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Comment by davidbnewquist | Hacker News Reader

The author laments: "Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering."

Really?

To me it's pretty clear that they mean, "we don't know how to make web advertising pay the bills around here."

As for "ambitious news gathering", there I kind of agree with them; I'm not sure that there's much of a future in the broad, frequent and relatively superficial net that the New York Times and similar papers throw. Newspapers are set up on the premise that broadly disseminating a variety of news is hard, and requires a mediator, but that's not the case anymore.

Blog-level coverage is just fine for a lot of things in the popular sphere. In depth and investigative stuff I'll get from The New Yorker or The Economist (which I would pay for).

The traditional way of financing print media was to have the advertisers pay for the paper, printing and administration, whereas the purchasing price went to pay for the actual journalism, the researchers, writers, editors. That way, at least the good, investigative journalism was independent of the advertisers, and could even criticize them. The web made the paper/printing costs vanish, but also the purchasing price, so now the news-consuming public does not pay the journalists any more. Web advertising and ambitious news gathering (which is not afraid to investigate the behavior of the advertising companies if there's a good story to be found) are mutually exclusive.

And it's a cheap shot to tell the journalists: "Go find yourself a better business nodel, you old-media turkeys hahaha." People who used to pay for content stop doing so, advertisers will not pay for content that they can't control and that might investigate their own companies, and we're loosing independent journalism that way. There's a bit too much joking about this for my liking.

Is there a counterexample on the horizon?

It's possible that the article itself may be a counterexample: NYT is running ads alongside this story. So NYT is at least trying to be profitable from online ads.

Yes, everyone is trying. But those money is not probably enough to pay the writer, his editor, his copyeditor, and his bosses. ;-)

The assertion is not necessarily wrong, it's that it misses the point. It implies that the natural order is that 'we do the content, you do the ads.' You aren't doing your job, that's why we are failing.

That kind of attitude lets news-people stay high browed & complaining about how suits are ruining their content, so long as they are bringing in the ad-dollars. The new paradigm (as the author goes on to explain) has the dumb suits replaced with the dumb public ("The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news,...?") The constant is 'real news.' The world better hurry up and find them a business model or you'll be sorry.

If I step back and look at the whole thing from the outside I'm not worried about democracy and the flow of information being destroyed by a mostly free web.

Taking a step even further back, I would note that there is systemic risk in a business model where you're main advantages are disconnected from your revenue sources. They were never selling news. People have never bout news. They were a way for companies to interact with their customers. They are no longer such a good way of doing this.

I wrote up a suggestion 2 weeks ago. http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-04-23-21-23-27-soc

No, there's no counterexample on the horizon, and I have full confidence that there never ever will be.

Seriously: Who uses words like "never" in serious opinion pieces -- especially pieces that run in the NYT?

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