journalism does seem to be going behind paywalls now. This isn’t great for an educated society.
I'm not on an Apple platform and don't even know what this is.
I suppose it works for Apple subscribers?
Given Apple platform support on Android and Linux, I don't think it's something I'd find much value in. I'd be shocked if they even had an Android app. If they don't, the suggestion is a total non-starter.
I could be wrong, but based on previous experience, I'm probably not going to investigate until I hear my friends using Android talking about Apple News.
I'd like to see a Spotify for news. I saw that another comment mentioned Substack, which seems interesting and could be along those lines.
Competitors from Google and CNN are rumored to launch soon.
We can't seem to support this many journalists anymore - because FB and Google suck up the advertising revenue.
Would breaking up big tech also bring back the local news room? That would be such a bonus.
For literally small-town (vs. smaller cities), local news has been an issue for decades.
The quality of writing on substack is magnitudes better than what’s available on NYT. I’m not sure if NYT was always this bad and the internet just revealed them or if they degraded, but their product is not very good. Other papers have a similar issue.
I live in about a 7,000 person town. Let's say half the people would pay $20/year for a local paper--which we had at one point. That's wildly optimistic I know. Throw in some advertising. But I'm guessing you're still something under $100K/year. So you end up with just Facebook and NextDoor and no one actually doing reporting as such.
"The number of newspaper newsroom employees dropped by 51% between 2008 and 2019, from about 71,000 workers to 35,000"
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/20/u-s-newsroo...
"Since 2004, hundreds of local newspapers have closed up shop. The author of a report on this trend said areas without a local paper suffer in a variety of ways."
https://www.wqad.com/article/news/local/drone/8-in-the-air/a...
We do need local papers though, large papers like the NY Times and WaPo aren't going to cover local politics or spend money on investigative journalism of issues that aren't (inter-)national.
Consolidation in the news industry is a boon for corruption everywhere.
Makes me wonder how much money used to be raised from subscriptions to individuals compared to daily edition sales.
If You Don’t Read the Newspaper You Are Uninformed, If You Do Read the Newspaper You Are Misinformed
https://reclaimthenet.org/gates-foundation-funds-facebook-fa...