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Comment by spunker540 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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