Gift link:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/news-media-industry-dying.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Y00.GtDc.iqKaPZxPqP42&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/news-media-ind...</a>
This idea that "media" has always owned "news" is frustrating. Would be akin to lamenting the death of almanacs and how facts are now out of reach for people that read them.<p>There is certainly a shift happening. But the idea that most people benefit from knowing world news is dubious. To that end, what I regret is how out of touch with local news we all seem to have become.
At think at its core, the question is "how do you make people value journalism in such a way that they'll pay for it, pay for the quality of it?"<p>Everyone's taste is now shaped by the most profitable marketing, perhaps more than anything else. So en masse, we are funneled into whatever content delivery will extract the most overall money.<p>How could high quality news ever compete with that?
Back in the early days, when our local paper went digital, I couldn't get a simple subscription that just gave me the paper, the WHOLE paper in a PDF, you had to use their app to get the page you wanted to see, etc. It was horrible.<p>That was back when I believe the paper honestly reported the news.<p>Enter the New York Times, the world leading experts in pushing a narrative that the facts can support (or get close enough to support to fudge it). They aren't honest brokers, and most of the industry followed them into the toilet.
I’m sure it’s been done before, but I wouldn’t mind free synopsis, pay small per-article fee for full version.<p>The tease paragraphs used on every news site always feel “mean” to me in some way. The text fades out, or it cuts off mid-sentence.<p>If there was a bespoke intro+conclusion that actually communicated something valuable, I would reach for the Apple Pay button to drop 3$ for the added context and analysis.<p>Could even have a little marker in the full article, a little past the full fat intro: “Single Article subscribers should start reading here”<p>There’s no easy solutions though, I’m not going to pretend that works, even if I would like that.
I wonder if a better model for journalism is the model employed by Hindenburg Research. They find stories that when published will have a devastating impact on a company, short the company, then drop their research and reap the change in market conditions. For everything there isn't a market for prediction markets and side-effects on other assets might make up the gap.<p>The way I see it, this would require these publications to be truthful about their reporting, if it was revealed they weren't the market would no longer react as strongly to their signals.
Nyt is still trying to make me pay their exclusive membership while I read ar most 3 of their articles monthly. Ans I'm still very inclined to pay 12$ and even probably more to get a spotify like subscription for articles but no one is offering it.
I think they’re too narrowly focused on subscriptions and I used to work in journalism.<p>I don’t want buy the whole paper for some arbitrary length of time, with maybe a few exceptions in print that are already hyper focused on my specific interests (New Yorker, NYRB).<p>They need to have a button that says .99¢ for this article, one click, apple pay, no sign up flow that makes me navigate away, no dark pattern bullshit.<p>It has to be so close to instant that it operates right in the moment an article catches my interest.<p>And maybe, if I buy five articles in one month, maybe give me an auto-renew subscription option.<p>I don’t think this is a hard problem, I think the issue is:<p>1. Wanting to force a subscription model for revenue predictability, etc.
2. Mimicking of crappy web bad patterns for capturing user juice and retention.
3. Editorial drift that’s chasing social media clicks and compromises the product.
>How the media industry keeps losing the future<p><i>click</i><p>(giant image) 2 sentences talking about some dude I've never heard of.<p><i>close</i><p>Huh. I wonder. I mean, obviously it wasn't the only nail in the coffin and they need money but I mostly see nytimes, Wired, BI, etc links and look for an archive link or just move on.<p>I'd value it more but half of the time they don't even do any actual reporting. It's just rewriting the same crap 5 other papers wrote from a 100 character release from the AP.<p>Yeah, I value quality, honest reporting. The problem is most of the time they all are in the same race to the bottom. I saw a video on youtube the other day from "Forbes Breaking News" titled "Biden's dog bit secret service agents on 24 different occasions".. WOW Forbes that's definitely breaking news! It's really important that we watch that RIGHT THIS MOMENT isn't it? Really important info there.<p>These "journalists" and their papers can whine all they want. The reality is they are out of touch and toxic. Yeah, you lost to comment sections because people can actually just read through them.<p>You also lost because half of the time when I see a tiktok or video on twitter about an event, it's from the source. Someone, on the scene, actually looking at what's happening. Then the bigs swarm on that person's DMs "CAN WE WRITE AN ARTICLE?!"<p>And as far as investigative journalism goes, youtube is full of people doing it 100x better than most of the crap I see these days in big orgs. Do I want to watch the 25min rundown of the whole situation from the perspective of some dude who spent the last 3 months researching with his team? Or do I want to read a 3000 word article that bloviates about irrelevant things while occasionally repeating the same factoid they based the whole piece on?<p>I'm just one person with a pretty cynical view of most things but my view is that news orgs lost because they dug their own graves. Because they continued to be out of touch and manipulative and wrong in so many cases that I stopped caring about whatever clickbait garbage they were trying to serve me.