Facebook Freeloads Off Newspapers. This Plan Might Stop It | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Freeloads Off Newspapers. This Plan Might Stop It

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49 pointssamizdis77 comments

My hometown newspaper has been completely gutted since the late 90s. It's not just FB's fault. There are other factors. The Internet in general. But it is disturbing to me. The local politicians are more corrupt than ever because nobody is watching. The only local journalism now is the evening news, and viewership of that declines and skews older more and more each year because of cable cutting. A few reputable news outlets have survived on a national scale, but local journalism is mostly dead. And this is normal for younger people, so they don't even realize what they are missing.

Yep. Local corruption was already fairly bad but is gonna get a ton worse now that local papers are all but completely dead, and that shit's corrosive to democracy. [edit] and a huge drag on economic productivity, for that matter.

In 20 years of thinking about this stuff I've gone from being a huge Internet optimist to wondering if the open Internet is even compatible with a healthy, free society, at all. I'm starting to lean toward "no". McLuhan nailed it, and the message of the medium of the Internet may not include liberal democracy.

What happens when instead of killing bookstores, the market "decides" to kill something absolutely necessary for democracy's health?

If something beyond individuals voting is absolutely necessary for democracy's health, then it is already dead.

Because however you provide that thing, it will be co-opted and controlled.

So... it's never been alive? Several things beyond the franchise are necessary.

Canada (and other countries[1]) levy a tax on blank media (cassettes, CD-Rs, DVDs, etc...) to compensate rights holders for piracy of their work.

Do you think something like that would help? I'm thinking of an ISP tax where the proceeds are used to support local journalism.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

State-funded media isn't great for liberal democracy either.

The only state-funded media that I know of (BBC, CBC, and PBS) are all pretty good. I'd be sad to see any of them go away.

PBS, or really mostly member stations, do get some funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but it’s not really state-funded media and the best known programming would probably easily find a home elsewhere.

What public funding there is has also been a political sticking point from time to time when some show or other has ruffled some legislative feathers.

> the best known programming would probably easily find a home elsewhere

You're right - the popular stuff doesn't really matter when it comes to subsidies. If CBC has their funding slashed, Hockey Night in Canada will continue there or elsewhere. It's the unpopular stuff that needs support.

I share your concerns.

It brings to mind seeing videos of primitive tribes being given automatic weapons and thinking "you don't 'deserve' this, you haven't evolved to create them and therefore shouldn't have your hands on them"

That's the way I feel about the internet with "modern" society -- we're still too primitive to use these tools. We're still of tribal mindset but we've been given something quite dangerous that we are not well equipped to handle.

I see the tribalism here in HN (which I consider to be a top site for intelligent dialog).

It's not clear people even want democracy at all now. It takes a lot of work and moves slowly. People want an autocracy like Disneyland which permits only the right thoughts and actions.

Indeed. Nobody complains about the evils of suppression and oppression anymore; they complain about how the wrong thoughts are being suppressed and the wrong people are doing the oppressing.

It's not freedom vs suppression anymore; it's "ban teaching about racism" vs "ban saying naughty words". The idea that you should defend the rights of people you hate is completely dead in the water.

"the open Internet" in theory should be good for local newspapers because it enables fast easy(ish) efficient publishing but the fact that it also enables fast easy efficient copying kills existing models of monetization.

The fundamental problem is that copying digital media is so easy that it breaks the intuitive publishing model reliant on physical possession of any media inherently acting as license to access that media.

Right—I think there are two chief problems:

1) There is no longer a business model that can support strong local media. It's completely gone, and there doesn't seem to be any replacement or substitute coming from "natural" market action in the current environment.

2) The rage-algorithms and radicalization-rabbit-holes of social media giants have so completely captured everyone's attention that it's not clear anyone would read local reporting, anyway, even if it could somehow get funding. Unless it could serve the rage-algorithms and radicalization-rabbit-holes. Though perhaps at least the most shocking stories would get picked up more widely and be noticed.

Sort of.

What I am saying is that the ease with which digital media can be copied and distributed is the fundamental problem.

Prior to the free open Internet and widespread access to digital media, physically producing and distributing the actual newspaper was the hard part.

The time and difficulty of physically printing and delivering the actual paper media automatically covers for all the effort that goes in to producing the content of that media.

Anyone who would want to steal that content still had to do the actual hard part (physical production and delivery of the paper media).

Now though, with the free open Internet, production and distribution of the physical media (beeps, boops, zeros, and ones) is ludicrously cheap and easy. The content is now not only the most valuable part of the deal it is also easier than ever to steal.

There was also a forced bundle and local monopoly. The person with an apartment to rent out probably didn’t especially want to pay for the reporter covering the local town zoning board meetings. But they didn’t have much choice but to take out a classified as.

You are conflating separate concerns. Advertising is a whole different ball game. Though, to belabor this metaphor, it is played in the same arena.

As far as I am aware, newspapers did not typically have de jure monopolies. Presumably, you are thinking of telecoms as a comparison. But an apparent de facto monopoly could easily arise based on the previously mentioned physical constraints for actually handling paper media. It only makes sense to send the trucks so far. But in populated areas customers could easily have access to multiple different papers.

Edit: as far as the "forced bundle" is concerned, that AGAIN comes back to the inherent difficulty of producing and distributing paper media relative to the content contained on that media. It's pretty easy to include a simple report of the zoning board meeting in the content you are already printing and distributing but it doesn't make sense to run a separate production line to produce a separate version of the paper.

Has anyone tried this model of monetization: The articles are free online, but only the paying customers can write comments below them (that anyone can read)?

You could of course link the articles from elsewhere and have a discussion there, but then your comments would not appear under the original article.

I strongly agree with the corruption bit of your statement while strongly disagreeing with the rest of it.Newspapers were begging to be killed because they have been abusing market power to drive large profits for decades because the controlled the main chokepoint for the average person to learn about world and town recent events. They grew their wage/benefit structure to eat a lot of their monopoly profits and that killed them when their ability to abuse their chokepoint for excess profits and that killed them. There are lots of citizen and independent journalists popping up to fill in their place these days with much more streamlined cost structures.

The really big problem is lack of effective self directable filtering and aggregation of news for the average person. Nerds like me can kind of make it work with an rss reader, rss bridge and hundreds of rss feeds across broad content sources (i.e. websites, twitter, youtube, specific mastodon users, etc.) combined with a service like ground news to give some feedback on who is promoting what and point to other sources for the same story, but it's really hard to impossible for the average person. Instead what the average person has are echo chamber creating things like their facebook feed that tend to amplify the loudest, often cringiest voices.

People don't pay for newspaper subscriptions either. I have coworkers whose kids have grown up without ever getting a paper delivered to their house. It's a totally foreign concept to them, an anachronism you see in movies from the 80s/90s. I'd lament about how kids nowadays never get to experience the Saturday morning comics in them but they've got webcomics now, which are debatable better quality than the dull, mass appeal cartoons found in papers.

Are we sure it's not that politicians seem more corrupt because everybody is watching their every move?

Harvard's Shorenstein Center has studied this, and there's a strong correlation between local newspapers closing and corruption in local politics increasing. (You may be addressing national politics which is a different matter entirely.)

Tried to find the study you're referring to by googling but came up empty handed -- could you point me in the right direction?

Funnily enough the closest I came was another comment of yours :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561773

Lots of resources on the actual site mentioned https://shorensteincenter.org/?s=corruption

Nothing about a link between corruption and lack of local journalism, however

I found this: https://shorensteincenter.org/solutions-americas-local-journ...

> Research shows that the disappearance of credible local news and information contributes to widening political polarization, increasing costs for local government and meaningfully suboptimal community outcomes as independent oversight decreases or, in the worst case, evaporates entirely.

I guess the "increasing costs for local government and meaningfully suboptimal community outcomes" bit. It's worth noting that I can't seem to find anything in the references that specifically links that with a decline in reporting by local news.

> There are other factors.

Like Craigslist. I think loss of classified ad revenue was the first deep wound.

Local news has been dead for decades from Craigslist; this howling is because national news is dying, and they will not go quietly into that dark night.

I subscribe to 5 online newpapers. I wish more people did.

The decline of newspapers, and journalism in general, is 100% due to the now common practice of writing a story that says "<another outlet> reported ...". Why would anyone spend the time money to do actual journalistic research when it's so much cheaper to steal someone else's work. When stories became a commodity, it became a race to the bottom.

The local paper around these parts charges about 4x what I'm paying for a high quality national paper. I'd pay a little more for local (economies of scale pretty much guarantee their marginal costs are higher) but not that much more. Especially because even at that higher price it's still filled to the brim with advertising and copies of news from other sources.

I've heard an argument that more disclosure and coverage on local politics actually leads to more accountability, but not the way you think. If no one reads and makes decisions based on local news or the dump of accountability disclosures, then it doesn't do anything. But lobbyists do follow these. So it helps a lobbyist to see which senator amended the bill or proposed what kind of spending. It helps the lobbyist keep the politician accountable.

Most people are caught up on national politics for some reason. I see people in NYC protesting laws in Texas while they neglect real issues affecting their quality of life.

These newspapers all have Facebook pages (and Twitter accounts) where they voluntarily post and promote their news articles. I’d venture they get a ton of free traffic from social media companies and are far more dependent on social media than the inverse…

The bottom line is people weren’t paying newspapers for their news. They had a geographic moat, and controlled printing and distribution; and when the internet made distribution costs free, their business model tanked, much like the music industry and CDs. But it’s far easier to blame Facebook than admit that the world changed and left them behind.

> they get a ton of free traffic

which they can't monetize anymore.

they absolutely could throw everything behind a paywall and not even let search engines in without payment/subscription. they choose not to because they want the ton of free traffic that comes their way by being indexed and auto-expanded on social media feeds.

except they currently have to act alone, as the article notes. So if an individual newsgatherer were to shut itself down like that, readers looking for "news, any news" would just bounce off to another source that was more open.

>These newspapers all have Facebook pages (and Twitter accounts) where they voluntarily post and promote their news articles. I’d venture they get a ton of free traffic from social media companies and are far more dependent on social media than the inverse…

I mean, isn't that where 99% of newspapers GET their stories? I was under the impression that the new newspaper cycle was:

News Event > Social Media (Twitter or FB) > Journalist sees it > Story in Newspaper/online Newspaper

You make an interesting point that made me realize something.

I already pay for a couple of (digital) newspaper subscriptions, but I am willing to pay double that (if not more) for a subscription to a news publication that explicitly prohibits their writers from using tweets as sources or evidence of anything in their coverage. I am very sick and tired of how often "news" is not actual news, but a "journalist" trying to pump out articles and harvest clicks by just searching for whatever tweet to make a point they want to make seem as "real" in the article. Imo people gossipping online isn't the news I want to read, and a sample of a few randos tweeting something that supports your point is not valid data.

Rare exceptions apply where the tweet itself counts as material news, e.g., it was made by a leader of a country and it actually is some big news and the tweet itself is being the primary source (e.g., not just a link to an official press release). But it is so rare, it could be imo almost discounted. Also wouldn't apply to video footage sourced from twitter, because a video is a video, regardless of where it originated.

unfortunately, society still need to send someone to see what happen. Newspaper performed this role in past. I am interesting about what will happen when news YouTube channel find there are no more news source.

It's not just that distribution is free, it's that newspapers lost their monopoly on much of their content with the advent of the internet. Classifieds? Craigslist/Angie's List will serve you better results. Comics? Reddit's r/all has better memes. Sports/world news? A local paper can't possibly compete with the larger organizations in terms of coverage and quality.

There's just not much left that local papers are specifically the best at (I think Cuban calls it a 'core competency'). I think there's definitely a market for re-calibrating reader expectations by rebranding from being a newspaper to being a brochure or pamphlet.

It's sad, but this isn't going to work. Facebook and Google don't need these newspapers. The newspapers need Facebook and Google. We already saw a law exactly like this one in Spain, after the EU tried protecting its local news outlets from Google, and the result was Google calling the bluff and simply pulling every newspaper in Spain from Google News until the nation capitulated and created exemption rules that essentially returned everything to status quo ante.

These kinds of laws are written by people who clearly do not understand the relationship between the tech giants and traditional media, and have no comprehension of who holds the leverage.

On a related note, Australia successfully pass a similar law that forced Facebook and Google to re-negotiate with newspapers and sign a deal. I don't know whether it was actually a good law or not, but it seems to me like there could be different approaches to making such laws and some might work and some won't.

Matt Stoller certainly thinks it was good: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-we-save-newspapers...

I haven't gotten round to reading that article in detail yet, but I find him pretty insightful when it comes to the harmful impacts of market consolidation.

Set your robots.txt appropriately if you don't want to show up in Google.

If I want my website to show preferentially in Google, I have to pay them. But oh no, we can't have the same rules for journalists as we do for us regular folk.

They want Google to pay them for sending traffic to their sites. This is not the way the world works.

They actually like being featured on Google News and Facebook's news sections. They just want to be paid for it, or else force the tech giants to redirect traffic to them, directly. But as long as Google et.al. have the ability to walk away from the deal, they will exercise it, since they know the newspaper will feel more pain from the separation than the they will.

This is a flagrant money grab and no more. Years before social media existed these outlets loved the free traffic from aggregators like the drudge report. They just don't see a huge money pit there that they can go after.

I don't understand why the tech companies haven't fought back harder against this extortion. YouTube even explicitly favors "authoritative" sources which is basically the companies trying to extort them here. Why don't they just drop them from their platform?

I think previous attempts along these lines have proven that, if you actually manage to force Facebook (or Google) to pay for linking to your content, they will just stop linking to your content. If your content is news, anyway. Harsh as it is, they are probably making the right business decision. Would people really see fewer FB (or Google) ads if there were no news content there? I don't think that's why most people go to FB or Google.

It reminds me somewhat of the fights in the 80's and early 90's about pirated software, in which Microsoft wanted people to all pay for Office, but didn't want them to consider free options. They never quite pushed the issue as hard as they could have, because I think at some level they knew that if they got an ironclad anti-piracy strategy, it would simply have caused StarOffice (or other options available at the time) to skyrocket.

I'm not saying it's good, but the truth is that news is currently getting $$ roughly equivalent to how much people value it.

Sure, but is it equivalent to how much value it provides? Would the world be better or worse off if news media shrunk to take up only the amount of resources people are willing to give it as charity? It seems like not. Local news has been decimated, people increasingly only pay attention to national issues helping accelerate polarization. It seems like a lot of the value news provides is given by just the titles which is tricky for the companies involved

I think it is plausible that a "public radio" type funding model could work, but only after you have a working news source that people find worth supporting. This is a chicken-and-egg problem (aka a bootstrapping problem).

But, my earlier statement was only intended to describe the current state of things, and is no way an endorsement of that state. I agree a greater focus on local news would be preferable, for many reasons.

Can Twitter sue journalists for freeloading? If a journalist wants to write a trend article that consists of four tweets and fluff, should they have to pay for it?

Much as I want local journalism to thrive, I'm concerned about the attempt to redefine fair use here. A thumbnail, headline, short excerpt or summary, and link to the source article is textbook fair use.

It seems to me the fundamental problem is that local newspapers can't make money from advertising the way they used to because tracking/targeted ads are more profitable and big tech platforms are better at delivering them than anyone else. Other sources of revenue like classified ads have also dried up due to more effective competition.

I don't really get this. I mean, we either have a copyright issue here, or we don't, right?

I consider banning links to newspaper articles (or banning links in general for that matter) to be a non-starter in the US due to the First Amendment.

So what does that leave us with?

Edit: to be clear, I really do think good journalism is a good thing, and regret what is happening to it. But I don't understand why they're barking up this particular tree.

Does it really? When I still used Facebook I never ever used it for news.

I only used it to keep track of my friends. In fact the way Facebook kept inserting ever more other crap into my timeline was what got me to leave. Well that and Cambridge Analytica.

But I'm genuinely surprised that they are really considered a news source. I've only ever seen this stuff as "cheap filer" content. That might be as well some cat videos instead of "news".

Im not sure where the freeloading claims come from, because, to my knowledge, no site hosts the content of these articles.

It seems like we are trying to ban talking about articles, and banning sharing links, unless we pay. That seems ghastly.

I'd love to figure out where to give newspapers & media sites some kind of help. But this seems alarmingly misguided an attempt.

Journalists freeload off of each other.

If you want copyright in news, go for it, but it's a bit more complex than "FB Bad"...

I mean this has been the core issue of journalists since FB started to render page previews for users.

The whole "FB Bad" news cycle, in my opinion, is primarily the result of traditional media feeling threatened by FB "freeloading" on their work.

I'd like to see a "syndicate" system where I have an account, and micro-pay for each article I read in any newspaper that is part of the syndicate. At the end of the month, all my purchases are added up and charged to my credit card in one lump sum. The syndicate adds up all the articles read by all subscribers, and remits the total payment to each newspaper or other news source.

This replaces the onerous subscriptions I would have to maintain for each individual news source I wish to follow. I don't read enough New York Times to justify paying CAD $120/yr, but if fifty people like me consume $5 of articles per year, that's a win-win.

Newspapers will not be forced into this model until they are at death's door.

The reality is producing good local news is hard work. It takes not just critical thinking, but effort to build a local network of sources and knowledge to report what's going coherently while keeping readers engaged. This costs money. It doesn't matter if you think local media's business model is outdated or not, it is a critical part of functional democracy and governmental transparency. This bill might not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. It's naive to think nothing of value is lost when the internet destroys something.

Is this still the case? I don't use FB like I used to, but almost every time I log in these days (2-3x/month), my News feed is mostly friend's posts and ads.

I see local news, but I doubt the guy with a local news site is gonna get a cut.

What happens when Tucker or Maddow pull up some article from the NYT or WSJ and talk about it on their shows? Does Fox/MSNBC pay those outlets? Genuinely curious

I always thought this was a sort of news stations replaying the apple 1984 superbowl commercial, that a piece of media covered by the rest of media gives aforementioned piece free publicity. When a journalist shows up on either of these shows, the host is I’m lying you should watch out (pay/subscribe) for said journalists work. Maddow even ends segments reminding viewers to subscribe to their local newpaper to keep them alive.

I have a number of thoughts on this. I'm in my early 50s. My family when I was young had the local paper delivered. It seemed to have some value in keeping up with local issues. As kids we liked reading the comics.

Since I became an adult, I have never subscribed to a newspaper. By the time I lived on my own in the mid-90s, I was already getting more value from the internet than from newspapers, local or otherwise. Furthermore, we had cable news and local news on the TV. There was little reason to get the local (or any paper).

Now I subscribe to AppleNews+. I don't love it, but it's a reasonable option. It gives me a host of local news from many different places. I'm seeing articles from small-ish papers in Connecticut, upstate New York, and others while living on the West Coast, in addition to bigger stuff like the Washington Post, the Atlantic, etc. I'm seeing international stuff that I never saw before like papers in Isreal, etc. I despise that there are still ads even though I'm paying for it, but they are the least intrusive and least annoying ones I've ever experienced on news sites, so at least there's that.

This whole thing is a way to enrich corporate media and disenfranchise independent journalism.

Joe Rogan or The Young Turks won't be eligible for any of these anti trust exclusions or subsequent payouts. Even though much of America relies on them for political coverage, news and debate.

This whole things is a blatant money and power grab and has nothing to do with increasing the quality of independent, high quality Journalism.

The two sources you named are barely sources of journalism on their best days.

You might say that, but multiple political organizations through internal polling have found these independent journalists to have such a large audience that they get candidates to appear on them.

There are plenty of publicly available data points that present a reasonable case for this that im too lazy to cite on a friday evening, but there are a few in this reddit post that may help: https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ben0rp/is_joe_big...

The tech industry has the leverage in this fight and I say it's about time they used it. The legacy media at this point mostly exists at the courtesy of tech.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"

Why does the bill single out "Journalism" as the sole type of content that requires an anti trust exception to take on distributed publishing in the online world?

Why not help the music industry, the pornography industry and scores of other types of content that are pilfered everyday in the name of the section 230 protections that these platforms enjoy?

The answer, if i may offer an opinion, is to indirectly impose an illegal tax on a profitable business model to serve as a "forever fund" into the hands of businesses that support a certain political viewpoint.

The mainstream media does not represent honest journalists and this collective bargaining contract will only empower the mass-media behemoths to continue pushing groupthink while independent, small journalists who dare report on stories such as sex scandals involving politicians (or their sons hacked computers with videos containing drugs and prostitutes) will get cut out of the collective contract.

This is one of the small steps on the way to news outlets and journalists being licensed by the state, and with that licensing given special speech privileges. Where Zimbabwe leads, the world follows.

While I don't agree with the content of the bill or its general approach, the underlying problem is real. The music industry, the pornography industry, etc. don't need help, because music and pornography are still being produced, in abundance. Journalism, especially local journalism and investigative journalism, not so much.

It's also quite reasonable to ask, though, if this bill would actually benefit local papers, and not just the NYT and WaPo.

Lol, i love the discourse on HN /s

And you suppose Journalistic pieces aren't produced in similar abundance right now? We are in an era where anyone can spin up a podcast/video channel/website etc. The SINGLE LARGEST TRUSTED NEWS SOURCE IN AMERICA according to many political investigative entities is JOE ROGAN.

And that's a great tangent. Would Joe Rogan be eligible for these payouts if he publishes snippets outside his Spotify deal and it shows up on Facebook ? OF COURSE HE WONT. That's the point of the bill . . .to suppress independent journalists and enrich the establishment.

How much does Joe Rogan rely on clicks from facebook for money?

Does the bill literally say a news outlet needs to rely on “clicks from Facebook for money” to qualify?

Come on, you’re probably smarter than this and can present a better argument than needing to stoop to a straw man.

Indeed, we certainly have an abundance of journalism. Perhaps the point about local journalism still stands, however.

And most people making music and pornography don’t make much money either. Also make no mistake. If individuals writing code were dependent on tip jars they wouldn’t be any better off—as has been abundantly demonstrated.

I mean, anytime the subject of giving a little money to foss developers is brought up theres, theres lots of angry people in the comments saying those developers shouldn't be given anything.

Because newspaper business models have no moat, especially as news commoditizes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com