How the media industry keeps losing the future
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is certainly a shift happening. But the idea that most people benefit from knowing world news is dubious. To that end, what I regret is how out of touch with local news we all seem to have become.
Not to say those things don't matter at all, but I've noticed (take NPR for example) a huge bias toward negative news that is completely out of my control and often around political problems (as opposed to say scientific problems).
The reporting feels like it has no connection to reality. Yeah, the stuff happened. But that stuff just happens. Buildings catch fire, people die in car accidents, robberies happen, etc I just don't need to know about every single instance of it that happens on the surface of the planet.
It was a shock to me because I felt like I had always been saturated with the idea that things are especially bad now. I do put the blame on media because when they report problems I feel they intentionally avoid establishing historical baselines.
Which is not to claim that "racism is dead." But I don't know why you would amplify failures while silencing successes. Or, if you do, I don't know why you would be surprised to see more of what is amplified. :(
Everyone's taste is now shaped by the most profitable marketing, perhaps more than anything else. So en masse, we are funneled into whatever content delivery will extract the most overall money.
How could high quality news ever compete with that?
It's always been about advertising!
The user needs to be able to ask themselves afterwards "did reading this article, imbibing this knowledge, add $1 of value to my life? and is this article an efficient way to obtain that value?".
That was back when I believe the paper honestly reported the news.
Enter the New York Times, the world leading experts in pushing a narrative that the facts can support (or get close enough to support to fudge it). They aren't honest brokers, and most of the industry followed them into the toilet.
Reminds me of the odd story of microfilm. I may be out of date, at this point, but my understanding is a ton of libraries were convinced to destroy large parts of their archive to convert into microfilm on the idea that this would be more resilient and easier to work with. Sadly, it has turned out to be neither.
The tease paragraphs used on every news site always feel “mean” to me in some way. The text fades out, or it cuts off mid-sentence.
If there was a bespoke intro+conclusion that actually communicated something valuable, I would reach for the Apple Pay button to drop 3$ for the added context and analysis.
Could even have a little marker in the full article, a little past the full fat intro: “Single Article subscribers should start reading here”
There’s no easy solutions though, I’m not going to pretend that works, even if I would like that.
If you can feel confident based on headlines that yes, there's at least a few things in today's NYT that will interest you, it seems like paying $1 to get a PDF or whatever makes sense.
I think digital needs to fight a little harder than just headlines and above-the-fold style intros. I think including a short conclusion is valuable. Also valuable to write this free micro-article separately, with the intention of being a complete thought. It means people could post something here or other social media, and the unpaid state would actually communicate something.
That would make me feel better about paying, since it doesn’t feel like I’m being fished. The faded out text and incomplete sentences do make me feel that.
Consider the inverted pyramid theory, which says that your news story should begin with the absolute most essential info (who what where when why and how) in basically the first paragraph. This allows readers to skim and still get the essentials; it also makes it easy for editors to trim stories as necessary. Your conclusion/summary is that first paragraph -- and for a lot of people, that's all they need to read.
The way I see it, this would require these publications to be truthful about their reporting, if it was revealed they weren't the market would no longer react as strongly to their signals.
Does Hindenburg run into any liability there?
Still, I wonder if there is a structure which resolves liability.
I don’t want buy the whole paper for some arbitrary length of time, with maybe a few exceptions in print that are already hyper focused on my specific interests (New Yorker, NYRB).
They need to have a button that says .99¢ for this article, one click, apple pay, no sign up flow that makes me navigate away, no dark pattern bullshit.
It has to be so close to instant that it operates right in the moment an article catches my interest.
And maybe, if I buy five articles in one month, maybe give me an auto-renew subscription option.
I don’t think this is a hard problem, I think the issue is:
1. Wanting to force a subscription model for revenue predictability, etc. 2. Mimicking of crappy web bad patterns for capturing user juice and retention. 3. Editorial drift that’s chasing social media clicks and compromises the product.
(And its likely someone, somewhere has focus grouped or A/B tested this. It's not a novel idea. But there's a reason it doesn't exist, probably that it results in LESS money for the content producer)
But newspapers need to reconcile that in an era of hypersmall publications (aka blogs, substack, etc.) they are no longer in a market which is about the overall package (the paper) but the individual writer.
The business model does not reflect this reality, tie the transaction to that value, or respect that diversity of authorship is the value of the web. I want to read 20 authors from 20 papers, not 20 from 1. There is less and less value in having “a venue” to subscribe to apart from the support it gives individual authors to do in-depth work.
It's owned and operated by the journalists themselves, and they all maintain their independent and individual reporting. But now with the added support of 20-30 other journalists to work together for the really big stories.
And it's easy enough to have the overarching cooperative submit for grants, donations, or other revenue-generating activities to support the journalism.
I'm a firm believer of "The less time one gives to the newspapers the better.." (Title: Nobody's Girl (En Famille), Author: Hector Malot) (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27690/27690-h/27690-h.htm)
Not just journalism but all subscription media should have non-subscription options. All the streaming video or music services should allow 1 day access for $1 or 1 week for $5. It costs them nothing to do so and I don’t think it will erode their monthly subscribers since it’s going to be cheaper for a month.
Newspapers, articles, videos, games, apps etc.
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(giant image) 2 sentences talking about some dude I've never heard of.
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Huh. I wonder. I mean, obviously it wasn't the only nail in the coffin and they need money but I mostly see nytimes, Wired, BI, etc links and look for an archive link or just move on.
I'd value it more but half of the time they don't even do any actual reporting. It's just rewriting the same crap 5 other papers wrote from a 100 character release from the AP.
Yeah, I value quality, honest reporting. The problem is most of the time they all are in the same race to the bottom. I saw a video on youtube the other day from "Forbes Breaking News" titled "Biden's dog bit secret service agents on 24 different occasions".. WOW Forbes that's definitely breaking news! It's really important that we watch that RIGHT THIS MOMENT isn't it? Really important info there.
These "journalists" and their papers can whine all they want. The reality is they are out of touch and toxic. Yeah, you lost to comment sections because people can actually just read through them.
You also lost because half of the time when I see a tiktok or video on twitter about an event, it's from the source. Someone, on the scene, actually looking at what's happening. Then the bigs swarm on that person's DMs "CAN WE WRITE AN ARTICLE?!"
And as far as investigative journalism goes, youtube is full of people doing it 100x better than most of the crap I see these days in big orgs. Do I want to watch the 25min rundown of the whole situation from the perspective of some dude who spent the last 3 months researching with his team? Or do I want to read a 3000 word article that bloviates about irrelevant things while occasionally repeating the same factoid they based the whole piece on?
I'm just one person with a pretty cynical view of most things but my view is that news orgs lost because they dug their own graves. Because they continued to be out of touch and manipulative and wrong in so many cases that I stopped caring about whatever clickbait garbage they were trying to serve me.
And BI is recycled garbage but NYT breaks stories left and right. The cycle is such that anyone who breaks a story will get their story rehashed by everyone else including clickbait artists. But realistically the old guard of NYT, AP, NPR, WaPo and the like are actually uncovering the big stories and doing the legwork of just listening to all the players. Them plus the galaxy of niche players and scrappy independent journos who score occasional scoops.