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Comment by thejohnconway | Hacker News Reader

Almost as if a for-profit model isn’t a great fit for journalism… especially on the internet.

How do you suggest we pay journalist? They certainty shouldn't work for free.

Either form journalist orgs as non-profits (e.g NPR) or modernize journalism content (e.g Morning Brew). The traditional print news model is getting increasingly out of date and it's going to take a bunch of old geezers dying to modernize journalism. It's still "content", and news outlets need to keep up with changing consumer tastes.

What do you mean by modernize? Is being funded by ads modernizing in your eyes because that is how Morning Brew makes their money. If that's how you look at it then you'll be happy to know that many publications are very modern and write sponsored content filled with modern ads.

Morning Brew gets good sponsorships because of their modern content. Modern content is making video, appealing to a target demographic (Gen Z for them), and being active on social media. Many newspapers don't care enough about social media to realize if they make social media oriented content, they would get sponsorships on those platforms.

I used to work at a large regional newspaper, and they could not understand how social content works. They never made short form content, they refused to make a TikTok or post on Instagram reels or YouTube.

Newspapers have always been supplemented in some way by advertising, but the old people in charge seem to think you can throw some banner ads on your website and call it a day. Sponsorships are a lot different than banner ads.

Thus, you get a bunch of old people reading articles on websites, while the younger people are all on social media. Newspapers also don't understand you can use social content as a way to promote your full newspaper subscription.

The place I worked at was a bunch of people who worked there for 30 years doing the exact same thing as they did on day 1. No desire to appeal to younger people, no desire to compete on social media. Probably because of their arrogance in thinking video or social media is below them and not "real" journalism.

Regional newspapers also by definition have a geographically restricted market. That worked well when there were geographical restrictions to distribution (printing and delivering newspapers), but less well in our modern age. NYT et al have found success by appealing to pivoting to larger national and international audiences.

Taxes -> Libraries -> Grants

Bundles (Apple One, Microsoft 365) -> Apple News, MSN Pro

Feedly -> Publishers -> Authors

The problem with paying for journalism, is you have to pay ahead of time to consume an unknown. To do that you either need trust, or institutions collecting a little from everyone and making decisions where to allocate funds.

Non-profit organisations. Large and small foundations and charities. This is not a solution, I don’t know how to get there, but I think it would get better results.

E.g. Pro Publica. It gets pretty good results, for its niche (investigative journalism, focused primarily on institutional corruption).

The for profit model of journalism has been the dominant form for over 100 years. During the majority of that time it flourished. Only in the last 25 years has it collapsed. I’d say your view probably needs some updating.

But it collapsed for reasons that can't be reversed or maneuvered around. For all the talk about the more esoteric reasons for journalism's problems like partisan polarization or Big Tech— which aren't wrong but are mostly higher-order correction terms— the fundamental problem is much more simple: most journalism was paid for by things other than reader revenue. Classified ads, movie showtimes, and a whole bunch of other revenue streams were actually what propped up newspapers; these were all obliterated by the Internet and they won't ever return.

At no point in history has journalism ever survived on subscription revenue alone, there was merely an anomalous period where it didn't need to because there were enough sources of supplemental revenue. But now that period is over, and so we have to think about a business model that can survive given the reality of "subscription revenue is not enough and can never be enough".

> At no point in history has journalism ever survived on subscription revenue alone

Aren't there quite a few journos that are thriving via substack, which is, to my knowledge, purely subscription based?

There are quite a few opinion columnists thriving on Substack. I think there are few, if any, journalists doing boots-on-the-ground reporting thriving there.

It was a fluke that it worked so well for so long.

Over 100 years is a fluke? Nothing about it feels unlikely, lucky, or by chance.

fluke - noun - an unlikely chance occurrence, especially a surprising piece of luck. Ex: "their triumph was no fluke"

The etymology of that sense of "fluke" is from the game of billiards. It's when you make a successful stroke by accident.

And yes it was a lucky stroke for journalism that the same newspapers that carried their words happened to carry lucrative ad space and sports box scores that were hard to get elsewhere.

Classified ad revenue carried a lot of newspapers because for a long time there was really nothing else like it. That was lucky. It wasn't anything particular to the news; but a lack of other options. Now there are other options.

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