Comment by mmooss
2 days ago
> the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.
The product is not priced at what it costs to produce it. Price is what you pay, value is what you get.
Why is it priced too low for its value? IMHO a major reason is people not rejecting the 'post-truth' era, but embracing it - devaluing truth. For example, they way overvalue information on social media, because its lack of truth is not a consideration.
Journalists personally are on the scene, talk to key people, read the documents, interview experts, and are trained professionals in gathering and reporting information accurately. Somehow hot takes from someone who hasn't left their basement is seen as valuable. Imagine someone on social media who did all that work.
I agree with you on the value > price, but disagree about why. If you take out classified (and later internet) Ads, almost no newspaper and no TV news in the US was _ever_ profitable.
It might sound crazy but as a percent of revenue, news was actually moving more towards subs and away from ads even by the 1980s and 1990s. I used to work with a very long tenured editor who told me that in the 1970s north of 70% of most newspapers revenue was from ads.
Back then overhead was massive due to printing presses and delivery infrastructure, now it's dominated by labor costs, but the point stands that doing good journalism isn't cheap. Even people who care about the product don't want it enough to pay its production cost, and never have.