Comment by Animats
2 days ago
Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
We need that again. As I point out occasionally, read news, and ask yourself which stories started out as a press release. For the City News Bureau, nothing started as a press release. They had people pounding the streets of Chicago for a century. Today, the pundit to reporter ratio is far too high.
There's a great book about the Bureau, called "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite". (by Dornfield, not the one by Sears, which is something else entirely.)[1]
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/06/20/if-city-news-burea...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sweetheart-Get-Me-Rewrite/dp/08...
Legacy journalism has changed from a low-barrier-to-entry working man's occupation, with entry level reporting leading to high-paying punditry, into a high-barrier-to-entry ivy league occupation with new entrants to the field expecting prestigious positions from the start.
It’s also what’s called a high prestige low pay career which is by definition exclusionary of poor and middle income people, so the news makers are further and further detached from regular people.
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-...
There are still hundreds of thousands of journalists around the country who don't have ivy league educations and are getting paid a pittance to work in their fields. I once worked for a publisher which hired reporters making $12 an hour who easily worked over 60 hours a week. Big city reporters might push out a few stories a week. The small town people are cranking them out by the dozen, with about 3/4ths of their bylines being "<newpaper>" Staff so that people remain unaware of how understaffed these papers are.
Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit..
I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961
>This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
The Rust evangelists don't want you know this, but a land value tax would fix data races
Haha it feels like it makes sense!
Yes the deeply depressing thing is that these sort of city news articles are now very much taken verbatim from press releases, and those press releases are from professional police communications departments, and so this gives enormous new powers to the police in able to shape the broader narrative as their politics and agenda see fit.
For example we can see here that this news article is lifting directly from the police press release. https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3lu...
Maybe it wasn't even an overworked city reporter that did this but simply an automated AI creating news articles straight from the police press releases.
The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars.
Would people pay for real journalism?
Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media.
You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf...
Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do.
You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.
You're really just observing that the marginal cost of reading is tiny. That doesn't mean that the fixed cost of producing an article or edition isn't very large, and needs to be paid for somehow.
"You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight."
I have literally never seen this. In the US?
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The beginning of the end was Gannett and USA today...
Lets be real here, in the past advertisers did pay for it, but all advertising spend has moved on to the clickbait-youtube/google/Facebook garbage heap.
Don't people already pay for things like the NYT?
I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
Nobody pays for news from the NYT. NYT is a game developer that also provides news on the side. Their games are their main draw; my gf subscribes and never reads the news.
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media...
The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.
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It's fascinating to me that people would pay to read obvious political propaganda.
I get that the state-sponsored "news" in many EU countries is heavily politically coloured, but why would something like NYT be if they have paying subscribers? I never did the research, but I'm guessing they must have huge additional streams of income besides payments from readers?
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Traditionally it was ads that contributed most of the money a newspaper took in, but the fact that people were paying for the paper re-assured the people buying the ads that the papers were actually being read.
NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
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Surprised that no one has mentioned 404 media, a dedicated news sub I pay for annually. Good reporting is worth it to me, especially to get past all the b.s. marketing hype and influencer shilling. Maybe they’re unpopular here on HN but I stand by the sentiment: legit, good journalism is worth supporting financially.
>Would people pay for real journalism?
See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable.
All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.
Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
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I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.
The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content I don't care about. More bang for buck. People have to be met halfway.
> I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.
The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for.
Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works.
The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads.
There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.
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The underlying assumption is that of capitalism, that is, that things should be profitable or at least self-sustaining. But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc.
Independent news should be completely free from capitalist interests.
[0] https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/
> But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc.
and that is a problem because? These are funded by tax dollars collected. It's impossible for people to stop paying for them whether they make sense or not.
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The article here is about bad faith left wing arguments. Presumably you'd pay for those I guess?
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