Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com