For example, mng has 50+ newspapers. Why not identify 10 different ideas and test them out on a few newspapers. Some bad ideas that get my point across: - Have a reddit-style front page with upvotes/downvotes - Put all articles on a map so users can see whats relevant near them - Ask users to sign in to facebook and google on the website so that each ad is more targeted and provides more revenue
This frustrates the hell out of me. The public greatly needs the journalism, not the paper and ink. Despite decades of warning and preparation, many just can't seem to embrace the new medium and find profitable models. You can see it in their generally awful websites: Nobody designing a website from scratch, including for news, would make those choices; you could show me dozens of unidentified news websites and I expect I could easily pick out the newspapers. Also, they can't seem to embrace any medium of communication but text, as if it were 1995 and other media on computer were just being developed. They are still trying to stick to paper-and-ink layout and mediums, just displayed on a website.
The New York Times is scary to watch. I know people laud its digital efforts, but I suspect that's based only on reputation because I haven't seen anything laudable. They also can't seem to fully integrate other media; the other media is displayed beside the text, not integrated fluently into it as most bloggers or social media users could do - imagine communicating with images! Looped animations! Short video clips! Their social media manager, at least as of several months ago, was someone who didn't use social media himself. A little while ago, a NYT IT staffer's wriieup of their newly developed "text editor" was posted here - they used the term repeatedly, but it wasn't a text editor; it was a content management or enterprise publishing system; they didn't seem to know that basic terminology - at the NY Times! (It's not that I care about terminology, it's that it's a red flag - if someone referred to a CMS as a "text editor" in an interview, I'd be concerned.)
Underlying it all is the mistake in assuming that truth matters, in an advertising revenue based system. Longer - If you pay for specialist news sources, even today, you will immediately see a massive difference in detail and quality of information. For at least 70+ years, if not centuries, the News world has tried to stop the effect of advertising on media. Media targets human brains, and human brains care for rewards more than “truth”. If a newspaper sells salacious gossip for cheap, they obtain a huge readership. This in turn provides them with advertising power and thus revenue. This also translates into political power. Take a look at Murdoch’s empire other than Fox news. All of this generally came under the name “the faster news cycle”. Once we as a species switched to 24/7 news, human attention spans came under increased pressure. This forced news channels to move towards even more sensational (engaging!) news in order to keep their place.
And then came the internet. The internet destroys the paid classifieds section, the only thing allowing many smaller news papers to stay afloat. The internet and coders also create tools to perfectly answer other questions “which format ensures maximum engagement, and time on site”. Which font, which design. Which words? An unwholesome amount of human experimentation is done, from game design to UX/UI design to best create addictive sites. This further saturates the average human attention span, and at this point overwhelms it. In todays day and age, News websites are…. Not about traditional news. Everything is about “hacking” the human brain to make it do something. This is all “content”, which has to be “engaging” or “viral” or “addictive”. We are dealing with the industrialization of thought, and the actual product is just “content”.
So to ask for Innovation, is to ask a dead man to act. You could have them innovate all you like, but the moment they land up on some sub reddit it just gets converted into echo chamber fodder.
Let me explain a bit. By "can sustain", I mean that the whole point of being a journalist is objective reporting, with cultivating trust as a goal. Without trust, a journalist is no better than a blogger with a writing degree. Except I don't think that trust meaningfully exists anymore. Most news in the largest nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests, and with there being no legal obligation to divorce fact from opinion from advertising, they probably will not, so long as not doing so remains as profitable as it has been.
What's the substantial difference between a journalist you can't trust to distill pertinent facts from events, and a random blogger you have no reason to trust in the first place?
One makes more money. Maybe. Are you sure you didn't just read a native ad?
By "needs", I mean that faced with this loss of trust, individual people are going to have to do what they should have been doing in the first place, namely choosing their news sources carefully and paying more attention to subtle and not-so-subtle bias. It's a huge mistake to rely on media credentials as a proxy for likelihood of telling the truth, yet that is the entire concept of journalism as a career path.
That was true for a long time, but the Internet in fact greatly increases the news options:
The Internet lowers barrier to entry compared with the old newspaper (presses and distribution costs) and TV (broadcast facilities, spectrum licenses, etc.). My locality has several publications that wouldn't exist without the Internet. Also on larger scales there is the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, ProPublica, etc. etc. etc. Think of the world of IT news; how many of those would make it as print publications?
The Internet also makes news from other localities far more available. I can easily read news from all over the world; in fact HN links to it.
The Internet and web technologies also lower the cost to free for much news (with all the complications that involves), and allows aggregation and other facilitation.
And of all the news sources I've referred to (local, national, international, etc.), think of how incredibly long the list of owners is and how diverse it is.
As an example, you mentioned BuzzFeed - did you know that Comcast nee NBCUniversal invested roughly $400M into them[1] in the last couple years? Or that they were caught deleting posts[2] critical of their advertisers in 2015?
Did you know that Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch are all owned by Verizon[3]?
I'm not sure the proliferation of sources amounts to much, as many of those sources are hardly independent at the end of the day. What's your favorite flavor of tech news.. Verizon or Comcast?
I'm not being fatalistic here, I'm saying that most people don't bother to do this work, and so they aren't aware of how few owners actually exist in the journalism market. This is not a healthy state of affairs.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Funding
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed#Advertiser_influence_...
I still think there's more diversity now than before the Internet. There are several more publications in my locale, for example, and some are more focused on local public affairs than the leading local newspapers were (which I assume have to appeal to a wider audience). And there are the other sources I mentioned.
Do you know if it's objectively worse than before the Internet?
But they are also at odds with each other, and can gain advantage by exposing one another. Just like with politicians — a true democratic system is designed with crooks and liars in mind, and balances them one against the other.
Media credentials are a way to aggregate that trust on the long run and invest decades into building a reputation of integrity. With the expectation that it will be profitable in the future, people will come to rely on you because they know how costly any damage to that reputation is to you.
In the model where every internet page is a source that has to vetted individually, the journalists are indeed obsolete but not because they weren't useful; now every citizen must do their own full journalistic investigations before trusting anything written. Most people lack the skills and education to do that work and society is, on the whole, worse off.
People will not be doing what "they should be doing in the first place", we will get the misinformation soup that served us with Trump, Brexit, antivaxx and the score of post-truth social ills.
You really couldn't have picked a worse example.
Brexit is a more complicated topic, but it's worth pointing out that it occurs after a decades long smear campaign by much of the UK media against the EU.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_...
Yes the MMR scare was bad reporting of bad science. But this:
Brexit is a more complicated topic, but it's worth pointing out that it occurs after a decades long smear campaign by much of the UK media against the EU.
... is just laughable. What you mean is that the UK media, rather unusually for Europe, actually digs up dirt and reports negative stories about the EU. You know, holding government to account, one of the primary functions of journalism.
I've noticed lots of people in the rest of Europe like to describe the UK media this way. I find it rather pathetic. Even the head of the EU Parliament after the Brexit vote explained it by saying the people had been "brainwashed" by the media.
The only reason it feels to them like the UK press runs a smear campaign against the EU, is that supine and useless European newspapers are all ideologically in bed with it and refuse to publish negative stories at all. I read the German press sometimes and any article that at first may appear to be criticising the EU invariably is actually criticising national governments, often with an explicit or implied appeal to the EU to bring the elected governments into line. EU supporters have got used to dog-like loyalty from the press and act shocked when they read genuine, hard hitting criticism in British newspapers.
The rightwing UK press is extremely selective about what negative news it reports about whom. It could and should be savaging the UK government for its lack of Brexit planning but instead it's running articles labelling judges as "TRAITORS".
Just scanning down the list for some recent examples, here's one from 2015:
https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-european-developmen...
It says:
In a drive to have a go at the EU, on 20 July some UK newspapers (Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail) chose to ridicule circus artists and coconut production
It then goes on to admit that the EU does fund trapeze and sewing courses in Tanzania, but "elaborate metaphors and frivolous choice of visuals aside, mastering – to quote the articles – “the art of the trapeze” can open job opportunities for a person in Tanzania (by the way, the same project also provides courses in carpentry and sewing)."
So this "myth" is in reality not a myth at all, the reports were true. The Commission also managed to totally miss the point of the stories, namely, why is the EU spending money on trapeze courses in Tanzania during a time when its member governments are cutting back on healthcare and welfare to their own people? Instead it posts a pretentious blog post in which it redefines facts as "myths" and shits on journalists doing one of the things journalists are meant to do: asking hard questions about government spending.
Here's another true "myth"
https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/eu-funds-do-not-favour-...
"It appears the press are just as keen on recycling as the Commission. The claim that British taxpayers are subsidising bullfighting in Spain was published in The Daily Mail and Daily Mirror recently, some 18 months after a strangely similar story appeared in The Daily Telegraph in May 2013."
But indeed, the claim the papers made is once again completely true and the EU doesn't deny it. Instead it simply claims that under the EU's own agriculture subsidy rules they don't specify what the subsidies are used for, and so if Spanish farmers choose to use the subsidies to rear bulls for bullfighting that's got nothing to do with them. Except that, you know, they pay for it.
If the EU wants to tackle bad reporting about its own operations in the press, then it needs to stick to cases where the press were actually wrong. It surely does happen. Instead it published a blog that boils down to a big pile of tetchyness, evasion, and slippery use of language - all paid for by the taxpayer. You get the overwhelming impression the EU really doesn't get that an aggressive press is a part of democracy; they see it as an opponent to be defeated.
It's a great way to weed out the economically disadvantaged who can't afford to do educate themselves.
This is why Trump won.
A good example might be the Snowden documents. They were quite numerous and multiple news agencies put a lot of manpower into actually looking through them.