Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

Nearly every single newspaper and magazine company has the exact same revenue and subscriber growth chart over the last 20 years. Its a roughly 30-degree angle down and to the right, from a high around 2000 to todays near bankrupcy across the board. Everybody got laid off, everything is produced by freelancers hitting wordcount and postcount metrics by the hour. There's nothing special about NatGeo here, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Wired, across the board.

Even the digital upstarts ready to disrupt and replace them have all flopped now, having never actually had a plan beyond "i dunno what if web pages instead?". Huffpo sold for a dollar, buzzfeed shut down its news division, vice went bankrupt, gawker got murdered, mic and ozy were scams. gizmodo jezebel and deadspin run into the ground by private equity. Vox limps along aimlessly, the atlantic is an insipid clickfarm.

The recent drama at reddit is essentially the end of this trajectory/narrative. Magazines and local papers were places for communities to organize around and communicate with, we have subreddits for that (and other niche fora like the very one you and I are communicating on right now), but as the recent IPO related drama and layoffs have shown, there's baaaaaaarely a business model there. Serving communities that used to support hundreds of magazines with tens of thousands of paying subscribers. HN only works because its a glorified content marketing strategy for the epicenter of the zirp/vc bubble.

It makes sense that the internet changed everything. It makes sense that often the old things have to die for the new things to truly take over the ecological niche. The last 20 years has been the death of media (the content side) as a business. Theres not a ton of point in picking apart why any one given dinosaur like NG died. The internet-meteor did them all in.

A much more accurate description of what's actually happened is that all the profits of the news media industry were captured by an oligarchy that was able to successfully (and illegally) take over and dominate the market for digital advertising.

There's quite a bit of money in online media and quite a bit of demand for it, including the type of reported media described here. Not all of it, and not every model works in the internet era, but enough to matter and make the story look very different than it does today absent actual illegal conduct.

Due to anti-competitive behavior, various forms of advertising fraud, and obvious violations of various antitrust laws, basically all the money was siphoned off to make people at Google and Facebook rich.

Worth noting that the point of view I'm outlining here is not some old man screaming conspiracy theories, it's the official point of view of the United State Department of Justice:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

Decent explainer:

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/google-is-stealing-from-...

As a general life heuristic, every time you see someone saying "well yeah that's just like the natural way the market works nothingcouldabeendoneaboutit" you should be highly, highly suspicious.

> It makes sense that often the old things have to die for the new things to truly take over the ecological niche.

The real problem is when the old things die and nothing has really filled their niche. NG is a good example, I think.

> nothing has really filled their niche

Traditional media has become replaced by Social media.

A good Youtube Adventure film, such as a tour of a beach town or historic town, a safari documentary, or a foodie tour, scratches my adventure itch quite well-- along the same vein as a magazine article, yet a film feels more sensory-immersive.

> Traditional media has become replaced by Social media

But there is nothing that I've seen that fills the niche that NG filled at all. If you just want a shallow look at another place, then yes, there is plenty of that online. But that wasn't NG's thing.

It's not just NG. We have lost quite a lot of really valuable things, never to be replaced with anything comparable.

I'd argue that Vice News's website-news articles partially filled the void of NG, with their travel adventure content. It was basically the web-form of a magazine.

Could be! I'm not familiar with their travel-adventure stories.

vice that just declared bankruptcy after torching a billion in VC to fill that void. the void is back.

This is the most cogent and succinct explanation for what happened. The future for print magazines is a lot more niche and lot more pricey. The internet ate the mass-market in every sphere.

They are constitutionally different. They are a non-profit, do (did) fund their own research around the globe, and reported on real things you couldn't find anyplace else.

That said, I discontinued my subscription decades ago for some reason. I don't remember why.

Not exactly, no. Most newspapers are profitable. The mostly non-newspaper titles you list were all chasing the over-saturated market for liberal commentary and opinion.

http://marcedge.com/jombs.pdf

"This research follows on a 2014 study of North American newspapers which examined annual financial reports for publicly traded chains and found that none posted an annual loss on an operating basis between 2006 and 2013. An analysis of UK newspaper company financial reports was thus performed to determine whether predictions of extinction similar to those made in North America are likewise unfounded and to compare their performance. Results showed more variation than in the U.S. and Canada. Most UK newspapers are still profitable, but not as profitable as before. The Times, historically a loss maker, has moved to profitability in recent years with the introduction of a paywall for its online content. The same paywall reduced the advertising revenues of News Corp’s Sun and was thus dropped."

you have the facts correct and their meaning wrong.

they're profitable because they have to be. certainly no investor is willing to eat losses to fund their negative growth curves.

they do/did so via cutting off all r&d and investment in the future first, and then by iteratively cutting and laying off from the present expenses next. profits have been extracted by riding the model into the ground.

places that have survived with paywalls do so making a tenth the money with twice the audience. they're only surviving and profitable in the sense that they won the race to the bottom, not because broad swathes of society are getting valuable information about their interests.

the decent into heavily opinion/chatter oriented content was not the cause of the decline, it was an inevitable byproduct of cutting the budget for all the writer headcount. a 20 year process of replacing 40 and 50 somethings who had health insurance and a week to work on something with 20 and 30 year olds who had a daily postcount and viewcount to hit. when you don't have time to leave your chair, all you have to talk about are your thoughts and feelings.

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