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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

At think at its core, the question is "how do you make people value journalism in such a way that they'll pay for it, pay for the quality of it?"

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?

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The other factor is unbundling of newspapers. People used to pay for foreign bureaus and investigative journalism because they had to in order to see the classified ads for an apartment they wanted to rent or the score of last night's game.

Free “Alt” weeklies have been a thing pre-internet, but maybe some landlord’s thinking was that someone paying $1 for a newspaper was a better tenant (true or not).

You just reminded me that there’s a Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Ha! That's like the Buggy Whip University having a Henry Ford School.

News is pretty boring. I mean I do find it interesting, but if I’m going to be honest, I only pay for it (like 5 magazines and 4 newspapers) cuz I know the world would fall apart if actual news disappeared, but actually paying for my own reading probably isn’t worth it.

Like anything else, it needs to add value.

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?".

Newspapers were funded by classifieds at their peak.

It's always been about advertising!

It doesn’t help that the outfits that are profitable have been strip mined by private equity.

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