Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re...
by dragonwriter on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @02:56AM
(#14495302)
> Eg, have newspapers _ever_ had integrity, and if they _did_, what's different?
They did somewhat before the massive corporate consolidation starting in, IIRC, the late 1970s when newsrooms started getting axes and the major dailies progressively became skins over wire services and lightly-rewritten press releases.
The internet often gets the blame, but it providing actual competition was decades after the terminal quality and subscribership decline of American newspapers began.
It actually was the internet competition (both wire services being directly available to readers and the loss of advertising) that actually got some of them talking about building up newsrooms, rebooting investigative journalism, and relying more on subscription income (paid subscription was never paying the bills before, it was pursued as a key metric advertisers used in determining how much it was worth to advertise in a paper.)
They did somewhat before the massive corporate consolidation starting in, IIRC, the late 1970s when newsrooms started getting axes and the major dailies progressively became skins over wire services and lightly-rewritten press releases.
The internet often gets the blame, but it providing actual competition was decades after the terminal quality and subscribership decline of American newspapers began.
It actually was the internet competition (both wire services being directly available to readers and the loss of advertising) that actually got some of them talking about building up newsrooms, rebooting investigative journalism, and relying more on subscription income (paid subscription was never paying the bills before, it was pursued as a key metric advertisers used in determining how much it was worth to advertise in a paper.)