Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)

I follow one or two very local news sources[1], who post about three to five stories a week. I find those valuable: new restaurants opening, construction going on, what's going on with local organizations & politicians, some local history. It's up to ten minutes a day. And, I choose to pay a subscription to support each of these.

Outside that, I 100% agree with you. National news? Complete waste of time. World news? Somehow an even bigger waste. Reading random vomit on Twitter? Good lord, taking up smoking is a better use of your life than that. No way in hell I'm wasting my life or money on any of that junk. It's despairing to see so many people I know spending hours every day reading national news junk to absolutely no purpose. You can know everything you need to know about the world in ten minutes a day. More than that is just throwing your time down the garbage.

[1] An example: https://racketmn.com

I don't think though there is unbiased news. Generally a classic recommendation has been to read across multiple sources.

https://www.statista.com/chart/16414/jailed-journalists-time...

This is only one data point and doesn't include journalists who were railroad out of their jobs, disappeared, murdered, etc.

I don't think there is: You pay for it, since it's in your best interests to. I'd pay for that. Unfortunately, in my country, there aren't any outlets like that that I know of, everything is government propaganda.

When visiting my Aunty, it was obvious why newspapers are favoured in her house. They had a big sun-room at rear, with big tables where numerous newspapers were found spread out in various stages of completion. One glance across the table provided immediate feedback on a range of headlines, pictures, and articles. You can instantly see how long a piece will take to read. So with coffee in hand, you sit down and enjoy the experience.

Newspapers when spread out on tables provide superior readability than a single screen tablet where scrolling and wrestling all the annoyances is a test of patience.

If someone invents a lightweight digital "book" the size of a newspaper but containing less pages, maybe 10 or 20 double-sided digital e-ink pages that can be turned like real pages, I believe people will buy it.

The spine would allow the book to lie flat on any page, like a ring-bound book. When you get to the end, obviously you could choose to load up the next 10 pages from that publisher, or switch to a different publication. Importantly, the book can be left open, laying around the house for the next person to wander in with their coffee, sit down and have a relaxing browse though stories both local and global. No annoyances, no pop-ups, no tracking how long it takes you to read a page or any of that nonsense.

Before we label regional people "outdated", perhaps consider they simply like better reading experiences with their morning coffee.

Me. I am exactly opposite on this. I don't want to watch a video if it could have been an article. I don't think this is uncommon, either.

News websites have pushed video in various forms, as it generally has higher ad revenue, but people often skip right over it for the text.

A perk of text is you can glance through it extremely quickly, to see if there is anything interesting.

The stupid thing is, though, that they're right. Our democracies need investigative journalism to survive, or we get what we're seeing now - corrupt politicians looting the public coffers. What has happened in the UK over the last ten years would not have happened back in the 90's, not because politicians were better people back then, but because the journalists would have had a field day reporting on their shenanigans.

You can't have this paid for by taxes. The BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia, have both been suspiciously quiet about government shenanigans and have generally not rocked the boat, which desperately needed rocking at times. There's just too much weight behind the never-spoken-out-loud threat of revoking the charter if the boat gets rocked too much.

We're seeing news organisations funded by billionaires, but they do interfere editorially, and we know that, and more importantly the politicians know that. Billionaires can be leant on to stop investigative journalists from doing their thing.

It needs to be funded by the readers. But the readers are reluctant to pay for this (as TFA says). It's a conundrum, but we need to sort it out soon.

On the national level, it's partly a matter of commoditization. Most national or global News is so well reported, usually, you're going to find many sources.

Media bias and govt collusion, perceived or real, is another reason why some are looking beyond traditional media sources alone.

That doesn't even get into new media and domain specific news sources.

But above it all. The same reason people don't pay for every streaming service. They can't afford to and shouldn't be expected to. People don't tend to get their news from a single source anymore. Nobody is going to pay for a half dozen news sites or more.

I want. I grew to despise video format, unless it is a movie or a TV series.

I think you need to check your personal biases there. I want to read an interview, rather than watch it. Reading is typically faster, allows for skimming, can can be done anywhere with little fuss (e.g. no headphones).

That's why I tend to hate video content that could be presented textually. Video should only be be for things that are necessarily visual.

I'd really only want to listen to an interview if it's someone I'm so interested in that I want to take it slow and make time for it.

And that's not just for news. I work in a company where "documentation" is typically a pile of years-old, 1-2 hour long meeting recordings, if you're lucky. All that content would be soooo much better as text.

> Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood?

Because I might go to that neighborhood sometime? The whole point of a regional newspaper is to give a view of a local area not a hyperlocal area.

It's messed up, but very little national news actually affects you. It's the carjackings, the city council meetings, all the boring boring stuff that actually decides things like your mortgage taxes, driving habits, crime rates in your neighborhood, etc. And it's the state level stuff that decides whether you can conceal and carry, the discounts you can get on electric cars and solar panels, the quality of the schools that are teaching the kids that will (hopefully) fund your retirement and such.

But nobody (including me[1]) cares about it, so nobody wants to pay for it, so reporters aren't getting paid to cover it. That's because we've successfully gamified (inter)national news to make it feel important, and it leads the way in the culture wars that we all think actually matter.

[1] I spend about $50/month on local and state news sources and I read those subscriptions on average about once a month.

I think this sentence says a lot about why regional news paper are going under. In the case that someone was interested in a local carjacking why read about it in the paper when you could probably find out directly from the source on some local social network group (Facebook/Nextdoor/etc)? In the event that this is a trend why bother waiting for the newspaper to report on it when the internet makes it easy to read direct statements or directly question your local government about it? The local busy bodies using social media do a better job than the local news paper for about 99% of the non-events that are usually reported on.

Sometimes, even when you are paying for the product, you are the product. Nothing prevents companies from taking money from you and then making more money e.g. by selling your personal data.

Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics.

On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise).

On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all.

At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere).

One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated.

There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023

But say there is some piece of breaking news and I click on a NYT article and get a "please subscribe to read this article", I might be tempted if they were the only ones running the article but I can just go to google news, search for the topic, and find 10 other outlets running the same story, 5 of which require no subscription so I just go to one of those.

But say there is some piece of breaking news and I click on a NYT article and get a "please subscribe to read this article", I might be tempted if they were the only ones running the article but I can just go to google news, search for the topic, and find 10 other outlets running the same story, 5 of which require no subscription so I just go to one of those.

And beyond that there's the reality that even the reasonably honest ones care more about being able to report than about the accuracy of the report. The threat of denied access gets most everyone to lie.

Don't write code, don't talk to users?

There's also just too much news these days and most of it isn't important. It's saturated. Maybe if we cut down on the number of media outlets. You used to just buy 1-2 newspapers at most but the equivalent now is likely 5-10. And each 1 would be 2x as thick.

Every phrase that is conveyed/transmitted must be paid for somehow. If not state-funded, journalism must find funding that scales to cover the production costs.

Advertising money is (a) abundant and (b) seeks the broadest possible delivery.

The WWW (e.g. browsers, WWWtech) is an optimal match for ad money.

For decades before, Advertisers and Journalism maintained one another in a state of equilibrium. Journalism cultivated an audience and was gatekeeper of what was "printable" (tolerable to its paying audience); Advertisers were gatekeepers of marketing gimmicks and brand reputation.

These two tensions were complementary. An audience with education and money to spend represented value to journalism; the audience, together with advertising, paid the salaries, business costs, and legal fees of journalism. QED.

But then came WWWtech, which gave Advertisers everything the latter ever wanted: access to motivated spenders, day and night, all the time, everywhere. WWW ads are relatively cheap to produce and fast to market; WWWtech provides a deluge of fascinating facts about the market.

Journalism was jilted. So it reworked its channels.

But good journalism is important to Democracy. People care about their communities, voters do need factual information. There should be astute, principled, critical evaluation of social and economic events, of government policies and corporate activities.

Today, the only ways journalism is surviving (hardly) are through i) funding by the state and subscribers, or ii) by consolidating journalistic brands to deliver monetisable content that is unhitched from stabilising principles.

State funding has risks but may be the most effective option. Otherwise, we see that Anything Goes, as Cole Porter said.

Now the citizens of Democracy itself are struggling to understand why peace, order, good government, and factual information are so hard.

In this regard, I think there is a replacement. And for local news, I would argue that in many instances the replacement is far better since it is quicker to publish and has the potential to be far more objective.

EDIT: actually I think that hole is being filled, at least in part, by independent documentary filmmakers. What got disrupted were the mega conglomerates like Fox, CNN, MSNBC etc. And while spin and misinformation will always exist, because news is published by humans, I don't know why we would trust those conglomerates any more than any other random joe.

Ain't that the truth.

So, a teenager feels apathetic... and you're claiming this is a new development?

> politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work

Hard disagree. It won't immediately change anything. But on the scale of months, years, decades? It has the potential to change nearly everything. If not for you, then surely for the marginalized.

If you're from the UK - Brexit was not an inevitability. Different parties in power, even a different PM at a certain point, and it wouldn't have happened. And it's demonstrably wrong to claim that isn't changing the lives of everyone in the UK by a huge amount.

If you're from the US - are you really so dumbly apathetic that you're going to claim that the choice of the next president won't affect your life?

There are a few countries that are stable enough (currently) that an argument could be made any political actions like voting won't change much. But these countries are few and far between,and even those are not guaranteed to stay stable.

Maybe that is true for you, but this is not true for minorities and people who are fighting for a cause (abortion and trans rights, for example). Not being willing to cast a vote because it doesn't change anything for you doesn't seem like a virtue.

A great place to start, IMHO, is allsides.com and an RSS reader.

At least there are a couple I can think of, LGBT papers in particular.

In its absence, there is no accountability pressure for any individual or organisational actor. It doesn't matter whether I as an individual know what's going on, nothing I can do anyway, but history is overflowing with societal change being forced to the surface through public scrutiny.

All kinds of horrible things happen when nobody has to look over their shoulder to see who's watching, and very obviously, the legal system is designed only to address escalations, not to generate them.

There is a vast universe of information that is collected and reported by the news industry: from global news on wars, pandemics, disasters, to business / market / technology news, to political news, all the way to local news.

All them are "actionable" one way or an other, although not in the same way for everyone. Biases and varying signal to noise ratios are real, but your remedy is akin to choping off your head because you have a headache.

Of course they are, if you live in a place with good local news coverage and you have some kind of stake in your local society. For example, news about infrastructure plans have a huge effect on how companies conduct their business, which will have an impact on the daily lives of people working there. This will never get national coverage, because it's not of national interest.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

I think there's a lot of truth to it, though I wouldn't want to live in a society where I couldn't get news when I sought it out.

Absolutely refused to watch any kind of news or to follow politics whatsoever

In the same beat he told me in complete seriousness that a small town near him in Michigan had apparently been turned into Ghana-city after getting a million migrants from Ghana.

An information that he had heard from an older colleague on the shop floor of his factory

That would be the entire yearly immigration flow of the united stated being exclusively from Ghana and going exclusively to a small town in Michigan

It's a claim so outrageously easy to dismiss if you're even remotely informed that it makes you wonder what else that guy might believe

Just how exactly are you supposed to have a working critical thinking mind when you don't have any data in your brain to lay the foundation for it? The guy has the right to vote, by the way

So, yeah, obviously I'd disagree. You can't make smart choices without good data and getting the news contributes to this whether you realize it or not. Plus, democracy is more than voting freely, it relies on having educated and informed citizens to function.

I have read multiple articles detailing corrupt activities from politicians. Knowing this I made the explicit decision not to vote for them when I had the opportunity to do so. I would consider at least part of it actionable.

What I've noticed both through my own experience and research of the history of journalism is that business news has, in general tended to be far more reliable then general-consumption news, if also strongly self-serving to the interests of business and fiance.

Amongst the best quality news sources that I find presently are the Economist and Financial Times, with Foreign Policy also standing high. The Wall Street Journal had a very strong (if of course pro-business) reputation when it was still owned by the Dow Jones corporation, somewhat less so of late. Newswires such as AP, Reuters, and AFP are also generally quite good. You can also find regional business news publications of high quality and relevance, especially as compared with their non-business local counterparts.

In debunking a century-plus old hoax (the "Banker's Manifesto") a few years back, one of the more amusing bits I'd found was that of all the claims it made, one which was more easily addressed was a mention-in-passing of the failures of several banks. It turns out that of all the things that a bank-centric publication is interested in, it's the solvency of financial institutions, and the bulk of any given issue addressed insolvencies and failures, of which those mentioned in the (bogus) manifesto made no appearance...

I suspect that a large reason for greater relevance and accuracy is that business news tends to be actionable to businesses, executives, and managers. I also suspect that misquotations and misrepresentations of interviews tend to get sharp responses. By contrast, the principle operating principle of a mass-market paper is to maximise circulation and eyeballs. At the worst of the Penny Papers this lead to outright hoaxes (e.g., the Great Moon Hoax: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax>). And of course, with large circulations it was also possible to steer public opinion (e.g., exploiting the explosion of the USS Maine to incite the Spanish-American war by Hearst and Pulitzer: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yellow_journa...>).

But I'd suggest that the population for whom quality, relevant news is of high interest is relatively small.

Maybe once payments are bundled into the browser coupled with some W3 standard…

Their attempts at political manipulation is arguably even stronger while in opposition, so if anything they would be even more likely to make politically and ideologically motivated appointments!

I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling? Even setting aside concerns about the quality of the product, news subscriptions are priced way too high given the amount of competition for those dollars. Then they'll monitor everything you do and sell your information to the highest bidder. Then when you realize it's not worth it, they'll put you through hell and back to cancel.

Online, there's very other options that don't include a perpetual agreement.

The first is simply a recognition that partisanship as a whole has increased, without ascribing causality.

The second is a fair note that there's been an increase in overtly partisan major news sources, which again is pretty well founded. Fox News in the US beginning in the 1990s, right-wing talk radio (attempts to create a left-wing alternative have largely foundered, see Air America), and increasingly branding of even major news organisations as leaning strongly to one political party or the other: WSJ (Murdoch-owned and GOP), NYT (Dem), MSNBC (Dem), Sinclair (GOP), etc.

(I'm focusing on the US, there are of course examples elsewhere, notably in the UK, DE, FR, and AU press.)

You make a point that I agree with strongly, and probably gets at a key mechanism: "People pay for virtually nothing on the internet if they can get a free (usually ad driven) alternative."

This is absolutely true, and has exceptionally pernicious impacts not only on how content is funded, but what content is sustainable. Advertising is dependent on many eyeballs, common appeal, and reasonably-advertiser-friendly content. There are types of content which thrive in such a world, and many, many, many types which do not.

A large part of my argument is in finding alternative paths to funding which give content which struggles under an ad-centric market, and which has substantial social value. For reasons argued both within my essay and elsewhere (and I can give further reading on request) markets and information play together poorly.

IIRC, he said Craigslist killing classified ads did major violence to papers' finances.

1. didn't have the stuff I was looking for (tech comes to mind). I was still trying to use it hoping more magazines would come along.

2. changed their model. It is a few years ago now, but I think there were two things:

2 a) the original model had a time limit were you could look at an article and if you immediately realized it wasn't your thing you could go back within x seconds and not pay.

2 b) IIRC they also switched from a reasonable pay-per-view price to an "all you can eat (from our very limited buffet)" model. I think it was at this time I stopped checking and gave them up. "Pay monthly and have access to everything"-models are only really attractive if you have access to everything you want: Spotify and Apple Music are good examples here.

Thoughts?

Do I need to subscrible to all of them?

Just not practical...

For me I find skipping the daily hystronic news cycle is better for my health. Anything of significant enough import would get to me via social channels, at which point I can go find enough sources about a subject to get a proper nuanced view

In the olden days papers would target people like me who only occasionally read news with good headlines on the front and a low price for that day's print run. Now they are asking for a subscription (which is too much to pay for a single article) and acting like the archival value add is worth it to me (it isnt).

or HN :)

No, I won't pay a subscription for each random site that gets posted on here. I might pay a few cents, if it's a unified service as you say, but micropayments are 10 years away every year.

Isn't this what the Apple News+ service offers? I haven't used it, but for US $13 per month Apple says it offers content from over 400 publications. Of course it necessitates using one of the Apple OS platforms, and I've heard both good and bad about the overall design and presentation of the content, but it seems like this kind of service is akin to what you describe.

I'd think this kind of broad offering would appeal to readers more than a single-site subscription. The Apple cost of $13 per month sounds much better than, say, the NY Times cost of $25 every four weeks, but maybe the Apple access to publications is limited or has other problematic attributes.

With print subscriptions, the publisher was one clear tollbooth, as unless subscribers paid for delivery, the paper wasn't delivered. That was a leaky model --- there were copies circulated at offices, people would bring and leave papers at cafes, they could be read at libraries or private clubs. But generally, a copy of the paper or magazine had to be bought.

The other tollbooth was the newsstand, where individual copies could be bought from either a manned or unmanned site.

With the Internet and Web, the notion of such tollbooths is largely eliminated. As I've suggested several times in this discussion, the two highly obvious tollbooths are either the ISP (with whom the reader has an existing relationship, though less so in the case of, say, public WiFi), or a taxing authority who could assess a payment on all residents of a region (on the basis that media and an informed public contribute to the common weal). Or perhaps other indirect assessments, as with old legal notice requirements (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)>

It's got its plusses and minuses. Presentation, however, is pretty good.

In the past, people wanting to get rid of journalism have not been on the right side of history.

Provide a low friction subscribe and unsubscribe flow, and I will gladly pay for your product, Reuters.

If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5 or 10 times a month. But I guess capitalism says that they would rather have 1 person pay $100 a year than 2500 people pay fifty cents once a month.

I'd first noticed this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which was a huge, complex, long-evolving story covering a huge area. Trying to get useful information from news media was ... maddening. Even good sources were at best useful for 1) initial reports and 2) a long dribble of additional developments, but after the first day or so reading, listening, or watching news items gave very little clear overview of the story.

There've been many, many, many such cases since. The Oroville Dam crisis (a notable press exception was Brad Plumer, then at Vox, whose single-author reportage largely equaled Wikipedia). Covid-19. Various major court cases.

Most recently, after hitting several outlets (BBC, CBC, NPR, NY Times, Guardian) over the outbreak of riots in the UK, and trying to relate the news and answer questions to an older relative, I remembered my Wikipedia trick and turned to their coverage. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gave all the relevant context far more clearly than any of five or so mainstream media sources I'd turned to.

Moreover, the Wikipedia article had on the order of 175 footnotes and references, linked in the article but separated from the text, as footnotes are, meaning that one could read the text as a narrative and NOT be constantly interrupted by attributions as one so often is in current reporting. Yes, it's useful to have sources cited, but doing so as part of the narrative is itself, in my experience, mind-numbing in its own way.

And if you're not happy with the Wikipedia coverage, there's the article's "Talk" page, which discusses issues and conflicts amongst editors, at length. At the time I'd checked, the article ran about 18 screens (on my A4 e-ink tablet), only half of which were the actual article, the remainder being references and other Wikipedia "furniture". The Talk page ran 38 screens, which is to say, twice the length of the article and four times the length of the actual text, such that virtually all major conflicts and concerns were voiced there. And of course there's edit history so the reader can see what's changed, when, and by whom.

I'd really like to see media organisations adopt a Wikipedia-like format for long, complex, and evolving stories such that it's easy to turn to such a page and get the best, concise, current state of understanding, again with sources and discussion if wanted.

Most media organisations, even those which are now fully digital, seem still to embrace the notion of a static printed product, and haven't fully embraced the capabilities of digital production, dissemination, change-control, and disclosure. It's ... disappointing.

But we do have Wikipedia, and I'd strongly suggest using it.

(A more permissive edit capability on HN, and for that matter, Diaspora*, would also be nifty. Perhaps an earned privilege, probably with strong penalties for abuse, as in "you lose privs". But SRSLY...)

I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding. Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with... but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if they want what everyone else is reading

Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!

I actually do go to the homepages of several news organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+ at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story, largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I'll also listen to podcasts (largely not news-related, though some are included). I've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back markedly on radio as well.[1]

That said, my practice is probably not typical.

I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though that's not especially user-friendly. Adding in sections that are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples, though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at ProPublica and the WSJ (speaking to layout rather than content/editorial slant) are better than most.

It would be really interesting to find a publication which dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've found, but managing content on it is an absolute nightmare, and there's nothing about it which would make a regular subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't "pick it up and throw it away". I do append items of interest to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some benefits.

I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times, possibly also earlier at Vox.)

I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole / desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course: how are you (and they) getting paid?

What's success look like? Failure?

________________________________

Notes:

1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's The World much more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s or early aughts.

Yeah this part really sucks, top of the line premium journalism leads to something like the Panama papers... no consequences whatsoever. So we get to know the world is shit, but nothing will be done about it whatsoever.

If there was some renaissance where actual journalism resulted in a series of deeper investigations on perceived jerks' deeper crimes, then maybe it would make a comeback

Why do you see NPR as such a positive example of journalism? It seems to me that it's been skating on its previous good reputation for quite some time now.

I think it would be very difficult to set rigor (truth?) standards. There's a long history of truths that directly conflict with the "facts" provided, especially those from governments, which could probably not be reported under such scrutiny. I'm also curious how lying by omissions, which is the biggest problem I perceive, would be handled.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi...>

I'd especially point out Hamilton Holt's excellent, fact-filled, and highly readable Commercialism and Journalism (1909), 124 large-print pages. Yes, it's dated, but precisely for that reason it both pressages virtually all present discussion and gives an excellent and valuable view of how things stood and had evolved just as the phenomenon of advertising-supported media was emerging.

<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n7/m...>

There are far more academic, recent, detailed, and lengthy works. But if you want the maximum bang for your reading buck, start with this one.

Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were explicitly partisan, often organs of various political parties, e.g., the Arizona Republican (GOP) or American Federationist (labour / AFL/CIO).

Emergence of a (nominally) unbiased, nonpartisan press largely followed publication of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (1922), and probably came to a fore during WWII, which in many ways was the high-water mark of American journalism as a near-universally-purchased service.

I.F. Stone's 1974? interview on public broadcasting's Day at Night is an excellent insight into the state of US media at that time. It had reached another high-water mark with the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters ultimately brought down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown since then:

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>

Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere: Television and the News (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of the fundamental issues, particularly around audience development and narrative-fitting, remain:

<https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst>

Politicians and parties with a majority can change. How can we trust that those regulating the news and determining what is truth or misinformation?

>Truth is less important

>Truth gets on the way of consensus and getting big things done.

NPR CEO https://x.com/realCarola2Hope/status/1823746926279582115

That's before getting to the ease or lack thereof of subscribing / cancelling.

There are well over 100 news sources which are routinely submitted to HN. Subscribing to each of those individually would cost a small fortune.

It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it might solve some.

News companies are mostly collapsing. The only viable way to keep in private hands might be the Guardian model, of a trust established in it's name.

Bozo could certainly afford to do that for the Wash Post, instead they're leading the race to the bottom with firings and more for-profit articles.

- is it important that voting citizens are informed about various issues?

- is the market (or some other mechanism) currently meeting this need?

Are there specific parts of my diagnosis or etiology you specifically disagree with? Which?

Huh? You can easily name the news that literally never happened before e.g innovation and tech