I used to work for newspapers (as a software engineer) so I'm very familiar with this conundrum.
Ultimately it's the value proposition, particularly with regional newspapers. I worked at a regional newspaper and their subscription price was more than the New York Times. Their subscriber base was basically all old, suburban white people who still got print newspapers. Print is still the cash cow of regionals to this day.
They had terrible technology. Stories, of course, were always presented as... stories. They were stuck in their ways. No emphasis on, like the post mentions, creating good data products - e.g. events, restaurants, weather maps, etc.
A big hurdle for newspapers is, yes, on giving away their news for free in the early days of the web - creating a certain expectation. But also their arrogance of not adapting to the times. The Charlotte Agenda was one of the only digital only profitable news publications before it got bought by Axios. They made money from a jobs board and other ideas (that I am now forgetting) that would cater to a regional audience.
News people tend to think "journalism is sacred" to the point of myopia. Their product is outdated. I read the New York Times for national news, but regional news (which is the majority of newspapers) consistently don't appeal to me. Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood? Yes, give me important stories, but also give me visuals and data and products that would fit into the "not video" segment. Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview. Give me information that can't be expressed in video and that isn't 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery language.
Needless to say I don't work in news anymore. The people are very interesting and I'd work in news again. But at the end of the day newspapers are selling fax machines.
> who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview. Give me information that can't be expressed in video and that isn't 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery language.
Me. I am exactly opposite on this. I don't want to watch a video if it could have been an article. I don't think this is uncommon, either.
100% I hate the videofication of the internet. So much content is locked behind a video that is vastly more difficult to pull detail out of and search and just text. Videos are a great supplement to most text, but rarely do they make a good primary source of information.
Sometimes me. But 99% of the time, my preference is for a competent journalist distilling the interview into an article. Thus sparing me all the ways that politeness, chit-chat, and long-winded stuff can turn a 1,000-word article into a 4,000-word interview.
I'd prefer the other way around. Reading the raw interview instead of the biased report of a journalist. I want to see all the quotes, not quotes out of context, summaries of answers or stuff like that.
To follow the gist of the leading post on this thread, we should easily have access to both. I'm perfectly happy to read a summary; Then then journalist's take; And ideally the quotes would link to the transcript of the full interview, and ideally those would timecode to the audio / video of the full interview.
In modern times there's no reason we can't have all of these things for all our news.
There is no such thing as a 'raw interview' unless you're sitting right there with them. Every printed interview is edited for 'concision and clarity', and the interviewee for the most part knows what questions are coming. Journalists also quote interview responses verbatim, so where is the bias if they're printing what was said?
Radio and podcasts actually. Politico does this, and cpr.org (my employer) does it too. They'll have a blurb about the topic, a link to the podcast, and then a printed, edited version of the interview. I love it.
If it is important, I want to read it. If it is merely a curiosity, I want to listen to it while doing something else. The newspapers deliver mostly curiosities.
I used to be this way, but I've started to err on the side of video because there's a lot that's unspoken/unfiltered through the journalists biases if you watch someone in an interview. Body language, what they leave unspoken, answers to questions that seem conflicting or irreconcilable with previous answers.
> I read the New York Times for national news, but regional news (which is the majority of newspapers) consistently don't appeal to me. Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood?
It's messed up, but very little national news actually affects you. It's the carjackings, the city council meetings, all the boring boring stuff that actually decides things like your mortgage taxes, driving habits, crime rates in your neighborhood, etc. And it's the state level stuff that decides whether you can conceal and carry, the discounts you can get on electric cars and solar panels, the quality of the schools that are teaching the kids that will (hopefully) fund your retirement and such.
But nobody (including me[1]) cares about it, so nobody wants to pay for it, so reporters aren't getting paid to cover it. That's because we've successfully gamified (inter)national news to make it feel important, and it leads the way in the culture wars that we all think actually matter.
[1] I spend about $50/month on local and state news sources and I read those subscriptions on average about once a month.
Part of this was Zuckerberg outright lying to everyone about video's impact. I was involved in a newspaper doing this and we did a big push to video because FB told us it got more impact. Actually digging into the numbers showed this wasn't true, or if it was then people weren't clicking through the video to somewhere we could serve ads to them. It ended up losing us money and diverting time and effort when it was sorely needed elsewhere.
> Part of this was Zuckerberg outright lying to everyone about video's impact.
Perhaps I'm missing some important aspect, but what would be the benefit of lying about this? How would serving video that didn't promote engagement help FB at all? Just more storage and bandwidth without increased opportunity to serve an ad -- backwards from how I understand FB's model.
People do say something false for a believed gain all the time. But usually when I hear something false it's a misunderstanding or misspeaking. So based on my (relatively naïve) model of how FB works as a business, "lying" doesn't seem like the right word here.
they've admitted to knowingly reporting impossible metrics, which is lying as far as i'm concerned.
these specific metrics were used to indicate to business accounts what kind of content was appreciated, and cited in executive keynotes, essentially demanding an internet-wide "pivot to video".
one lawsuit has already settled with a payout and it seems like a second one is ongoing.
i believe the intent was that video embeds are watched in the feed, whereas articles are more often links out.
it was incredibly destructive as nearly every news outfit cited this as the motivation for gutting their investigations and writing staff.
There are many reasons why Facebook would want to push videos at the time. There was probably a strategy shift to video at the board level then it trickled down into this.
Facebook gets paid for showing ads and videos were playing automatically on hover. It looks like more engagement but the call to actions is lower (no one clicks on a link).
Is this related to what almost killed CollegeHumor/Dropout? IIRC facebook were lying to them about how well their facebook videos were performing, so they hired a large team based on that ad revenue. When them + advertisers found out that facebook were lying, they had to let go almost everyone apart from a skeleton crew.
Yes, I believe so. We had less staff issues, we tested the waters before going all-in, but it was still a diversion of effort and emphasis for zero gain (for us - I believe Meta did well from it).
Look, I agree that this was a terrible, terrible situation that caused a _lot_ of pain for publishers (and contributed to many outlets becomingly meaningfully worse for me).
That being said, this was a bug in the code. All of us write bugs, and so we should maybe not be as harsh to other people who do. Was it a convenient bug? Yes it was, it helped push a narrative around video and provided more videos for people on FB. Was that intentional? Almost certainly not, although they should've fixed it much, much quicker.
At facebook's size and for the duration that lie was told, no, that's inexcusable.
That's a knew or should have know territory - they were pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the new feature, they changed the industry around it and wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug" - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know, double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal for advertisers.
When this happened, Facebook was a much, much smaller company. They made the decision around pushing videos before this code was written, because of the engagement of videos on Facebook and Instagram.
Source: I was there, and tangentially involved in this
For a different perspective on print news, consider for a moment the vastly improved reading environment in your typical newspaper reader's home.
When visiting my Aunty, it was obvious why newspapers are favoured in her house. They had a big sun-room at rear, with big tables where numerous newspapers were found spread out in various stages of completion. One glance across the table provided immediate feedback on a range of headlines, pictures, and articles. You can instantly see how long a piece will take to read. So with coffee in hand, you sit down and enjoy the experience.
Newspapers when spread out on tables provide superior readability than a single screen tablet where scrolling and wrestling all the annoyances is a test of patience.
If someone invents a lightweight digital "book" the size of a newspaper but containing less pages, maybe 10 or 20 double-sided digital e-ink pages that can be turned like real pages, I believe people will buy it.
The spine would allow the book to lie flat on any page, like a ring-bound book. When you get to the end, obviously you could choose to load up the next 10 pages from that publisher, or switch to a different publication. Importantly, the book can be left open, laying around the house for the next person to wander in with their coffee, sit down and have a relaxing browse though stories both local and global. No annoyances, no pop-ups, no tracking how long it takes you to read a page or any of that nonsense.
Before we label regional people "outdated", perhaps consider they simply like better reading experiences with their morning coffee.
Paper UI beats digital in a lot of ways. I haven’t replaced my several-hundred book library with ebooks not because I love all these heavy, bulky objects, but because the UI of an ebook is a lot worse for anything but entirely linear cotton-candy fiction reading. It’s got (enormous) advantages on weight, searchability (… though, a good index is better IMO) and not needing separate large-print editions for some readers, but basically everything else about the UI is worse.
I’d be thrilled if ebook devices could somehow close that gap.
Have worked in newpsapers. Can confirm the "Journalism is sacred" attitude, accompanied by a "we don't need to think of the economics or the reader - we write what we (i.e. other journalists) think is good copy, and someone needs to pay us for doing that" attitude.
The stupid thing is, though, that they're right. Our democracies need investigative journalism to survive, or we get what we're seeing now - corrupt politicians looting the public coffers. What has happened in the UK over the last ten years would not have happened back in the 90's, not because politicians were better people back then, but because the journalists would have had a field day reporting on their shenanigans.
You can't have this paid for by taxes. The BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia, have both been suspiciously quiet about government shenanigans and have generally not rocked the boat, which desperately needed rocking at times. There's just too much weight behind the never-spoken-out-loud threat of revoking the charter if the boat gets rocked too much.
We're seeing news organisations funded by billionaires, but they do interfere editorially, and we know that, and more importantly the politicians know that. Billionaires can be leant on to stop investigative journalists from doing their thing.
It needs to be funded by the readers. But the readers are reluctant to pay for this (as TFA says). It's a conundrum, but we need to sort it out soon.
"It needs to be funded by the readers. But the readers are reluctant to pay for this (as TFA says). It's a conundrum, but we need to sort it out soon."
Readers often say they want one type of coverage but actually consume others, too. (e.g., people complain mightily about "clickbait" headlines and so forth -- but write an in-depth article with everything people say they want and often it gets a fraction of the traffic.)
But, yes, the best path to producing news that a community needs in the form of investigative journalism and not being driven by entertainment factors is if the news is paid for by readers.
Of course the other problem here is "L" in the article: Subscription fatigue. I do value quality news, I do subscribe to several publications local, national, and global in scope. But every now and again I look over my credit card statement and think "holy shit, that's a lot of little charges".
As a side note, I love this article and I wish I knew the author to go out for beers and discuss/argue about media.
> Readers often say they want one type of coverage but actually consume others, too. (e.g., people complain mightily about "clickbait" headlines and so forth -- but write an in-depth article with everything people say they want and often it gets a fraction of the traffic.)
I think that just means "readers" is a group of many people with different habits and opinions.
Not to mention the addicts' problem of genuinely wanting to quit but not being able to.
I think what you're actually pointing to is a failure mode of the market itself, as in it doesn't produce what's good, it produces what sells now (which is not the same, despite the confusion of many).
> think what you're actually pointing to is a failure mode of the market itself, as in it doesn't produce what's good, it produces what sells now (which is not the same, despite the confusion of many).
Yeah, this is one of those situations where markets don't provide the optimum outcome.
News used to be an industry with a few dozen providers, and journalistic integrity was a known thing - you did not read "News of the World" for actual factual news, and everyone understood that. Likewise if The Times stated something, it was probably true (same for The Guardian, only misspelled). They certainly put their slant on things, appealing to a particular demographic, but kept the facts pretty straight.
Now the news organisations are not required to tell the truth, and can pick a niche and tailor their copy to that niche with no integrity at all. Because there's so much competition and the market is huge, readers are able to pick and choose, finding news outlets that will tell them exactly what they want to hear, reinforcing existing beliefs. And, of course, driving everyone apart, making us all more extreme by reducing the set of common facts that we have.
I don't think the answer is the culling of "misinformation" because that leads to the Orwellian situation of the government being able to shape the official truth to their needs.
I think the answer is finding some way of funding journalists to go do their thing with no interference, and let them police each other for integrity and truth.
> "You can't have this paid for by taxes. [...] There's just too much weight behind the never-spoken-out-loud threat of revoking the charter"
Sounds like an implementation issue more than a fundamental truth. In Switzerland, the public broadcasters are funded by a special tax as well, but any change to it would have to be approved by the population.
At the same time, I'm not sure the SRF/RTS is actually better at reporting shenanigans.
My opinion is about as strong as my knowledge is weak buuuut here's my take. There's no editorial control over blogs or social media or chat. That opens them up to everything from typos to honest mistakes to outright disinformation. And people are using them for that.
However that lack of editorial oversight also means instant information, which also can't be beat.
The BBC used to call out the government, but yeah that has clearly changed.
Australian ABC still does call out the government. In fact they were raided for reporting on the Afghan files. The politicians have threatened revoking the charter multiple times.
The ABC generally leans socially liberal which means it's usually the conservatives complaining though.
> Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview.
I think you need to check your personal biases there. I want to read an interview, rather than watch it. Reading is typically faster, allows for skimming, can can be done anywhere with little fuss (e.g. no headphones).
That's why I tend to hate video content that could be presented textually. Video should only be be for things that are necessarily visual.
I'd really only want to listen to an interview if it's someone I'm so interested in that I want to take it slow and make time for it.
And that's not just for news. I work in a company where "documentation" is typically a pile of years-old, 1-2 hour long meeting recordings, if you're lucky. All that content would be soooo much better as text.
> Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood?
Because I might go to that neighborhood sometime? The whole point of a regional newspaper is to give a view of a local area not a hyperlocal area.
For that matter, online community sites generally do okay for staying informed of local news and events.
On the national level, it's partly a matter of commoditization. Most national or global News is so well reported, usually, you're going to find many sources.
Media bias and govt collusion, perceived or real, is another reason why some are looking beyond traditional media sources alone.
That doesn't even get into new media and ___domain specific news sources.
But above it all. The same reason people don't pay for every streaming service. They can't afford to and shouldn't be expected to. People don't tend to get their news from a single source anymore. Nobody is going to pay for a half dozen news sites or more.
I can't even imagine the number of times I've been reading an article about some event that takes place in a very specific area for which understanding that area is crucial to understanding the story and yet - no map! Nada. Nothing but words and maybe a few pictures of people doing something that while being nice shots convey no information other than that people were involved. It's maddening.
>I read the New York Times for national news, but regional news (which is the majority of newspapers) consistently don't appeal to me. Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood?
I think this sentence says a lot about why regional news paper are going under. In the case that someone was interested in a local carjacking why read about it in the paper when you could probably find out directly from the source on some local social network group (Facebook/Nextdoor/etc)? In the event that this is a trend why bother waiting for the newspaper to report on it when the internet makes it easy to read direct statements or directly question your local government about it? The local busy bodies using social media do a better job than the local news paper for about 99% of the non-events that are usually reported on.
> Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview. Give me information that can't be expressed in video and that isn't 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery language.
I want. I grew to despise video format, unless it is a movie or a TV series.
Ultimately it's the value proposition, particularly with regional newspapers. I worked at a regional newspaper and their subscription price was more than the New York Times. Their subscriber base was basically all old, suburban white people who still got print newspapers. Print is still the cash cow of regionals to this day.
They had terrible technology. Stories, of course, were always presented as... stories. They were stuck in their ways. No emphasis on, like the post mentions, creating good data products - e.g. events, restaurants, weather maps, etc.
A big hurdle for newspapers is, yes, on giving away their news for free in the early days of the web - creating a certain expectation. But also their arrogance of not adapting to the times. The Charlotte Agenda was one of the only digital only profitable news publications before it got bought by Axios. They made money from a jobs board and other ideas (that I am now forgetting) that would cater to a regional audience.
News people tend to think "journalism is sacred" to the point of myopia. Their product is outdated. I read the New York Times for national news, but regional news (which is the majority of newspapers) consistently don't appeal to me. Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood? Yes, give me important stories, but also give me visuals and data and products that would fit into the "not video" segment. Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview. Give me information that can't be expressed in video and that isn't 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery language.
Needless to say I don't work in news anymore. The people are very interesting and I'd work in news again. But at the end of the day newspapers are selling fax machines.