The problem with modern capitalism is that it doesn't actually incentivise the production of value, but of monetization. News, _especially_ investigative journalism, produces value but is hard to have a moat around and monetise (this is true too of basic science). Whereas Twitter or Facebook or Reddit really don't provide much that a rival couldn't except for that fact that they already exist and people use them and the network effect is near insurmountable (Threads is not a counter argument), but because of that they are better at monetising. Solving this fundamental commons issue is what is needed because otherwise all the effort will be spent hunting for walled gardens and not actually producing value.

Are Twitter and Reddit actually good at monetizing? Both have utility, but I don't think of either as particularly successful on the financial aspect of their businesses.

They were looking good for monetizing, until the users, the ones who make the platforms valuable, screwed it up for them.

I've always assumed that's why NYT has spent a ton of money building out its cooking and gaming verticals (including buying Wordle). They can basically subsidize the news operation/the bundle can bring in more readers than news would alone.

FWIW this isn't a modern phenomenon: until the internet came along hard news was heavily subsidized by classified ads.

How is Threads not a counter argument? Its clearly a counter argument. Twitter has shown great weakness, and something good is coming in, with the marketing muscle and thoughtful support of certain features that are well positioned, breaking Twitters moat.

I suspect if Twitter wasn't perceived as going "down hill" in the first place, Threads wouldn't exist.

Threads is not a counter-argument because it's only working because it has Meta/FaceBook/Instagram and their existing network backing. It's not an unknown player simply offering a better mousetrap.

why is that inevitable?

Don't think the market can support multiple newspapers behind paywalls, the leaders will take control with better coverage + features and the differentiator will be the editorial slant.

Most markets with zero distribution and switching costs are winner-take-all. The only reason newspapers were regional to begin with was that it cost a lot of money to print and ship them, once the Internet made that stop being true, the natural equilibrium was toward only a few large papers and the rest dying off.

That's not it.

Newspapers used to have a monopoly on advertising, at least in the local area. Once they lost their monopoly they were no longer financially viable.

They never had a monopoly: direct mail, billboards, Yellow Pages, TV, radio, leaflets…

The local movie theatre wasn't going to be advertising show times anywhere but it the newspaper!

If you wanted to sell a car, or fill a job opening, or rent out an apartment, you needed to advertise in the classifieds.

There were classifieds other than the daily paper. All around town were newspaper boxes with ads for cars, apartments, and jobs. There were also weekly papers with classifieds.

Even during the time when towns had just one daily paper, this paper did not have a monopoly on nearly any form of advertising.

You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers.

Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly.

They've also were spamming basically anything as "Breaking News" for awhile that I had to block all notifications for the app.

I've generally found WaPo to be a bit more pleasant.

I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was.

Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.

God bless the good reporters who put a one paragraph article into one paragraph, unlike some reporters who insist on stretching it out into an entire essay that says nothing.

And they use bullet points! Bullet points!

Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.

Axios is (i think) unreadable in that way

> I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.

That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.

That’s not the impression i notice, so far, with respect to agenda biases but it’s clear that the overtly biased sites do pick up and seemingly bias content from apnews and reuters.

It would be interesting (in this experiment) to find two articles if different bias both based on a single feed from apnews or reuters.

Why do you say anyone other than backers of NYTimes or their editors sets their agenda?

> Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly.

When I was a kid, I used to play with my older cousins at family events. They were in high school and in wrestling programs, much bigger and stronger than me.

Inevitably in my case, and probably all across family events in America, our play eventually devolved into the “stop hitting yourself” game.

Seems that’s where we’re at now.

> You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly.

The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not. They all have multiple dashboards that track site traffic minute by minute and make editorial decisions on an hourly time scale. Specifically they rewrite headlines, metadata, ledes, and add/alter keywords within copy if a story seems to be underperforming. On a daily basis they make writing assignments based on this data.

Big news services can to some extent “push” stories at the beginning, but not for long, maybe a day or two at most. They’re so dependent on traffic for the business model, and so close to the edge of not making money, that they have be acutely aware and reactive to organic traffic patterns.

>The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not.

I thought about it and just had to rage recently.

What is _organic traffic_ for something like the NYTimes that is a subscribtion paper and not any public ad-invested news site.

I can tell you, nobody uses the NYTimes search function to find old articles, people inherently just open up the site or app and browse what's fed to them.

Are we saying NYTimes using the X free article day to bombard paid subscribers with shitty content when subscribers generally want curated good content?

But also if NYTimes is then curating what a subscriber sees as the daily paper, why do they go and gaslight the subscribers?

> You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top...

Yeah. Recently I've noticed they've promoted "Opinion" over "World" in their app. World News used to be the second section after "Most Popular"; now it's 3rd, after "Games" and "Opinion. IMHO, it's a bad sign. One of the main reasons I subscribed to them was I liked their in-depth coverage of world news, specifically China, but that's gotten noticeably worse. Maybe Ukraine has sucked up all their budget for that (though for little good, IMHO those stories haven't been very informative or interesting for the last several months).

> ...that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers.

> Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly.

I'm not sure if that's gaslighting so much as an appeal to their subscriber's smugness and outrage. I kind of feel they have a lot of subscribers who'd like to be outraged over something like that. And also feel like they'd be happy to oblige.

What is the definition of left leaning as it pertains to a newspaper? Is this an impression you have or is there a roughly objective criterion that the NYT meets to called left leaning?

The most recent Republican candidate they endorsed for president was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...

The Republican party is only right in the sense that they've gone over the edge, and the Democrats have chosen to stop short of it. We don't really have a left with meaningful power in the US unless you bulldoze the traditional meaning of left and build a shopping center over it. What we have is a nationalist party and a neoliberal party domestically. Every so often a member of one will realize this and move over to the party that aligns with their views. Both are nationalist when it comes to geopolitics.

There is no objective criterion on left vs. right leaning. These are all based on impressions. The only thing you can do is survey readers and ask if the NYT has a bias. It is pretty well acknowledged that NYT does have a left lean, but it is not on the extreme left. Another thing to note is that many argue what we call left in the US is closer to center right in Western Europe. Perhaps in a global sense it is at the center.

Agreed. I'd also emphasize that "center" is not synonymous with "neutral." Which is fine, politics cannot be neutral, but sometimes I see people clinging to the idea of the center as something virtuous or good in and of itself. The center is relative because it sits between whatever the left and right is, and those two points vary. Like to your point, I would say the politics of the USA has shifted to the right over the last several decades.

For 30 years right wing pundits have decried “liberal press”. I suppose of you say it often enough people believe it. What would be nice are reasons for this belief other than my tribe says it is so.

https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times-opinion-...

That's always going to be a subjective metric, but the general consensus, including my own perspective, is that NYT is a traditionally liberal (so slightly left leaning) paper.

Left on Identity politics, right on economics.

In USA it's all neoliberalism. There is really no Left.

And to most Europeans, liberals are center-right. Center-left is socdem and part of the green (the bicycle part), then you have socialists/radical greens (both part of the 'radical left' but still like or at least tolerate representative democracy, they mostly want technical solutions for 'better vote'), then you have the far left/revolutionary left, two branches, one based on trotskism, one on anarchism, mostly Jaques Decoeur, Emma Goldman as an ideological pivot from 'regular' Marxism

There is no absolute definition of "left", nor absolute calibration.

At best, relative comparisons can be made.

Politics are controversial, but near universal consensus is that WSJ is right of NYT, and others are left and right of both respectively, and in between.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Accusations...

Is an impression I have mostly. Do you really want to debate if the NY times is left leaning right now? I know of no objective criterion, maybe someone came up with one based on the editorial staff or bag or words, or number of news articles about certain topics labeled left v. right. But feel free to reject the premise I guess, seems fairly self-evident if you've paid any attention to what they've been writing at the very least post Trump.

It's only left in the sense of left of the New York Post or the Republican Party.

In short, NYT is only "left of" hard right wing.

They endorse the war in Iraq. They don’t side with Occupy Wall Street. They have some famous conservative columnists. Etc. Is there a left lean to their factual reporting? Is there a left lean to the types of news they report on?

Outside of the U.S. I think the NYT would be considered right of center. Same with the Democratic Party. There has been a steady rightward shift in U.S. policies since Reagan. From my perspective there is no liberal bias as such but there is a lot of rhetoric stating this. I’ve yet to see any sort of semi objective reasoning behind this belief.

> The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ

Neither are left or right. They are both serve the interest of the same ambidextrous elite.

Also, in the internet era, all newspapers are 'national' ( or even 'international' ) since they are all equally accessible by the population via their news feeds. All news essentially has national or global distribution now.

Populist papers will be in front of paywalls.

Breitbart and Jacobin confirm this statement.

The establishment has left and right wings. You may have notices, for example, US Congress (and most others), which literally has seating in two parts, a left wing and right wing.

Both sides of established power uphold the capitalist status quo. While they'll fight over culture war nonsense, they agree more often than not. As it stands, the USA cannot build things like a universal healthcare system or significantly reduce military spending, because the most powerful people in the USA benefit from the status quo (and those in Congress listen to those powerful people more than the rest of us, giving them more power).

So, sure, Congress and media outlets have a left and right, but they largely serve as boundaries as to what is considered the "acceptable" range of ideas.

Noam Chomsky explores the idea well in Manufacturing Consent (both in the book and in the documentary).

It is a very interesting and uncomfortable notion in American politics and I do agree with Dr.Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" and particularly the shift of both left/right-wing American politics away from class towards identity politics.

However I'd take it a step further and disagree with Dr.Chomsky and argue that increasingly "the consent is not manufactured" per-se by the evil advertisers, politicians or Illuminati who are attempting to keep control; but rather I believe by Americans themselves who feel otherwise powerless in the political and capital processes. By that I mean, both a working-class black American in Detroit voting for the pro-immigration policy of the Democratic party - or a working-class white American in Detroit voting for a regressive tax policy of the Republican party is voting for policies extremely to hostile to their own economic interests.

But they do so anyways in a quasi-religious manner like the working-class of Europeans did in the 18th century prior to the Manifesto - precisely because of faith (in Christ, humility and work ethics) which gave meaning and sublimation to their otherwise horrendously and explicitly exploited livelihoods by the nobility. And this religious zeal of "humility" to one's tribe trumps even one's economic interests and gets then in terms co-opted and amplified by political, marketing consultants and the "invisible hand" of the YouTube algorithms of our 20th century - looking to capture and monetize a "demographic authenticity".

If George Orwell was alive today, he might be tickled to add the addendum to Marx's quote "religion is the opiate of the masses" (a la "all animals are equal...") to that of "religion is the opiate of the masses; some identity-based religions however are more profitable than others".

Uhhhhh

From Outside of this weird polarization/persecution fetish bubble a lot of Americans seem to be in, the nytimes seems to be doing a decent job trying to be centrist with a left tinge. If it looks too leftist, consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end.

I think the pandemic played a big number on entitled people suddenly being asked to do things out of their choice and obey rules everyone else is subjected to, and polarize them against socialist ideals than before.

> consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end

Putting off the New York Times specifically for a moment, this is a "no true scotsman" fallacy.

Example:

"The New York Times is not that left-wing, and all centrists realize this."

"Many centrists think they are getting more left-wing."

"No true centrist would think that, therefore, they aren't centrists."

"Beef is not vegan, and all vegans realize this."

"Many vegans think it is vegan."

"No true vegan would think that, therefore, they aren't vegans."

No True Scotsman is about a particular form of reasoning, not any sentence that includes the word "true". It's a form of ad-hoc rationalization where someone rejects counterexamples out of hand. ramraj07 wasn't really making a generalization, and the rejection of the "counterexample" was neither ad-hoc nor unjustified. Many people outside the U.S. have always viewed American liberals as right-wing, and this is justified because American politics actually are right-wing compared to much of the world.

It’s not exactly rocket science to substantiate my position. Nyt regularly publishes opinion pieces from quite right wing people. Their editorial stance also often call out clearly problematic extreme left views (like Lea Thomas controversy).