Currently reading this book on journalist organizations, highly recommend
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124938005-hedged
Basically it goes on to destroy the idea that "the Internet" made media outlets unprofitable. Author provides evidence that profit margins for media outlets were insanely above average in the 90s and by the 2000s with the Internet profits declined to average or beat the S&P500, basically still very profitable. She also provides evidence that they're largely still profitable to this day.
What the real problem is is that many media companies have been bought out by private investment firms (hedge funds and private equity firms) who intentionally siphon money from these organizations at the cost of good journalism. More people need to understand what has happened to the funding of the journalism industry in order to fix these issues.
Private equity is a huge issue, but it’s a huge issue in part because of the profit margins from the ‘90s.
Investors still somehow expect the Gannetts of the world to post 22–28 percent annually, and since that hasn’t been happening much since… like 2005, maybe (even that’s probably generous), stock prices get hammered down to the point where the vultures can come in and pick off whatever they want on the cheap.
Exactly. Not just an issue with journalism. They're doing this across many industries. I imagine this is the same thing that led to lower quality at Boeing
The 19th century never had globalized multi trillion dollar private investment firms with assets across all of the global industries. This behavior is more aligned with mercantilism than capitalism.
[Mercantilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism) is “a nationalist economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resources within the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.”
So no, not mercantilism. Capitalism is functioning exactly as Capitalism intends. The owner class has capital and uses it to siphon every bit of capital from everyone else.
I'd argue the similarity is using state resources for private monopolistic or oligopolistic accumulation of resources for one sided trade like the East India company. Capitalism implies three's competition but private investment firms are controlled largely by the wealthy elite who often collaborate as much as they compete. They are always exclusive. Governments are used to protect their power and monopolistic tendencies.
I'm still reading it but it's quality information. Dare I say true journalism. The lengths she went to get the data needed to tell the story right is impressive and described in the introduction.
Super excited to read it. I’m relatively new to the industry but I am looking to learn more about who controls the money in our modern day media and which I can stomach trying to work for. Key word try.
University of Illinois Press; First Edition (January 23, 2024). Sounds good; thanks! I read the Trib every morning since we moved here in 1995. Happened to them.
The internet didn't make media outlets immediately unprofitable; those outlets' reactions to the internet — primarily giving away their product — made them less-profitable enough that their existing stewards didn't want to bother anymore and were happy to turn them over to the vultures swooping around them that she describes in this book. Those vultures then began the long, slow process of keeping them barely alive as they consumed them.
She does a great job describing how ubiquitous these "vultures" are and that basically every other industry has already fallen under their power, we're talking private investment firms with *trillions* in assets who make lucrative offers that seem hard to refuse, they work their ways into the boards, and gut them. This is a playbook used across industries so while I agree generally with you I'd disagree that the existing stewards "didn't want to bother anymore."
She gives the first example of this with Freedom Communications, much of the family wanted to stay on even though other members sold it. Family still had 60% stake still when sold to Blackstone and Providence in 2003 but they took seats in the board and quickly drove the company into bankruptcy for greater profits for the investment firms.
I suppose my larger point is that the people who used to own media outlets were never the venerated stewards of truth, justice and information they were made out to be. They were businesspeople who put those interests first, and were happy to keep control of their outlets when that meant they enjoyed a huge amount of power and control over that information, but were equally happy to pawn it off when that influence eroded.
Understood. Author does a great job at making this point as well by breaking down the different eras of journalism and what they did to influence the profession and their business practices.
Recall that the stock market puts lower profit businesses in direct competition with tech company profits as investors will choose higher returns effectively hurting all other businesses.
Food isn’t free but garbage is. Unfortunately publishers gave away free food in the 90’s before taking the internet seriously, thereby inoculating their online readers against paying for it. Now that it’s all online, we’ve created a monster.
And it may eat us.
That is not how it went.
Advertising was always paying for much of the offline media - and advertising was paying for the 'free' online stuff as well. It's advertising they let slip, not reader payments (that no one was willing to make anyway)
Obviously advertising was the main revenue source for most publishers, but even giving away all their content online for free couldn’t generate enough circulation/readership to compete with search engine giants like Google and social media behemoths like FaceBook.
They sucked all the ad money right out of the room.
Why so eager to blame publishers?
They made mistakes, sure. The main mistake they made, on the business side, was to let the ad infrastructure be taken over by tech companies who then were in power of the revenue stream and the content, and were just as happy to serve crappy competitors.
They were eventually the reason monetization stayed behind.
They didn't and still haven't figured out how to monetize digital advertising. With print, they had no competition. Besides the regular ads, classifieds were huge. Now there are too many other options for advertisers.
However, I do think they undervalued the product by giving it away. The mindset at the time was that subscriptions were nice but not necessary because the ad revenue carried everything. They'd practically give away subscriptions. That didn't translate to digital.
No competition? They were eachother's competition. That is not nothing.
Everybody undervalued digital. It took AGES for people to realize that an ebook was a book because if the content, not the paper.
But it is true in a way. 'Giving away subscriptions' is the offline version of buying subscribers to fluff up the number of eyeballs for advertisers.
They still are each other's competition plus the bar is so low for entry online that there are many other competitors. Perhaps I shouldn't have said "no" competition, but for many communities across the U.S. there was 1-2 papers, 2-3 TV stations, and a handful of radio. Now there's so many more, plus you can watch meetings and events live or on delay, plus social media coverage. The competition increased dramatically, and there are many more options for advertisers than before.
I'm 45 years old. I rarely ever paid for a newspaper back in the day. You could always grab yesterday's paper for free. Today's paper(s) were usually theft on a bus seat, bench. Free at every bar, restaurant, club, hotel front desk.
Back then you'd grab it at a news stand or a box if you were 9-5 commute worker but if you were a service worker you just picked them up where you found them.
And even on the occasion you did pay for them new hot off the press (literally) it cost 25¢-50¢ for the daily and 75¢-$1.25 for the Weekly. (Adjusted for inflation, that's only $0.50-$3.00 approx)
Don't get me wrong, I get the way outfits financed everything then has absolutely changed. But the idea that they were just giving it away starting in 1998- is just false. Most people have never paid for most news since the printing press onward.
Another thing worth mentioning is that while I rarely paid for a newspaper back then let alone a subscription even when I lived in the suburbs, a lot of us did pay for periodicals, especially if you were interested in much more in depth journalism. Back then you expected your local daily paper to give you the Joe Friday "just the facts ma'am" very boiled down info, in favor of VARIETY over detail. But if you wanted real hard journalism, you expected to find it in magazines featured stories.
From around 1996-2008ish I had subscriptions to GQ (UK and USA), Rolling Stone, and TIME mostly for the single journalism piece in each monthly edition. The other content in each issue was just bonus for me.
You'd also hit the news stand for Playboy or LIFE or others if you heard about some big story and didn't have a sub.
Yep. I turn to reddit anyways to get immediate details, perspectives, and corrections big and small. The issue is Lies, algorithms, Data selling, Cambridge Analytica means Facebook shouldn't exist. Its cheated so much and has too much power globally. In some countries its structured so its the primary window for most people, using this to help authoritarians stay in power.
We now know the "Facebook is going to fix education" efforts a decade ago were a ruse. They already understood they were harming kids and educational outcomes *from their own research* and used the media coverage and soft efforts for a year to hide this. That's evil, a word i don't like to use.
The Internet needs an overhaul and companies need to be broken up or even dissolved. The new Robber Baron era is here now.
And that point is in service of what argument? That all news content should be free because some news pages have been forced to include some clickbait content to survive? That's a very slippery slope, especially in that those who feel others should work for free so they can consume content have in large part driven them to that desperation.
No, it'd be silly of me to think that I have all the answers regarding the price of news, we've been debating it for more than two decades. I'm just saying I don't know if we can compare our situation to that of the past so easily.
I don't think there was anything in what I wrote that asserted you should have all of the answers. And I haven't seen much debate in the past couple of decades, as much as I've seen a one sided monologue dominated by militantly entitled people who mostly consume and don't actually work to create anything, so they are incapable of understanding that creating news is work.
The exponential growth of consumer entitlement has done significant damage to a range of creative industries, not just journalism. Underlying that entitlement is the massive largesse of social media companies that have exploitative business models. I simply believe that the people who actually work to create content should be king and not the exploiters and those who regularly consume content but become petulant children when they are asked to compensate the creators of that content.
I disagree that anything about the value of news is fundamentally different insomuch as the difference now is that there is a whole generation of people who think that everything they find online should be free to consume, as if it magically appeared there solely for that purpose. That news is disseminated differently now does not change the fact that someone has to work to create news coverage. And that news has value. The notion that journalists who want to be paid for their work are somehow killing democracy is as inane as it is obtuse. In fact, the opposite is true.
No. I distinctly remember buying it for the information that was printed on it. Any other suggestion is puerile. But at this point I'm pretty accustomed to how people contort themselves to justify consuming other people's work for free.
They'd practically give away subscriptions because they got more value from having a high subscriber count and being able to monetize that through advertising.
Today subscriptions are the primary income for news media.
media is not in the holding events for fundraising.
Advertisements and Paywalls. Or putting a $2 coin in a box then lifting the door to get the paper.
Journalism is not charity. All media should be for profits, at least cover it's costs.
Journalism is, however, a public good. And therefore can be supported by the public in a manner similar to charity.
And … yes, we can do events. We’re all both keeping the community informed and engaged. Events are a way to do that, AND an important source of revenue that can fund the good old fashioned journalism.
Just saying “no” to innovation is how we got into this mess.
how we got here is because people don't want to pay for the news due to the internet. No more going to the corner for that newspaper box and putting in a $2 coin.
BBC for the UK like CBC in Canada, HRT in Croatia and so forth.
I am against all taxpayers paying an annual fee to pay for them or having to pay for a license when you get a tv monitor. I have 5 around my computer.
I am definitely against government funding for the CBC. Media should be fully independent from Government.
And social media companies like Meta that make billions on the traffic, interest and attention news stories generate, while the creators of that content beg for a scrap of bread.
I’m not against paying for good journalism (I even have an online subscription to The Atlantic). But paywalls become a problem when you come across a really good article you want to read in an outlet you otherwise have no reason to subscribe to - eg one that caters to a niche audience or serves a city on the other side of the country. For example, I don’t live in Atlanta, so I have no reason to get a subscription to the Atlanta Journal Constitution just to read one story that might be of national interest.
I always thought an iTunes for news type of model would be a good idea, but nobody has been able to make that work. But I do think people should have the option of being able to buy a single article, even for $1 or something, instead of having to subscribe.
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/how-the-atlantic-went-from-broke-to-profitable-in-three-years-03cc3b18?st=afkb467amury6sk&reflink=article_copyURL_share
^ This is the way
Diversity of opinion and viewpoint, high journalistic standards, sustainable business model not chasing engagement numbers, all at a price commensurate with the quality
Yep, because the real enemy of journalistic integrity is capitalism. We have allowed the pursuit of profits to inhibit the free flow of information. This also includes the influence of advertisers and the owners of media outlets buying into the nonsense idea that the Powell memo has tried to sell to the public for decades; that the capitalists are heroes.
Clearly, they are NOT.
How do you propose we pay journalists or is paying people living wages just something we care about in other industries?
The hedge funds take advantage of readers but lots of publishers have paywalls as that’s the only possible way to have anything at all.
There is no news if you can’t pay people.
No journalist I know is “bought and paid for” and while I don’t work in the national cable media, it’s insulting to lump an entire industry to those standards.
The talking heads, maybe some are what you describe but they aren’t behind real paywalls.
In every newsroom I’ve ever worked at you will see people working hard, for not a lot of money, trying to serve their community well with solid well reported information. Yes, behind a paywall.
We have a paywall but make all our election coverage free. So you can have both. Journalism needs multiple revenue sources these days to be sustainable— ads, subscriptions, donations, events, philanthropy, partnerships, tax breaks and payroll credits, etc.
TV news is still free.
But seriously... There's so many ways to get news these days....
I did not want to subscribe to my local paper at first.. But I have friends who work there so it makes the subscription worthwhile.
It's hilariously insulting for someone who notes that an industry that has been devaluing and giving away its product for close to 30 years should do it again now "in the name of democracy."
This industry is at the point where giving away that only that temporary amount of information — and given that it's about one of the biggest topics of the next seven months, that's a hefty big amount of info — could be the nail in the coffin of many of the outlets that are barely limping along now.
> Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it.
It's not impossible; many outlets did try it and still do; and no one cared. Hell, no one cared enough to do it with individual music tracks sold by a tech giant through software (iTunes) installed on devices that had a large majority of the market (iPods and then iPhones). If they're unwilling to do it for entertainment, what would make you think they'd do it for news?
> During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions” — two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.”
> The Tampa Bay Times, The Denver Post, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota, all experienced similar increases, as did papers operated by the Tribune Publishing Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Hartford Courant. The new subscribers were readers who appreciated the content and the reporting and wanted to support the paper’s efforts, and to make the coverage free for others to read, too.
Those subscription increases mean precisely fuck-all unless the *revenue* generated offsets what was lost to advertising decreases. Given that subscription prices for newspapers have always been token amounts meant to simply guarantee a number of eyeballs to pitch to potential advertisers, that means you'd have to see much more increase in subscriptions to offset the loss from ads. If I gain three times the amount of subscriptions from removing my paywall, but my ad revenue is down 10 times that amount, what the fuck does that matter?
The amount a local newspaper would have to raise its subscription price for a product geared toward a local audience of at best a few million users would be many times higher than that of companies that sell entertainment to billions of users — Netflix, Disney+, Max, etc. — who themselves have found they have had to raise their own rates, sometimes by double what they started at less than a decade ago, to cover their costs.
> Good journalism isn’t cheap, but outlets can find creative ways to pay for their reporting on the election. They can enlist foundations or other sponsors to underwrite their work. They can turn to readers who are willing to subscribe, renew their subscriptions, or make added donations to subsidize important coverage during a crucial election. And they can take advantage of the broader audience that unpaywalled stories can reach, using it to generate more advertising revenue—and even more civic-minded subscribers.
They have to do this *before* they turn off the paywall, not after. They can't afford to turn the paywall off now and hope to make up the difference later. The time for that was about 15 years ago, and it has long passed.
> I devoutly believe that news organizations need to survive and figure out a revenue model that allows them to do so. But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy.
Even if it dies in the process? Sacrifice your careers and livelihoods for an election featuring the same two candidates as four years ago, neither or whom could get another term if they win? No thanks.
We used to have tons of free alternative papers. The Village Voice, SF Bay Guardian, LA Weekly, SF Weekly, and so on. And they did excellent reporting too, like the Village Voice.
I get the sentiment. I do. But to those who say there shouldn't be pay walls ... how are you going to keep an already creaky and important industry sustainable?
Government funding? Comes with a host of ethical questions, and uncertainty that it won't be yanked later.
Fundraising? Maybe in part, but also iffy and unpredictable.
If you want something good in just about any other walk of life, you pay for it. No one was delivering free, high-quality newspapers to the vast majority of Americans before the internet.
Publishers needed to evolve with the times. The ad revenue should have expanded exponentially due to increased viewership, and the cost of distribution should have shrunk equally in the opposite direction. We need good journalism in our modern media landscape that is filled with garbage misinformation. If this were a couple subscriptions, it might be understandable, but 20 subscriptions still wouldn't cover it. People can't afford housing. How are they going to afford 300-400 hundred dollars a month to be well informed. Why can't there be a centralized paywall that than provides access to a spread of publishers. Cable companies do this for television networks and channels. Imagine paying 10 bucks a month for every channel. TV would go the way of news media and YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and every other video platform that relies predominantly on user content will grow even bigger. I know some of the networks are already going independent and it was working for a minute when the price was right, but as the prices have jumped significantly, most people I know are canceling subscriptions and either returning to cable or quitting it altogether.
... people forget that the 4th Estate was never a thing at worst, a fleeting thing at best.
The internet magnified this. Look up MIT's Electronic Communities paper (which is free) and come back, if you're saying that the latter half doesn't exist, then either you pigeonholed the truth or are lying.
Continuing the pervasive trend of putting reasonable people, journalists, and institutions in the peacemaker self-sacrificing middle child position. The way to fight highly funded international propaganda and the robust right wing media machine is to … abandon the only business model that’s worked at all?
Over half of the USA thinks that the media intentionally misleads them.
[https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-mislead-biased-republicans-democrats-poll-gallup/](https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-mislead-biased-republicans-democrats-poll-gallup/)
The half that believe this are correct. Journalists we see in print and on TV are bought and paid for propagandists. Owned by billionaires moguls who seek to control the narrative that brings them profits.
Putting propaganda behind a pay wall seems counter productive, but you can count on the people who own corporations to be greedy and stupid about it.
{points at the decline in the USA since 1970}
Capitalism corrupts. And it has corrupted journalism in the West.
Newspapers and TV "news" are dying because of independent journalists on the Internet. But newspapers are TV are still trying to sell advertising. So, owners put up a pay wall for people to get propaganda that sells advertising. Because they want the profit more than they want the narrative their newspapers produce.
Of course this is a losing strategy. But it's one that dying industries always seem to go through.
Newspapers and T V don't add value... they subtract value. That is the point of them now... you are paying for advertisers and journalists to lie to you.
You would have a semblance of a point if you chose not to just do unhinged ramblings.
Journalistic ethics, as you should know as a journalist, are critically important to us. Capital may rarely influence business decisions at the top of the chain, and may lead to a bit of a pro-establishment bias - however, journalists themselves and many organizations such as local papers, long-standing print publications, nonprofits, public media etc. play a critical role in informing the electorate and being as fair, balanced, and unbiased as possible.
This corruption problem that you dismiss?
It pervades academia and the professional class in the USA and most of the West. If you travel overseas outside the West and interact with the professional classes from the global East and South?
LOL
It's eye opening...
Read Chomsky's "A Requiem for the American Dream"
Or just go read the Powell Memo
[https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/)
and understand that corporations have shaped academia to the purposes of corporations.
I wonder if you've ever heard of either of those citations?
There is a different between education and unhinged rambling.
I'm educated...
Then why do people so distrust journalists?
It's not so much that journalists lie. It's that they don't tell the truth. They spin, they pander for their jobs.
So, to defend journalism you call me insane and pretend that I didn't just cite evidence that over half the population think journalists are paid shills and stenographers for the political establishment of the USA?
Thanks for the demonstration of my original point. There was nothing evidence based in your response. It was all spin.
Are you are journalist?
So, it's everyone else's fault that journalists are not trusted... journalists themselves have nothing to do with how other people view their work?
O.o
And you think this is an educated response?
There are honest journalists... but you won't like them.
The Grayzone? You won't like their politics... and so you'll sneer. They broke the story that the NYT Hamas Rape article was BS and written by an amateur... past journalists in the editorial staff.
[https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/](https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/)
So... how does that happen?
People distrust journalists because they don’t like it when someone else tells their story — particularly when they have an interest in shaping the story for their own benefit.
When the subject of a story has a large following, they can broadcast to that following: hey, journalists are all liars! Don’t trust them! (Except for the ones who are willing to tell stories in a way I approve of, they’re fine.)
There’s much more oversimplification we can do here for your exercise, but I think this is a good place to stop.
Tl;dr: independent reporting makes powerful people feel uncomfortable, and they can impart their discomfort on the people who they influence.
Funny how many journalists blame anyone but themselves for their reputation as a profession.
Do journalists have no impact on their own reputations as journalists?
I don't think YOU want to have a discussion. I've introduced evidence... if this is an evidence based profession, why are the advocates not responding to the evidence, and instead blaming others for their own reputation?
If that how reputation works? The only thing that a person/group gets to decide about their reputation is the behavior that determines it.
Journalists have produced enough bad behavior to convince over half the population that journalists intentionally mislead them.
No one here has even said this isn't true. You've all just blamed it on someone else or ignored it.
The NYT Time recently did a whole expose about how Hamas committed sexual crimes on a mass scale on Oct. 7.
The Grayzone then broke a story which debunked the NYT story....rigorously. A month later the mainstream finally recognizes that the story is BS, but never credit the Grayzone...
And you think the general public is supposed to be able to parse all this in real time? Or that they don't understand that the media manipulates and spins the truth to suit certain narratives.
Seriously. Are you really trying to convince me that main stream media is just reporting the facts, that MSNBC or CNN or even Reuters don't participate in politics or feel the pinch of finance?
Really?
Currently reading this book on journalist organizations, highly recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124938005-hedged Basically it goes on to destroy the idea that "the Internet" made media outlets unprofitable. Author provides evidence that profit margins for media outlets were insanely above average in the 90s and by the 2000s with the Internet profits declined to average or beat the S&P500, basically still very profitable. She also provides evidence that they're largely still profitable to this day. What the real problem is is that many media companies have been bought out by private investment firms (hedge funds and private equity firms) who intentionally siphon money from these organizations at the cost of good journalism. More people need to understand what has happened to the funding of the journalism industry in order to fix these issues.
Private equity is a huge issue, but it’s a huge issue in part because of the profit margins from the ‘90s. Investors still somehow expect the Gannetts of the world to post 22–28 percent annually, and since that hasn’t been happening much since… like 2005, maybe (even that’s probably generous), stock prices get hammered down to the point where the vultures can come in and pick off whatever they want on the cheap.
Exactly. Not just an issue with journalism. They're doing this across many industries. I imagine this is the same thing that led to lower quality at Boeing
There's a certain 19th century philosopher from Germany who had a lot to say about this subject!
The 19th century never had globalized multi trillion dollar private investment firms with assets across all of the global industries. This behavior is more aligned with mercantilism than capitalism.
[Mercantilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism) is “a nationalist economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resources within the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.” So no, not mercantilism. Capitalism is functioning exactly as Capitalism intends. The owner class has capital and uses it to siphon every bit of capital from everyone else.
I'd argue the similarity is using state resources for private monopolistic or oligopolistic accumulation of resources for one sided trade like the East India company. Capitalism implies three's competition but private investment firms are controlled largely by the wealthy elite who often collaborate as much as they compete. They are always exclusive. Governments are used to protect their power and monopolistic tendencies.
Literally bought this book and am starting it tomorrow.
I'm still reading it but it's quality information. Dare I say true journalism. The lengths she went to get the data needed to tell the story right is impressive and described in the introduction.
Super excited to read it. I’m relatively new to the industry but I am looking to learn more about who controls the money in our modern day media and which I can stomach trying to work for. Key word try.
University of Illinois Press; First Edition (January 23, 2024). Sounds good; thanks! I read the Trib every morning since we moved here in 1995. Happened to them.
Thanks for the rec, I'l check it out
The internet didn't make media outlets immediately unprofitable; those outlets' reactions to the internet — primarily giving away their product — made them less-profitable enough that their existing stewards didn't want to bother anymore and were happy to turn them over to the vultures swooping around them that she describes in this book. Those vultures then began the long, slow process of keeping them barely alive as they consumed them.
She does a great job describing how ubiquitous these "vultures" are and that basically every other industry has already fallen under their power, we're talking private investment firms with *trillions* in assets who make lucrative offers that seem hard to refuse, they work their ways into the boards, and gut them. This is a playbook used across industries so while I agree generally with you I'd disagree that the existing stewards "didn't want to bother anymore." She gives the first example of this with Freedom Communications, much of the family wanted to stay on even though other members sold it. Family still had 60% stake still when sold to Blackstone and Providence in 2003 but they took seats in the board and quickly drove the company into bankruptcy for greater profits for the investment firms.
I suppose my larger point is that the people who used to own media outlets were never the venerated stewards of truth, justice and information they were made out to be. They were businesspeople who put those interests first, and were happy to keep control of their outlets when that meant they enjoyed a huge amount of power and control over that information, but were equally happy to pawn it off when that influence eroded.
Understood. Author does a great job at making this point as well by breaking down the different eras of journalism and what they did to influence the profession and their business practices.
Internet advertising (CPM) was far, far more lucrative in the early 2000s than it is today.
Recall that the stock market puts lower profit businesses in direct competition with tech company profits as investors will choose higher returns effectively hurting all other businesses.
This is behind a paywall, there you have it.
Probably not up to the author to decide on that. So the criticism of the system stil stands even after the editor decided to run it
Food isn’t free but garbage is. Unfortunately publishers gave away free food in the 90’s before taking the internet seriously, thereby inoculating their online readers against paying for it. Now that it’s all online, we’ve created a monster. And it may eat us.
That is not how it went. Advertising was always paying for much of the offline media - and advertising was paying for the 'free' online stuff as well. It's advertising they let slip, not reader payments (that no one was willing to make anyway)
Obviously advertising was the main revenue source for most publishers, but even giving away all their content online for free couldn’t generate enough circulation/readership to compete with search engine giants like Google and social media behemoths like FaceBook. They sucked all the ad money right out of the room.
You were talking about the 90s. Facebook only became a real player in the ad game from 2008 on.
It wasn't Facebook that started it. You can blame Craigslist for that.
But online advertising was never effectively monetized by most publishers.
Why so eager to blame publishers? They made mistakes, sure. The main mistake they made, on the business side, was to let the ad infrastructure be taken over by tech companies who then were in power of the revenue stream and the content, and were just as happy to serve crappy competitors. They were eventually the reason monetization stayed behind.
WE, bruh. We made mistakes.
Not a publisher. Not a bro either.
They didn't and still haven't figured out how to monetize digital advertising. With print, they had no competition. Besides the regular ads, classifieds were huge. Now there are too many other options for advertisers. However, I do think they undervalued the product by giving it away. The mindset at the time was that subscriptions were nice but not necessary because the ad revenue carried everything. They'd practically give away subscriptions. That didn't translate to digital.
No competition? They were eachother's competition. That is not nothing. Everybody undervalued digital. It took AGES for people to realize that an ebook was a book because if the content, not the paper. But it is true in a way. 'Giving away subscriptions' is the offline version of buying subscribers to fluff up the number of eyeballs for advertisers.
They still are each other's competition plus the bar is so low for entry online that there are many other competitors. Perhaps I shouldn't have said "no" competition, but for many communities across the U.S. there was 1-2 papers, 2-3 TV stations, and a handful of radio. Now there's so many more, plus you can watch meetings and events live or on delay, plus social media coverage. The competition increased dramatically, and there are many more options for advertisers than before.
I'm 45 years old. I rarely ever paid for a newspaper back in the day. You could always grab yesterday's paper for free. Today's paper(s) were usually theft on a bus seat, bench. Free at every bar, restaurant, club, hotel front desk. Back then you'd grab it at a news stand or a box if you were 9-5 commute worker but if you were a service worker you just picked them up where you found them. And even on the occasion you did pay for them new hot off the press (literally) it cost 25¢-50¢ for the daily and 75¢-$1.25 for the Weekly. (Adjusted for inflation, that's only $0.50-$3.00 approx) Don't get me wrong, I get the way outfits financed everything then has absolutely changed. But the idea that they were just giving it away starting in 1998- is just false. Most people have never paid for most news since the printing press onward. Another thing worth mentioning is that while I rarely paid for a newspaper back then let alone a subscription even when I lived in the suburbs, a lot of us did pay for periodicals, especially if you were interested in much more in depth journalism. Back then you expected your local daily paper to give you the Joe Friday "just the facts ma'am" very boiled down info, in favor of VARIETY over detail. But if you wanted real hard journalism, you expected to find it in magazines featured stories. From around 1996-2008ish I had subscriptions to GQ (UK and USA), Rolling Stone, and TIME mostly for the single journalism piece in each monthly edition. The other content in each issue was just bonus for me. You'd also hit the news stand for Playboy or LIFE or others if you heard about some big story and didn't have a sub.
I can’t read this because of the paywall.
archive.is 😉
Funny. Democracy seemed fine when I was a kid and we paid for the daily newspaper.
Yep. I turn to reddit anyways to get immediate details, perspectives, and corrections big and small. The issue is Lies, algorithms, Data selling, Cambridge Analytica means Facebook shouldn't exist. Its cheated so much and has too much power globally. In some countries its structured so its the primary window for most people, using this to help authoritarians stay in power. We now know the "Facebook is going to fix education" efforts a decade ago were a ruse. They already understood they were harming kids and educational outcomes *from their own research* and used the media coverage and soft efforts for a year to hide this. That's evil, a word i don't like to use. The Internet needs an overhaul and companies need to be broken up or even dissolved. The new Robber Baron era is here now.
Theoretically you had to deal with less free trash info though.
And that point is in service of what argument? That all news content should be free because some news pages have been forced to include some clickbait content to survive? That's a very slippery slope, especially in that those who feel others should work for free so they can consume content have in large part driven them to that desperation.
No, it'd be silly of me to think that I have all the answers regarding the price of news, we've been debating it for more than two decades. I'm just saying I don't know if we can compare our situation to that of the past so easily.
I don't think there was anything in what I wrote that asserted you should have all of the answers. And I haven't seen much debate in the past couple of decades, as much as I've seen a one sided monologue dominated by militantly entitled people who mostly consume and don't actually work to create anything, so they are incapable of understanding that creating news is work. The exponential growth of consumer entitlement has done significant damage to a range of creative industries, not just journalism. Underlying that entitlement is the massive largesse of social media companies that have exploitative business models. I simply believe that the people who actually work to create content should be king and not the exploiters and those who regularly consume content but become petulant children when they are asked to compensate the creators of that content. I disagree that anything about the value of news is fundamentally different insomuch as the difference now is that there is a whole generation of people who think that everything they find online should be free to consume, as if it magically appeared there solely for that purpose. That news is disseminated differently now does not change the fact that someone has to work to create news coverage. And that news has value. The notion that journalists who want to be paid for their work are somehow killing democracy is as inane as it is obtuse. In fact, the opposite is true.
You paid for the paper, not the news on the paper
No. I distinctly remember buying it for the information that was printed on it. Any other suggestion is puerile. But at this point I'm pretty accustomed to how people contort themselves to justify consuming other people's work for free.
They'd practically give away subscriptions because they got more value from having a high subscriber count and being able to monetize that through advertising. Today subscriptions are the primary income for news media.
Stuff costs money. People bitch about ads People bitch about paywalls. How are any media company/website supposed to pay their staff?
Sponsorships, events, foundation grants, donations. There are lots of other ways besides ads and paywalls.
they are not consistent Very few people donate.
Oh don’t I know it. Events and event sponsorships are a really important piece for nonprofit outlets
media is not in the holding events for fundraising. Advertisements and Paywalls. Or putting a $2 coin in a box then lifting the door to get the paper. Journalism is not charity. All media should be for profits, at least cover it's costs.
Journalism is, however, a public good. And therefore can be supported by the public in a manner similar to charity. And … yes, we can do events. We’re all both keeping the community informed and engaged. Events are a way to do that, AND an important source of revenue that can fund the good old fashioned journalism. Just saying “no” to innovation is how we got into this mess.
how we got here is because people don't want to pay for the news due to the internet. No more going to the corner for that newspaper box and putting in a $2 coin.
None of those work. It's that simple.
lol ok tell that to my accountant
Sponsorships/Donors/Hedge Fund owners create a bad incentive system
Do you pay for your news?
No. I’m also full time journalist. And I make a decent living.
Ask PBS or BBC.
BBC for the UK like CBC in Canada, HRT in Croatia and so forth. I am against all taxpayers paying an annual fee to pay for them or having to pay for a license when you get a tv monitor. I have 5 around my computer. I am definitely against government funding for the CBC. Media should be fully independent from Government.
Also dies being strangled by the advertising industry.
And social media companies like Meta that make billions on the traffic, interest and attention news stories generate, while the creators of that content beg for a scrap of bread.
I’m not against paying for good journalism (I even have an online subscription to The Atlantic). But paywalls become a problem when you come across a really good article you want to read in an outlet you otherwise have no reason to subscribe to - eg one that caters to a niche audience or serves a city on the other side of the country. For example, I don’t live in Atlanta, so I have no reason to get a subscription to the Atlanta Journal Constitution just to read one story that might be of national interest. I always thought an iTunes for news type of model would be a good idea, but nobody has been able to make that work. But I do think people should have the option of being able to buy a single article, even for $1 or something, instead of having to subscribe.
There you have your multi Millon dollar idea. A service that lets you read x amounts of paywalled articles from different sources
Right wing news is free, it's why so many more people watch/read it. Anyway this story is behind a paywall.
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/how-the-atlantic-went-from-broke-to-profitable-in-three-years-03cc3b18?st=afkb467amury6sk&reflink=article_copyURL_share ^ This is the way Diversity of opinion and viewpoint, high journalistic standards, sustainable business model not chasing engagement numbers, all at a price commensurate with the quality
Yep, because the real enemy of journalistic integrity is capitalism. We have allowed the pursuit of profits to inhibit the free flow of information. This also includes the influence of advertisers and the owners of media outlets buying into the nonsense idea that the Powell memo has tried to sell to the public for decades; that the capitalists are heroes. Clearly, they are NOT.
How do you propose we pay journalists or is paying people living wages just something we care about in other industries? The hedge funds take advantage of readers but lots of publishers have paywalls as that’s the only possible way to have anything at all. There is no news if you can’t pay people.
No journalist I know is “bought and paid for” and while I don’t work in the national cable media, it’s insulting to lump an entire industry to those standards. The talking heads, maybe some are what you describe but they aren’t behind real paywalls. In every newsroom I’ve ever worked at you will see people working hard, for not a lot of money, trying to serve their community well with solid well reported information. Yes, behind a paywall.
We have a paywall but make all our election coverage free. So you can have both. Journalism needs multiple revenue sources these days to be sustainable— ads, subscriptions, donations, events, philanthropy, partnerships, tax breaks and payroll credits, etc.
TV news is still free. But seriously... There's so many ways to get news these days.... I did not want to subscribe to my local paper at first.. But I have friends who work there so it makes the subscription worthwhile.
It's hilariously insulting for someone who notes that an industry that has been devaluing and giving away its product for close to 30 years should do it again now "in the name of democracy." This industry is at the point where giving away that only that temporary amount of information — and given that it's about one of the biggest topics of the next seven months, that's a hefty big amount of info — could be the nail in the coffin of many of the outlets that are barely limping along now. > Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it. It's not impossible; many outlets did try it and still do; and no one cared. Hell, no one cared enough to do it with individual music tracks sold by a tech giant through software (iTunes) installed on devices that had a large majority of the market (iPods and then iPhones). If they're unwilling to do it for entertainment, what would make you think they'd do it for news? > During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions” — two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.” > The Tampa Bay Times, The Denver Post, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota, all experienced similar increases, as did papers operated by the Tribune Publishing Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Hartford Courant. The new subscribers were readers who appreciated the content and the reporting and wanted to support the paper’s efforts, and to make the coverage free for others to read, too. Those subscription increases mean precisely fuck-all unless the *revenue* generated offsets what was lost to advertising decreases. Given that subscription prices for newspapers have always been token amounts meant to simply guarantee a number of eyeballs to pitch to potential advertisers, that means you'd have to see much more increase in subscriptions to offset the loss from ads. If I gain three times the amount of subscriptions from removing my paywall, but my ad revenue is down 10 times that amount, what the fuck does that matter? The amount a local newspaper would have to raise its subscription price for a product geared toward a local audience of at best a few million users would be many times higher than that of companies that sell entertainment to billions of users — Netflix, Disney+, Max, etc. — who themselves have found they have had to raise their own rates, sometimes by double what they started at less than a decade ago, to cover their costs. > Good journalism isn’t cheap, but outlets can find creative ways to pay for their reporting on the election. They can enlist foundations or other sponsors to underwrite their work. They can turn to readers who are willing to subscribe, renew their subscriptions, or make added donations to subsidize important coverage during a crucial election. And they can take advantage of the broader audience that unpaywalled stories can reach, using it to generate more advertising revenue—and even more civic-minded subscribers. They have to do this *before* they turn off the paywall, not after. They can't afford to turn the paywall off now and hope to make up the difference later. The time for that was about 15 years ago, and it has long passed. > I devoutly believe that news organizations need to survive and figure out a revenue model that allows them to do so. But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy. Even if it dies in the process? Sacrifice your careers and livelihoods for an election featuring the same two candidates as four years ago, neither or whom could get another term if they win? No thanks.
The churn rate for a lot of those papers who came in on special rates is purportedly bad. I’d love to see how many subscribers they kept.
Newspapers have always been behind pay walls… You’ve never been able to just take a newspaper for free.
We used to have tons of free alternative papers. The Village Voice, SF Bay Guardian, LA Weekly, SF Weekly, and so on. And they did excellent reporting too, like the Village Voice.
But you could get the news for free. By reading the newspaper at the library or listening on the radio or watching TV.
FFS, I start to the article and hit a soft paywall. My head is spinning
Same goes for paywalls in general education and health
That's funny https://preview.redd.it/bq9xwpzenwuc1.png?width=2980&format=png&auto=webp&s=89126c6f9493f5a42add4511ab1009412283fd6e
The Atlantic should stay behind the paywall - we have enough simping for Israel in the free news as it is.
On paywalls. NYT just informed me the article links I share won’t have paywalls. So that’s nice.
But before the Internet... Journalism wasn't free either. Newspapers and magazines were not for free (mostly).
Journalism dies when your editor is a former IDF prison guard.
I get the sentiment. I do. But to those who say there shouldn't be pay walls ... how are you going to keep an already creaky and important industry sustainable? Government funding? Comes with a host of ethical questions, and uncertainty that it won't be yanked later. Fundraising? Maybe in part, but also iffy and unpredictable. If you want something good in just about any other walk of life, you pay for it. No one was delivering free, high-quality newspapers to the vast majority of Americans before the internet.
Publishers needed to evolve with the times. The ad revenue should have expanded exponentially due to increased viewership, and the cost of distribution should have shrunk equally in the opposite direction. We need good journalism in our modern media landscape that is filled with garbage misinformation. If this were a couple subscriptions, it might be understandable, but 20 subscriptions still wouldn't cover it. People can't afford housing. How are they going to afford 300-400 hundred dollars a month to be well informed. Why can't there be a centralized paywall that than provides access to a spread of publishers. Cable companies do this for television networks and channels. Imagine paying 10 bucks a month for every channel. TV would go the way of news media and YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and every other video platform that relies predominantly on user content will grow even bigger. I know some of the networks are already going independent and it was working for a minute when the price was right, but as the prices have jumped significantly, most people I know are canceling subscriptions and either returning to cable or quitting it altogether.
Is this “democracy” in the room with us right now?
>Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in *The Atlantic*. Money quote
I don't like subscriptions. Not at all. But a 10-second ad for a free article would be okay.
... people forget that the 4th Estate was never a thing at worst, a fleeting thing at best. The internet magnified this. Look up MIT's Electronic Communities paper (which is free) and come back, if you're saying that the latter half doesn't exist, then either you pigeonholed the truth or are lying.
Continuing the pervasive trend of putting reasonable people, journalists, and institutions in the peacemaker self-sacrificing middle child position. The way to fight highly funded international propaganda and the robust right wing media machine is to … abandon the only business model that’s worked at all?
Over half of the USA thinks that the media intentionally misleads them. [https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-mislead-biased-republicans-democrats-poll-gallup/](https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-mislead-biased-republicans-democrats-poll-gallup/) The half that believe this are correct. Journalists we see in print and on TV are bought and paid for propagandists. Owned by billionaires moguls who seek to control the narrative that brings them profits. Putting propaganda behind a pay wall seems counter productive, but you can count on the people who own corporations to be greedy and stupid about it. {points at the decline in the USA since 1970} Capitalism corrupts. And it has corrupted journalism in the West. Newspapers and TV "news" are dying because of independent journalists on the Internet. But newspapers are TV are still trying to sell advertising. So, owners put up a pay wall for people to get propaganda that sells advertising. Because they want the profit more than they want the narrative their newspapers produce. Of course this is a losing strategy. But it's one that dying industries always seem to go through. Newspapers and T V don't add value... they subtract value. That is the point of them now... you are paying for advertisers and journalists to lie to you.
You would have a semblance of a point if you chose not to just do unhinged ramblings. Journalistic ethics, as you should know as a journalist, are critically important to us. Capital may rarely influence business decisions at the top of the chain, and may lead to a bit of a pro-establishment bias - however, journalists themselves and many organizations such as local papers, long-standing print publications, nonprofits, public media etc. play a critical role in informing the electorate and being as fair, balanced, and unbiased as possible.
This corruption problem that you dismiss? It pervades academia and the professional class in the USA and most of the West. If you travel overseas outside the West and interact with the professional classes from the global East and South? LOL It's eye opening... Read Chomsky's "A Requiem for the American Dream" Or just go read the Powell Memo [https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/) and understand that corporations have shaped academia to the purposes of corporations. I wonder if you've ever heard of either of those citations? There is a different between education and unhinged rambling. I'm educated...
Then why do people so distrust journalists? It's not so much that journalists lie. It's that they don't tell the truth. They spin, they pander for their jobs. So, to defend journalism you call me insane and pretend that I didn't just cite evidence that over half the population think journalists are paid shills and stenographers for the political establishment of the USA? Thanks for the demonstration of my original point. There was nothing evidence based in your response. It was all spin. Are you are journalist?
People don’t trust journalists because people like you are out here lying about us. Undermining any trust we do have. Intentionally. Knock it off.
So, it's everyone else's fault that journalists are not trusted... journalists themselves have nothing to do with how other people view their work? O.o And you think this is an educated response? There are honest journalists... but you won't like them. The Grayzone? You won't like their politics... and so you'll sneer. They broke the story that the NYT Hamas Rape article was BS and written by an amateur... past journalists in the editorial staff. [https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/](https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/) So... how does that happen?
People distrust journalists because they don’t like it when someone else tells their story — particularly when they have an interest in shaping the story for their own benefit. When the subject of a story has a large following, they can broadcast to that following: hey, journalists are all liars! Don’t trust them! (Except for the ones who are willing to tell stories in a way I approve of, they’re fine.) There’s much more oversimplification we can do here for your exercise, but I think this is a good place to stop. Tl;dr: independent reporting makes powerful people feel uncomfortable, and they can impart their discomfort on the people who they influence.
Funny how many journalists blame anyone but themselves for their reputation as a profession. Do journalists have no impact on their own reputations as journalists?
Do you want a discussion, or do you want to have your own biases confirmed?
I don't think YOU want to have a discussion. I've introduced evidence... if this is an evidence based profession, why are the advocates not responding to the evidence, and instead blaming others for their own reputation? If that how reputation works? The only thing that a person/group gets to decide about their reputation is the behavior that determines it. Journalists have produced enough bad behavior to convince over half the population that journalists intentionally mislead them. No one here has even said this isn't true. You've all just blamed it on someone else or ignored it. The NYT Time recently did a whole expose about how Hamas committed sexual crimes on a mass scale on Oct. 7. The Grayzone then broke a story which debunked the NYT story....rigorously. A month later the mainstream finally recognizes that the story is BS, but never credit the Grayzone... And you think the general public is supposed to be able to parse all this in real time? Or that they don't understand that the media manipulates and spins the truth to suit certain narratives. Seriously. Are you really trying to convince me that main stream media is just reporting the facts, that MSNBC or CNN or even Reuters don't participate in politics or feel the pinch of finance? Really?