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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

They choose it though, it's their decision. They tell us over and over how important their work is. Yet you go to their site the first thing you're harassed by a cookies banner, then it's the begging banner "Please give us money blah blah our work is important, honest", then the autoplay video with an ad, then if you're lucky you can read it if they don't block it because they detected an ad blocker or whatever.

Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control?

All the ad tracking in the world isn't going to save your company when the generation who grew up thinking your websites are just a bunch of cookie and begging banners don't have the act of going to your site inbuilt in their habits.

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> Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control?

Journalists don't typically control the actual platform they publish to. The news agency does, and the news agency is the one trying to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of revenue out of a dwindling number of readers.

I'd much rather hear from the journalists directly, and I'd love to see platforms treat those journalists as the ones running the show. "Patreon for good journalism" is a far more compelling value proposition than any newspaper. Could someone hurry up and kill the newspapers and provide a platform for all their good journalists, please?

In some ways, "Patreon for good journalism" is Substack's pitch. It has its good and bad aspects but no doubt it's a very different monetization model than the ad-driven model.

It's an improvement, but it assumes you already know who the best journalists to follow and support are, and you just need a way to support and hear from them. Curation is a useful service in itself; curation just shouldn't mean you get to extract the vast majority of the value.

Kinda. It still tend to encourage frequent posting, which weighs against long form investigative journalism - monthly or yearly subscriptions don't work well when you might work on a piece for over a year.

That, combined with risk, means some of the most interesting stories out there still need patrons with long attention spans.

Those patrons are often more successful Substack journalists, these days, who double as the outlet in which they publish.

I think Substack achieves the goal of Patreon for journalism and has demonstrated market demand for high quality independent writing.

They even run a program that started several months ago where they offloaded risk from promising writers for a year by guaranteeing them a minimum pay in exchange for a larger cut of realized platform for the same year. AIUI several writers like Matt Yglesias et al have done well via this program and built audiences that will give them significant windfalls when their risk-mitigation contracts with Substack expire.

I think the agency of the future is just some sort of partnership between several writers on the platform or other similar platforms that allows you to purchase a group subscription to several writers at a small discount. I imagine that writers who are able to sustain such high levels of revenue may also be able to hire editors etc as necessary along with taking on intern writers to write [approved!] guest posts on their streams.

Substack isn’t for journalism. It’s for opinion articles. I think it’s an awesome platform and I’m glad it exists. But it’s not journalism imho.

I'm not too familiar with Substack aside from reading a couple "columns" (can't think of a better noun) from there but is there any reason why it wouldn't be a useful platform for journalism, aside from it being so associated with opinion pieces?

> I'm not too familiar with Substack aside from reading a couple "columns" (can't think of a better noun) from there but is there any reason why it wouldn't be a useful platform for journalism, aside from it being so associated with opinion pieces?

Compared to opinionating, actual journalism is more expensive, is more specialized, takes more time, and often elicits less of the strong emotional reactions that drive "engagement."

what does any of that have to do with whether or not finished journalism goes onto the web via Substack?

> what does any of that have to do with whether or not finished journalism goes onto the web via Substack?

Because who's going to pay a monthly subscription to an individual for an unwritten scoop that will take months to investigate and may not pan out?

All an opinionator needs is a keyboard and some input to have an opinion on, so they can pump out that kind of entertainment day after day.

But the "news agency" also provides value. If you have a bunch of journalists working together (i.e., "a newspaper"), then those journalists are freer to take long term risks (e.g. work on big investigative stories). At better newspapers journalists don't need to churn out junk every day; they don't have to worry about doing all of their own marketing, sales and editing; they get to use their colleagues and their colleagues' networks/resources/sources to improve their stories and their reporting. I think substack ("patreon for good journalism") has a good model, but we shouldn't ignore that it has both advantages and disadvantages compared to most news orgs.

The gig economy will not produce good journalism, as good reporters prefer a stable job as much as anyone else. I like a few writers at the NYT, so I pay $5/month to support them. Same with a few other newspapers. The bonus is I also get an absolute mountain of other stuff that I occasionally read and really enjoy (like the cooking column). I don’t see how giving a handful of individuals $5-$10 per month each, Patreon-style, is a good value. And they definitely won’t have as good of a health insurance plan.

Not to mention that journalism isn’t really a solo gig. The processes, standards, and traditions of an institution are just as much of a factor as good reporters in producing good journalism.

> I don’t see how giving a handful of individuals $5-$10 per month each, Patreon-style, is a good value

It's not, this is why microtransactions are so important for us to make colloquial.

> provide a platform for all their good journalists

What will all the recent journalism school grads do before they become skilled?

Collect information for skilled journalists and work with them. Isn't that kind of how news agencies always operated? In the "Patreon for Journalism" model you just change the number of "agencies" from a dozen per country to a dozen per city. With all the up- and downsides that come with that.

Good point. I'll bet CGP Grey's employees start their own youtube channels someday.

I got so angry with my local paper with their email newsletters. I'm a subscriber. I pay a whopping $9 a month. I shouldn't be emailed newsletters with ads about weird ointments or tonics or other conspiracy theory things "doctor's don't want you to know" right there in line with the major headlines. I get hosting classifieds and taking out ads, but the ads that are placed on the website and in the newsletters are straight out of tabloid rags. They wouldn't ever print ads like this in the actual paper. People would get fired if they ever did.

Have you canceled your subscription, or at least written the editor to let them know how gross this is? If not, that's tacit approval -- or at least tolerance -- of what they're doing.

Failing to give feedback also fails to give someone the concrete evidence they'd need in a meeting to persuade their boss to change course.

A couple times on HN there's been an article by a person that took one of those giant b+w LCD displays, married it to small computer, fixed it so it displayed the current front page of the newspaper, and hung it on the wall.

I'd love to have such a thing, though I don't want to spend the time building it. I just want to buy it.

The relevance here, though, is your site has to look attractive, like a real front page of a newspaper, or nobody is going to do this for your site.

I like that idea a lot. Make an instagram account named "Beautiful Newspapers" and post a picture of the framed homepage of some newspaper every day. Sadly I think it would be a parody account in practice.

It could use an e-ink display instead. This company sells a 13.3" e-ink photo frame for €800 that might do: https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/ Or you could go full DIY and make them yourself for probably ~$250 with a pi zero, picture frame, and a $180 e-ink panel from alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/E-Ink-Display-Eink-E-...

Sadly, if you want to go much bigger with e-ink it'll be rather pricey like this 31" for $2.6k: https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/

I kinda need a new project...

I meant e-ink, not LCD :-)

People will really go to lengths to spend hundreds of dollars on a frame for a website but still complain about paywalls that cost a few dollars to get through.

It seems disingenuous to claim that the commitment level to get through the paywall on many of the newspaper sites we refer to is just "a few dollars" when there have been widespread and numerous reports (even on this very website) of nightmare-inducing subscription cancellation practices.

But your comment misses the point entirely: An organization's home page is its face. They should at least try to make their face look attractive. Even a newspaper stand shows a nice view of above the fold through the window.

The idea that the homepage is a publication's face is woefully outdated. Traffic flows to stories through social media and SEO, distributed entry points that don't touch the homepage. It's not irrelevant, but this is a disproportionate emphasis to place on it.

The front page is quite different from the homepage for newspapers that have a print version.

> Please give us money

What's sad about that is they're also begging for government money so they can be "free and independent". One is always beholden to the paymaster.

That's generally advertising money...

I never have any trouble reading the news. I never get harassed or blocked. I use a text-only browser.

The problem with online ads and tracking arises because 1. ads are permitted on the network and 2. "tech" companies rely on them to make money. Newspapers are not driving the development of the online ads business. They may be customers, but it is "tech" companies that write the browsers and websites and a gazillion lines of Javascript (collectively, "ad tech") that make the web extremely ad-friendly, at the same time lining "tech" company pockets, while newspapers die on the vine. "Tech" companies facilitate online ads in exchange for money. They sell nothing else. They purport to offer value for "free". This is just bait to lure in ad targets.

Newspapers produce journalism. They hire people to produce journalism. "Tech" companies just sit on the web as middlemen, lapping up user data and marketing their "business" to advertisers. "Tech" companies do not hire people to produce journalism.

This "but look, they are using ads themselves" argument is really getting old. It does not change the message. The journalist is not equal to the media company that employs her. It's like arguing that newspapers cannot write about the newspaper business because they are a newspaper.

If anything, we should be marvelling at how for the past 20 years newspapers routinely drove traffic to the web (away from print) by reporting on it ad nauseum, and how they now are reporting on privacy issues even though they themselves may benefit from using privacy-invasive "ad tech".

And below the article there's the chumbox, full of clickbait, outright scams, fake news, detailed pictures of nasty diseases, and borderline porn.

And you didn't even touch on the nastiest of the bunch: the "GDPR" dialogs which give you a button "I allow and accept every single piece of tracking" and 600+ individual switches which have a timer of 1 sec on each switch so it would take you hours to opt out of tracking.

Usually you get those over those NYT & Co. articles blasting Googles, Facebooks and others for privacy and tracking.

While there's still a ways to go, NYT specifically is improving here: https://open.nytimes.com/to-serve-better-ads-we-built-our-ow...

Most of them seem to allow you to select minimal tracking if you click twice.

Typically there's a button to allow all tracking and one that's non-committal, something like "see my settings". The second one, as you say, brings up 600 switches, but usually the "non-essential" ones are turned off and all you have to do is scroll to the bottom and click "save settings" or something like that.

They are obviously making it more difficult than it has to be, and probably that causes a lot of people to allow all, but once I got the hang of it, it isn't too much trouble.

Yep... and the "by continuing to use this page, you agree...".

"reject all" should be the default option.

But this was messed up horribly from the beginning. Cookies should be disabled (or deleted when closing the tab) by default at the browser side,, with a small button somewhere to enable them for that specific site, and a opup notification to enable them, if the browser detects a login.

This is because it is a prisoner's dilemma: quality news sites would prefer no one to track, but if everyone does, they have to in order to make any money.

You forgot the “stay informed by giving us your email” banner with a guilt trip or hidden “no thanks” button, which pops up if you either scroll down too far or motion towards the back button

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