Stopped reading after this. Whining does not suit the NYT well. It is an outstanding newspaper and has basically, also thanks to the internet, a world wide audience. It is better prepared to the changing business model as most other newspapers. Whining here about google and facebook is rent seeking.
I'm just incredibly baffled by what you're proposing the solution is if its not a cultural shift towards paying for content? In an exclusively programmatic ad based market, the only long term winning strategy is to write click-bait and fake news.
We should all be extremely concerned about what the writer is getting at. If you're going to call it whining, and say they need to change their business model, what should they change it to?
If we shift toward paying for content, is there not going to be a market for subscriptions to fake news as well as subscriptions to real news? Paying for content alone doesn't solve the problem of fake news. How does Joe Average even know which subscriptions are the right subscriptions? Please don't let an algorithm decide for them.
In terms of payment itself, I feel the going rate is a big issue. Checking the NY Times just now, they're asking $5 per week of me for a basic subscription. Let's make the math easy and call that $250 per year, and assume four subscriptions are needed to be sure we have a well rounded intake, giving a $1000 per year news budget. For a person with a net income of $100k+ per year, maybe this is not a big spend. But for people on lower incomes - who I would argue are likely the people most susceptible to fake news - this becomes a much greater expense and will discourage them from subscribing to anything. Compared to freely available news, it would be putting disadvantaged people at a even greater disadvantage, and let's face it - in a democratic society, I'd rather everybody have access to the same information, than know half the population is making decisions based on garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.
In terms of what the new model should be, I don't think I have any answers. I just know that I have a budget for news and it is not in the order of a thousand dollars a year for a well rounded intake, however I also want everybody to have access to the same news, so I don't think paywalls are a good idea.
> If we shift toward paying for content, is there not going to be a market for subscriptions to fake news as well as subscriptions to real news? Paying for content alone doesn't solve the problem of fake news. How does Joe Average even know which subscriptions are the right subscriptions? Please don't let an algorithm decide for them.
It doesn't solve fake news, except that subscriptions might keep the production of real news economically viable. Internet-ad revenue probably can't support real journalism at all. It's too labor intensive.
Real news is expensive to produce, you have to pay reporters to spend their time finding the facts; fake news is cheap, since lies can be made up in your pajamas.
The internet makes it that they don't need to fill pages and pages every day just to be tossed into the trash bin. A year old article can still be valuable, and it can be augmented with additional sides and updates. It just takes diligence and work, not to mention setting up publishing and formatting abilities way beyond the average cookie cutter CMS. Investing in their own production processes and technology, in other words.
But nobody's doing that. They're just making the churn more efficient. At most they'll link to some previous articles, forcing you to do the sifting yourself, and only linking one way.
By the time a newsworthy event reaches mainstream level, it's already been going for a while. That's the point at which I'd want to read a brief one pager of backstory, before diving into current events, surrounded by more context. Take the conflict in Syria: it might just be me not paying attention and being too busy with other stuff, but I genuinely missed when that started. When it did enter my radar, everyone was talking about it like we all knew how it happened. Well, if you take a random person on the street, someone who was upset at the (staged?) pictures of a dead kid... How many can tell you what that conflict is about and get close to the truth? I bet it's incredibly low, the only difference is I'm being honest about my ignorance instead of doing the stupid primate thing of pretending to be in the know in fear of looking foolish (and, I guess, western propaganda being just that when it comes to these subjects).
There's your hole in the market. That's what people want to pay for: not being the person who can't join in on interesting conversations. Well, are our current journalists up to that task? I very much doubt it, cos most have no ability beyond being a newsperson, jacks of no trade at all. Instead of letting experts do the talking, we're letting self important pretenders do it, and then, mostly to push an agenda.
The Quillette expose linked here about the geneticist bullied into suicide should lead us all to ask: why are we letting these morons tell us anything? They just want to enter industries and scenes they don't know, mine them for brief moments of relevance, and leave behind a wreck of human dignity. All over a ten minute talk they couldn't be bothered to understand, because bullying a sperg was more useful to them.
I agree with this. The 24/7 news cycle ruined us in many ways, even print.
I’d rather have a journalist spend a week on a story (or more) and give more context instead of basically rehashing what was said by both sides.
I like The Atlantic, as it is mostly long form, not breaking news, but the impact of social media and 24/7 news has affected it as well.
Either way, I think the more you focus on the larger picture through long form journalism instead of the daily machinations, the better informed we will be and less spun up all the time.
> setting up publishing and formatting abilities way beyond the average cookie cutter CMS. Investing in their own production processes and technology...
I need to point out that the NYT is doing this. They probably have one of the more advanced CMS setups and their tech team puts out some really interesting things as well.
As to your other point, I want to see good, factual, long form content, but a lot of people will not read that. They only want the headline and bullet points. So newspapers need to adapt to that and ensure the main facts are presented right up front, but then have the detail and back story for those that want to do a deep dive.
"I'm just incredibly baffled by what you're proposing the solution is if its not a cultural shift towards paying for content?"
I am not in the news business. Nor am I am in the diesel motor business. It is not my task to suggest solutions to a changing business environment. The NYC can now, thanks to the internet, deliver its content to a world wide audience. A paywall can be easily established. I pay for good news (e.g. "The Economist"). For institutions like the NYT or "The Economist" it would take quite some skill to screw this up. The market may move into "the winners take it all" direction.
I agree that free news is a problem to many newspapers. Fake news are another problem. But solutions like screaming for government subsidiaries (e.g. in Germany) or getting fees from google or facebook are not solutions. Taxing eCars to pay employees that produced diesel engines to save jobs is not a solution either.
If you don't want to get indexed by google because you are afraid they "steal" your content, then this can be solved by one line in your robots.txt file
And it is really hard to ask for redistribution of common news without any further added value.
I dont consider BuzzFeed as quality either. Wishing a meme producing site wasnt sharing the name as whats supposed to be a news site. My other issue is when they dont properly check the source of a story like the MAGA teens whom they claimed were doing things they clearly were not if you saw the full video.... Fake News goes both ways... If the "mainstream" media wont check sources better then they are just as much a part of the problem.
Why BuzzFeed chose to use the same brand to cover such different sites is beyond me. Every time a quality article is linked here, almost without fail there is someone who will comment along the lines of "BuzzFeed is trash, I'm not clicking that"
I don't blame them. It's not their fault that the news site decided to share their name with a trash clickbait site.
I've noticed how prevalent the "BuzzFeed News isn't BuzzFeed, it's totally different and actually does some decent journalism" meme has been in the past couple years, to the point where I caught myself explaining it to someone that way, with zero first-hand knowledge, just repeating the meme more or less verbatim.
I acknowledged this in my comment, I also raised a concern about quality of reporting. Sure they can have some good apples, but the bad apples are the ones that poison you.
Huffington Post occasionally has deep and (what looks like) well researched articles though.
It's a real mix and that's my problem. I want to pay for something that's good. I don't need all the bullshit filler, and in fact seeing the bullshit filler makes me not want to pay at all because it's an insult to my time.
I had never considered the click-bait outlet "HuffPost" as "quality journalism".
"We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism." Well, paid journalism is not a guarantee either: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-relotius...
Stopped reading after this. Whining does not suit the NYT well. It is an outstanding newspaper and has basically, also thanks to the internet, a world wide audience. It is better prepared to the changing business model as most other newspapers. Whining here about google and facebook is rent seeking.