I think that this illustrate well the shameful impact of lobbying. Because of their mediocrity, media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well. Instead they use of their influence to steal income from other business.
They also raised the prices for the papers, and wonder why people are stopping their subscriptions.
The problem with this mindset is that there is a negative correlation between investigative journalism and corruption. (e.g. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/08/25/when-the-local-ne... and https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/72689)
When local newspapers close (or stop doing real investigative journalism) political and corporate corruption increases which causes a financial drag on the region. Given that we tend to bail out failing cities with state funds and failing states with federal funds the rest of us have a vested interest in ensuring that the other regions we're bound to maintain basic levels of functional governance.
Setting aside the specifics of the strange law in the article, I would not be opposed in principle to spending $X a year propping up journalism to avoid spending $100X a year propping up corrupt cities and states.
They are complaining that people just take the titles and don't pay for articles, but articles are empty block of rephrasing the content they got from AP.
I think the trend is even having IA and co generating these contents, like for sport newspapers.
And if you notice, also a big quantity of major newspaper ( like tv channels) are bought by moguls or the richest businessmen of most countries and then they clearly avoid doing dangerous investigation about the government and powerful persons because it is bad for business.
But if you look carefully, the media that are still doing real investigative journalism and the one that are fighting corruption are not the one that are trying to racket Facebook.
At the opposite most of them are independent, and they are proud to be funded by readers. And it works. People pay when they see that they get quality work.
For example, in France, the is an online newspaper (Mediapart) that exposed most of the recent corruption cases and still they give the option for subscribers to share the articles that they want with friends for free. It works and I think that a lot of people like me are very happy to continue funding this media with our subscriptions.
A "newspaper" that stops doing journalism and just reprints AP/Reuters articles and blog posts has already died. Whether they actually go out of business or continue on as a zombie is irrelevant since they have stopped producing journalism in either case.
To reiterate my earlier comment, I am not arguing in favor of this strange California law. And I agree with you that reader-supported journalism (and other media) is the best approach, and I subscribe and donate to several organizations I feel do good work in this area.
I'm solely responding to the earlier comment that the "media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well" to point out that we should not be so sanguine about the death of media like journalism. I am skeptical that democracy and free markets can survive without it.
And if there are no journalists asking questions, how will you know they've been selling permits to their cousin developer for cents on the dollar while jacking up your taxes?
This is literally all just a question of supply and demand. The only people who care show up, and the rest wouldn't even spend $2 on a local newspaper.
Also, you don't have to go to the meeting to know what happened there: all of these councils and committees produce minutes that are accessible from your city's website. I bet out of that city of 1 million, only 2x as many people read the minutes of the city council (which are almost always public) as go to the meeting. The production of those minutes is a public service.
Then I moved to a suburb which didn't have that newspaper and now I have no idea about anything nor are there any avenues for me to learn. And I have kids, so no, I'm not going to all those meetings.
I'm not sure that local news is something I want as a government function, though...
Furthermore, those communications platforms should be able to say "No" if journalists demand payment for incoming traffic to their articles.
they aren't. this is akin to licensing content.
And we don't need a license to link. We have never needed a license to link. You published it in public; that's my license to link. The only access restrictions have been robots.txt and restrictions the site itself imposes by technical means.
IANAL, but so far as I know, the controlling precedent is Ticketmaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....) If you put it online, I can link to it. That's been the legally-defined rules since 2000.
So if California wants to change that, they're very probably going to lose the court case that is almost certainly going to be triggered by this bill. And then, as others have pointed out, the result will be that nobody links to the news sites, and they lose traffic instead of gaining money.
Niche things are generally inefficient to produce, so niche reporting goes away. Goodbye local and special interest news. Regurgitated press releases and coverage of the latest Twitter drama are highly efficient to produce, so you get more of those things.
Unfortunately for California, this measure isn't very likely to help the situation. It doesn't actually address any of the incentives that are killing local and special interest reporting. Even if the law sticks, these outlets are likely to just die anyway unless something else is done.
It is not normal in a free market for an entire industry to die. In a free market, if one competitor starts flailing, the other competitors should pick up their slack. If every player in the market is suffering the same disease, that is indicative of a deeper problem that could plausibly be solved via regulation.
Why would you "regulate" to keep it alive? (which means keep it alive with our money)
Who decides which industry should be kept alive and which should die? Let me guess, you do.
Sometimes that's better than letting "the market" decide.
IMHO, it's a mistake to think of the market as some kind of best-decision making machine that should be left to run unattended. It's a effective, but buggy program with a lot of WONTFIX bugs that need to be mitigated through other means.
Close. It's decided democratically, via elections of representatives who in turn vote on such issues. This system has it own problems, of course.
Maybe they need an ubi for marketers and lobbyists as well.
I’d buy your argument if these media outlets were being replaced by higher quality journalism, but instead is low quality, low effort, click bait/attention seeking headlines with no substance.
(I don’t really think California is going down the right path either, but the “free market” is objectively producing garbage)
If high quantity sold, the market would shift to produce it. As it stands, people are happy with consuming only the headline of an article and moving on.
There are still many high quality outlets; most have just changed to discussion based formats. Take Joe Rogan for example. He talks to a variety of people, sometimes about current events, sometimes not. Similarly, Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Stephen Crowder, The Daily Wire, Ethan Klein's show, etc. all are daily news shows that produce content in the format people want.
The market shifted. Those working for dying industries can reallocate themselves. That's how the market keeps capital allocation efficient.
At the end of the day the position of free market fundamentalists always comes down to a tautology.
This means that goods/services are regularly not produced because it is unprofitable. If for some reason local news is profitable, then anyone that wants to consume it could easily step in to produce it.
Efficiency doesn't necessarily mean good. But it does prevent or at least minimize wasteful economic activity. Anything outside that realm is a good candidate for a hobby.
That’s my point, just because it’s a product of the market, doesn’t mean it is what’s best for society.
Just because it is a market outcome doesn’t mean that it is optimal.
Edit: it is also important to note that substack still hasn’t been proven out in the market. It is being subsidized but VC money, time will tell if it is actually something that would survive in the “free market”.