there were literally newspaper boys on the streets yelling an outrageous headline and making you pay two cents to read the article itself. I don't think subscription papers existed in large amounts during that time.
it's weirdly hilarious to me to think that urban sidewalks used to be analogous to facebook...
Ad-supported online journalism has unbundled news and precisely quantified each part. Management know exactly what each piece of "content" earns. Editors can no longer pretend that the prestige of serious reporting is a worthwhile investment.
Ad-supported online journalism is now almost entirely dependent on traffic from social media. As we have learned from the "fake news" imbroglio, reputation means almost nothing in this arena. You're only as good as your next clickbait headline.
As I see it, the only future for quality journalism is subscription-based, one way or another. Adsense is killing journalism.
In Australia, the equivalent of the NYTimes is probably The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald. On both sites, people read a lot of gossip. I haven't seen stats recently, but when a mate worked there they were usually the top stories on any given day outside say Steve Irwin dying.
Someone can read gossip anywhere - so why go to a reputable site to do it? I think people still go to reputable sites because they can convince themselves they aren't one of the masses that reads gossip. Oh no. They read The Age / NYTimes etc.
The publications that chase pageviews at the expense of reputation threaten to destroy that convenient delusion, and I wonder if, longer term, that will hurt the bottom line. Fake News SHOULD be a huge financial gain for the mainstream media, as reputation is the number one factor people suggest when working out if something is fake news. So more than even reputation is the key - even when the goal is more gossip pageviews.
The fact is that tabloid, clickbait style of journalism has been going on for decades and was popularised by Rupert Murdoch first in the Australia then UK then the US. What we see on many online websites are merely digital versions of The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph etc which were all very popular news publications.
Great book, if you're looking to understand how media in the internet age became such a disaster I recommend it highly.
It used to be that people would have to buy a whole issue or subscription to a publication. So you'd choose based on the overall reputation of the publication. So that's what the media maximized.
Now, on the Internet, people consume articles for free from many sites based on links. They don't care (and often don't know) anything about the reputation of the publication they're reading. And sites get paid based on views (through ads served). So now the sites are optimizing for getting people to read this article, without much concern about the overall image of the site, which most people won't know anyway.
It's an obvious, huge, and very impactful change in incentives for media people.