As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple's news app be a lifeline?
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And I don't want to read news in an app. Just inside a browser.
Now that FB and Google are instead deprioritizing news, I get way fewer visit to my paywalls. It's just a conversion rate formula.
It felt like news publications wanted to double dip. Pay me to show me on your feed AND send traffic to my paywalls. That felt a bit too greedy.
So news sites need to fund journalists and somehow make enough money. Bs sites just need to make cheap shit content fast enough to sell enough ads or "zing the libertard" merchandise.
Social media is killing it but not because they not paying per link. And making them pay will make the problem even worse.
Unfortunately I don't have any solutions. Everything that comes to mind ends up no better than now.
I want to connect with journalists that share the news accurately, for free, and without abuses of my attention. I'm sure they exist. I think it's a matter of finding them, tracking reputations, and moderating the resulting Libre News Desk.
Had a thought about this.
We could once have argued that volunteer editors would bullshit too much for use in an encyclopedia. But Wikipedia taught us that a special kind of person will contribute high quality edits for free in their spare time, just because they want to fight against knowledge scarcity.
That same knowledge contribution instinct could be tapped for news. That gives us back news without seo spam essays and ad cascades. In fact one of the most reliable sources of world news is already the Wikipedia current events index. I feel like this idea could scale up a bit more to specific niches, like various industry news, local news, special interests, etc.