BuzzFeed News is shutting down
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
They also had one of the best news org GitHub repos, with the code and data and documentation for their investigations:
https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything
[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-news-wins-ge...
https://futurism.com/buzzfeed-publishing-articles-by-ai
> Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard...
> This month, we noticed that with none of the fanfare of Peretti's multiple interviews about the quizzes, BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid...
> The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another. Check out these almost-copied lines:
> "Now, I know what you're thinking - 'Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'" in an article about Cape May, in New Jersey.
> "Now I know what you're thinking - 'but Caribbean destinations are all just crowded resorts, right?'" in an article about St Maarten, in the Caribbean.
> "Now, I know what you're thinking. Puerto Rico? Isn't that where all the cruise ships go?" in an article about San Juan, in Puerto Rico.
>The company-wide layoffs and elimination of the news operation come just months after BuzzFeed had laid off 12 percent of its staff in a cost-cutting measure. That penny-pinching move, which Peretti said was necessary due to an “ongoing audience shift to vertical video,”
On an individual to individual basis we might recognize bad content meant to feed off of our base emotional instincts versus content meant for accuracy and to inform.
However collectively it appears there's more of us that rather get sucked into the rage content than try for objective or accurate reporting.
This mirrors the transition of television News from not needed to be profitable to needing to be profitable. Look at the success of cable news.
I think this is less of a comment about us as a species and more a comment about the economic systems that we have in place. Our economic systems used to support journalism.
We ought to exercise what agency we have in shaping social systems, but not only this, we need to remind ourselves regularly that we do have agency in order to exercise it
Why would someone choose to wade through a listicle when they can get their rage unfiltered and on tap?
What is the alternative? And I do mean an alternative that would incentivize and yield the same creative explosion we've seen with the web over the last 30 years.
This wouldn't have happened without ads, no other alternative has ever been found that got the author of a website paid while not directly charging the reader.
The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without, hell without ads there probably wouldn't even be a search engine to find anything on the web and without a search engine nobody would be able to find anything of any use.
All? That's such a ridiculous generalization that it's practically a lie. If that's all you remember, then I suggest that your experience has been too short and/or limited. Before Google even existed there were tons of sites that were there for reasons other than ads. (I've been involved with the internet since before it became public BTW, plus Usenet and other things before that, so I have some perspective.) Even after Google became the ad behemoth it is today, plenty of sites flourished while having nothing to do with it. I had my own blog from 2000 until last year, moderately well known in some circles, but neither I nor most of the other bloggers I interacted with had anything to do with ads. There were forums without ads, e-commerce sites without ads (not counting their own), etc. The current situation, where everything seems to be a walled garden or infested with ads, is pretty recent ... and even now, there are plenty of sites that decline to play that game. Like the one we're having this conversation on.
And I re-iterate, whatever and however many sites there were knocking around on the early internet pale in comparison to the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads when people realised they could fund their hobbies and write about topics they loved at the same time.
It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense and it will vastly outpace the output of the contingent who simply wish to write for the sake of it.
Ads supercharged the webs development and I see nothing that could've replaced them, I say that as someone who's never been involved in the ad industry.
Confuse correlation with causation much? The internet has certainly grown, but not just because of ads. In some ways it has shrunk because of ads. Innumerable forums and blogs and even social-media sites like MySpace were shunted aside as VC- and ad-funded walled gardens like Facebook became dominant. That's a loss (and I say that as someone who worked at Facebook for a while). As I said, the volume has increased but the creativity hasn't. I'll take ten truly creative people over a hundred YouTube or TikTok "influencer" types any day.
> if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense
It makes me sad when I see people who can't even imagine a motive other than profit. Seems particularly common here, and I've learned not to engage with such. Have a nice day.
And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is constrained by what advertisers approve of.
You're not going back far enough. The heyday for the web predated Google.
> The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without
This does not at all comport with what I've experienced.
For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could possibly be talking about, there are some examples discussed here [1], from which I highlight a handful of bullet points, which may not all be mutually exclusive:
- financial stability
- the need to "chase the algorithm"
- sensationalism as a perverse incentive of the market
- a lack of incentivization of quality content
- the perverse disincentivization of long-form content
- the perverse incentivization of cheap editorial content over expensive investigative journalism
- the availability of quality information to people who can't afford to pay for an expensive news subscription or who may simply not have access to news where they are
- editorial independence from commercial or industrial interests
- long-term viability of more local news
- collapsing advertising revenue due to macro, social and tech trends
- parasitic audience capture by social media platforms
[1] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_developme...
You have to think a little harder than "where the funding comes from" (yes that's important, everyone knows it's important to follow the money... but it's not the full picture). Sophisticated administrative structures can insulate you against certain risks by altering how power is normally or naturally distributed. When you design these systems, you create the accountability mechanisms that you want: almost anything is possible.
Similarly, when issues come up with existing structures, the answer doesn't have to be an ideological pole (in whichever direction). The most reasonable answer is usually just to tweak the administrative structures / accountability mechanisms. In other words, you don't have to try and reason about this in purely theoretical, vague terms: it's a very practical and concrete problem that can have as much context and nuance as you want.
That doesn't mean it's easy, but I hate that almost everyone seems to not even spend a minute being creative. Similarly, I hate how people confuse the issue of "is the media free to editorialize" with "do I agree with this piece of editorial content", which is >90% of the criticism I seem to see in general.
We need to destroy ads as a viable business model before we can even try exploring other models. Installing an ad blocker is ethical.
I suspect this dynamic also applies to software, including, perhaps counterintuitively, FOSS software. "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with both paid and free (actually free). Interest in developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in using FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly spyware) software, than one without it.
people who contribute want to know the thoughts and insights of others, so comment!
It's unfortunate the internet went this way, but as you said, it happened because people "wanted" it to.
Oh. Well.
Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.
What creative explosion? Trash news sites, social media? The world would be a better place without any of these.
The main change is that web media seems far more comfortable than traditional with being _just_ fluff, so the journalism is increasingly endangered.
At the same time, it's sad to see yet another an independent news outlet go. As the recent meltdown over the (well deserved) Government Sponsored labels on Twitter showed, it's becoming increasingly difficult to run independent news when a lot of your competitors are state-backed, meaning they don't actually have to turn a profit.
Plus they would still have the problem where people see "Buzzfeed" and immediately turn away because they have a preconceived notion of what kind of content they produce.
BuzzFeed (the listicle site) never had any credibility, so the only direction they had to go was up.
For starters, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), a left-wing watchdog with Progressive right in their website title, denounced BuzzFeed News' coverage of Obama during his term as "almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic," and even "creepy" for literally having only one negative article about him in their assessment out of one hundred random samples from Google (though they specifically call out the majority assessed were News Division, not BuzzFeed the tabloid). Their top tech reporter, Ryan Broderick, was fired after plagiarizing for almost a decade, and basically the entire time he was working there. And publishing the Steele Dossier as though it was actual news at first, even though even Wikipedia says many of the statements in it were false, was also a low point; even the Washington Post in 2017 said it was bad journalism. So bad actually, that the editor of BuzzFeed felt the need to publish an opinion piece in The Atlantic today (yes, today, 6 years later) defending his actions. Another Pulitzer-prize winning journalist (Barry Meier) called the whole event a "media clusterfuck of epic proportions."
FAIR: https://fair.org/home/buzzfeeds-obama-coverage-is-99-percent...
Broderick: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/markschoofs/a-note-to-o...
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/01/... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/11/th...
Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/ben-smith-...
Meier: https://bookshop.org/p/books/spooked-the-trump-dossier-black...
From The New Yorker [0]:
"The story was sourced to “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.” However, once it was published, other federal officials spoke up. Mueller’s office released a rare public statement, saying that “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.” BuzzFeed, and its editor, Ben Smith, have stood by the story."
[...]
"I recently spoke by phone with Leopold about his reporting of this story and his other work on the Trump-Russia affair. Leopold, who was previously at Vice News, is considered an expert at using Freedom of Information Act requests and was part of a team of BuzzFeed reporters who were Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2018. He has also been the subject of controversy. In 2002, Salon removed an article from its Web site after Leopold was accused of inaccuracy and plagiarism. Four years later, he incorrectly reported that Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, had been indicted in the investigation into the outing of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame. (Leopold was open about past substance abuse and mental health issues in a 2006 memoir, “News Junkie.”)"
I still respect the outlet's FIFA story, but BuzzFeed News remained a step below mainstream outlets with investigations like The Washington Post.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-buzzfeed-reporter-e...
That most certainly wasn’t when that push started.
e.g. Here’s a piece from Reuters in 2015, prior to Trump, “FEATURE-Beyond cute cats: How BuzzFeed is reinventing itself”: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-media-buzzfeed-idUSL2N0L...
My take is that Mueller was trying so hard not to find Trump guilty that he bent over backwards to interpret Cohen's testimony in an unrealistically benign light, splitting hairs over whether Trump's coaching amounted to "directing" or not.
Buzzfeed in general gets flak but to people in the industry, it was quite clear that they:
1 - Understood the medium 2 - For a brief while, nailed the art of messaging within it
And it's a shame Buzzfeed news needed that substrate to survive on.
Jim DeRogatis is the person most singly responsible for bringing justice to R Kelly.
"Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/insuranc...
"A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers To Kill Its Political Enemies. This Could Be The Future Of War." - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...
"Secret NYPD Files: Officers Who Lie And Brutally Beat People Can Keep Their Jobs" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/secret-n...
"A Chicago Cop Is Accused Of Framing 51 People For Murder. Now, The Fight For Justice." - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/detective...
"WWF Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People" - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wid...
The freemium models of the New York Times and Washington Post are the ones that are cleaning up. You get a few free ad-supported articles a month to pique your interest, and if you are really into it, you need to pay a subscription. But Buzzfeed never had a brand people would pay for.
Buzzfeed, the non-news part, certainly knows how to produce cheap content, which makes it easier to ad support. They also do sponsored content.
But I'd hesitate to say that Buzzfeed understood the medium. They knew how to game traffic. They didn't know how to make money.
A lot of news outlets chased clicks. They thought they understood the medium. Making money and supporting yourself is the ultimate understanding the medium. Turns out The Gray Lady understands it the best.
And it's an even worse business model if you rely on social media for your business model and one day Twitter (or any other platform eventually) decides that if you're going to make money sharecropping in their fields, you need to start turning over revenue to the landlord in the shape of checkmark payola for reach and gatekeeping fees for access to the API.
It's the classic platform enshittification end-game: Social media embraced companies like Buzzfeed for providing the content that they used to build critical mass, then turned around and viewed them as ATMs to be plundered. Same story as app developers in walled gardens.
We have to filter out noise in some ways, and BuzzFeed has made no considerable effort to position themselves as a platform worth listening to.
I thought Buzzfeed was online "tabloid journalism" like The National Inquirer.
The business model seemed to be "what if we have truly great investigative journalism, funded by clickbait listicales that we, inexplicablly, use the same brand for".
It's easy to mock the branding decisions they made (and not entirely unfair) but it's still a loss to the internet to see them go.
It would certainly improve your reputation among raccoons.
Buzzfeed News was amazing real journalism at its finest.
It’s demise goes to show that humans do not want fact-finding journalism.
Even highly paid humans like HN developers refuse to pay for journalism so…
…what we’re left with is entertainment such as Fox News and the others.
Isn't it a more accurate description to say that this goes to show that if you dilute your fact-finding journalism brand with clickbait nonsense, then people will ignore all of it?
The Steele Dossier was “good” journalism?
It was partisan hackery.
https://www.thewrap.com/buzzfeed-finally-updates-story-that-...
Non sequitur. People didn’t realise Buzzfeed News was fact-finding journalism because Buzzfeed proper was everything but. Plenty of people on HN pay for news, as evidenced by the constant complaining about paywalls.
Not wanting "BuzzFeed" to be someone's source of journalism is not the same thing as that person not wanting to consume high-quality journalism/news.
That said, I could understand the argument that if someone is generally well-read in this world, they would definitely know BuzzFeed News was, for the most part, a separate entity. I can only speak for myself - I'm fairly happy with my mix of Propublica, The Economist, USA Today, and NYT, but I've also not really analyzed that mix much since 2019, and I definitely don't read everything all the time (it's too much to consume).
It doesn’t really indicate that we don’t want serious journalism, just that we’re not really willing to give every service the benefit of the doubt.
I certainly never did.
What I'm saying is there is already plenty of better (or just-as-good, or near-good) sources of journalism. I did not even know BuzzFeed News was separate from BuzzFeed, so why would I waste my time even looking into them when:
* There are already decent news outlets
* My only perception of BuzzFeed is that their quality is extremely sub-par, which is by their own doing.
In the competition for my attention, I'd rather lose out on a possible diamond in the rough that is BuzzFeed News, then subject myself to the far likelier possibility that BuzzFeed News was really just more "BuzzFeed".
In this edge case, that filter is wrong, but ask yourself - if Fox News came out with a new source that was of Pulitzer-worthy quality and was honestly unbiased, would you still give it the time of day? I still wouldn't, because the chances it adds something of value higher than my current level of journalism consumption is much lower then the chances that this magical "Fox News" offshoot is actually something decent.
Maybe just maybe Buzzfeed did both because in the end it’s the only way that journalism has been able to survive.
In the end you entertain and inform because to inform only means to go out of business.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer
“In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors. The wide appeal reached a million copies a day and opened the way to mass-circulation newspapers that depended on advertising revenue (rather than cover price or political party subsidies) and appealed to readers with multiple forms of news, gossip, entertainment and advertising.
Pulitzer's name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes established in 1917 as a result of his endowment to Columbia University. The prizes are given annually to recognize and reward excellence in American journalism, photography, literature, history, poetry, music, and drama. Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism by his philanthropic bequest; it opened in 1912.”
Good stories take months (sometimes years), so you need hundreds of good journalists to make good stories in a high enough frequency that people would even consider paying for a subscription.
You're either chasing public grants (and people always question your impartiality), or you die. You can count on one hand the ones that have been in this game for longer than a decade and even then you'll have fingers to spare.
Today we lost a great one.
Disclaimer: I work for OCCRP.org which I would (subjectively) put in the same basket. No Pulitzer yet, but we got a Nobel Peace Prize nomination this year!
Maybe not everything in life ought to be ruled by The Market.
I don't think it shows that at all. What it shows is that if you take something good and slap a brand on it that people associate with crap, people will think your good thing is crap and avoid it, too.
More here: https://www.axios.com/2021/11/14/steele-dossier-discredited-...
> specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations
And that
> The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.
I don't really hold it against them that they published a document they had been given with a big disclaimer on it.
As far as Semafor is concerned, I'm pretty sure SBF's investment was public record. Where did they fail to disclose it?
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/22/2022/sam-bankman-fried...
In the end, Im pretty sure Elon was correct and Semafor did in fact misreport this, SBF didnt invest anything in the acquisition.
This thread is no different.
But they really should have renamed it. Would that be so hard?
Well, they did win a Pulitzer. That sounds like it would position them as a platform worth listening to and also like something that took some considerable effort.
Bottom line is that Buzzfeed news was a far left rag. The world will be better of with less polarizing news outlets.
I have no problem with extremist sites doing partisan hit pieces if they are good, worthy hit pieces.
I just learned this from your comment. Sounds like something I would have appreciated. Unfortunately, the "BuzzFeed" in the name likely acted as negative-marketing, here.
So whenever buzzfeed is mentioned someone welll-akchuallys “buzzfeed news is a serious news outlet tho”.
https://www.theonion.com/kidnapped-journalist-forced-to-expl...
The team that won it is also very interesting:
- Megha Rajagopalan, probably the only one that is a journalist by profession. She left for the NYT [1]
- Alison Killing, an architecture and urban planning investigator [2]
- Christo Buschek, a data and computation investigator [3]
It was such an interesting mix of disciplines and expertises, and is reflected in the award for reporting in international affairs::
For a series of clear and compelling stories that used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former prisoners, to identify a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims. [4]
Worth checking out, although it is from that era when web sites made your mouse wheel overheat from scrolling:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/fincen-files
---
[1] https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-expands-inter...
[2] Technically "geospatial investigator", but I am going off her own description based on her web site https://killingarchitects.com
[3] https://twitter.com/christo_buschek
[4] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/megha-rajagopalan-alison-ki...
Sounds like a big branding fail. Not the critics' fault for not recognizing the literary awards here. Next time don't splatter the Internet with You Won't Believe What This Celebrity Looks like Now!
Here's a headline from today: "Victoria Justice Addressed The “Stupid” Rumor That She Was “Jealous” Of Ariana Grande During Their Time On “Victorious” Years After That “I Think We ALL” Meme Went Viral
And the exerpt:
“This is so dumb. Ten years later. How is this even a story? This is so stupid.”"
I can't tell if I'm reading satire anymore.
- Help, The World Is On Fire And I Feel Like My Life Is Over At 24
- Multiple Women Are Reportedly Cooperating With The Criminal Investigation Into Jonathan Majors, And His Attorney Again Said He’s Innocent
- Two Former New Mexico State Basketball Players Accused Their Teammates Of Sexual Assault And Blamed The University For Doing Nothing To Stop It In A New Lawsuit
- A 34-Year-Old Man Who’d Recently Been Released From Prison Is Accused Of Killing His Parents, Two Of Their Friends, And Injuring Three Others In A Shooting Rampage
These are "featured" articles right now. I know interest is subjective but it just seems like none of that really matters for your day to day life. I stopped watching national news around 7 years ago and I have felt _immensely_ better since doing so and I don't at all feel like I've missed out on a thing. My life has seemed to slow down (in a good way).
The only news I pay any attention to is HN and my local news but even that is really only a few minutes a day.
Who is the target demographic for this news? All those stories could have been randomly generated and it wouldn't make a difference for the majority of visitors to that site.
I have a slight bias against journalism because I've personally been effected by a twisting of truth and being in finance (I run a trading firm) just the way investing/stocks are presented blows my mind (in a bad way)... that said, I'm never one to rejoice at people losing their jobs. I just really am curious as to why and what Buzzfeed news hoped to accomplish.
This is kind of like saying "I have a slight bias against maps because one sent me in the wrong direction." People need a way to know what's going on in the world.
Most of it is not even news, it's fear peddling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
If you must watch the news, limit yourself to the old fashioned 30 minute nightly news shows on the major channels. Everything else is bad for you.
Exactly. I'm not suggesting everyone be uninformed... just that they don't need to be informed about the majority of what is considered "news" these days.
>Most of it is not even news, it's fear peddling.
Wow! Not even a joke. I just went to what CNN considers relevant "United States" news and this is the page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230420200421/https://www.cnn.c...
Half of the articles are about random killings or violence. I don't see anything positive to come from visiting that page.
Maps giving the wrong directions is an accident. Journalists deliberately misleading for the benefit of their career/company is not an accident.
And continuing the maps analogy for the misinformation in finance, I would question the value of a map that often was entirely incorrect.
>People need a way to know what's going on in the world.
Why do people need to know what's going on?
I mean this genuinely because I have tuned out from national news, like buzzfeed, for a long time and it has only had positive effects on my life.
But people need to have an option to know. You need access to information for healthy society, even if you mostly don't consume it. News is information, even the articles you posted.
I don't disagree that people should be able to post news, 100% they should post whatever they want.
I just don't understand who the news is for. It seems to be news for the sake of news.
If almost everyone could live their lives without the news and remain largely unaffected, what is the point of it? Why not have niche sites handle the topics vs national outlets?
I was going to link to some of their good stories, but hilariously they have their own listicle of some: "17 Explosive BuzzFeed News Investigations That Made Waves In 2019" [0]
[0]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/17-explosive...
What the heck does that mean? It sounds like someone is talking about AI as purely a buzzword without really understanding what it is.
first it was EVs, now it's AI
The very essence of generative AI applied to profit-driven journalism, in other words. And the ultimate realization of BuzzFeed's business model from the very beginning.
Very interesting listen from How I Built This interviewing Jim Vandehei who built both Axios and Politico. https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-pol...
shutting it down just seems like a formality at this point.
"Funny" how it panned out.
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BZFD:NASDAQ
The finance trend is going south. :-/
https://fortune.com/2019/02/13/buzzfeed-union-layoffs/
https://www.nyguild.org/front-page-details/buzzfeed-news-uni...
This applies to serious news sites, like BN that don't have the cachet of the Washington Post...which itself couldn't operate independently and was acquired by Bezos.
Organic reach for brands on social is dead, it's pay to play (promote posts, that is). Google giveth once but now they'll just gently nudge your towards spending more on ads.
That's one example that comes to mind of a potentially viable model - less clickbait, shorter news cycle, more depth, with a print option.
Online-only news has been a race to the bottom, I'd guess that profitability is more likely at the higher end.
That isn't a criticism, just recognition that even though the other sites are still ad supported, that alone isn't enough.
They've also been pretty unprofitable in recent years. https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GCI/earnings
Of course, critical analysis is beyond the average know-it-all who gets their opinions from headlines with no real analysis
First, you need organizations interested in sustainable and not more and more shareholder returns. Sustainable is a different way to look at the financial planning.
Second, newspapers have long been funded by ads. But, the current structure of the ad business puts most of the profits in the pockets of the middlemen. Newspapers would need to re-evaluate ads and how to functionally be successful.
Third, you only need so many national or international level news organizations. Local news brings a of opportunity. Investment there may be worth while (I'd like to think so).
Basically, we need to change the way we think about it. Innovation.
Yeah, I agree. Lots of local papers have been bought up and hollowed out by national organizations. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Smaller & more focused is the key. One reason I don't pay for the big news outlets, and even the local big-name newspapers, is because they are owned by and employ some really disgusting people, who I don't want to financially support. The bigger you are, the more likely that is to happen. More choice of many smaller outlets means you can be choosier.
As a single example, here in the Twin Cities a handful of journalists are trying out the model at Racket[1]. They're mostly reader-funded, and because they're not doing big national stories, they don't need a shitload of subscribers or scummy ad money to keep the lights on. There's some hope to be found here.
[1] A look at their first year of finances: https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-august-2021-july...
But PP, along with Axios and Politico, is an exception that proves the rule. The NYT is probably the only legacy news org that has an optimistic long-term future, due to its last-man-standing position and diversification into tech and games.
(TV news is a different situation, obviously Fox News has done very well. CNN had major cuts during the Discovery-Warner merger, but I don't think they're on a downward spiral)
https://www.propublica.org/reports
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142...
Real journalism is difficult and ultimately expensive. Telling people what they want to hear is cheap and easy.
I'm not certain that that's the case, at least in Canada.
Time and time again, much of the lowest-quality reporting/journalism I've seen has been from the largest Canadian news organizations that have significant resources at their disposal.
On the other hand, most of the best journalism I've seen has been from the organizations that are far smaller, and with far fewer resources.
It has even gotten to the point where relatively average individuals who are merely live streaming or sharing videos/photos of events end up providing more detailed, representative, objective, and timelier reporting than the large news organizations.
This could be stated for all news organizations, especially those that claim to be impartial on paper. You could argue Fox News is worse, but don't pretend that the New York Times or Washington Post don't have a slant - or a 30 degree angle. Especially after the Nicholas Sandmann debacle in which they paid settlements for defamation. Or another example, MSNBC was banned from the Rittenhouse trial after being caught following the Jury Bus.
This is why it is fascinating to watch what happens to experiments like NPR, although even in that case it was only a partial success.
Page 43:
- 5.8 million monthly page views
- 506,544 newsletter subscribers
Page 44:
- 2022 revenue $42 million
- Online donations $4.3 million
- The rest is grants and gifts
- Expenses $40.2
This is... not good at all.. it is basically a tiny blog that runs 90% on donations from a few rich people. I've seen single tweets with more views than what they get in a month, propublica sadly can't be sustainable for much longer I wouldn't think.
This subject has been giving me anxiety since about 2006. Nothing seems to stem the decline and I am scared what kind of world we will end up in soon as a result.
It's worth noting that investigative work has always been like this. Even before news orgs had web analytics, they knew that a multi-month investigation into government spending/corruption might be a few thousand or just hundred readers, but as long as those readers included people in positions of power and influence -- e.g. a member of congress who can call for a congressional hearing -- then that boosts the newspaper brand and influence as much as any popular story.
PP focuses on investigative work rather than general news. It doesn't publish frequently enough, or about any specific topic, to drive regular annual readership (i.e. subscribers) -- I doubt there are many people who'd check PP's homepage on a daily or even weekly basis. So, better to attract charitable foundation grants and small donor contributions than to do a subscriber paywall.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
The thinking is that in the old days, when you had a print newspaper, there were ads and articles, but they were completely decoupled. You could read an article, or just the headline, or just glance at a photo, but regardless, you would see the ads. Now, of course, you have to decide to click through.
BUT -- and this is the key part -- the newspaper-style ads still exist, they just exist upstream in the flow, and giving the revenue to the aggregators, not the people doing the reporting. (It also leads to incredibly misaligned incentives between the aggregators and the publishers, leading to things like clickbait...)
Our hope is to be able to close that loop, share the revenue from in-feed ads with the reporting partners, and try to get away from the Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc model.
I personally like Breaking Points and I am happy to pay for it. [1]
You wont find good journalism in NYT and Washington Post anymore bc they have not figured out that high quality, subscriber-only content is more sustainable than advertising. You will increasingly find good journalism if you subscribe to individual journalists that are not beholden to their advertisers.
I'm not clear if that totally covers its operational costs, but it sounds like a good start.
Is it? Why? Journalists don't make a lot of money. A lot of them are trust fund babies because you can't write for the New York Times and live in NY without outside help.
2) Find a rich patron.
3) Disinformation for hire.
or a combination of all 3.
Why and how is it a public service? I wish I could remember the episode.
1. When journalists investigate their local politicians it helps keep those politicians clean.
2. Strong local papers and journalism is taken into account by loan officers who in turn save the municipalities tons of money by shaving off a percentage of a loan. This is massive returns when it takes 20million to build a local high schools, Libraries, etc.
Very few. But we know all about Trump’s dealings with porn stars.
It's also a chance of re-hiring the best staff for cheaper wages.
Here we go. AI generated content. At this moment it's not there yet. Going forward on AI is as dumb as removing (nude)images on imgur.
I know people like their favorite news outlets. They'll swear by the legitimacy of the reportage. Others dispute the same. Why bother disputing it here?
Everyone has an opinion. Many will share their thoughts for free online. The value add of journalism isn't there anymore. I can click through to vapid takes all day. Few readers have the attention span to consume more than a paragraph at most.
Pulitzer was a tabloid publisher, political activist and later politician. Who really cares about these awards? It isn't a sports league play-off or a golden cup. It is an appeal to authority.
Muckraking has never been cheaper to achieve or consume. Inflammatory content has always grabbed eyeballs. Now those eyeballs have even more inflammatory, muckraking, outrage inducing content pursuing them.
If trends continue, soap-boxers will need to pay their audience. Meanwhile traditional journalists are locking themselves behind paywalls, auto-play videos, and 20mb page weights. If you've read this far, please invoice me for 2 cents.