Silicon Valley Ditches News, Shaking an Unstable Industry | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Ditches News, Shaking an Unstable Industry

nytimes.com

27 pointsgnicholas24 comments

>The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago ... “We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution,” Emma Tucker, The Journal’s editor in chief, told the newsroom in the meeting.

The news used to distribute itself instead of relying on others to do that work for them. Now that social media is no longer distributing news and generating hate clicks in the same way, they might have to go back to the old fashioned days of distribution.

Does this mean clickbait will stop being as lucrative? You mean news might need to be relevant and accurate to have value?? Say it ain't so!

> Does this mean clickbait will stop being as lucrative? You mean news might need to be relevant and accurate to have value?? Say it ain't so!

I guess the question is what will be lucrative for publishers, if clickbait fades? In broad strokes, they used to rely on advertising and classifieds, then craigslist killed classifieds. Things didn't go great for a decade-ish, but then social media took off and brought tons of eyeballs. If the social media wave recedes, what will be left? Or what will replace the old business model?

Media companies might have to go back to primarily subscriptions, especially since adblock is ubiquitous and people aren't visiting from social media like they were. They might also have to settle for making less revenue because the "stonks only go up" economy doesn't really exist anymore and I feel like there will be a lot of correction in a lot of companies as a result.

I can only speak for myself, but here is what I would happily pay for: I would happily pay up to 20 cents to read a single article, ad free (or even, I suppose, not ad free), and for perpetual access to that article. And I would happily pay up to 50 bucks a month for all of the articles I read from all publications combined. What I will not do is purchase 20 subscriptions with recurring charges to 20 different media publications, none of which let me read articles from any other publication, and then remember to cancel them and reactivate them on a continuous basis so I can fly through paywalls. What I will also not do is hand over a bunch of personal contact information for the privilege of reading a single article, subjecting myself to all manner of unsolicited marketing emails. I have a feeling I'm not alone.

The sooner we can get to where this is all going, which I believe is tiny, contactless, trust-less, anonymous micropayments on a per-page basis, not a coercive subscription model built on dark patterns like recurring charges and call-to-cancel, the better it will be for everyone . Paywalls and other gating have totally ruined the user experience of the Internet and it is totally orthogonal to how the Internet and its protocols were designed to function. The sooner media realizes that they have to band together to adopt some sort of per-page or per-view micropayments solution in order remain aligned with the content model baked into the web's architecture, the sooner they will figure out how to support their profession with a continuous revenue stream and also, yes, even profit.

And for those who say that will warp the incentives of news reporting: they are already warped by page views and ad revenue. It's self-deluding to think that subscriptions somehow prevent that.

The Apple News subscription is basically what you are asking for.

The main problem is that it pays publishers by article view, so it still incentivizes clickbait.

I’d love an alternative where you choose N publications that each run their own feed. Payment would still be done by articles read, but the financial incentive would change to having a good feed instead of having good clickbait headlines.

I thought of Apple News also. My understanding is you can get access to most of the content from some publishers, but even then discovery is an issue. That is, you can't easily read the WSJ cover-to-cover.

Yes, I'm an Apple News subscriber, and it is the closest thing to what I'm talking about, no doubt because Apple is the only company with enough sway to convince publishers this is in their own interests. But even Apple can't push them nearly far enough. Having to look up the same article in Apple News when I'm paywalled through the web site even though I can legitimately access it is extremely annoying. These publications are definitely not going out of their way to take me to my legitimate, paid-for Apple News copy of their article - and I'm sure that's by design. Secondly, only a subset of publications are available. I want there to be equal access to all articles. But media does not want to compete on a level playing field like that.

> But media does not want to compete on a level playing field like that.

I think they would say they don't want to build in someone else's sandbox.

Then they can make their own sandbox that doesn’t treat their readers badly. But I see no signs of that.

SV was never interested in news. It always considered it content. Journalists were labelled content producers. The holy grail was internally produced free content that reinforced circular engagement. They have that now. Lots of people happy to produce TikTok style videos for internet points. The idea of emphasising any content that led off-platform has always been something they wanted to get rid of. This was inevitable.

https://archive.today/s2ICG

---

And yet Hacker News chugs along, happily amplifying all sorts of things, including news sites.

The stability of this community is comforting.

it never seems to occur to them that it's because their content has gone from great to good to bad to worse

i used to work with publishers (incl many implicated in this article) and they often operate on the presumption that everyone would be paying for a news subscription, if only tech companies weren't twisting their arms and misdirecting people away from doing so

Why did it just so happen that their content only started getting worse when people stopped paying for it and algorithms started deciding whether they would get ad money for their article?

lower revenues -> lower budgets -> relying on poorly equipped junior staff

Curious if Threads is still a thing

I think they said they didn't want to focus on news in the feed.

Others, like Elon Musk, the owner of X, have expressed disdain for the mainstream press

It's pretty grimly funny seeing this in the NYT, days after the banner, page-spanning headline blaring "Israel strike kills hundreds in hospital, Palestinians say" https://twitter.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/171442640676182856.... It appears that every one of the first six words is a lie, and a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad killed dozens of people in the hospital's parking lot. And then the tepid followup: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/business/media/hospital-b...: "After Hospital Blast, Headlines Shift With Changing Claims: The fast-moving events highlighted the difficulty of covering the war between Israel and Hamas." OSINT Twitter accounts were more judicious and ultimately more accurate way faster.

The NYT is fine if one wants a particular slant to the news, and it may be that social media companies think many people don't. Their cooking vertical for recipes is really good, though.

And this comment is ignoring the way the NYT and other legacy media have been attacking the tech industry since Nov. 2016.

Yea of course it's false if you ignore the "Palestinians say"... That's why it's there

I believe the point is that the headline was written to suggest that the claims were factual, and to deemphasize their source. An alternate, less manipulative, headline could have been: “Palestinians blame Israel for deadly hospital blast.”

And of course, when you consider the weaselly correction headline after, the slant is undeniable.

This has only been said by the IDF, the same ones who lied about the children, and lied about poisoning wells in 1948. So yes it was a bomb from Israel, and Hamas never had such a powerful bomb.

Also by US intelligence.

Which never lied every before/s

Before ever*

Reply on news.ycombinator.com