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>"This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money."

People have this notion that the media used to be way more honest and impartial before the digital age but I doubt that was ever the case. Papers were playing fast and loose with the truth long before the ad revenue model in order to get subscriptions (edit: and quite frankly, to be partisan and shape public opinion). The internet no doubt accelerated things, but I assert it only exacerbated what was endemic to journalism itself.

Even George Washington had to deal with sensationalism and slander: "He regarded the press as a disuniting, "diabolical" force of falsehoods, sentiments that he expressed in his Farewell Address."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#Second_term

I think people have short memories. They perceive that the news used to be better, so they assume it was always that way and that the current supposed decline is unfixable- after all, such a state of affairs has no precedent!

Similarly with claims of censorship over covid. Yes it is a cause for concern, but no, it probably won't lead to the Ministry of Information, as some people claim. But crucially, even if it does, that isn't in itself dystopia, our governments created propoganda ministries during WW2, and they don't continue to exist today. Military censorship has always existed but the propoganda ministry of WW2 was much more active than just censoring military information.

Also Yellow Press, which was the big fake news of the late 1800/early 1900s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

For a while during the last half of the 20th century, this type of sensationalism was staved off though, as the FCC had determined anyone with a news broadcast license had the public responsibility to present different sides to controversial issues. And for a while, it worked pretty well.

This was the fairness doctrine, which was abolished in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

Thank you for your research and insight. I was trying to figure out why both sides stopped being presented.

In the 90s, 2000s both sides were still presented until Omaba, got really bad under Trump. Now a cnn panel of 6 people all have to agree with each other or they won't be back next week.

Yeah despite being abolished in 1987, the lack of fairness doctrine took about a decade or two for the market to adjust (as conglomerates like Sinclair grew). We're only recently getting back to early 20th century sensationalism levels it seems.

Newspapers and magazines have derived most of their revenue from ads since long before Google and Facebook. They're lucky to break even on subscription fees.

Seriously newspapers spent the entire 20th century charging people as much as $100 for classified ads, job postings, real estate listings, etc. Craigslist murdered them and they deserved it. Everything after that has been sour grapes.

Do you realy think the value they give to communities is less than have 100$ job post

My local newspaper is a notoriously worthless rag that has probably done more to harm humanity than to benefit it, including starting a major war.

Your local newspaper has started a major war?

Yes. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journa...

I was about to say you must be from New York, but I was rather thinking about NYTimes, Judith Miller and the US War on Iraq. Plus ça change...

Incredible, I'm glad I asked - TIL. Thank you!

I think local papers give lots of value, but at the same time if I am a for-profit business, my goal isn't to help out the local newspaper, it's to make (and possibly save) as much money as possible. I don't know the success numbers of job classified ads, but I doubt it comes anywhere near the success numbers of places like Indeed or StackOverflow Jobs or Dice, all of which charge substantially less money and reach a larger audience.

People have a really rosy memory of local newspapers, but I grew up in a small midwest town with an "award winning" local newspaper in pre internet days, and I remember it mostly consisting of poorly written drivel and AP wire articles.

I'm sure it was a mixed bag but Corporate Media did not break the Epstein story. They famously avoided it, @see Amy Robach and ABC News leak. The Miami Herald, a local paper, broke the story thanks to a great journalist there.

IMO you are really discounting just how massive the importance of local journalism has historically been.

PE firms are now buying up and destroying these once great outlets, including the Miami Herald.

I don't think the local newspaper in their community would have broken the Epstein news story either. The Miami Herald is one of the largest in Florida, and where many of Epstein's crimes took place.

This is right. It's not Facebook that ate the media's lunch, it was craigslist, ebay, and any marketplace that allows free listings. They've been trying to make up that revenue ever since. Subscriptions were always a pittance.

That's not to say Facebook didn't make things worse. They make everything worse; They even ruined wishing friends happy birthday. But the news vs the internet is a much older story than middle-aged social media platforms.

The news companies had their opportunity to win this, but they moved far too late.

> Subscriptions were always a pittance.

It's not that they were a pittance, it's that they were eaten by the cost of printing and distribution. But the internet doesn't have that.

The problem was the chronology of how this happened.

Newspapers had paid print subscribers and advertisers and were profitable. Then the advertisers were eaten by eBay and Craigslist, so they went into the red. But their paid subscribers were still print subscribers, so they still had all the costs of printing and distribution. So they responded by laying off reporters.

Then they had no content worth subscribing to, so the subscribers went away. At that point they're just worthless clickbait mills chasing online ad money.

But the model of paying to subscribe to high quality content which is then distributed over the internet so that money goes to the reporters instead of the distribution costs, that works fine.

The real "problem" with it is that it works fine without a newspaper company. The reason you had a hundred reporters working together in the same building was so they could share a printing press. Without that need, you end up with individuals doing reporting on substack. Which works, but not for the shareholders of the New York Times.

I mostly agree with your assessment apart from this part:

> Without that need, you end up with individuals doing reporting on substack.

Content that is produced on substack is opinion, not news. It is produced from a comfort of a chair, not from a war zone or a hurricane zone. Nothing wrong with that (if opinion is what you are after), but you actually need to have a news organization to produce news coverage. A single person can not do it in a professional and repeatable way.

> A single person can not do it in a professional and repeatable way.

Putting aside whether this is even true, there is no requirement for a substack to always be exactly one individual, or for that individual to be unable to hire a third party proof reader or fact checker. That still doesn't require a billion dollar media corporation.

There is also no requirement for it to be opinion rather than factual reporting. Most of what existing large media companies produce is not factual reporting.

You just defined a news company.

Yet that thing is not a publicly traded multi-billion dollar media corporation.

Hm I think we have a misunderstanding. Who said that a news company has to be publicly traded multi-billion dollar media corporation? My local newspaper is a news company. It can not effectively be replaced by someone on substack, let alone a news company with aspirations of more than local news coverage. Substack is OK for opinion, not news. That was my whole argument.

Why exactly can't your local news company be replaced by "someone on substack"? If the individual reporters who currently work for that company would quit and host the same reporting on substack (either as a team or individually), what would be the major difference to the user?

For starters, an individual can not be at two different places at the same time to report (for example about a fire and a football game happening at the same time). If they report about both tomorrow, then it is not news anymore.

Also an individual may not have the same knowledge or understanding to report about science, sports, education, economy or crime with same quality.

If you propose multiple individuals forming an organization and using substack as a platform, that is fine, you just replaced paper or a website with substack, so the platofrm changes but they would still be running a news organization/news company.

I consider the reporters as just a part of a local newspaper (IMHO less than half of people working on it), so them moving to substack and abandoning all the non-local-news functions of the local newspaper (syndicated 'external' news, advertising, printing, etc) results in a substantially different kind of news organization than the local newspaper was, not just the same thing on a different distribution channel. It would effectively mean the death of the local news company as a concept, as the replacement is something quite different with a rather different business model, incentives and thus perspective.

>They make everything worse

I would go further. Facebook are just filling in a need and by doing so, making it worse. They never created anything. Calling the problem 'Facebook' won't help in the broader sense, i think that ultimately it's a distraction but people are happy with it because it allows them to outsource their problems rather then acknowledge them.

News media organisations were forced into bed with Google and Facebook by a tragedy of the commons. Readership was going to go to those platforms as long as any small proportion of media organisations published there. Smaller orgs like the ones involved in these lawsuits had only two options - publish on FB/G or miss out on a large proportion of readership.

> monetize like news were monetized for hundreds of years - you pay to read them

Very, very few news organisations have been sustained only or even primarily on readership spend. Your local paper you paid $1.20 for per issue barely paid for its own distribution with that money, much less the staff writers and freelancers doing the actual reporting. Unfortunately advertising dollars have been paying for news for much longer than FB/G have existed.

My local paper was bought by USA Today. They shut down the printing press, and laid off everyone except a literally handful of reporters/staff. Printing is done at another paper they bought in another medium sized town 60 miles away.

They increased the cost of the paper subscription (even online) and force us view the ads, even with a online subscription. Last time I looked at a giant Sunday paper, 3 articles were local, and from the reporters, the rest was from the USA today pool reporters or AP. The other fun thing was cancelling, that requires a telephone call, only during east coast business hours (we are west coast) and then 20 min of them doing anything they could to keep me from actually cancelling.

they can F-ck off and die.

I'm not sure how your post is related at all? Is USA Today one of the small news organisations involved in these lawsuits? My understanding is that USA Today is a behemoth news organisation.

Yes, my understanding was always that subscriptions and newsstand sales basically paid to get a physical paper into people's hands. But actually creating the content for that physical paper was paid for by advertising. I'm sure the specifics varied but, to a first approximation, those were the basic economics.

Put the paper online for free and, again to a first approximation, you now need the same advertising revenue to support the same reporting, editing, etc. But with the classifieds blown up and advertising generally going from print dollars to digital dimes, the revenue available to put out a newspaper cratered while the relevant costs didn't go down much at all.

Subscriptions also sell ads.

If you can tell an advertiser you've got XX,000 subscribers paying some nominal amount for your newspaper, that tells them that there are that many people who (probably) read the paper, and that they have some small amount of disposable income.

That was of course the long-time model of the trade press. You had XX,000 qualified subscribers and you supported sending an issue out every week or month with ads sold against those subscribers.

No one is willing to pay for news because as soon as a piece is published there are thousands of other publishers posting copycat articles. The copycats have next to zero expenses and post on aggregators like facebook with no fee so everyone just reads them. It's a tragedy of the commons that only the government can solve since people prefer to read their news through facebook/google blurbs for free.

> tragedy of the commons that only the government can solve

Tragedy of commons are not always solvable by governments, in this case most certainly not as people in government have their incentives aligned with getting favorable publicity from media.

Government can be a more effective regulatory mechanism for say polluted air or river because cleaner air benefits everyone equally. Media is not the case. Media benefits to those who can control it and putting government in charge will give us another CNN and FOX News.

I'd love a subscription service that gives me access to all my local news sources

My idea has been to build a centralized subscription service, somewhat like Apple News, but structured differently.

You buy a monthly subscription that grants you credits each month. You can allocate those credits to whichever news sources you want, and for that month you get unlimited access to your chosen outlets.

That's just monthly newspaper subscriptions with extra steps.

Better to do the music subscription route, where the user sub revenue is automatically divided amongst all the newspapers the user accesses for the month.

IIRC Google tried to do this with display ads, where you would see pictures of cats instead of display ads on the news pages and pay the website the few cents they would have made on the impression. Dunno what happened to it but people who are willing to pay for content always overestimate the size of the market of other people who are willing to do the same.

The problem is that, increasingly, those local news sources simply don't exist. My town doesn't have a newspaper. There's a website that hosts local news in my state but there is just hardly ever anything there. I get more news from Facebook or Next Door.

> Own it up, create credible news products, and monetize it like news were monetized for hundreds of years - you pay to read it.

Yes. Online adverts did not break journalism. The news media houses did this to themselves and frankly I think they are getting what they deserve.

"Opposite of reading is not reading, it is reading something like New Yorker or Atlantic". - Source unknown.

The problem with monetizing news the old fashioned way is cultural. When a user posts a paywalled article on Reddit or Tildes or any number of other similar sites, they are often crucified for it and asked to post low quality blogspam versions instead. People are used to the idea that news should be free, and seem unwilling to give up that idea.

Slightly differing perspective:

Newspapers and Google/Facebook (hereinafter "Big Tech") are not competitors, regarding the product of news. The former produces news, the later does not. Access to news can be sold. Readers will pay for it.

The question is what exactly does Big Tech produce that is saleable. IOW, what does Big Tech produce that can be sold. What do they produce that people will pay for. With respect to news product, Big Tech are intermediaries, what we colloquially refer to as "middlemen".

Newspapers may be willing to provide some news "for free", e.g., via a website. However newspapers also can sell subscriptions. Newspapers have a saleable product. The saleable product is what attracts an audience, irrespective of whether readers are paying subscribers or not.

Big Tech generally provide access to the work of others "for free". Generally, Big Tech has no saleable products (cf. services) of their own labour. Any audience that Big Tech attracts is reliant on the products of others. Big Tech generally does not produce the content it uses to attract an audience. The content belongs to someone else.

To any reader who sincerely believes Big Tech has "products" (cf. services) of their own labour, please consider how much revenue could Big Tech "earn" without acting as intermediaries for the work product of others. IOW, how much revenue could Big Tech earn solely from selling their own "products". Would Big Tech still be "Big".

NB. "cf. services" as used above means please distinguish products (tangible) from services (intangible).

The sellable product that Big Tech sells is aggregating and ranking billions of pages of content somebody else produced, so when you type a few characters into a search box, the most relevant results show up in few milliseconds. The ability to do that turns out to be more valuable than the actual content being read if measured by a typical ARPU of Big Tech vs ARPU of News co.

One of the problems of course is that Big Tech then does not actually sell this valuable product but chooses to monetize it with ads instead, which did democratize access to information, but also incentivized creation of huge quantities of low quality information and misinformation (again mostly for the purpose of monetization with ads). Whether we are better off as a society is another question.