> There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments. Before the Facebook News deal, the Times famously published an op-ed titled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” by Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook turned critic. And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher, among others, have been similarly critical. In December, the editorial board welcomed a lawsuit calling for Facebook to be broken up.
It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?
The core conflict here isn't new, surely. Newspapers have taken advertising money from news-making companies since time immaterial. The question has always been whether that money affects coverage. And so far it seems like "no", or "not yet". And there's a very worthy debate to be had here, much as there always has been about advertising in news media, but the headline doesn't do that debate justice.
> It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?
My question is: Do you really need to ask that? Human nature is human nature; there's little doubt that it's happening to some extent. Virtually impossible that it's not happening at all.
The problem to me seems quite similar to campaign contributions in politics. Yes, it's indirect, and all parties can say it's innocent, no strings attached, the elected representative is not "required" to do anything. Those are words that help people ignore the reality of human nature. Money is influence.
This is why the business side and news side of (quality) news papers have been historically kept separate. It also leads to perceived "weirdness" to readers when they see a paper taking money from a corporation to run an advertisement alongside an article critical of said corporation.
This isn't to invalidate your point completely, but to give some insight to those who are not aware of how this conflict of interest has been generally handled.
Yes, of course, I agree. And it doesn't invalidate my point at all. I would say that you're pointing out the problem that people don't understand how important it is to avoid conflicts of interest, and that we need systems in place to minimize it.
The case of Donald Trump is a perfect example. He had conflicts of interest galore, didn't even deny them, in fact he flouted them, and many people seemed to think everything was fine.
We need to be aware not only of the existence of conflicts of interest, but also of (1) how corrosive these conflicts are, and (2) the crucial importance of designing systems to minimize the bad incentives and effects that arise from conflicts of interest. Systems, in other words, that minimize the harm that -- because of human nature -- inevitably flows even from well-intentioned people when conflicts of interest are tolerated.
Yes, you really need to ask that. When accusing someone of misconduct you really do need to ask if it is really happening and not just hand wave about human nature and make judgements based on untested assumptions. You really really can’t just go along with whatever fits your biases.
Well, I would say that if you want to accuse them of misconduct then the main thing would be to ascertain intentions. Certainly, if there is no bad intention on the part of the actor, then it makes no sense to accuse them of misconduct. So if you want to accuse them of misconduct, definitely, yes, you need to ask questions about their intent.
On the other hand, regardless of intent, it does still make sense to say that the system is maladjusted, that the system is designed in such a way that even actors with good intentions are incentivized to do harmful things. And the question regarding the system really is clear: Does a recipient accepting money from an advertiser tend to create in them a more positive opinion regarding the advertiser than if the recipient received no money at all? To that, the answer is yes. It doesn't mean the recipient has committed "misconduct"; more likely it's just that the recipient is a well-intentioned actor in a maladjusted system.
Yes, we've got to make sure we're talking about the same thing here. In general, we don't morally censure a person who does bad things with good intentions. For example, in criminal law there is usually a requirement of ill-intent, called "mens rea"[1], which means the actor is aware that what they're doing is wrong.
If a person does something wrong but is not aware that what they did is wrong, the general reaction is not to "accuse them of misconduct", but rather to explain to them what it is about their action that's wrong, after which (if they in fact have good intent) they will no longer do that action.
Mens rea is subtly different, I think. It is intended to allow a defense that you really didn't want to break the law and did so unintentionally. It isn't quite about the self-perceived goodness of your intentions. That is, stating "I knew I was breaking the law but my actions were good and I didn't realise people would think I'd done something bad, therefore I don't have mens rea" won't work. Knowledge that it was illegal was sufficient. And mens rea is also not a defense that allows legal ignorance.
It's also worth noting that quite a lot of broad crimes are strict liability these days, especially in America. For example money laundering is a strict liability crime, along with more obvious ones like speeding.
Misconduct though is not normally a criminal law term anyway. More like a code of conduct for an organisation.
Not really. I'm a lawyer so I have a decent grasp of this stuff. Mens rea is closely tied to intent, not really to whether it had anything to do with intending to break a law (ignorance of the law is generally not a defense). Think of the difference between someone who commits premeditated murder, someone who commits manslaughter through gross negligence (e.g., a drunk driver), and someone who by complete accident is responsible for another's death (someone runs out in front of your car). In each case a person's actions directly cause another person's death, however we attach different levels of culpability to each. We're getting a little bit far afield from original issue, here, though. Anyway . . .
This permissive admitted towards public corruption is a fairly new development in US politics.
Jimmy Carter put his struggling peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid the appearance of corruption. This has become a punchline today, but was standard at the time.
Frankly, the corruption of the Clintons, who generally took turns raking in cash while the other performed duties as a public servant, sent the dominos crashing here.
Because corruption is incredibly easy to hide and obscure, it is correct to cultivate a culture of transparency accountability when, for example, tens of millions of dollars change hands between powerful institutions for no apparent reason.
Could you justify that claim a bit more? I downloaded the report and the phrase New York Times doesn't seem to appear in it.
The whole report is actually a bit odd. It talks about the "five core values of journalism" and claims only super-liberal people support all of them, but the list of values appears to be basically a list of left wing priorities and worldviews, e.g. the last two values are "giving voice to the less powerful" and "social criticism". Factualism is defined not as an absolute value but merely a tradeoff, given that "the truth is more than just the matter of adding facts and this emphasis on factualism can mask bias". So that would appear to be tautological - all they've done is ask a bunch of journalists what they feel is important, got a bunch of left wing priorities, discovered that only left wing people agree with the full list, and the only thing people across the spectrum agree in is that facts are important. Surely these findings are true, but so what? It's just a dozen different ways of telling people things that are already obvious, rephrased in terms of Haidt's moral foundations theory. US journalists are much more left wing than the population as a whole, that's a widely published result for many years already. The fact that the AP felt a need to do a research study to prove it is sort of indicative of why the media has such deep problems.
The final section is quite telling. They do an experiment where they take a test story and rewrite it to be less left-biased and contain more facts. They find the resulting story appeals more to everyone, not just conservatives. It's a sad indictment of the AP that this is actually presented as a novel finding.
In the info tsunami conditions we live in, what news orgs think or push constantly get diluted by literally thousand other sources every second. They have great faith in their ability to capture the attention of the herd, but since everyone else is great at it too, there is no great value to it.
Therefore it doesn't matter what the NYT does in terms of critique, what they think or what they want people to think. Or who they take cash from. Be it Facebook or anyone or anything else.
Thats what the AP study reinforces for me. The NYT and its critics and fan clubs overestimate greatly the value of the NYT or any other mainstream news org in the current info tsunami environment.
The only contribution or "value" left for news orgs in an info tsunami, is surfacing new data through their networks and that the AP study calls facts. This is what google search bots do when they scour the network. Beyond that news orgs play no role, but they haven't realized that yet. And that wastes everyones time.
They would be much more useful to society if they acted more like search engines or gathering points for info exchange on the network and shed all the other baggage.
>The core conflict here isn't new, surely. Newspapers have taken advertising money from news-making companies since time immaterial.
And if you can find a viable alternative to this, your company will be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars[1]. The internet has killed the classifieds business and commoditized news to the point that most people won't pay for it. Accepting advertising from potentially news-making companies is hugely important to keeping news organizations afloat. Vilifying it whenever it happens is potentially dangerous and we should really wait to level these accusations until there is actual evidence of wrongdoing.
> Vilifying it whenever it happens is potentially dangerous and we should really wait to level these accusations until there is actual evidence of wrongdoing.
Everything makes sense except for this. The fact that a business model being broken has caused standards to slip isn't a reason not to point out slipped standards.
Also, the fallacy that there will always be some physical evidence of corruption has to die. Every single business or agency I have ever worked for has formal and informal policies about what can be spoken about in media that has a retention policy, especially if they were liable to FOIA requests. The only way you get evidence of that stuff is through making secret recordings (which is why people don't talk on the phone about this stuff either.)
It's the appearance of corruption that should be penalized, not the ephemeral evidence of it.
>The fact that a business model being broken has caused standards to slip isn't a reason not to point out slipped standards.
What "standards" are you referring to here? Is it standards of the quality of reporting? Has that actually slipped? Where is the evidence for that? If not, is it truly a problem if the standards of appearance have slipped while there is no actual change in the quality of the work?
>Also, the fallacy that there will always be some physical evidence of corruption has to die.
Who said the evidence needed to be physical? I don't need a smoking gun email or a covert recording. Verbal testimony is evidence too. Where are the anecdotes from former NYT journalists about being told to kill stories about corporate partners?
I've re-read your post a few times and I'm sure it wasn't your intention, but it keeps reading to me like "bad things have become the normal and people should stop pointing it out". Whether or not there is a better solution, I think there are clearly dangers inherent to monetizing news with ad revenue and I think there is value in keeping a careful eye on them.
Yes, I agree that there are dangers. However is there any evidence of the dangers being a reality in this instance? The article directly says there is no evidence. If there is no evidence, why is this story specifically about the NYT and Facebook?
There is also danger involved in shaming the NYT for accepting ad money and in turn having them cut coverage in response to decreased revenue. There are plenty of examples of that.
I am more concerned with the danger we have evidence of rather than the one we don't.
> However is there any evidence of the dangers being a reality in this instance?
Are we specifically talking about a news organization softening its coverage on a sponsor? There aren't any examples which spring directly to mind, but there are countless examples of other organizations doing this. Politicians being bought-out by businesses and lobbyists is nothing new. Platforms like YouTube have crafted and modified content policies specifically to appeal to their sponsors.
News organizations benefit from maintaining an appearance of trustworthiness. If they modified their content for the benefit of a sponsor, they would obviously try to be very discrete about it. Is it a stretch to imagine it has or could easily happen? Especially if people stop worrying out it? Other than reputation, is there anything else to counteract that motivation?
> If there is no evidence, why is this story specifically about the NYT and Facebook?
As for the NYT/Facebook thing in particular, it doesn't strike me as being inherently worse than any other sponsorship deal. I'm not worried about it in particular so much as I am generally concerned with how dependent news is on ad revenue in general. I'm not vouching for the credibility of this story, but I'm worried that your comment is too dismissive of the broader subject.
> There is also danger involved in shaming the NYT for accepting ad money and in turn having them cut coverage in response to decreased revenue. There are plenty of examples of that.
I don't know about this. I think whenever an organization is dependent on another for revenue, they risk appearing less impartial towards that organization. I see HN comments accusing Mozilla of appearing to be less impartial towards Google because of their relationship all the time, despite Mozilla directly competing with and regularly speaking out against Google.
News outlets benefit from an appearance of impartiality and revenue partnership they form with a third-party comes with a risk of damaging that appearance. It's up to the NYT to convince readers they can be trusted with the partnerships they've made. Frankly, I think they've probably built up enough of a reputation that this particular deal wont hurt them much, if not benefit them.
> I am more concerned with the danger we have evidence of rather than the one we don't.
I'm also more concerned with the dangers we have. That doesn't mean I can't keep an eye out for the dangers which could be. Even if this particular danger hasn't yet manifested, there is clear motivation for it and precedent for it in other markets.
>There aren't any examples which spring directly to mind, but there are countless examples of other organizations doing this. Politicians being bought-out by businesses and lobbyists is nothing new.
This specifically is a great jumping off point to highlight why this is less of a problem in journalism. In politics, the person accepting the money is the same one who is acting. The politician shows up the oil industry fundraiser one day and is voting on climate change regulation the next. Bias will exist there even if it isn't conscious or intentional.
It works differently in journalism. From the outside we see the NYT as a single entity, but that isn't the case from the inside. There is a strict firewall between the business and editorial staffs at any reputable news org. The people who sell the ads or count the money are not the same people who choose what is covered or write the stories (this can change at smaller outlets and blogging changed some of this online, but the basic premise still holds). Anyone who has been to journalism schools has been taught the importance of this separation. Most journalists feel very strongly about this separation and they often speak out when it is violated.
That is an excellent point. I wasn't aware there was a distinct separation like that. If a news outlet can demonstrate that their publishing arm is organizationally unaffected by influence from their business arm, that would alleviate a lot of my concern about the ad revenue model. I do think it will fall on the organizations themselves to demonstrate and advertise that separation, though. If they can't/won't do that, I don't have much sympathy for any loss of reputation which comes from deals like this.
I have paid for news, even going so far as to buy a printed newspaper, but frankly most of it is worthless: crime reports that doesn't matter, a bunch of opinions by people, etc.
Online most are just reprinting Reuters.
I would pay for insight that I can use and exclusive (relevant) news, sadly investigative journalism is too expensive.
What news source are you referring to? That doesn't describe most publications, online or offline, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Monthly, where the OP article is published. It doesn't describe many local publications I know of.
Certainly there are some publications that fit the description, but we have many, many alternatives.
The internet destroyed newspapers ability to milk classified ads so we should look the other way when journals get in bed with the newsmakers? Wait until we have overwhelming proof because the system isn't working?
But things are working for the Times not so much for regional players. How does this help us?
>Wait until we have overwhelming proof because the system isn't working?
Where did that word "overwhelming" come from? I want us to wait until there is any proof rather than screaming "WOLF!" at a mere shadow. I will highlight this from the originally linked article:
>There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments.
The lack of a frontpage story since the deal on the evils of facebook today is proof that they are not publishing the same type of articles.
If you are waiting for smoking gun evidence by the time that comes out we won't care. We will be conditioned to accept it as the norm by then. Now is the time to speak up.
“If you don’t take money from companies you have a conflict of interest with, it’s dangerous! Think of the children!”
I’m sorry but I may have exaggerated for humorous effect, but your line of reasoning I reject outright.
There are ways to do this effectually. This is not that way.
This is the New York Times we are talking about. Literally everything is within their reporting purview. Who can they possibly accept money from that won't present a potential conflict of interest?
National stories are also often regional and local stories. I just pulled up the NYT website. The top story is the Derek Chauvin trial which is certainly also a local story in Minneapolis. The second from the top Opinion piece is about the NYC mayoral race. Does that mean that NYT shouldn't be able to accept any advertising dollars from those markets?
What is great about the regional model is the large number of regions which removes the need to not accept from a regiin. In your example Minneapolis is one of many cities the pressure local ad dollars never makes it's way to the editorial board.
Their readers and only their readers otherwise no trust should be given to their reporting. News is worth what people pay for it, and if no one is willing to pay for it then we won't get any real reporting.
Sounds you have beef with the readers for not paying enough, and with non-readers who freeload off investigative journalism's social benefits, and with and plagiarizers like Business Insider. Has a major paper ever not been ad-supported?
Miramax was over 10 percent of the ad spend in the NY Times in the early 2000s. They conveniently killed the story of Harvey Weinstein (head of Miramax) then:
The news/reporting side of the organization and the Opinion group are very very separate.
It's important to look at the news gathering side. Reporters don't take to being told to 'go easy on this group cos we have business ties' - that usually provides the opposite response.
I think we shouldn't be naïve about how money works to influence actions.
Proving the quid pro quo is hard, but just the knowledge that the money is there and can go away at the whim of a private actor will having a chilling effect on the sort of content you report on.
Journalistic entities have an incentive to project an image of an unbiased, principles institution untouched by the private business world, but as someone who was raised by two editors, that narrative is more mythos than reality.
This can be seen easily via pharma adds on major news networks. It's not like anybody's ever asked their doctor after witnessing the list of side effects scroll by.
Pharma ads as the #1 advertiser on major network news channels is purely to reign in negative press.
The very idea of consuming news wherein the primary funding comes from a third party is absurd, but it's what people are used to.
These discussions often miss the point and get bogged down in trying to prove or disprove individual instances of bias or censorship.
The problem for me is prior to all of that.
If the New York Times (say) lacks financial independence, then it will always be structurally indebted to whoever foots the bill. It's just a matter of fact built into the nature of the relationship between the two entities.
Facebook executives may not have established the relationship simply to "buy off" the Times. I imagine most of them have a real commitment to "fixing the news" in their hearts. But it doesn't matter.
If news agencies depend on organizations outside of themselves for the basic necessities of their existence and reproduction, then they aren't independent. They are dependent on those organizations, by definition. What they can report on now has conditions and limits. I want to emphasize that this is a restriction on what it is *possible* to report on. It might not ever produce a distinction that you could easily measure. This is a different, and worse, problem than Facebook purchasing some flattering reporting. Facebook now (obscurely, tacitly) sets the structural conditions (without having to explicitly state any rules or appear to be a bad guy in any way).
It's not hard to think of an example of reporting which could become impossible under these conditions. Imagine if the Times, due to some public outcry, or for whatever reason, took a major rhetorical turn toward combating digital surveillance, just like they did in the last year with racism and issues of cultural morality. A sudden "moral clarity" emerged around topics that the paper used to try to be neutral about.
Whether you like those developments or not, I imagine most people will agree that the employees of the New York Times, not executives at Facebook, or anybody else, should decide the course of the Times' reporting. An existential financial dependence will of course condition all reporting on the maintenance of that dependence.
It doesn't. This isn't how American media is made; this is just another money grab by desperate media outlets who are used to getting massive revenue that isn't going to be there in a 10 years.
The headline is provocative, as headlines often are.
The article also focuses heavily on the Times but mentions that FB has these deals with other publishers too. To the extent that there’s ire in the article, I think it would be better focused on Facebook.
The ad-supported business model of newspapers has always been problematic. In theory there’s a firewall between the business side and the journalists, but my faith that this is the case is reduced when orgs like the NYT get rid of their public editor.
The NDA between FB and the publishers is really gross. It shackles the NYT from covering itself and keeps the various orgs that have this deal from reporting about it on each other. It’s not a good sign when the NYT can’t hold the WSJ accountable. This part is weird tho:
> Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019. [...] The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year...
So the WSJ is reporting on the deal despite signing the NDA?
I think what is happening is they are buying their ability to publish news. Once accomplished you will see plenty of those "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" I think.
>"And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher ..."
Those two individuals are both Op-Ed writers. The Opinion section in a paper is not the same as regular news reporting and so not beholden to a newspaper's editorial policy.[1]
The question of whether money affects coverage is among those which are incredibly difficult to find evidence for without a smoking gun. There's no direct proof in whether a given story supports or hurts a financier. I'm stretching for an example but there is circumstantial evidence the interactions between various macro ecosystems push conditions of earth's biosphere toward homeostasis, but suggesting this is deterministic is not substantiated by any known directly testable phenomena. Until we decode latent genetic algorithms, it'll remain speculation. Likewise we're left only with speculation in the absence of an explicit, "run story or we pull funding" type memo.
That said a lot of economics tends to make sense when examined through a lens of incentives. There has been an observable shift toward radicalization of news content since this article indicates FB began funding its news feature. Opinion pieces seem to often displace primary stories based on whether they suit a dominant hyperbolic narrative. Whether by FB design or simply a natural response to the soaring appeal of hyperbolic click bait favored by social news aggregation is anybody's guess.
I will say I am appalled by a lack of accountability the Times has had over the last year. For example regularly publishing summary statistics without acknowledging significant sampling problems, figures any self-respecting statistician would never consider submitting for academic review are still regularly passed off as fact. Moreover discourse regarding what constitutes effective policy, consideration of cost and benefit, or even determination of what society's goals are let alone whether they are realistic has been contemptuously derided as conspiracy and dogma of the Trumpian cult. Without rational discourse there is little hope for progress, and in that regard I arrived at my own foregone conclusions, that the hyperbolic nature of news media is one of the most significant barriers to positive change we face as a society.
On that note, if you find yourself buying into a fear of outsiders you might want to reconsider the fact most people share the same fundamental values and our differences between one another is often negligible. Believe it or not beyond the lazy opinions about issues scantly related to every day life, the average liberal and conservative have exactly the same amount of love for their friends and family. We often simply disagree regarding the means to similar ends. As a single global society we all face the same problems, but our biggest problem right now is spanning the distance we've created between coming together socially as friends and colleagues.
Tech blogs are regularly bribed for good coverage, and tech companies are known for doing it. Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism.
The Verge has historically been very favorable to Apple and Google. Why? They get exclusive interviews with Google and Apple executives. An interview with Sundar Pichai is worth millions in ad revenue, and if a blog is too critical of a company, they won't get interviews. Offering an interview to a news outlet is really not significantly different from cutting them a check.
Apple has been known for pretty much cutting out any site that dares to step out of line. I think whatever is left of Gizmodo is still banned from Apple events after Gizmodo reported about getting hands on a prototype iPhone.
> An interview with Sundar Pichai is worth millions in ad revenue,
Uh, say again?
Let's guess at a CPM of $10, and "millions" to be "2 million". That would be 200 million hits. You seriously think that an interview with a tech CEO whom few normal people will have heard of is going to have double the audience of the Superbowl?
I'd bet that in reality interviews with tech execs do horribly when it comes to generating traffic, but are done for the prestige of publishing something that looks like traditional journalism.
I don't know if it's really "worth millions", but I think you're missing aspects besides CPM. Having an interview with such a well-known person gives your blog a lot of credibility that you can leverage, e.g. when making deals with sponsors.
There are reputational benefits that are hard to quantify. Getting interviews with big names legitimizes you, which probably increases views on other articles
I kinda disagree with the idea tech blogs aren't real journalism or shouldn't be held to the same journalism standards. Especially with revenue on print media declining as much as it has, I'd say smaller blogs tend to do a lot of the deep original research online that many news organizations would've traditionally done. A blog like The Verge is often the original source of major revelations about tech companies and their behaviors.
Furthermore, while one might consider tech blogs a niche area, we consider Amazon, the world's largest retailer, a "tech company", so as "tech companies" start dominating major traditional verticals, "tech news" starts to just... be "news".
Here's the difference as I see it: major fact-based independent news outlets like the NYT, WaPo, etc. are essential for democracy. We rely on them for essential reporting about war, corruption, scandals, everything we need to make informed decisions at the voting booth. We expect them to report "both sides of the story".
Industry news is different. We often expect blogs, authors, etc. to be openly pro- or anti- on certain subjects, to be given favorable treatment by companies, etc. We expect them to be "editorial". Such journalism can be openly one-sided.
Reporting on the war in Afghanistan is fundamentally different from a review of the Oculus Quest 2.
That isn't to say tech blogs can't report unbiased, hard-hitting news. They sometimes do, and that's wonderful.
But I do believe that our general societal expectation is that industry news sources are free to (and often expected to) editorialize without a hard wall between news and editorials, while independent objective news outlets are expected to maintain that hard wall.
Of course they're obvious -- that's good. With larger players, you have no idea who they're being paid by (as shown, for instance, in the crux of this article). In contrast, with "new media" (e.g. a podcast), I can be reasonably confident they are only being paid by a few key sponsors, and that's public knowledge on account of them having purchased ad space.
That seems a little too optimistic. Nowadays, they cancel their subscriptions when they get to read some fact they don't like. For example, back in the run-up to the 2016 election there was an utterly nutso, completely nonsensical conspiracy theory about Trump using DNS as a secret communications channel with a Russian bank and, for some reason, a US medical clinic which the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate. After that demand went viral on social media, the NYT pushed back in the gentlest way possible by saying the FBI had looked at these claims and concluded all the evidence was likely the result of normal mass marketing emails for Trump hotels. (This is also what most experts concluded regardless of political affiliation. Other problems included the fact it would've made a really awful communication channel and wasn't even remotely under Trump's control.) Some time later, there was such a pushback against this including a campaign of cancelled subscriptions, that the Times basically ended up apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again.
To this day, the only part of this that has been called a conspiracy theory by any mainstream publication is the idea that the whole thing could be an entirely technically unremarkable result of ordinary mass marketing emails for Trump hotels.
Is this the case? The NYT seemed much more reasonable on the Russia stuff than say, most cable news.
> the Times basically ended up apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again.
This did not happen. I'm assuming you're referring to this passage from an article two years later:
> The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.
> A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts. But the article’s tone and headline — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning.
> Democrats say that article pre-emptively exonerated Mr. Trump, dousing chances to raise questions about the campaign’s Russian ties before Election Day.
> Just as the F.B.I. has been criticized for its handling of the Trump investigation, so too has The Times.
This is not "apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again."
I agree that the term "conspiracy theory" is not used in a balanced way. Mainstream democrat theories that turn out to be without merit just stop being reported on (such as the Steele Dossier), whereas theories from either left or right fringe generally are called conspiracy theories.
> Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism.
>> People do with the NYT and WaPo,
For me neither of those newspapers have integrity at all.
Edit: there is ample evidence of both "newspapers" flat out lying; what I would call straight out propaganda as if they are part of an agenda. I doubt downvoters will want to debate me but if any of you have the guts please reach out. It'll be an easy win for me.
> Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism.
To offer a bit more nuance: consumers care about enough integrity; and powerful institutions (public or private), who stand to win or lose based on press narratives, care about enough "fairness" to their own perspectives (and interests).
Looking purely at realpolitik incentives, journalistic institutions can straddle that line and hit well over 50% on both fronts. Not to pick on the guy, but my poster child for this phenomenon is Daring Fireball's John Gruber: he's built a longstanding personal brand of integrity, covering Apple-centric tech for 20 years, and is frequently critical of the company and its products. And yet, he's frequently given preferential treatment by the company and its executives, because that same history has also signaled a (heartfelt) bias to being sympathetic to Apple's values and motives, meaning execs have a high confidence that reviews will be fair, interviews will be free of the scariest "gotcha" questions, etc.
I would say I've seen more critical pieces lately. I think over the last couple of years, a lot of this has broken down because of just how egregious corporate behavior has gotten. But especially around 2015-2016, it was palpable how much Verge was holding their tongue in articles especially in the months around Sundar Pichai interviews.
Then the publication has to please its readers, not telling them news they don't want to hear. Imagine a user-funded source publishing negative news about the GameStop mob.
The Economist has a history of lies and falsehoods by omission when it comes to foreign policy and international coverage. Anywhere from their Bolivia, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, Syria, Chile (the editor openly boasted of delivering the coup) and so much more. They are often a bit more nuanced compared to coup and regime change lovers like Fox, Washington Post, and the NY. Times.
Can you explain more about the 'history of lies and falsehoods by omission'? I am not familiar with the specific articles about the countries you listed. Can you give a few examples? Ideally if we could compare/contrast articles with other outlets you think are more credible that would probably help!
The funny thing is that you can be openly pro coup without resorting to lies. John Bolton and his crudeness will be missed. Although a Yale law graduate he refused to use sophistry of The Economist etc. for violent regime changes and attempts.
John Bolton on a Fox TV interview talking the advantages of a coup in Venezuela and how to take over Venezuelan oil:
“We’re looking at the oil assets,” Bolton said. “That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that.”
“We’re in conversation with major American companies now,” he continued. “I think we’re trying to get to the same end result here.”
“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,” Bolton admitted.
I actually stopped reading the Verge because of how relentlessly negative they were about everything related to tech. Which for a tech blog is sort of weird. So not sure what you mean about favorable coverage there.
You can't know what they didn't publish.
So how can you know there's no influence?
How do you know the NYT doesn't use theis bad coverage as leverage in some negotiations?
Your attitude is very naive.
>It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?
All the time. Using both direct bribes to journalists, friendly favors to the owners of the newspaper, and more often than not advertising money (which can be open from the company looking for favorable coverage itself, or through 1-2 layers of subsidies and shell companies which nobody can/will track).
On the contrary, it does indeed and has been known to do so for many decades [0,1]
Indeed, in Citizens United, SCOTUS in the concurring opinion claimed the founders intent in the 1st amendment was to allow monied interests to own and influence media for political purposes.
The question is not whether distortion exists but how prevalent it is.
It is worth remembering the Australia fiasco. The Australian media led by Murdoch basically shook down Facebook until they came to am agreement to give the media kickbacks. Then Australia agreed not to apply its law.
The European media has also demanded payments, even though the value flows from sending traffic to news sites and not the other way around.
The media seems to believe it is entitled to be send traffic AND to be paid for it. Common story all over the world.
So, to reduce those demands in America, Facebook pays kickbacks to the biggest media orgs.
Here, the media publication is presenting it as a grant for favourable coverage. But the far more likely explanation is Facebook knows the media will shake it down for more money unless it gives them a payoff.
Which likewise suggests that the money's purpose is to avoid another Australia. If the large players are all appeased, the small ones stand little chance of influencing Congress on their own.
And further articles like this serve the purpose of requesting broader payoffs.
Nowhere does the article question why the media gets money for nothing. The article assumes it is the media’s right and the money should be increased and more widely distributed.
It's always been the case that big advertisers influence the media that cover them. In the quaint old days there was a metaphorical "wall" between the business side and the news side, and neither could influence there other. In theory, that is. In practice, at a high enough level, the wall was less of a 16' fence topped with razor wire and more like police tape.
Of course, we don't live in the quaint old days. There's no distinction between news as journalism and news as business. Writers are measured not on how good their reporting is, but on how much "engagement" it gets, which is just a proxy for how profitable.
Is it a bribe or buyoff? Or just a failure of credibility? Newspapers used to have a position called the ombudsman to address just this scenario. The New York Times had a position called Public Editor. That position was eliminated in 2017[1]
a little marketing tip: summarize both the rationale and the conclusion. it’s tempting to think just one or the other is enough to entice the potential visitor, but no, it’s much easier to dismiss a link if it comes off as fantastic, implausible, or unsupported, which is more likely when you leave out one or the other. it’s more enticing to get an obvious full bite rather than an elusive nibble.
Private mainstream media in Canada takes a lot of direct subsidy money from government as well (famously, $600m a few years ago), and it's to the point where it's debatable whether news outlets are real businesses producing something people need or desire, or they're just a policy objective.
A real news business, one that publishes non-fiction content about current events that people want to read in exchange for subscriptions and advertiser dollars, is probably too fringe to be considered News at this point, because what most people really want is not what is officially approved as good for them. It's not official news unless it supports an establishment narrative, and somehow journalists and editors have come to believe they have official credentials unrelated to the truth and quality of their work that are deserving of some kind of recognition, and even deference.
I don't even see this question of whether the NYTimes and other publishers might be compromised by FB money and others as a point of contention. It's like everyone already knows, but they're wrestling with whether they can tell people themselves.
> As Doug Reynolds, the managing partner for the West Virginia newspapers suing Facebook and Google for damages, told me, “If the future of this industry is that we’re dependent on their goodwill, then we don’t have an independent press anymore.”
One of the things we're seeing (imho) is that many of the news institutions are trading on legacy reputation that is quickly running out.
If you ask me which I trust more, 60 Minutes or Glenn Greenwald, I trust GG 1000x times more. I would even say I have a negative opinion of 60 minutes.
There's a reason Glenn Greenwald is making crazy money on substack - its because his reporting comes off as more authentic than many 'official' news sources.
> It's not official news unless it supports an establishment narrative.
You're so close that's it's annoying that at the last second you veered off into right field. There are two different things that you're confusing. There's capital-N news which is the purview of capital-J journalists; they create a verified bone dry account of events and statements made by those involved which is more historical record than something you might read with your morning coffee. You have always been able to find troves of this style of news but it's in the archives of news sites, not on the front page.
Then there's storytelling which is what people actually want. Someone takes all the news together and, adds some context both historical and cultural, and some basic production value to create a cohesive narrative. This is a good thing! We want this because it shows us how individual events are connected and the bigger picture.
It's the difference between reading police reports and local news articles and listening to a true crime podcasts -- the latter is waaaaaay more popular.
Confused, surely. To me that conflates contrived narrative with honesty. Reinforcing an overarching cohesive narrative comes at the expense of a true and coherrent one. The difference is that cohesion is necessarily consonant, where coherrence accepts dissonance in exchange for greater fidelity, or truth, the craft of actual reporting.
People (us) want what we can use, and sometimes indeed that's just a sense of actual shared community experience, but usually, it's more concrete. Like should I move my savings into a certain sector, my odds on finding a better job, should I sell my house now or wait, do I need to move to another state to get my kids a proper education, etc. This is what people use real reporting for. Journalists are not in posession of a bigger picture, and the ones who think they are believe so at the expense of their reporting.
Capital-M Media has become the inferior good, since as soon as people have alternatives, they switch away from it.
To be fair Canadian news is still pretty diverse, it just hasn't resorted to social-media clickbait headlines (all that much). If you look at any of the "Sun" newspapers you have a pretty consistent right-wing opinion, "Star" newspapers get you a left-wing opinion, and the various local news companies are also pretty diverse.
The CBC and Globe and Mail might be boring / establishment, but is that a bad thing?
It absolutely is. I detest Facebook's level of tracking and invasion of people's privacy but I'll be damned if it doesn't enable businesses of any size to market with the same power previously reserved for supermassive brands for pennies.
I feel like there's basically no allowable nuance in this discussion because holding any opinion than "tracking is 100% bad with literally no upsides for anyone other than ad networks any business that claims to get any value whatsoever is being misled" is taken as a defense of the current state of internet advertising and is the digital equivalent of burying your head in the sand while everyone else continues like you don't exist.
If you can't understand and explain why the fence was put there then you'll get nowhere trying to argue that it should be torn down.
> but I'll be damned if it doesn't enable businesses of any size to market with the same power previously reserved for supermassive brands for pennies
You forgot to add this part:
> At the expense of the consumer, and usually without their consent or knowledge.
Facebook is the particular bad guy here, because we usually need to rally around one target to get anything done (and they are by far the worst offender). But the goal is not to take down Facebook, it's to limit or eliminate tracking and other practices that violate and exploit the privacy of people.
Of course small businesses can benefit from doing what Facebook does, just like a homeless person can benefit by robbing a bank. That doesn't mean it's right.
Stronger privacy laws might kill small businesses that engage in that type of behavior, but it's not going to kill the economy. New business will be born, and the free market will fix itself.
I think its pretty clear that no matter the take on tracking, facebook is a bad actor with previous scandals including knowingly took money from children, experimenting on people's feed, did large scale psychological experiments on their own users without consent, selling/giving access to user data to political firms, collecting email contact data without consent, etc etc. And those are only just what I remember off the top of my head.
Even if you were ok with tracking facebook is not the people I'd trust to do it ethically.
- You don’t pay for your news (to a partisan substack doesn’t count)
Edit: Added likely to comment. Icing on the cake is if you consume almost all your news through Twitter / social media.
Maybe stop clicking and reacting and instead stop and reflect your role in all this?
Cold hard truth? We caused this problem, Facebook is a great scapegoat, and most here likely contributed to bigger issues with information distribution in one way or another through their employment.
But... Why wouldn't a "partisan" substack count? What if I spend around 30 seconds a day on Google News, just to see what the different propaganda machines try to push for today, so it's not something I would like to pay for, but I value and trust some "Substack" journalists and opinion people.
Maybe. I pay for The Mill [1] which is published on Substack. The founder of it has written an excellent piece, explaining why he created it [2]. It is a local paper, that you have to pay for; which means actual journalism. It's still small but now has an office and one full time employee. I'm hoping that one day this model works for cities all over the world; because advertising doesn't work for local journalism.
Substack is super great. Just paying for it is not the same as paying for a NYTimes subscription however people would like to spin it.
You're right, in a lot of cases substack writers can be more transparent about their conflicts of interest and aren't beholden to censors who kill stories that might upset NYT readers or writers.
> Cold hard truth? We caused this problem, Facebook is a great scapegoat, and most here likely contributed to bigger issues with information distribution in one way or another through their employment.
Yeah, yeah. We should all recycle more and drive less too; smokers should stop smoking, and the anxious should stop having anxiety.
Users didn't create the system that exploits them, and it's very weird any time I see someone blaming them for it. Facebook isn't a scapegoat - they did exactly what they are accused of, and they should be accountable for it.
I obviously don't subscribe to a straw man position. My comment was about systems exploiting people, because it's a system that needs to be fixed. Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla protecting the system from change.
Well, first of all I agree. Though I think it's more of a line of 800 pound gorillas knocking at your door. It's not going away because "we stopped Facebook". For example, I actually think Twitter influences the system in much worst ways. It's just easier to look the other way with those and is trendy to hate on Facebook because techy SV people don't use it anymore.
> Cold hard truth? We caused this problem, Facebook is a great scapegoat, and most here likely contributed to bigger issues with information distribution in one way or another through their employment.
That's bullshit. The current state of affairs came about due to Facebook and Google's actions and business practices over the past two decades. Both of these companies massive scale (obtained in large part due to anti-competitive practices and a total lack of regulation) and reach gives them complete control over what we consume and where.
It's a long history with a lot of different parts to it, but it's mostly the fault of these two companies. Consumers can't be blamed for seeking the most value in the market, it's just that the market is fucked because of these two powerful bad actors.
That doesn't add up - it is Craigslist who surplanted classifieds, Monster and other for job postings.
Furthermore why are media companies assumed blameless for failing to adjust their business model. "Millenials are killing X industry" was widely mocked because it was understood that it was undue entitlement to think their business model was sancrosanct and anything which went against it was guilty. How does the news differ?
Serious question: which news organizations should I consider paying for?
It appears like a negative feedback loop to me. News orgs are bad because they optimize for clicks and "engagement" to drive ad revenue. News works rely on ad revenue because nobody will pay for them. Nobody will pay for them because they're bad.
Is there anyone who hasn't succumbed to this cycle which is worth my money?
My current strategy is to visit aggregators like HN to help filter out some of the better content. Aggregators are subject to the biases of the communities they foster so I have to be very careful of echo chambers, but they're better than nothing.
I pay for several of my main news sources, but I can't possibly pay for all of the news websites I occasionally read articles from until either micropayments are made to work or some other solution is found.
That's making a lot of assumptions about people on HN, all to basically say this [0]
If you want to stereotype the typical HN user, then I'd be willing to bet money the average HN user is more aware about the dangers, problems and short-comings of social media than the average FB user.
Mostly because there are only a couple of million people reading HN, even fewer actually participating, while FB has billions of active users, the vast majority of which are complete laymen about tech. A rather big number of them see FB as synonymous with the web, as in a lot of developing countries FB struck deals with mobile-carriers so FB traffic won't count into the data caps.
Compared to that, the HN crowd is tiny and while they are more likely to be employed in the tech sector, it's a bit misleading trying to ascribe collective guilt to HN as if every single FB employee hangs out here to get inspiration. Case in point: I don't even work in tech, I work in healthcare.
In that context I really don't see how not even a handful of million people would be able to influence the behavior of billions of people on a completely different platform, the biggest platform of its kind, the platform that actually championed many of the things considered problematic with social media.
> You don’t pay for your news (to a partisan substack doesn’t count) ... Maybe stop clicking and reacting and instead stop and reflect your role in all this?
I have - well, not now, but a long time ago - and because of that, I pay for much of my news.
However it is not true, IMO, that "we caused the problem", because disorganized news consumers have less of a pull on what happens than organized, conscious forces like large companies involved in news media (well before Facebook, see my other comment).
Ouch, that hurts. But, there really isn't any difference between secondary-source news outlets and a substack. The substack just allows me to know exactly what I'm getting. In a world where there is no such thing as neural or fair, the most we can do is promote those that are transparent and thoughtful.
> You don’t pay for your news
I do pay good journalistic outlets. ThePrint in India charges me $10 a month, but they routinely produce good quality Indian news. They also openly declare a 'economically liberal, socially liberal' for their editorials and it is rare to find that kind of openness.
I would've paid for the Economist if I read it more often. I would've had an opinion on WSJ if I read it at all. Reuters has deteriorated a bit, but they provide first sources which is indispensable for the entire industry. But those 3 would be the closest mainstream new outlets that I'd consider paying for.
With how blatantly partisan NYT, WaPo, Guardian and the likes have become, it is hard to justify giving them a single cent of my hard earned money. Especially when they hide behind a veneer of fairness, prestige and even-handedness.
I’ve been a proud paid subscriber of The New York Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine for several years. I advocate often just how worth the price is for quality, long form journalism.
I certainly pay for some of my news. I subscribe to two US newspapers, one international one, a trade newspaper, a glossy trade magazine, and two US weeklies that are among the heavy hitters of criticism and cultural writing, including a lot of news analysis and investigative reporting. And that’s just the paid subscriptions.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume the HN audience, of all audiences, is penny-pinching serious journalism out of existence. I bet we even have a fair number of WSJ subscribers among us.
Substack (to me) is more of a lens you put on to consume the news. Multiple other use cases but most people are paying and trusting someone to filter the noise for them.
> - You don’t pay for your news (to a partisan substack doesn’t count)
Point me to a somewhat unbiased, affordable (no, anything more than $9 a month is not affordable and I've got other expenses), non-US centric news source and we have a deal.
I pay for multiple print subscriptions but I see your point.
What's free often proves most costly. Less fortunate people can't afford to pay and consume whatever is shoveled into them for free. Moneyed interests can afford to subsidize bullshit.
I advocate for publicly funded journalism, elections, etc. but our legislators are already captured as well. And yeah if that means higher tax revenue to support that then that's just what we have to do.
Right. I would like to have Netflix for news. Pay $10 a month. And have access to NYT, NPR, The Economist et al. I want it to be easy to sign in and out.
In theory that's like Apple News+, but unfortunately all the major news providers (e.g. newspapers) do not make their content available with an Apple News+ subscription.
The point is that with "Netfilx for news" you increase the number of people paying. Thus decreasing cost for the individuals.
> With password managers, it’s not that much work to visit multiple websites.
It is not just about managing logins. You also have to manage payments. And make the decisions about what you want to read months in advance. People hate making decisions. A lot of people end up jumping over the fence and not paying at all.
I do not think that is possible due to the ease of copy pasting journalism. Journalists and their companies are also mainly selling their reputation, and it makes no sense to muddy it with others.
What are my alternatives, really? Be part of the very small subset of NYT readers who actually pay for it and still have access to the virtually the exact same content? I'd rather pay for something fully paywalled like the WSJ
I think we need new laws to make public funding of the media by interests who will benefit from a blind eye or active promotion of their goals much more visible.
NPR is now heavily compromised by endless donations from foundations but still implies its products are funded 'by people like you'. At least they say 'made possible by a grant from the Warbucks Oligarch foundation' along with a cute little advertising line about philanthropy, making the world a better place etc etc.
We need a lot more transparency. The Gates Foundation, which significantly funds the BBC, Guardian, NPR, and similar situations such as GMO bigPharma messaging, need to be made to publicly and prominently declare their interests and their agendas declared.
'Access' media is a huge problem because it purports to be unbiased when in actuality it is heavily agenda driven. In the case of Facebook & the NYT this is a very serious situation that further undermines what little is left of the NYT's credibility.
Advertising is the lifeblood of the media, so he who controls the advertising controls the media. Facebook is, like Google, an advertising broker. Therefore, Facebook, like Google, can influence and even decide who gets fed and who doesn't. It can shape the incentives of media companies and thus bring them into greater conformity with the preferences of the broker.
In general, the centralizing of communication and control over communication is dangerous. These are private companies and they are controlled by some of the richest oligarchs in the world. They are unaccountable. Without regulation, they can do as they please. National and otherwise local law is skirted, except when countries fight back, like Poland which placed speech on social media back under the protection of the law. This way, you can explicitly legislate and thus decide politically what sorts of things are protected and which are forbidden and punished according to civilized standards and the rule of law, not because despots like Dorsey or Zuck say so. Want to punish slanderous and dangerous rumor? Make this a legal matter with accountability and transparency.
As if buying-off politicians with $upport weren't enough, the fourth estate has to be controlled too.
So independent media (fifth estate) is locked-out again. Manufactured consent and sentiment for the benefit of corporations, by corporations. And, real journalism makes one a heretical dissident like Chris Hedges. Inverted totalitarianism at work.
So, Facebook is allowed to not only determine what is 'true' and 'untrue', on their platform, thereby giving certain news agencies essential monopolies on their platform and they're giving money to these organizations.
Explain to me how Facebook is not considered a publisher again?
Because the publisher/platform distinction is propaganda and it has never worked that way.
Section 230 was only a thing in the US because a vapor brained judge applied third party liability to a financial forum for not catching fraud with one hundred percent perfection when moderating.
I mean I’m not a music publisher if I buy the rights to play some artist’s music in my store or whatever.
Sure you could say FB is republishing a work which would imply some level of endorsement but paying for use on behalf of their users seems totally different.
Internet has made 'information' extremely cheap. I think we as a society are just beginning to come to terms with the implications of cheap information: Cheap disinformation, loss of traditional gatekeepers, loss of friction that enabled value capture by news organizations, etc.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a bribe and extortion.
The case in Australia was definitely the latter and based on the quality of NYT reporting on these issues I wouldn't be surprised if it's the case here too.
I’d really like to see a transcript of this interview with Thompson. My media literacy alarm is going off - why does the article splice together “far, far more” and “very much so” rather than quoting exactly what he said in context?
Why? The media has been stealing all of their articles and news pieces by eavesdropping on people with good ideas since the 1950s. They don't deserve a dime of your money or Facebooks money.
> ... cornering of the digital advertising market by the duopoly of Facebook and Google. Facebook’s threat to a free press ...
Press beholden to the interests of the advertisers is also not free. Granted, it is much less tightly controlled than when a few giant corporation funnel in most ad money, but still.
> The social media company is financially asphyxiating the news industry even as it gives oxygen to conspiracy theories and lies.
Well, the traditional press has also promoted conspiracy theory and lies: Most prominent in the last two decades, and in NYT specifically, have been Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction and Trump's supposed collusion with Russia. The difference is that, on Facebook, there is less control of which lies and conspiracy theories get promoted and which get suppressed. It seems the author of that column takes issue with this.
Having said that - I do agree with the thesis of Facebook (and perhaps Google?) being a significant source of revenue for a media outlet meaning it has a measure of control over that outlet. Unfortunately, in Capitalism (especially less-regulated Capitalism) this tends to happen all over.
> these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help.
Huh? The economy in general and mass media in particular have been driving smaller and local news outlets out of business for decades before Facebook was popular.
Ben Bagdikian famously wrote about the dangerous concentration of (news) media already in 1983, see coverage here:
Handy rule of thumb: On any headline with a question, the likely answer is: "No."
Or, more precisely: "No, but we wanted to tantalize you into reading this piece, where we'll go through 15 paragraphs of innuendo and then decide that it doesn't quite add up."
The caliphate series was so well done. I instantly became a fan of Rukmini Callimachi. Then RCMP released that Abu Huzaifa's story was fabricated. It took NYT 2 years to admit their mistake and return their reward. The podcast was not amended nor was there any press release from Callimachi about this. This is when I ended my NYT subscription.
I still view NYT as excellent journalism, but with such questionable practices, that I am comfortable working around their pay wall instead of supporting them.
Oddly, I had found the Caliphate series quite underwhelming when it first came out. To me it was a narrative style I find quite grating: there was so little material to go on, that Rukmini's journey itself was the story. Not my cup of tea.
I mentally tune out anyone who uses the word "elitist". To me, it's one of the clearest signs that they're arguing using prejudices rather than evidence.
one who is an adherent of elitism : one whose attitudes and beliefs are biased in favor of a socially elite class of people
I don't care much for her coverage but she's attacking a company whose CEO is worth a lot of money. Hard to say any of the people being criticized isn't part of the elite
Exactly. I love Lorenz's work (flawed as it may be[0]) in dismantling or at the very least shining a light on the hypocrisy and double-standards of the SV elites[1].
[0] I dare anyone to point me to a flawless employee regardless of their employer or job title.
[1] Just google her name you'll find plenty of coverage of (predominately) white, old VC dudes unleashing their followers on her.
That is not. Surely it’s obvious that the high-school your parents sent you to could influence your attitudes later in life, but they don’t define them?
(BTW, I don’t know who Taylor Lorenz is, and don’t really care. I’m just surprised by this reasoning.)
The profound pathologies driving all of this were on full display on Saturday night as the result of a reckless and self-humiliating smear campaign by one of The New York Times’ star tech reporters, Taylor Lorenz. She falsely and very publicly accused Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen of having used the “slur” word “retarded” during a discussion about the Reddit/GameStop uprising.
Lorenz lied. Andreessen never used that word. And rather than apologize and retract it, she justified her mistake by claiming it was a “male voice” that sounded like his, then locked her Twitter account as though she — rather than the person she falsely maligned — was the victim.
It’s not that it’s impossible to be what one could fairly describe as an elitist - it’s just one of those words that’s widely known to cast more heat than light. “Taylor Lorenz writes as though the social norms she’s familiar with are universal”, for example, is a less confrontational way to express the same thought.
I don't see how news is sustainable at current employment levels. Most papers cover the same stories from their own angle, but we don't need 1,000 duplicated takes.
Social media bubbles headlines and links up from a potluck of sources, so there's no central paper to subscribe to and support. The end result is ad blocking everything, ignoring paywalls, and subscribing or paying no one.
If I went to a paper's website instead of social media (HN, some curated reddits), I'd be inclined to subscribe, but none of them have great audience participation and discussion.
If there was a Spotify for news journals, I'd be happy to subscribe, but that doesn't solve the issue of clickbait garbage winning over real journalism and soaking up all the money. Nor does it supply enough revenue to feed all the journalists.
The solution, sadly, seems to be mass culling and centralization. The world is connected and nobody needs local newspapers anymore.
Edit: not sure why I'm at -3 for making an observation. I'm not defending Facebook. The news industry doesn't appear to be sustainable in the modern age.
>The solution, sadly, seems to be mass culling and centralization. The world is connected and nobody needs local newspapers anymore.
We do need local papers though, large papers like the NY Times and WaPo aren't going to cover local politics or spend money on investigative journalism of issues that aren't (inter-)national.
Consolidation in the news industry is a boon for corruption everywhere.
People have been talking about saving local news for more than 20 years. And the economics just don't work for the most part--whether in most cities or in smaller towns.
I live in about a 7,000 person town. Let's say half the people would pay $20/year for a local paper--which we had at one point. That's wildly optimistic I know. Throw in some advertising. But I'm guessing you're still something under $100K/year. So you end up with just Facebook and NextDoor and no one actually doing reporting as such.
Exactly. I'll longbets anyone that downvoted me that we're going to see incredible consolidation and atrophy in the next ten years. It can't be stopped, and artificial means of preserving it won't work either as it no longer makes sense in the Internet age.
"Since 2004, hundreds of local newspapers have closed up shop. The author of a report on this trend said areas without a local paper suffer in a variety of ways."
But the local papers have always had ads in them to supplement revenue, so I imagine you could still reach $100K or more. In a lot of small towns that’s still enough to cover an editor-in-chief and an additional reporter.
I'm just throwing out numbers. It wouldn't shock me if they'd actually have under 1,000 subscribers given that you'll have, at most, 1 subscription per household. And to sell ads, you probably need an ad salesperson now. The economics are just really tough--as demonstrated by the fact that most small towns don't have papers.
True in many places, but the papers in the 10- and 20-thousand person towns my relatives live in have a strong classifieds section because they’re too small to be on Craigslist.
We absolutely need local papers, they're critical to uncovering the kind of small-town corruption that won't make the national news but still greatly impacts people.
We can't seem to support this many journalists anymore - because FB and Google suck up the advertising revenue.
Would breaking up big tech also bring back the local news room? That would be such a bonus.
It’s not just ad revenue - substack has taken the best writers too.
The quality of writing on substack is magnitudes better than what’s available on NYT. I’m not sure if NYT was always this bad and the internet just revealed them or if they degraded, but their product is not very good. Other papers have a similar issue.
I sometimes think about how we read newspapers before the internet. For those old enough, how many of you remember someone who subscribed to the NYT? On the other hand, how many of you saw someone reading it on a bus? Remember how you could walk into any McDonalds or similar restaurant and find a stack of the daily papers there for anyone to read?
Makes me wonder how much money used to be raised from subscriptions to individuals compared to daily edition sales.
If you don’t want the social aspect of news, you can get the AP stories through the AP News app or subscribe to rss feeds to major papers. The AP keeps papers from covering the same story from their own angle, you’ll usually see the same AP stories printed in papers across the country.
I agree it’s hard to filter the news on your own and quality journalism does seem to be going behind paywalls now. This isn’t great for an educated society.
Yes it is an Apple app, and it doesn’t seem to have caught on, but it’s a good value if you are actually subscribing to newspapers and magazines today. Apparently it was built from an acquisition of an app known as texture but the Android app was shut down after acquisition.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-get-apple-news-plus
Competitors from Google and CNN are rumored to launch soon.
I'm sorry if my tone didn't convey my meaning. I don't think an Apple service is an analog to a cross-platform, non-device manufacturer content aggregator.
Given Apple platform support on Android and Linux, I don't think it's something I'd find much value in. I'd be shocked if they even had an Android app. If they don't, the suggestion is a total non-starter.
I could be wrong, but based on previous experience, I'm probably not going to investigate until I hear my friends using Android talking about Apple News.
I'd like to see a Spotify for news. I saw that another comment mentioned Substack, which seems interesting and could be along those lines.
Facebook would have to be stupid to not be bribing everyone in sight, it's not like anyone is going punish them. Anyone who still uses the site must think it's a good deal and additional information clearly won't change their mind at this point. The US government can't regulate any corporation without 50% of the population losing their shit at "big government overreach". There's no mechanism beyond those two to affect change in a corporation.
Washington Monthly would know about the topic, having previously been accused of being one of the many media companies bought off by Bill Gates. Probably looking for a new sponsor themselves.
It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?
The core conflict here isn't new, surely. Newspapers have taken advertising money from news-making companies since time immaterial. The question has always been whether that money affects coverage. And so far it seems like "no", or "not yet". And there's a very worthy debate to be had here, much as there always has been about advertising in news media, but the headline doesn't do that debate justice.