i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem.
>directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.
> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable
To appease Google…
Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets
> NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam
You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality.
Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now:
The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex
Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now.
New Zealanders Are Crazy for This Fruit. It’s Not the Kiwi.
Unfortunately the more news-worthy stories also suffer from a severe lack of viewpoint diversity.
Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.
Which "ideological narratives"? This is such a vague description that you could interpret it to mean anything, especially since the NYT has been getting blasted from all directions lately. Conservatives think it's left-leaning drivel, and progressives think it capitulates too much to viewpoints on the right.
One example: the NYT fired its opinion page editor for publishing an article by Tom Cotton calling to suppress the George Floyd riots with the National Guard. For context, calling in the Maryland National Guard to stop the Freddie Gray riots was one of the most popular things Larry Hogan ever did in that blue state. Cotton’s opinion was squarely in the mainstream, and by firing Bennett the NYT revealed itself to be quite far to the left.
Another example is anything touching on affirmative action. Americans oppose taking race into account in hiring to increase diversity by a 3:1 margin. It’s an extremely unpopular and out-of-the-mainstream position. But the NYT engages in such hiring practices. And when you read the NYT’s coverage of such issues, including the supreme court’s decision in SFFA, it’s clear where the paper’s bias lies.
This bias manifests in the way articles talk about events. For one thing, it’s quite obvious from the tone of the article what the author thinks about particular policies or events. An article about Biden’s declining support among minorities, for example, might be framed as a bad thing, instead of a positive development. You will also get selective use of what policies are labeled as “liberal” or “conservative.” Restricting abortion gets labeled as a “conservative” position (which it is), but affirmative action doesn’t get labeled as a “liberal position (which it is). You’ll also see a difference in when public opinion polling is disclosed. Articles on Dobbs heavily featured public opinion in favor of legalized abortion. But articles in SFFA usually didn’t mention longstanding polling opposing racial preferences.
The other subcategories on the left are “establishment liberals,” “democratic mainstays,” and “outsider left.” Those other categories include my dad, who votes Democrat but thinks CNN is “Democrat propaganda.” Then there’s the 42% of democrats who are even further to the right and watch Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-democrats-key-demo. None of those folks are saying the NYT is too far to the right.
The folks who got Bennett fired were indeed part of a very small minority of the left, which doesn’t even carry a majority within mainstream left-leaning organizations like the NYT. They’re just effective at weaponizing rhetoric to beat establishment liberals into submission.
These complaints are always funny to me, because the "viewpoint diversity" referred to is usually right-wing rhetoric which not only already has a voice in NYT, but also has several dedicated outlets that are elevated to "paper of record" sources among conservatives. What doesn't get much play is, say, PoC and lower class youth perspectives on topics like foreign affairs and economics. There a plenty of eloquent voices among that cohort (that you should have to be eloquent to be heard), but that would disrupt the manufactured consensus around what government and private enterprise do here and abroad.
If that's what you're arguing we should be hearing more of from the NYT, though, I'm all for it. Not, say, another half-baked article about "crime waves" so that the NYPD can get another billion in overtime or whatever. Or, on the hysterically liberal side, not another article about "Biden wiping out student loan debt [which he was obligated to do under already existing statute]."
Would you recognize a “PoC” viewpoint if you read it? I mean the term itself is a fake label that is basically only used by white people and elite non-whites who must navigate white spaces and institutions. My whole family is non-white immigrants, and I never even heard the term “PoC” until I went to graduate school and encountered far left white people. I think you probably have to be in the leftmost 10-15% of the political spectrum to use “PoC” unironically.
The funny thing is that, insofar as you’re talking about what the US is doing “abroad,” I’m very plugged into that political sentiment, since my home country was on the receiving end of some stupid American foreign policy choices, and my dad works in international development. I know lots of Nigerians, Palestinians, etc., but nobody would call themselves “PoC.” It’s an utterly non-sensical and reductive label.
The NYT certainly platforms self-identified “PoC,” but as far as I can tell, their viewpoints are limited to ones that flatter white liberal NYT readers. Would the NYT ever platform all the Bangladeshis I know that begrudgingly credit Trump for pulling out of Afghanistan or opposing the war in Ukraine? Would they publish my parents, who think affirmative action is a threat to Asians and want the state department to stop flying pride flags in Muslim countries? And would you even recognize that as a genuine “PoC” view if you read it?
>the term itself is a fake label that is basically only used by white people and elite non-whites who must navigate white spaces and institutions.
That's overly reductive and dismissive. An alternative POV is that language changes over time to introduce terminology that is now relevant due to some new context, shift in social dynamics, demographic changes, etc.
There are certainly people who identify as PoC in some of these contexts who who don't fit neatly into the two buckets you prescribed.
>My whole family is non-white immigrants, and I never even heard the term “PoC”
See above. Additionally, the history of race in the U.S. certainly does not impact every race identically. The phrase PoC does have a particular meaning and intent to describe a dynamic with certain groups that also have socioeconomic and other historical properties in common.
In any case, the term was likely never intended to be taken literally, hence to include your experience. But, that does not delegitimize it.
I would encourage you to consider that your family's experience as immigrants is distinctly different for many reasons that significantly impact your worldview. Not the least of these is a desire to identify with the majority in the nation to which you've voluntarily immigrated. This seems quite natural to me. But, for some, this impulse sometimes extends to a certain "fervor" to de-identify with other groups (e.g. PoCs) and their perspectives.
I've seen many of your comments along the lines of this one and it strikes me that there appears to be very little attempt to empathize with other experiences unlike yours. Further, your perspective frequently adopts the biased and somewhat punitive elements of some majority positions; for instance, concern that affirmative action discriminates against Asians in spite of the well-known data that shows everyone is far more disadvantaged by legacy and wealth.
So, it's also true that language can take on political connotations, especially in today's climate. And, that has certainly happened with this phrase. The same dynamics that animate your interpretation of affirmative action, etc. also make you disdainful of the PoC label.
> for instance, concern that affirmative action discriminates against Asians in spite of the well-known data that shows everyone is far more disadvantaged by legacy and wealth.
First, affirmative action is morally wrong. We shouldn’t inflict the concept of race on the next generation. Second, you can get rid of both affirmative action and legacy admissions.
Third, the math on that idea just doesn’t work. Eliminating affirmative action tends to almost double the percentage of Asians from 20% closer to 40%. There’s no way eliminating legacy admissions would have a similar effect. It’s simply not possible under any system of race balancing to make Asians better off than they would be in a race-blind system. More generally, when you’re a minority group that’s 6% of the population but accounts for 20% of the seats at Harvard and 40% of Silicon Valley, “equity” is simply contrary to your self interest.
>you can get rid of both affirmative action and legacy admissions.
Sure you could. But the point is about where the conversation has been directed and where the emphasis is placed, including by you.
>affirmative action is morally wrong. We shouldn’t inflict the concept of race on the next generation.
But, we should forget the impact of the legacy of race for some members of those same generations?
The problem with these kinds of arguments is that their proponents frequently recast corrective actions as "the immoral racist thing", then dismiss them as immoral and racist.
So, it begs the question of course. But, it's not exactly intellectually honest to start the clock at the place that suits one's argument.
The unfortunate truth is that race was the basis for what needs to be corrected. That wasn't a choice made by those in need of the correction.
The other elephant in the room, conspicuously missed by these kinds of arguments, is that racial discrimination continues to this day; not by law, but by biases, social networks and other artifacts from the era of overt and codified discrimination. Affirmative action also acknowledges this plain fact. The counter from those intellectually honest enough to also acknowledge it frequently runs something along the lines of "yes, but we can't fix discrimination with more discrimination". The truth is that we actually can, but it does require that people stop inciting resentment by facilely re-framing these corrections as merely more "immoral" discrimination.
And, what do we propose those on the receiving end do while society works through its ongoing issues with discrimination?
>Eliminating affirmative action tends to almost double the percentage of Asians from 20% closer to 40%
Your numbers here suspiciously align with Harvard demographics, and indeed you go on to cite that same 20% explicitly for Harvard.
And, that is stunning. You are essentially replacing every admitted student who could have taken advantage of affirmative action with Asian students.
The obvious conclusions are that:
1. Virtually every Black, Latin, indigenous and otherwise "affirmative action eligible" student at Harvard would not have been admitted, save for affirmative action.
2. Every seat taken by those students would have instead been occupied by an Asian student.
Not only is this wildly presumptuous and flat wrong, it reveals a lot about your thinking, including some "biases" (to state it euphemistically). There is a certain "they wouldn't have earned it anyway" undertone here, which also animates anti-AA arguments in the main. Poetically, these are exactly the kinds of biases I mentioned earlier, which lead to ongoing discrimination that AA seeks to address.
It also conveys a very specific POV—more accurately, narrative—that dishonestly frames affirmative action as a war between Asians and Blacks or other non-privileged groups, while de-emphasizing the effects of legacy and wealth. You have, essentially, been misdirected and enlisted as a proxy.
It's a time honored tradition to scapegoat underprivileged groups while the privileged enjoy the spoils. And, in spite of your claim that "the math doesn't work"—which you appear to have supported only with faulty assumptions—the numbers actually bear out who's really winning:
"In 2022, Harvard’s overall acceptance rate was 3.2%. The average admit rate was approximately 42% for donor-related applicants and 34% for legacies." [0]
Black and LatinX admittance stands at around 7%. So even assuming their overfitting is all due to affirmative action, this pales in comparison to donors and legacies, in both percentages and real terms (butts in seats, displacing other butts in seats).
> An alternative POV is that language changes over time to introduce terminology that is now relevant due to some new context, shift in social dynamics, demographic changes, etc.
Yes, the term was introduced due to the need in some circles to extend the white/black dichotomy of US politics to encompass Asians and Hispanics. But that label doesn’t serve the distinct interests of Asians and Hispanics.
> I would encourage you to consider that your family's experience as immigrants is distinctly different for many reasons that significantly impact your worldview.
Of course, but that’s exactly my point. The majority of people encompassed by the label “POC” are immigrants or descendants of relatively recent immigrants (excepting native Hawaiians and Tejanos and the like). But the term “POC” is based on the experiences of ADOS and indigenous Americans. It erases a salient distinction (the common experiences shared by immigrants), and elevates a superficial distinction (non-white skin).
> But, for some, this impulse sometimes extends to a certain "fervor" to de-identify with other groups (e.g. PoCs) and their perspectives.
Of course they do. Immigrants already have a pre-existing identity based on shared culture, language, and history. Why would they identify with other people with whom they have little in common, culturally or in terms of political interests? Why would they embrace “people of color” as an identity, which denotes no cultural or historical ties, but exists in mere juxtaposition to white people?
The term “POC” also obscures a fundamental conflict in economic interests between immigrants and ADOS/indigenous people. Immigrants are all basically at various stages of the same economic assimilation curve. Guatemalan Americans are poorer than Swedish Americans, but that’s because of timing of immigration; upward mobility is similar between the two. Immigrant POC thus have a strong interest in “not fixing what isn’t broken” (for them). By contrast, economic gaps between black/indigenous people and everyone else haven’t been closing over generations. They remain as big now as in 1960. Those groups this have strong economic incentives to demand fundamental changes.
That is not to say that individual Asians and Hispanics may not favor such changes for the same reason many individual white people do. But the starting point must be recognizing that different groups are distinct and have distinct interests.
I agree that they write a lot of normal headlines, like most of the ones you list.
I take issue with the last one (and others like it) because of its intentional coyness in an attempt to get you to click through. I've been seeing this more and more from them lately, and the kindest thing I can say about it is that it does not befit a newspaper like theirs.
It's disingenuous to claim those are "front page" stories. The NYT main webpage has the first pages of the different paper sections as you scroll down. The "front page", or most important news of the news site , is at the top, which is exclusively (right now) dealing with US politics, an Australian attack, the Middle East and Chinese/Indian foreign policy. Meanwhile, to get to the hangnail article you have to scroll 75-80% of the way down. Past the other news, the op-eds, the sports, all the way to the lifestyle section and right before the cooking section.
> You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago
What the heck does that even mean? A decade ago, NYT wasn’t behind an paywall. But even then, are you implying that my version of NYT is a decade old, or is my “operating model” of NYT my perception of the site? Either way, what you’re saying makes zero sense. I opened it right now and it isn’t what you’re describing. Most of the headlines you posted were never on the front page. Here’s what it shows right now:
Iran Fires Over 200 Drones and Missiles at Israel in Retaliatory Strike
Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll
A Closer Look at a Slight Shift in the Polls
China Had a ‘Special Place’ in Modi’s Heart. Now It’s a Thorn in His Side.
In Ukraine’s West, Draft Dodgers Run, and Swim, to Avoid the War
I subscribe to the NYTs, and one thing that drives me nuts is their animated graphics which play in a loop on some articles. They aren't ads - they are artworks created for the story, but I find it really distracting to try to read text when there's some dancing cutesy image looping endlessly in my field of view. They really should add an option to let the reader opt out of that crap.
NYT mobile app is busted with ad blocking. It tries to spam refresh the ad and freezes the whole app for multiple seconds every time it tries to show one. I already pay for a subscription, why should I be forced to see ads?
Maybe if Google ignored news sites, things would improve.
Look at the Washington Post site. One good article above the fold, a right column of clickbait, and more clickbait when you scroll. Then crap "lifestyle" articles. Pathetic.
Eh really? I’m a paying subscriber to the NYT, and every now and then I browse the site without an ad blocker, it’s unbearable.
But maybe we’re grading on a curve here.
Also they have a mix of comically bad articles and really good ones. Whereas in the past there was some level of baseline journalistic integrity.
Now I frequently read articles where at least once a week I have to check if I’m accidentally reading an op-ed, because it’s so opinionated. And this is even when I happen to agree with the political slant they’ve clearly taken.
I don’t want any slant. I want factual, objective reporting, whether I like the outcome or not.
the only reason they have to appease google is because they had given up on worrying about navigation or discovery on their own platforms, and ceded that to google. which is dumb. google's not forcing them to do anything, they gave up control and responsibility to google.
uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world
none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.
>who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world
They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
I opened the Google app on my phone to read the news feed, 9 out of 10 articles were unreadable under the cookie popups, floating videos I didn't even click to start playing, and other helpful offers getting in the way. It's shit, utter shit. Why don't they have "reading mode" to show only the text, I bet they are afraid of getting sued if they supported clean text like the HN app I have installed. On the laptop I always use ad blockers and don't see the whole scale of the disaster.
I've used firefox with adblock/ublock since I first learned about it 20-ish years ago. I have a vpn on my phone primarily because I can do dns adblocking. I gave up most news and social media around COVID times, and haven't watched ad supported tv in 10 years (oh god, I sound like the uni-bomber; lol) - so I forget how bad the cacophony of advertising is for normal people. That everyone who can doesn't instantly install an adblocker on their browser (I think its like ~30-50%) still blows me away...
Google rewards them by ranking them so high. In any case, Google doesnt actually give a shit about any core web anything when they’re raking in the adsense monies. These are simple distractions, they know which side of the bread is buttered.
What is unreasonable about not wanting your news organization to be ripped off for free?
What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?”
Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, and they’re so new at teaching, you wind up teaching them. Seems legit
I agree; moreover, I don't even understand why there's any controversy. A set of weights for a network trained using a particular document is a derivative work.
When I attended college and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, that didn’t make all my future design output a derivative work (legally).
I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)
Certainly not all of it, but if you were to cut and paste some words from one of your textbooks, maybe change a few words, and then pass it off as your own, I would call you a plagiarist or a thief.
The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you might do after 10 years on the job.
Credible argument? You call baiting and entrapment credible? Those articles don't pop up on their own from chatGPT, it takes effort. You need to know the first phrase and the title to prime it. And then it only works once in a while, not every time. They even complained in the lawsuit that the cases where the model doesn't regurgitate it hallucinates articles as from them and they don't like that either.
NYT itself is full of fluff and derivative news, and suing for expired news that only have historical value now. It's just flexing their power to corner AI.
We can't copyright everything. Some things are free: letters, words, sometimes common phrases, also, ideas. An AI is entitled to learn everything at the level of ideas, even from copyrighted works. They just need to paraphrase or rewrite as Q&A the copyrighted material before training to avoid identical replication.
Copyright is already too big as it is, don't allow them to make ideas protected as well, it will have a chilling effect on us too, not just AI models.
Baiting and entrapment? Please. They used the API the way it was designed. The next thing, you'll be arguing that hot women in nice dresses are somehow "entrapping" their rapists.
If anything, their examples illustrate the kind of knowledge that can only be found in the NYT's original reporting. They focused on some events that only their newspaper covered well and the AI responded by plagiarizing the NYT's coverage, something that's part of its inherent design.
And I'm not talking about copyrighting everything. Nor is the NYT. Consider the opposite case where they have no way to force readers to pay them for their hard work. Is that the kind of world you want to live within?
I'm very happy to reward the artists and writers who make creations. I don't see anything wrong with giving them what anti-copyright people call a "monopoly." Why? Because I know that it pushes other people to create their own new knowledge for society and not skate through by simply plagiarizing.
> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault.
To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.
> make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.
Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?
The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.
Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
Advertisers have wanted moving ads since the dawn of the internet, and I'd be shocked if they weren't always willing to pay more to get them. But the big selling point of Google, and one of the drivers that got them to where they are today, is they looked at that money and said "no, it isn't worth it, this will compromise the user experience". Then they went with text ads on Google search.
Over the years I assume they've changed that decision along with the general cultural rot that comes to large companies, but there is a clear precedent. Publishers didn't have to take money to make their own product worse. They could have made their product good and tried to make money that way.
Although realistically these media companies are probably going to go out of business with the current model whatever they try. The internet has made a mockery of their credibility; the future seems to be podcasters with dedicated audiences going it alone or blogs - the costs are lower and the quality is generally higher.
Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply.
I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome.
I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?
It was definitely not. AMP was mostly a standard for how you should build performant websites. Then you could opt into what was effectively google caching and serving your AMP-enabled webpages for you. This is good actually.
AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.
You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them.
There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
> AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.
That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it.
> of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave
You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view.
> There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.
As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that:
1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.
2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue.
3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril.
4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news.
The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.
When you've driven away your reader base, any profit you made while doing so will seem minor, compared to total revenues from keeping those readers happy and around for years to come.
Of course you can also view it as a major source of income immediately, and just ignore that it's driving away your readers. With the readers dwindling, you've lost leverage, and the advertisers are able to offer you worse and worse deals on the ads, which compounds with the dwindling reader base.
Scam ads are a choice that only makes sense in isolation. The advertisers are only your customers due to your reader base. You need to keep the reader base around.
It's a balancing act, of course, and as long as the optimization function of churn and revenue is trending positively it will remain. There are dozens of data scientists working on this problem. Taboola ads are at the bottom of pages away from the main content.
You're choosing to implement all of these terrible things by continuing your employment, so you "not wanting them" is kind of moot. Find a different job if you genuinely don't agree with what you're building. I'm a firm believer that companies would stop doing this kind of crap if we, collectively as tech workers (even better as a union!), stopped implementing it.
If it’s lucrative enough for the company, they will find an apathetic contractor who will put $LOVECRAFTIAN_HORROR_JS on the site, cash their check, and move on to the next thing.
So if a company hands you a gun and tells you to shoot someone you would pull the trigger because even if you refuse someone else would do it? Nothing but excuses for profiting off morally bankrupt behavior.
And to be honest, I don't think most of these things are terrible per se, albeit mildly annoying. Also, I don't see what you're suggesting as realistic, but idealistic. You can try to unionize developers, but good luck with that because you'll just be replaced with overseas contractors. I'd rather keep my job and feed my family, thanks.
Do you call that NPR story proof of a bias worse than what happens at other institutions? Or because it's biased in the direction that doesn't align with your views?
If NPR only represents a fraction of our nation’s viewpoints, they are not living up to their namesake of national public radio. If they wanted to call themselves progressive public radio I’d take no issue.
Mostly, NPR isn't publicly funded. It gets about 1% of its funding from the federal government. Public radio stations that carry NPR shows get more, but it's only about 17% from federal, state, and local governments. Some of them are also funded by universities, some of which are public.
If donating to NPR is a tax write off, it is publicly funded. If the majority of those donors are politically biased, they will create a feedback loop where news is catered to those donating to them. This isn't wrong per se, but just what it is.
I think part of the issue is that news does not seem to equal valuable information. Subscriptions, where a person has paying followers due to expertise in his particular domain do exist though. The difference is that they apparently offer value to the followers.
The issue is value. 1$ is too high, because most of the news right now are, and I am being charitable, opinion pieces. I have an opinion too. In fact, there is no shortage of opinions on the market. The market has spoken that opinions are worth less than 1$ a year.
Now, media companies do have an opportunity now to distinguish themselves as gatekeepers ( and a source of truth ) from AI generated stuff, but I am too cynical to seriously consider it as a possible outcome.
Last time I checked if you went in front of investors and said “hey, I want to make a business where nobody wants to pay, not even a dollar a year” you would be laughed out of the room.
So. I think that is your problem. Maybe make a business where people are wanting to pay for the content? Think about how much more money you would make!!!
I agree with you completely, and there are voices within the organization advocating for that as well. Big legacy mainstream media companies move at a glacial pace and making that kind of change takes a lot of time and buy-in throughout the whole org chart.
And, somewhat counterintuitively, I think it's also important to note that sometimes what the journalists want to cover and content that people want and are willing to pay for aren't always the same thing. Additionally, sometimes what people want and are willing to pay for doesn't sit well with advertisers, so it is always a nuanced balancing act.
What is weird is people use to pay for news papers and magazines. Yes there were some ads, but people still had a leg in the game by way of paying, it kept it balanced.
The internet grew up so fast and easy payment methods lagged, and still so mostly.
I figure out for my self if I can use Apple Pay, then I buy stuff, but if I need to do more than double tap on the power button I am out.
The main problem the news industry faces is they're trying to run for-profit businesses when they should see themselves as a public service that seeks to break even or produce sustainable losses.
News should be subsidized by people who want to inform the public whether out of public-spirited motives or out of a self interested desire to influence the public debate and, indirectly, the government. That means allowing people who want to support the news outlet to donate or to purchase a print version of the outlet's reporting. If I was a millionaire, I'd probably start or purchase my own media outlet to influence public opinion. Controlling the media is probably a better ROI than directly buying politicians so I'm surprised rich people mostly seem to opt for the latter. Even those who buy media outlets, such as Bezos buying WaPo, often don't noticeably change their editorial line or move away from the "we have to be a profitable business" paradigm.
It also doesn't help that journalists are, on average, well to the left of public opinion or that colleges offer degrees in journalism which was traditionally a blue collar profession that anybody could do. Journalism schools mean journalists are unnecessarily stuck with debts they probably can't ever repay and unable to pivot out of their profession if there's a lack of people willing to pay for it.
In some states it is the law to single click cancel. In others it is not, and requires a phone call to cancel. It's not impossible to cancel, but they bank on people not wanting to call in. They'll also try to negotiate down your rate if you call in wanting to cancel.
> 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.
Alternatives to increasing advertisements have been tried and found to work. However, these approaches may not be feasible for all publications—especially local news outlets that may not have as many resources. These approaches are to:
i) Start selling other services besides news. The New York Times—one of the most currently financially successful newspapers—has found a lot of success in its Games section. This was famously seen in their acquisition of Wordle, though this has already been popular with their Crosswords section. The company has also found success with its Recipes section. (This is not the only reason behind their financial success, but it's a significant part of their strategy.)
ii) Focus on financial news, which lets the publication frame their reports as having a financial value that arguably exceeds the subscription price. The Financial Times is also a highly profitable newspaper today, with one of the highest-priced subscription prices that can be about $500 USD a year for a standard subscription (depending on one's region). The Wall Street Journal similarly charges a high subscription price. Both are seen as important resources for well-funded companies to buy group subscriptions for. (Once more, this isn't the only reason for their success, but it's a major factor.)
iii) Focus on a specialized, niche area of reporting that other publications can't or won't cover—ideally appealing to institutions or large audiences willing to spend money. For example, several publications in Canada focus on providing detailed reports on federal politics (such as The Hill Times and iPolitics), which is useful information for their readership that fills a gap by less-frequent reports from the country's main newspapers—this lets them charge high subscription prices. The Athletic also used to be financially successful by standing out with its sports-only reporting, which led to its acquisition by The New York Times. These specialized publications can charge more, because certain audiences find these reports financially valuable.
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However, a major drawback to thinking about news through the lens of financial value is that many important news stories don't have financial value. While an outlet can attempt to use one of these approaches to subsidize the rest of their stories, it's also costly. It's usually not feasible for many local newspapers to fund the software development of a Games section (especially as this would need to compete with all the other online alternatives for one's attention).
It's also pricey to offer competitive enough salaries to create a newsroom to compete with The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. However, it's not impossible—there have been a few alternative publications that have found success by focusing on a niche, such as business news in a country outside of the US, or focusing on a sector such as biotech for the publication STAT.
It's a tough problem to try and fund local news. There is civic value for one's community to have a platform for providing a check against corruption by various institutions—yet in practice, oftentimes not enough for most local residents purchase subscriptions. Alternatives to support local news can include funding (such as through taxes), but that makes the outlet reliant on government funding, which is subject to change (and the perception, real or not, that the outlet is less independent from the government).
Increasing advertisements seems like a short-term solution for local news outlets trying to stay afloat, but it's hard for me to see this as a long-term solution for sufficient funding.
> It's a tough problem to try and fund local news. There is civic value for one's community to have a platform for providing a check against corruption by various institutions—yet in practice, oftentimes not enough for most local residents purchase subscriptions.
Philanthropy and donations seem to be making headway here.
Not enough to invest money and time, no. And my preferred party isn't in power, so it's not like knowing the current leadership is corrupt would change my vote - I don't vote for them anyway.
>yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
The problem with this is the problem with every scheme I have seen so far alongb these lines.It gives the government more control over what is and isn't "journalism." Either you give money to spam farms and watch dogs equally, or you wind up with cronyism.
I'm not educated enough in journalism to distinguish high quality from low quality, but as a listener/reader, some of NPR feels like good, original journalism (my ears perk up whenever I hear Eleanor Beardsley, for example); other content feels like it is just parroting the NY Times (which itself is a weird mixture of thought-provoking articles and clickbait headlines).
I guess you missed the op-ed written by a senior NPR editor recently. He admitted that NPR suppressed stories because they might help Trump and pursued poorly sourced (and ultimately false) stories because they would hurt Trump.
What more could NPR say about those slap fights (Hunter Biden, COVID-19) that wasn't already beaten to death by the credulous corporate media? Is every news outlet required to be subsumed by the right-wing noise machine's narrative?
Uri turning to Bari to air his grievances is pretty much all any one needs to know about his POV.
"But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming."
That's no slap fight, those were serious allegations and the fact that they were false is equally important.
NPR happily participated in spreading those left wing falsehoods, but was unwilling to spread the truth with equal vigor.
I agree it's a shame that Uri had to turn outside NPR to discuss this. But you know as well as I do that NPR would not have published this.
And while COVID-19 was certainly a controversial topic, it was no "slap fight" either. It was the most important issue in the nation for two years or more.
You're dismissing important issues as "slap fights" and dismissing serious discussion because you suspect someone has a different point of view. Does that tell us all we need to know about you?
What could NPR possibly add to any of those 3 food fights? In addition to the 100s of hours and 1,000s of column inches already wasted? New evidence, witnesses, analysis, pizza toppings, anything? Nope.
Was yet another rehash more important than every thing else? There are 1,000s of newsworthy topics and issues every single day. Was relitigating the precise definition of "collusion" really the most important topic? Again?
Was there any risk that any one any where wouldn't have already been fully immersed in those jello wrestling matches? (Benghazi!)
FWIW: Every side have long claimed "the media" censors their favored tickle fights. aka "Working the refs", public relations. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent explains how that endless meta-slapfight works.
To their credit, the right-wing noise machine created their own media ecosystem. (Though it's weird they continue to say they're being ignored, when conservatives dominate every medium.) The left, greens, socialists, grannies knitting for world peace, etc should all do the same.
> Does that tell us all we need to know about you?
Gods, I certainly hope so. Firstly, that the "news" actually be "new".
> The left, greens, socialists, grannies knitting for world peace, etc should all do the same [create their own media ecosystem]
You're proving my point there. Those are all relatively fringe groups, outside the mainstream of the Democratic party and the majority of elected officials. Prominent elected Democrats can rely on "the media" to get their message out and to protect them from criticism. (Both from the far-left and from the right, as we saw from their treatment of Bernie Sanders.)
The "right wing" (meaning mainstream Republicans and elected officials), had to create their own media because the "leans left" media will not report fairly about them. Twitter banned the POTUS. The NY Times forced an editor to resign for publishing an op-ed from a sitting Senator. And NPR targeted the President, according to that senior editor.
> Though it's weird they continue to say they're being ignored, when conservatives dominate every medium.
No one claimed they're being ignored. They're being attacked. When the left-leaning media, like NPR, covers conservatives, it's usually to take their statements and actions out of context and criticize them.
> Firstly, that the "news" actually be "new".
I agree completely, but we don't see much of that these days.
What we see is the neoliberal media chanting the neoliberal chorus, trying to silence both the right and (as you pointed out), the greens, socialists, and others to their left.
Most people misunderstood the role of NYT, WaPo, and NPR. They aren't left, right, up, widdershins, liberal, conservative, whatever.
Rather, their (self-appointed) role is to defend the status quo. aka the establishment, the beltway, the village.
NYT only looks "center-right" to me because I'm way far to the left, "left wing" to you because you're conservative. But those views aren't really helpful for understanding them. Those labels don't mean anything inside the bubble. (As revealed by their evergreen appeals for "bipartisanship", "compromise", and "consensus".)
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Not that you asked, but there's a similar disconnect between the folk understanding of politics and how politicos behave.
I've run for office. Dialing for dollars, campaigning statewide, door belling, interviews, endorsements, messaging & framing, debate prep, costumes and makeup, all of it. Very illuminating. And now I totally get why everyone in that ecosystem behaves as they do.
Everyone should run for office, do some policy work, try to get published, etc. We'd all be better off if more people had first-hand experience in the sausage factory.
You can try and guess my politics (you'd be wrong), but I can guess that you don't think journalists who agree with your politics can be biased. I can agree with NPR's politics and still admit they are biased, why can't you?
i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem.
>directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.