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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Journalism does not cost money. Running a company that is attempting to profit off of publishing costs money. Or have you never read anything produced at no benefit to the author that has ever informed you? I think you're putting the cart before the horse, and advertising supported journalism has always existed, and these companies would rather collect CPM from google than do legitimate placement of ads in their own content, which would be unblockable.

No, what I'm saying is, the existence of institutions that can publish at scale has no impact on whether individuals can do it or not. I can write code whether Google exists or doesn't. In that sense it belongs to individuals.

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the difference between new york times and a independent creator journalism is that the NYT can fund a huge legal department to defend free speech inside the court system. Its why the major free speech cases like NYT v Sullivan have the NYT in the name.

There is never, ever going to be an equivalent case with big tech ("Google V Sullivan") because Google does care what happens to youtube creators, and they are not liable because thanks to section 230 they are not a publisher. Google do not care if any youtuber get sued out of existence by the government or the powerful. Same for Wikipedia, Wikipedia is never going to be involved in a major free speech case because thanks to section 230 they have no legal liability for what others post on their site. Same for Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, all of them. Big Tech media has absolutely zero protections for any of the journalism done on them.

That is why big cases like Weinstein are still done by the NYT and The New Yorker.

If there was legal liability for user comments, this site right here couldn't host a comment section. And you'd have to use a publisher to complain about how hard it is to be a publisher

Of course journalism costs money.

Sometimes it’s just not directly paid (most commonly: ad-supported journalism), or even paid for by the journalist with their time and opportunity cost of not selling it to somebody that does charge for it (blogs etc.)

If none of these are applicable, chances are it’s PR, not journalism.

> Of course journalism costs money.

Absolutely. Journalism takes time. Good journalism takes a lot of time.

I would agree that it takes very little time to parrot LEO/Gov/Corp press releases.

It takes much more time to vet that PR for accuracy, truthfulness and historical context - and then chase down all the rabbit holes that get turned up and compile enough info to craft an understandable story.

It does suck that the first option gets chosen like 100-1 over the 2nd.

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