They don't ... for your site.

You know how often I see Hacker News on Facebook? Never. Yet I visit here regularly. Same for reddit and many other sources of news.

You know how often Breitbart links appear in Facebook or Google News? Never. Yet it's the 49th biggest site in the USA according to Alexa.

Our choices are: take FB head-on trying to get engagement with our users outside FB, or pay FB to regain our old levels of engagement. Not fun.

Isn't that cookie-jar thinking, just like cocktailpeanuts says? You got large amounts of free advertising and referral traffic for a long time. Very few businesses benefit from that sort of thing. Now you're back to having to get loyal users the old fashioned way, or you can pay for that traffic in the manner of traditional advertisers.

Producing quality journalism is expensive, the business model doesn't work to pay for the journalists and also pay for our traffic.

Having been through this test, our only viable long-term choice here is to gtf off FB. That's going to be extremely painful.

Let's hope a few good news sources survive the pain, eh? Otherwise all you've got left on your lovely FB/HN/Reddit feed is the shite that's cheap to produce and optimised for clicks...

The vast majority of news sources are actually worse than "shite that's cheap" and optimised for clicks - they're stuffed with lying, manipulation and nonsense designed to bring about political outcomes preferred by the journalists. See my other post in this thread about the FT. If we end this era with most current journalistic outlets going bankrupt and disappearing, fine! There will always be news. If it comes from other people who see journalism as a way to aggregate timely facts rather than push agendas, so much the better.

And, since this sort of thinking seems to be quite prevalent on HN: does anyone subscribing to this dystopian view of today's journalism care to provide a single example of a for-profit publisher that they consider high quality?

Because all I can think of when I read about "aggregate[d] timely facts" is the phone book.

Technical and scientific journals, for example, are higher quality than newspapers.

It is exactly relevant to your point. You don't derive value from those sites, you derive value from the content those sites link to.

AP/Reuters are also aggregators, they pull stories written elsewhere into a feed that publishers can use.

At some point, somewhere underneath this pile of aggregation, someone needs to actually do some journalism. And get paid for it.

But seeing as you're stuck on the aggregation aspect, I also directly navigate to several news sources.

Both Google News and Facebook tailor what you see based on your search history/engagement habits. Just because you've never seen Breitbart in your search results doesn't mean no one's seen it.