Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

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I think the conclusion is that changing your business model in a reactive way to internet developments is a bad idea if you want to have a stable business. If you want to run your business that way, you better be on top of everything and you better be lucky. They rode the social media wave and lost, and now they are going to try to ride the AI wave because they don't have anything to fall back on. They are going to lose.

Legacy media grew fat off of TV and local news. Captive attention markets did not teach them how to entice people's attention, they took it for granted. They are not equipped to compete with youtube and tiktok and reddit and they will lose. Trending news from the AP wire is not unique or in depth enough for anyone to want to read more than the AI summary of your article.

What should they do? What they are good at, and what they were always good at: journalism. Write in-depth articles that take time to research and talent to write. Hire real journalists, pay them to find stories that take time to write, and publish those stories. People will pay for it.

> People will pay for it.

I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily.

The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper targeting/polarization of social media and closed echo chambers has made it worse.

I don't think it is social media though. It started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers.

> started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers

To bolster this argument, the local papers that hard paywalled seem to have done just fine.

People get sick of it. Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time. We would rather have a shared notion of truth and a common bond. You can't predict the next 'thing' but you can usually count on it not being more of the same. Something new is going to take hold, and I would like it to involve substance and critique of narratives.

> Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time

They may not like it, but that does not mean they are motivated to break away from it. I do not think they are aware why they feel like that - they are more likely to blame the other people than the platform.

There is also an addictive element to it.

There generally hasn't been a way to buy just the local news, so who knows. I emphasize "news", rather than "newspaper", here.

I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.

This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/

>People will pay for it.

I'm willing to pay, but not by individual subscriptions per news organization. I'm more interested in following journalists than news organizations.

Sounds like the Substack model?

Potentially, yes. However, the same problem I have with current subscription models also exists with Substack. I added up all the subscriptions necessary to bypass paywalls I encountered every month, and it came to roughly $3,000 a year. I'll have to do the same thing with Substack subscriptions. I expect they'll be like $50 a year for the basic subscription, so it would probably only be a few hundred to a thousand per year.

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