> For too long, journalists have given away their stories for free in exchange for distribution by the duopoly.
The news industry does not "give" their stories to Facebook or Google. It allows the placement of links to the stories on those sites. (I use the term "allow" loosely, since in many jurisdictions they do not have the right to restrict in-linking.)
The news industry is free to try to prevent in-linking. The technical capability already exists in the form of robots.txt and the referer header. Although I can tell you right now what will happen. People will read less news, and read more of other stuff that is still distributed on Facebook or Google. They won't stop using Facebook or Google.
Honestly, it would probably be better for the world. People are reading too much news and it is contributing to polarization. Won't help the news industry's bottom line, though. Won't hurt Google or Facebook's.
It boggles my mind that the same people who support mainstream news coverage as legitimate journalism would also agree with you that people need to stop reading so much news and news is the reason there is so much polarization.
News is good and legitimate, and news is also causing huge societal problems?
Not accusing you of this sentiment, more just frustrated that any respects journalism in this day and age
There can be too much of a good thing. And not all news is contextualized in a way that helps people understand how big or small of a deal a given thing is.
Exactly. I have not done a formal study, but my guess would be that the majority of profit made by the "news" comes from rumormonging and trolling (with a few exceptions like the data-heavy WSJ). Now Facebook and the like are keeping that money instead.
I think we should #AbolishImaginaryProperyLaws and not reward the creation of non-sense by any of these actors.
This. The claim Google/Facebook are stealing from the news industry is neither here nor there, they want those stories to appear on social media/search results; if they didn't, they could just paywall their entire websites.
They are just trying to cry loud enough that the government will intervene, pretty much like their colleagues here in the EU.
Towards the end of the post we find out why they want to block news links from Facebook and Google, they are setting up a competing platform.
“That’s why we’re building Forth, a news-first platform that pays journalists for their work and offers the audience concise updates with context -- from the reporters they trust. All revenue generated on Forth is shared with our news partners.
We only allow trusted and credible journalists (vetted by our editorial team) to publish to the platform. It's a one-stop shop for accurate information about what's happening right now.”
Yeah. The premise of this article is just silly when the vast majority of news reports are covered by many many websites all vying for more traffic to their web properties.
Is there any news organization that has deliberately removed themselves from Google that you (or anyone else) know of? As you can de-index your site if this is a problem for you. I am just not aware of any organization that has done it.
The problem with monopolies is that no matter how harmful they are, you can't afford to separate from them.
The very fact that news publishers aren't doing this despite the raw deal they're getting from Google is conclusive proof that the law must intervene against Google and Facebook.
There are so many websites I visit because they were linked somewhere. I’m sure if Google stopped listing these websites I would never purposely visit la times or Washington post. Or especially local affiliate websites when there is some breaking news somewhere local. Who would know to go there?
I can only imagine it would be even more of a death blow to any news website that is local rather than national and not a top news source that people know by name enough to type in.
Legislative force in Australia is driving this change. The government is at odds with public broadcasters. Initially they excluded them from receiving revenue from linkage. They backtracked, but I fear for the consequence: I believe they will use this to introduce cost saving de-funding of public broadcasting.
Its "be careful what you wish for" stuff.
Also, we have a fight with a union-pension-fund backed news outlet being possibly responsible for (same government) legislative changes to prevent pension funds from investing in news (one word change to require their spend to be for members financial benefit, not just "members benefit" which permitted this investment)
Also Also we have huge dominance of print media and non-public news outlet by "News Ltd" which is Rupert Murdoch which is a cancer on the world of disinterested, bipartisan news (the leader writers and editorial panel of News in Australia are futher to the right than the Koch brothers, and have gone feral on anything even vaguely to the left of Reaganite views of pollution, green energy, public sector finance...) -The pay for links thing, is designed to get money to News Ltd which has suffered massive declines in revenue.
News hoovered up all the small independent newspapers in Australia. Its a public disgrace, of equal dimensions to the predation of news by Google and the Facebooks of the globe.
Stratechery did a great breakdown of the proposed Australian legislation[0]. Worth the read.
In Australia, I'm not sure about elsewhere, but Google's News service shows a headline, sometimes a picture, and then a link to the original article. I just can't see what value is supposedly being redirected.
Disclaimer: I pay for a subscription to the news service Crikey, and it's worth every penny. I read the ABC news website on a daily basis, and I avoid News Corp. services other than for reasons of "know thy enemy".
> We only allow trusted and credible journalists (vetted by our editorial team) to publish to the platform.
"Vetted by our editorial team" sounds insanely slow, which will be an excuse when biased Forth staff don't want to approve writers they don't personally like.
Accepting properly vetted anything should be slow!
I mean, honestly, if a website can just pop up online, call itself a news site, and start being almost immediately in news feeds, that's a major problem.
Facebook and Google provide more of a benefit to individual news organizations than vice versa. If everyone uses FB / Google already, you’re not doing them a favor by posting your content to those platforms, they’re doing you a favor by allowing more eyes to see the content. Of course in aggregate if all news publishers stopped publishing content then maybe less people would use FB / Google, which could harm them.
It's a tight rope arguing who deserves what when a lot of business are built on this chain of platforms (like a supply chain). News agencies have many channels, probably some of the largest being FB and G (hence this post) and now they're looking to cut out the middle man because they believe it doesn't provide them value and apparently detracts from it. However, note that there's an inversion of power at some point when a platform becomes much bigger than its customers. News agencies will pretty much die out without G and FB (if they are indeed by far the largest channels) because someone will just post the news from their platform onto G and FB obfuscated enough to bypass copyright because people want news on G and FB.
It stopped being about "I want news, oh cool G and FB have it!" And started being about "I read news on G and FB. What is this WSJ you are talking about" a long time ago.
Platform inversion of power taken to its extreme, some might even say perhaps Google and Facebook should demand revenue share from ISPs and computer/mobile manufacturers for incentivizing people to buy plans and devices to get on the internet?
Way back I remember when everyone knew newspapers were dying. Some people thought it was new competition with tv news. Other people thought bullshit sales tactics by newspapers pushed people away.
Anyone who has ever been in the news will tell you that the news always gets the story wrong. The scale of the news is vast. if you analyze every instance of journalism you will find it's entirely false. Whether or not this is intentional is unclear. Hanlon's razor suggests that journalists are probably just stupid. Which is quite true.
You might ask, why is journalism so bad in the last 10 years? STEM. We have pulled talent out of social sciences leaving the bottom of the barrel in journalism.
Not for the reader, or Google/Facebook. For Nillium.
No news company that I am aware of has learned how to have both credible editorial oversight and profit in the digital age. It seems that every news source, even the legacy new organizations, have an inherent strong bias, either explicitly in the narrative they espouse, or implicitly in the stories they don't report.
It's maddening.
Nillium touts their editorial board. Who are they? What is their experience? What is their approach to ensuring the news they release is based in facts, with follow up and naming of sources, explores both sides of a discussion and respects the privacy of those in the story? Importantly, do they eschew partisan framing and narratives and truly seek to be unbiased?
I don't get the argument that Facebook and Google are exploiting the news industry. Wouldn't people go to the site afterward? They are only reading the headline on Facebook or maybe a small summarized snippet on Google.
Does the author of this piece believe that Hacker News is exploiting her? Evidently not, as she posted it here. Like news organizations tend to do on Facebook or use AMP on Google.
Besides the obvious conflicts of interested pointed out a really serious consequence of removing news would be that users would go directly to their news sources and as a result would be in an even bigger/stronger echo chamber.
People aren't going to pay for news because the news doesn't provide anything of immediate value for most people. At best, it provides some momentary entertainment. This can be easily replaced by any number of free sources. Mostly it provides negative value in the form of stressing people out about things they have little control over.
In the aggregate, the news does provide value to society (theoretically) by informing the populace about things the government and large corporations are doing. But this value is not immediately useful to an individual.
My own proposal is that the news should have a time-limited paywall. Say, pay to have the news as soon as it's available, then after a day or a week make it freely available to anyone. If knowing about a political scandal or corporate merger is actually important to the day-to-day business of your life, you will probably pay to have access to that information asap. If not, you can learn about it later with plenty of time for it to still inform your voting or consumer decisions.
But I don’t see how google removes revenue from news agencies. They are free to put up pay walls and get deindexed. Or do the hybrid paywall thing that nyt and wsj does where they show up in the searches but people have to login/pay.
The problem is newspapers haven’t figured out how to make people pay online. This isn’t a google problem. It might be a Facebook opportunity/problem though.
From my perspective as a news consumer, the modern newspapers online are too expensive by far. I have a wsj article I want to read. But I’d have to buy a (no doubt hard to cancel) subscription to view it. Ditto the economist - they’re the worst I had a sub and I didn’t want to call them and deal with their hard sell desubscribe, so I had my credit card block them.
If this was the real world, and I saw that interesting wsj article, I’d fork over my $0.25 or $0.50 or whatever for the issue and walk away with it. Rather than entering a lifetime data relationship with some entity that wants to exploit me for more money.
That’s why people don’t pay for news: you can’t on a casual basis.
This won’t work. It’s fantastically easy for a low-quality site to summarise paywalled news articles (and it happens already).
Unfortunately newspapers made a massive mistake giving their news away for free in the early 00s. That set a precedent that has been impossible to reverse for all but a few large well-funded papers.
Local journalism has practically evaporated. It wasn’t really because Facebook stole the news. It was because Facebook stole their ad revenue, and the classified pages (a major revenue source for local journalism) have been swallowed by Craigslist and others.
You should just incentivize publishers to use Substack, which actually has the backing and has a good option (publishers can choose to publish for free or by inducing for-profit viewership) and writers don't have to pay. This is a much better option than another no-name entity.
I agree, but I'd rather use something that actually has working economics, than a Medium-like model that forces everyone to pay for stuff they might not read.
The news industry does not "give" their stories to Facebook or Google. It allows the placement of links to the stories on those sites. (I use the term "allow" loosely, since in many jurisdictions they do not have the right to restrict in-linking.)
The news industry is free to try to prevent in-linking. The technical capability already exists in the form of robots.txt and the referer header. Although I can tell you right now what will happen. People will read less news, and read more of other stuff that is still distributed on Facebook or Google. They won't stop using Facebook or Google.
Honestly, it would probably be better for the world. People are reading too much news and it is contributing to polarization. Won't help the news industry's bottom line, though. Won't hurt Google or Facebook's.