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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

Dominos would be my counterpoint: their pizza was just bad and they could do better. And they did.

I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly.

Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?

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> Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?

How is Rogan an an example of good journalism? He doesn't do background research or push back on guests.

Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective. They went from abysmal to merely bad. Which is fine at that price point and value prop.

> Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective.

They're not trying to be gourmet food, they're trying to be fast food. They were very bad by even that low standard, and they became better by that standard. I'm still not a fan, but to give credit where credit is due, they did improve.

Oh, 100% agreed there. But in a a larger conversation about "the media", Dominos is analogous to a large, mass-market, low cost outlet, not the media in general. It's entirely possible that TMZ or People Magazine had similar improvements that still keep them below the radar of someone serious about the product.

So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson is that good management recognizes when quality is falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.

That’s exactly my point:

We can both recognize the limits of mass market news and think that, eg, CNN is delivering a product below that standard.

Yeah, when did they get better? They've added more MSG over the last couple decades, I'm pretty sure, and kicked it up a lot when they publicized that they were re-formulating their sauce a decade or so ago—and, to be fair, they're far from alone in that, if you want a Pizza Hut pie that's about the same quality as a 1995 Pizza Hut pie, you're going to be paying more like $25 than $10 and you won't be getting it from Pizza Hut, all those chains been cutting quality and adding MSG for years to try to avoid raising prices—but haven't gotten better, except at making you regret eating it.

> They've added more MSG over the last couple decades

You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.

They already had some. Now there's a ton. And it's not to make it better, but to cover for the fact that all the other components have gotten a lot worse.

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