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Comment by BeetleB

8 hours ago

How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:

1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)

2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online

Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.

11 comments

BeetleB

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josephg  7 hours ago

Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people.

Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.

I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.

  • coatmatter  6 hours ago

    Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.

    • NikolaNovak  4 hours ago

      I think a mixture of BBC, cnn, al jazeera, economist, will get a casual reader to a decent spot, and they're all mainstream media. Possibly guardian but emlarhically not their opinion pages (I agree with them, but even so they're gratingly opinionated, hate to think what a die hard conservative will think of them :)

      1 reply →

    • fsckboy  2 hours ago

      if mainstream media has gone downhill, why would somebody have a preferred outlet? What's your preferred outlet?

abofh  4 hours ago

I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value.

The industry got it wrong when it digitized

wolvoleo  2 hours ago

We have plenty of state funded public news services in Europe but they do the same. Just shallow Reuters copy paste slop.

The real deep dives are hard to find.

And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort.

A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care.

And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.

protocolture  3 hours ago

>How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?

I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends.

Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions.

I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.