> And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income?
Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?
Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?
So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story.
This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective.
Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements.
Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.
If newspapers would be able to charge people for referencing an article, then why shouldn't Lamborghini be able to charge people who talk about the Aventador?
In journalism, articles are generally written following an "inverted pyramid" pattern. The most critical information is put at the top (the headline, and the first paragraph). As you move further down, the information becomes less and less critical to the overall story. The idea being that most people only want the broad strokes (X candidate won an election, Y submarine went missing in the Atlantic).
It is harmful to the news orgs because people used to have to buy their newspaper or magazine, or see ads on their website or TV channel, in order to get any of this information. Now people get 90% of the relevant information from their social media feed, where Facebook or Reddit or whoever rakes in all the ad revenue.
I'm not endorsing Canada's solution to this problem, but I don't think it is very helpful to pretend this isn't a problem at all. Good journalism is expensive, and the fact that nobody is willing to pay for it is why it seems like a lot of the news that is left is either clickbait or propped up by corporate or political interests. We need some way to continue funding quality independent journalism or it will cease to exist in a sea of clickbait and AI-generated nonsense.