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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

There is an alternative history where Google and FB et al. didn’t eat up all the advertising revenue that used to sustain good journalism.

It might be impossible to have independent journalism with the internet as it currently is.

I don’t know what the alternative is, but I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month. This might have trained internet folks to go to the news websites for news and kept the economics propped up a bit better than the disaster it currently is.

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My guess is that this would be even worse for news sites as it would lower their overall traffic. Certainly seems to be the case in Canada. I don’t get the sense that search engines/fb/etc are the problem. Rather it’s 1) loss of classified ads and 2) competition from all the free content provided in blogs, posts, tweets and so on. Why pay to read an uninformed opinion piece when you can get it for free scrolling through your X feed?

Absolutely. As someone who spent about 5 years working in local news a bit over a decade ago, it wasn't the search engines or Facebook that killed us, it was craigslist. Especially business classifieds, while not individually big $$$, they added up. We had some edge in content quality for a while, but the classifieds drying up led to deep cuts in the newsroom, and then there was nothing separating us from the local TV stations who also had superficial coverage, but got it out much quicker.

To get a full picture of what happened to journalism, we can't just blame Google and Facebook, we have to acknowledge all the years people stopped going to websites and only got their news on Google and Facebook. Those companies gave people what they said they wanted, or what they didn't outright say they wanted but silently expressed through their actions. Neither party cared that what they were doing was bad for the health of the web (to say nothing of journalism or the culture). If we just say "tech companies bad" and don't admit that our behavior is part of the problem, and that we're not robots or children—that we have choice and agency—we will only ever get a version of the same outcome.

> If we just say "tech companies bad" and don't admit that our behavior is part of the problem, and that we're not robots or children—that we have choice and agency—we will only ever get a version of the same outcome.

This is a remarkably-astute comment. The problem is that it is very difficult for people to be aware, in any given moment, that a seemingly-innocuous action they're taking now will have devastating consequences in a decade or a century or more. This is made more difficult by well-heeled commercial interests which are highly motivated to discourage such insight. Ultimately, one of the roles of government, and it seems strange to say this, is to develop laws which paternalistically protect people from themselves. As an example of this, see privacy/data protection legislation for the internet, e.g. GDPR. As a counter example, see any country which very deliberately avoids developing privacy legislation for the internet.

The "professional" journalists were all to happy to load their sites with chum boxes and native ads disguised as articles. The search aggregators don't expose that crap.

Another version of this discussion that comes up frequently is something like the "Support local businesses!" thing, where we're supposed to spend more money at the local diner and ignore a chain like Denny's.. but Denny's is open 24 hours. And people should use Mom+Pop's furniture store, even though they can get a better price plus light bulbs, and the rest of the groceries from Walmart. And we need to use less water during my showers, and ignore the golf courses or the chip factory down the road.

The idea of being a "responsible consumer" at most just delays the inevitable shutdown for a few years, because economies of scale is a real thing. Moralizing to people that they need to spend more money / time / convenience / change their habits isn't effective, because even if consumers are genuinely interested in making sacrifices in exchange for quality, everything that's independent is closing anyway when the small owners sell out to whoever is buying. Those who thrive on mergers and acquisition don't care whether consumers are "responsible".

Consumers aren't children or robots, but we also don't have any choice or agency.. in the US at least there are 4-5 companies that make 80% of the groceries you buy. Telecommunications and media are going to look even worse, depending on how you want to measure it. As much as I hate to say it, it looks like only big government can protect us from big business. So yes, blaming big tech is missing the point, but so is blaming consumers. Write your congressman I guess? Wish I could write his economist instead though.. for whatever reason discouraging monopolies doesn't seem to work, so maybe we should look instead at deliberately incentivizing variety.

I guess fundamentally I agree with this, but the user experience on most online publications is, and has been, wow, for more than two decades, I think, so bad that every time I'm forced to experience it, I can't even get through a single article before I get so repulsed in worst cases I get an actual negative physical reaction. And it's getting worse as time goes by.

I get that online publications have to advertise, but to do it with auto-play video w/ audio of unrelated content, animated/video ads, ads for items you already bought a month ago, the outright scam ads, SEO garbage ("this one trick to get a supermodel girlfriend"), superstitials blocking content, dark pattern ads (e.g. x icon opens a link rather than closes the ad), ads that move and hover on the page when you scroll down.

I could go on for longer, but I'm getting that same negative physical reaction by simply describing this crap.

> what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month

News sites would probably change whatever metadata Google is using to check site age to make their news articles appear one-day-more-than-month old to Google crawlers, all as a part of Search Engine Optimization techniques.

There is a trivial solution to this. Store your own copy (or hash, or whatever) of the article and don't rank it until your copy is at least a month old.

The idea is still nonesense because some other search engine will show up without this restriction, and any news site would prefer to be listed there, rather than not.

I dont believe your perception is accurate. I worked for Knight Ridder during this time, and print news was already a walking corpse. Cable/satellite news channels, and broadcast tv, and even radio before that had worn away the primacy of print. By the 2000s circulation had been dropping for decades. Local/regional newspapers were surviving on classifieds and local ad buys, which was eaten up by craigslist and ad exchanges generally.

At that point, 2000ish, there wasnt much newspaper journalism left to be sustained. Most US print news was gannett and knight ridder recycling AP/reuters wire stories. A handful of national/global mastheads could sustain real investigative reporters and foreign bureaus, for a little while.

Personally I dont see how (quality) “free to read” news persists. Quality and depth is the differentiation, and the consumer needs to pay for it. Id bet more on the bloomberg/the economist/stratfor models continuing in to the future.

Display ads / Google create lots of problems, but news used to be mostly funded by classified ads (and print subscriptions).

Craigslist basically killed that entire subindustry by giving the service away for free.

Right. That's an interesting though exercise. We ended up with "dumbed down" summary news.

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