Comment by kerkeslager
6 years ago
Hm, I don't know if I'd draw the cause/effect so directly.
To me, these are two separate problems: 1) NYT doxxes sources, 2) NYT serves advertisers rather than readers. There might be some relation between these two problems but I don't personally have enough information to conclude that.
I didn't make that clear in my previous post, my apologies. No implication was intended.
I have a hard time seeing how the statistic that the Times receives twice as much money from readers as from advertisers is evidence that the NYT "serves advertisers rather than readers". I think that probably puts them in the top 10% of media outlets in terms of how financially independent of advertising they are.
I take the point about subscribers being hard to count to mean that even though most of the money comes from subscribers, each individual subscriber doesn't have much leverage or bandwidth to communicate their desires to NYT. On the flip side, each individual advertiser commands some sizeable chunk of NYT's revenue as leverage.
The NYTs is also known to hassle subscribers who want to unsubscribe. The only reason a company would do that is because they know some people will give up, effectively disenfranchising them.
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I think any amount of money from advertisers is toxic.
There's a fundamental disconnect between the mission of a news organization and getting paid to lie (which is, fundamentally, what advertising is). You cannot accept ad dollars and be an effective purveyor of truth.
> getting paid to lie (which is, fundamentally, what advertising is).
Not fundamentally. A lot of advertising may be well be outright lying, or close enough as makes no difference.
But... I used to go by a shop named "Cards Galore", it had its name in reasonably sized letters hanging over the sidewalk, and then when I wanted to buy a card I knew where I could get one. Nothing lying about that. I think there's a lot of advertising which is like that.
Something weaker might be true, like "large-scale advertising will inevitably lead to large-scale lying". But "advertising is fundamentally lying" is not true.
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SlateStarCodex itself used to have advertisers on it, and the adverts seemed pretty much fine - just banners and descriptions from a bunch of sponsors, which were pretty relevant to the blog and, I guess, the people likely to visit it. Advertisement doesn't have to lie, it can just provide useful information you haven't seen yet. Although it generally does.
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>NYT doxxes sources
not to defend the NYTimes here, they're definitely in the wrong. but doxxing a source for an article and doxxing the subject of an article are very different things. The subject of this article is not a "source".
I understood article subject to be social groups during Covid.
the object of the article is an intentionally anonymous blog tho
I think it's equally plausible that the NYT believes that doxxing sources does serve their readers. Perhaps a significant portion of the NYT's paying subscribers are against anonymity in sources? Who knows.
Not saying this is a good thing, but I think assuming that this "policy" is there to get advertising dollars is weird. Why would advertisers care?