Well I didn’t expect some good coming from the ai revolution and yet.
If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great.
Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.
Newspaper really took off during Industrial Revolution, I’m not sure that a 1731 text is pertinent.
On that matter, people used to print newspaper for a variety of different reasons, some were to rally public to an opinion (political parties for instance), some were printed to exerce control over their reader (a factory owner making a newspaper for his employee) and there have always been people who wanted to report facts and get paid for that.
Still today, there are many newspaper and online news that don’t have any advertisement, sponsoring and are in a really good financial situation.
In France, I can think of mediapart (fully online), le canard enchaîné (online and paper). People pay for them because their paper is worth more than just lightening up a barbecue.
1. Create an elite only product that’s way too expensive for the general public.
2. Subsidize the costs of the newsroom with some form of advertising. There’s several of different forms that can take.
That’s the trade off. You can make it but there really is a need for ad supported reporting.
For what it’s worth I’ve been in this business 15 years and can’t name a single incident of your influence scenario. I can’t speak to every outlet in the world but this is not a thing that happens.
Its mostly a business with very little profit, why all these wealthy men buy more and more newspapers ? Media is the third power after politician and justice, it’s a well known fact.
And they don’t need to intervene directly, the lead editor in these companies just know that there are some subject he shouldn’t speak about or speak in a specific way if he wants to keep his job, get bonus, etc.
Believing it doesn’t interfere with the editorial line is naive, they wouldn’t build empire of news media if they couldn’t benefit from it.
I was thinking about this today. $40/month for home delivery of the NYT. Add in maybe $5/month for postage to pay my bills and other correspondence. That's still less than half what I pay per month for internet. It's tempting to just drop the home internet service and go back to the 1990s way of doing things.
If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great.
Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.