Hacker News Reader

Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

> It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?

The journalists are in the same boat as the engineers at Boeing: being held hostage by MBAs management at the behest of shareholders.

View on HN

The MBAs trying to keep old media afloat are held hostage by shareholders who don't even watch the product. The general public has become increasingly less willing to spend any amount of time (eyes on ads) or money (subscriptions) on broadcast and print journalism. A whole generation of consumers has grown up on ad-free content and cannot fathom how the business model worked so well, pre-AdSense. Even if they can comprehend broadcast and print business models, they refuse to participate and then complain about the rising cost of subscription services; services that are now experimenting with reintroducing advertisements.

Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.

Have they ever considered ... idk, making a compelling product? They sat around watching the whole Metallica vs Napster saga unfold while calling the internet a fad and writing articles about how "blogs aren't trustworthy".

If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.

Can we please stopping the cringe-meme of blaming MBAs? I assure you, engineers are just as prone to fall for greed and being unethical and sycophantic as MBAs, doctors, journalists or software engineers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com