Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

We need that again. As I point out occasionally, read news, and ask yourself which stories started out as a press release. For the City News Bureau, nothing started as a press release. They had people pounding the streets of Chicago for a century. Today, the pundit to reporter ratio is far too high.

There's a great book about the Bureau, called "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite". (by Dornfield, not the one by Sears, which is something else entirely.)[1]

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/06/20/if-city-news-burea...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sweetheart-Get-Me-Rewrite/dp/08...

Legacy journalism has changed from a low-barrier-to-entry working man's occupation, with entry level reporting leading to high-paying punditry, into a high-barrier-to-entry ivy league occupation with new entrants to the field expecting prestigious positions from the start.

It’s also what’s called a high prestige low pay career which is by definition exclusionary of poor and middle income people, so the news makers are further and further detached from regular people.

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-...

There are still hundreds of thousands of journalists around the country who don't have ivy league educations and are getting paid a pittance to work in their fields. I once worked for a publisher which hired reporters making $12 an hour who easily worked over 60 hours a week. Big city reporters might push out a few stories a week. The small town people are cranking them out by the dozen, with about 3/4ths of their bylines being "<newpaper>" Staff so that people remain unaware of how understaffed these papers are.

The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars.

Would people pay for real journalism?

Don't people already pay for things like the NYT?

I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.

NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.

> NYT is an exception

> The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests.

How is the NYT an exception?

a large paid subscription base

That's no different from the other papers and magazines.

Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.

That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models.

Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"

The Washington Post is also a public company (before 2013). In their 2009 filing, they state that the newspaper's revenue (in 2008) was 51% ads, with the other 49% not attributed.

At that time operating expenses exceeded revenues by 25 million dollars, though this was not an immediate problem for them because they owned several other more profitable companies.

By contrast, in that same year the New York Times announced that they had managed to stave off insolvency by securing a large personal loan from Carlos Slim, who went on to become their biggest shareholder.

How are we distinguishing between these two newspapers? What's supposed to be "exceptional" about the New York Times?

Why are you looking at 2009? Is it because you think it fits your narrative? What happened in 2008 I wonder that may cause companies to be struggling? NYT is a profitable company with majority of their income coming from paid subscriptions. Does that answer your question about how they are different or do you wanna check their revenue split and financials in 1928 too?

A business secured a loan from a billionaire after the GFC and paid it off in 6 years. The billionaire also acquired a significant position in the business that he has mostly exited with a significant profit generated from the business subscription model. More on this crazy story as it unfolds at 11

It's no different -> Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers -> well, they were struggling in 2009 -> ...

I'm looking at 2009 because the claim above was that newspapers other than the New York Times, but not the New York Times, are subsidized by billionaires, and 2009 is the year that the New York Times had to beg for a subsidy from a billionaire. Was that not clear from my comment?

How is taking a loan a subsidy? do you understand how loans work?

It's no different -> Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers -> well, they were struggling in 2009 -> they took a loan that one time -> ...

If the NYT could sell those shares at the market price, they'd have been able to sell them to public markets. The only reason they'd possibly have to transacting with an individual is if there was something about the deal that exceeded the debt or equity financing available publicly.

What shares are you talking about? Debt != shares

From wikipedia:

> Slim's investments in the company included large purchases of Class A shares in 2011, when he increased his stake in the company to 8.1% of Class A shares,[43] and again in 2015, when he exercised stock options -- acquired as part of a repayment plan on the 2009 loan -- to purchase 15.9 million Class A shares, making him the largest shareholder.

[my emphasis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Company ]

Your point being? I just want a coherent response from you. Your initial question was how is the NYT different as you assumed they make all their money from a billionaire benefactor and that subscriptions are not a significant part of the income of any news paper. Now it's about that one year where their income wasn't doing well. And they took a loan. And the creditor bought stock that they sold later.

> by securing a large personal loan from Carlos Slim, who went on to become their biggest shareholder.

NYT has dual class shares. It’s run by the Sulzberger family despite Slim’s stake.

They are rich, but not billionaires.

That's creepy when you consider how much subscription to ALL newspapers has collapsed between 1994 and 2021.

Tells you how hard advertising collapsed in the same time period. I was at a small chain of local papers from about '09-'13. I saw it first hand.

Classifieds used to be a cash cow... not EASY money nessesairly, it's made $20 or so at the time, but it was a lot of money. Things like apartments for rent or cars for sale.

Then craigslist came a long and killed that.

Similarly ads went from large purchases, often for very large placements (we'd do things like sell rights to entire sections for flat fees), went to Pay Per Impression models paying hundreths of a cent, with no guarantees or minimums.

I’m reasonably sure that most of the national-level news media companies have been owned by millionaires (and now billionaires) for the last century. William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Raoul H. Fleischmann, Cyrus H. K. Curtis are a few of the prominent wealthy owners of nationally-distributed news outlets and publications in 1925. Back farther to the Civil War you find more “independent” publications but it’s a challenge to determine which of them were privately owned by individuals of considerable wealth vs. those owned by their publishers who may or may not have been wealthy.

For a current breakdown, see: Index of News Media Ownership: https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/index-us-mainstream...

Also NYT has spent a lot of time and energy into diversifying into things that are not news.

There is a subset of its customers that is only really paying for the games like the crossword. There is a subset only really paying for Cooking. etc.

Just like the old days, when people would subscribe to the daily newspaper for the crossword, the comics, the TV listings, the want ads, or the ads and coupons with the Sunday paper.

NYT is really just making the old newspaper model work in the new age, albeit with higher reliance on subscription revenue and less an ad revenue.

> The problem is that nobody would pay for it

User "api" said "nobody", so that is enough to refute their point. Some people would might pay for it, it seems.

It's fascinating to me that people would pay to read obvious political propaganda.

I get that the state-sponsored "news" in many EU countries is heavily politically coloured, but why would something like NYT be if they have paying subscribers? I never did the research, but I'm guessing they must have huge additional streams of income besides payments from readers?

It's a form of tithing. You give to the propagandists providing the slant you align with, even if they're wealthy billionaires. It's been common for belief communities for centuries. Poor people do it for access to wealthy individuals or as a form of gambling on the promises of the propaganda, and wealthy individuals, when they give, are also doing so for influence (access to poor people en masse). Its propaganda all the way down.

It's just called exchanging money for goods and services. When did HN contract reddit's obsession with billionaires in every thread?

It's depressing to see the paper that once had the courage to publish the Pentagon Papers seen as publishing political propaganda.

What alternative revenue incentive do you see that could support independent journalism?

Don’t take it too seriously. NYT reporting contrary to the reader’s politics = propaganda/shilling. NYT reporting in line with the reader’s politics = hard hitting journalism speaking truth to power.

You think nobody accused the NYT of propaganda during the Pentagon Papers years? Or ultimately, any other publication during any other period? What's new?

Nobody pays for news from the NYT. NYT is a game developer that also provides news on the side. Their games are their main draw; my gf subscribes and never reads the news.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media...

The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.

If we're going by anecdata, here's another data point: I subscribe to NYT and don't play any of their games. Yes, I read it for the articles but also, to a large degree, for the subscriber comments as well. Similarly to the reason I frequent Hacker News. And to stay up to date with what has been my home for a long time. And also NYT Cooking, though I only access that once in a blue moon.

Traditionally it was ads that contributed most of the money a newspaper took in, but the fact that people were paying for the paper re-assured the people buying the ads that the papers were actually being read.

I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.

The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content I don't care about. More bang for buck. People have to be met halfway.

> I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.

The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for.

Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works.

The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads.

There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.

Yeah, it's good. I just find it expensive to pay for regularly.

I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman.

I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.

The Economist regularly goes on sale at discountmags.com. For years it was $1/week, but recently the price increased to $75/yr. It's not on sale at the moment, but for anyone interested, I recommend setting up a deal alert at slick deals [1] to get notified the next time it's on sale - probably around Black Friday / Christmas.

I have been subscribing to the Economist through DiscountMags for over a decade now, and consider DiscountMags to be a totally legitimate business. DiscountMags does automatically enroll you for their "DiscountLock" auto-renewal when you place an order, but you can turn it off at any time through their website without talking to anyone (and I would recommend turning off DiscountLock as it no longer locks in the original price like it used to... so better to just re-up during a sale period).

[1] https://slickdeals.net/f/18290980-the-economist-magazine-1-y...

For what it’s worth, they offer subs via IAP in the iOS App Store. If you subscribe that way, unsubscribing is just a couple of taps.

That €349 per year is pretty steep, though.

I sent them an email to unsubscribe one time to take a break too, though I'm European that was many years ago. I hope it didn't get worse.

>Would people pay for real journalism?

See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.

The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable.

All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.

Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.

> The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from.

Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.

One big difference there is that for the vast majority of people, they can get the vast majority of their music or video content from that single service (or at worst a small number of them).

But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles.

Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.

That's what I'm suggesting. If music streaming services can offer both gangster rap, classical music, heavy metal and pop, then surely a news/article syndicator should be able to offer access to papers from vastly different perspectives. I want both extreme right and extreme left, and everything in between in the same subscription.

Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media.

You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf...

Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do.

You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.

"You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight."

I have literally never seen this. In the US?

In Europe for instance

You're really just observing that the marginal cost of reading is tiny. That doesn't mean that the fixed cost of producing an article or edition isn't very large, and needs to be paid for somehow.

The beginning of the end was Gannett and USA today...

Surprised that no one has mentioned 404 media, a dedicated news sub I pay for annually. Good reporting is worth it to me, especially to get past all the b.s. marketing hype and influencer shilling. Maybe they’re unpopular here on HN but I stand by the sentiment: legit, good journalism is worth supporting financially.

Lets be real here, in the past advertisers did pay for it, but all advertising spend has moved on to the clickbait-youtube/google/Facebook garbage heap.

The underlying assumption is that of capitalism, that is, that things should be profitable or at least self-sustaining. But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc.

Independent news should be completely free from capitalist interests.

[0] https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/

> But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc.

and that is a problem because? These are funded by tax dollars collected. It's impossible for people to stop paying for them whether they make sense or not.

Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit..

I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961

>This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.

The Rust evangelists don't want you know this, but a land value tax would fix data races

Haha it feels like it makes sense!

Yes the deeply depressing thing is that these sort of city news articles are now very much taken verbatim from press releases, and those press releases are from professional police communications departments, and so this gives enormous new powers to the police in able to shape the broader narrative as their politics and agenda see fit.

For example we can see here that this news article is lifting directly from the police press release. https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3lu...

Maybe it wasn't even an overworked city reporter that did this but simply an automated AI creating news articles straight from the police press releases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com