I don't see how news is sustainable at current employment levels. Most papers cover the same stories from their own angle, but we don't need 1,000 duplicated takes.
Social media bubbles headlines and links up from a potluck of sources, so there's no central paper to subscribe to and support. The end result is ad blocking everything, ignoring paywalls, and subscribing or paying no one.
If I went to a paper's website instead of social media (HN, some curated reddits), I'd be inclined to subscribe, but none of them have great audience participation and discussion.
If there was a Spotify for news journals, I'd be happy to subscribe, but that doesn't solve the issue of clickbait garbage winning over real journalism and soaking up all the money. Nor does it supply enough revenue to feed all the journalists.
The solution, sadly, seems to be mass culling and centralization. The world is connected and nobody needs local newspapers anymore.
Edit: not sure why I'm at -3 for making an observation. I'm not defending Facebook. The news industry doesn't appear to be sustainable in the modern age.
>The solution, sadly, seems to be mass culling and centralization. The world is connected and nobody needs local newspapers anymore.
We do need local papers though, large papers like the NY Times and WaPo aren't going to cover local politics or spend money on investigative journalism of issues that aren't (inter-)national.
Consolidation in the news industry is a boon for corruption everywhere.
People have been talking about saving local news for more than 20 years. And the economics just don't work for the most part--whether in most cities or in smaller towns.
I live in about a 7,000 person town. Let's say half the people would pay $20/year for a local paper--which we had at one point. That's wildly optimistic I know. Throw in some advertising. But I'm guessing you're still something under $100K/year. So you end up with just Facebook and NextDoor and no one actually doing reporting as such.
Exactly. I'll longbets anyone that downvoted me that we're going to see incredible consolidation and atrophy in the next ten years. It can't be stopped, and artificial means of preserving it won't work either as it no longer makes sense in the Internet age.
"Since 2004, hundreds of local newspapers have closed up shop. The author of a report on this trend said areas without a local paper suffer in a variety of ways."
But the local papers have always had ads in them to supplement revenue, so I imagine you could still reach $100K or more. In a lot of small towns that’s still enough to cover an editor-in-chief and an additional reporter.
I'm just throwing out numbers. It wouldn't shock me if they'd actually have under 1,000 subscribers given that you'll have, at most, 1 subscription per household. And to sell ads, you probably need an ad salesperson now. The economics are just really tough--as demonstrated by the fact that most small towns don't have papers.
True in many places, but the papers in the 10- and 20-thousand person towns my relatives live in have a strong classifieds section because they’re too small to be on Craigslist.
We absolutely need local papers, they're critical to uncovering the kind of small-town corruption that won't make the national news but still greatly impacts people.
We can't seem to support this many journalists anymore - because FB and Google suck up the advertising revenue.
Would breaking up big tech also bring back the local news room? That would be such a bonus.
It’s not just ad revenue - substack has taken the best writers too.
The quality of writing on substack is magnitudes better than what’s available on NYT. I’m not sure if NYT was always this bad and the internet just revealed them or if they degraded, but their product is not very good. Other papers have a similar issue.
I sometimes think about how we read newspapers before the internet. For those old enough, how many of you remember someone who subscribed to the NYT? On the other hand, how many of you saw someone reading it on a bus? Remember how you could walk into any McDonalds or similar restaurant and find a stack of the daily papers there for anyone to read?
Makes me wonder how much money used to be raised from subscriptions to individuals compared to daily edition sales.
If you don’t want the social aspect of news, you can get the AP stories through the AP News app or subscribe to rss feeds to major papers. The AP keeps papers from covering the same story from their own angle, you’ll usually see the same AP stories printed in papers across the country.
I agree it’s hard to filter the news on your own and quality journalism does seem to be going behind paywalls now. This isn’t great for an educated society.
Yes it is an Apple app, and it doesn’t seem to have caught on, but it’s a good value if you are actually subscribing to newspapers and magazines today. Apparently it was built from an acquisition of an app known as texture but the Android app was shut down after acquisition.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-get-apple-news-plus
Competitors from Google and CNN are rumored to launch soon.
I'm sorry if my tone didn't convey my meaning. I don't think an Apple service is an analog to a cross-platform, non-device manufacturer content aggregator.
Given Apple platform support on Android and Linux, I don't think it's something I'd find much value in. I'd be shocked if they even had an Android app. If they don't, the suggestion is a total non-starter.
I could be wrong, but based on previous experience, I'm probably not going to investigate until I hear my friends using Android talking about Apple News.
I'd like to see a Spotify for news. I saw that another comment mentioned Substack, which seems interesting and could be along those lines.
Social media bubbles headlines and links up from a potluck of sources, so there's no central paper to subscribe to and support. The end result is ad blocking everything, ignoring paywalls, and subscribing or paying no one.
If I went to a paper's website instead of social media (HN, some curated reddits), I'd be inclined to subscribe, but none of them have great audience participation and discussion.
If there was a Spotify for news journals, I'd be happy to subscribe, but that doesn't solve the issue of clickbait garbage winning over real journalism and soaking up all the money. Nor does it supply enough revenue to feed all the journalists.
The solution, sadly, seems to be mass culling and centralization. The world is connected and nobody needs local newspapers anymore.
Edit: not sure why I'm at -3 for making an observation. I'm not defending Facebook. The news industry doesn't appear to be sustainable in the modern age.