They choose it though, it's their decision. They tell us over and over how important their work is. Yet you go to their site the first thing you're harassed by a cookies banner, then it's the begging banner "Please give us money blah blah our work is important, honest", then the autoplay video with an ad, then if you're lucky you can read it if they don't block it because they detected an ad blocker or whatever.
Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control?
All the ad tracking in the world isn't going to save your company when the generation who grew up thinking your websites are just a bunch of cookie and begging banners don't have the act of going to your site inbuilt in their habits.
> Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control?
Journalists don't typically control the actual platform they publish to. The news agency does, and the news agency is the one trying to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of revenue out of a dwindling number of readers.
I'd much rather hear from the journalists directly, and I'd love to see platforms treat those journalists as the ones running the show. "Patreon for good journalism" is a far more compelling value proposition than any newspaper. Could someone hurry up and kill the newspapers and provide a platform for all their good journalists, please?
The gig economy will not produce good journalism, as good reporters prefer a stable job as much as anyone else. I like a few writers at the NYT, so I pay $5/month to support them. Same with a few other newspapers. The bonus is I also get an absolute mountain of other stuff that I occasionally read and really enjoy (like the cooking column). I don’t see how giving a handful of individuals $5-$10 per month each, Patreon-style, is a good value. And they definitely won’t have as good of a health insurance plan.
Not to mention that journalism isn’t really a solo gig. The processes, standards, and traditions of an institution are just as much of a factor as good reporters in producing good journalism.
But the "news agency" also provides value. If you have a bunch of journalists working together (i.e., "a newspaper"), then those journalists are freer to take long term risks (e.g. work on big investigative stories). At better newspapers journalists don't need to churn out junk every day; they don't have to worry about doing all of their own marketing, sales and editing; they get to use their colleagues and their colleagues' networks/resources/sources to improve their stories and their reporting. I think substack ("patreon for good journalism") has a good model, but we shouldn't ignore that it has both advantages and disadvantages compared to most news orgs.
In some ways, "Patreon for good journalism" is Substack's pitch. It has its good and bad aspects but no doubt it's a very different monetization model than the ad-driven model.
Kinda. It still tend to encourage frequent posting, which weighs against long form investigative journalism - monthly or yearly subscriptions don't work well when you might work on a piece for over a year.
That, combined with risk, means some of the most interesting stories out there still need patrons with long attention spans.
It's an improvement, but it assumes you already know who the best journalists to follow and support are, and you just need a way to support and hear from them. Curation is a useful service in itself; curation just shouldn't mean you get to extract the vast majority of the value.
I think Substack achieves the goal of Patreon for journalism and has demonstrated market demand for high quality independent writing.
They even run a program that started several months ago where they offloaded risk from promising writers for a year by guaranteeing them a minimum pay in exchange for a larger cut of realized platform for the same year. AIUI several writers like Matt Yglesias et al have done well via this program and built audiences that will give them significant windfalls when their risk-mitigation contracts with Substack expire.
I think the agency of the future is just some sort of partnership between several writers on the platform or other similar platforms that allows you to purchase a group subscription to several writers at a small discount. I imagine that writers who are able to sustain such high levels of revenue may also be able to hire editors etc as necessary along with taking on intern writers to write [approved!] guest posts on their streams.
I'm not too familiar with Substack aside from reading a couple "columns" (can't think of a better noun) from there but is there any reason why it wouldn't be a useful platform for journalism, aside from it being so associated with opinion pieces?
> I'm not too familiar with Substack aside from reading a couple "columns" (can't think of a better noun) from there but is there any reason why it wouldn't be a useful platform for journalism, aside from it being so associated with opinion pieces?
Compared to opinionating, actual journalism is more expensive, is more specialized, takes more time, and often elicits less of the strong emotional reactions that drive "engagement."
Collect information for skilled journalists and work with them. Isn't that kind of how news agencies always operated? In the "Patreon for Journalism" model you just change the number of "agencies" from a dozen per country to a dozen per city. With all the up- and downsides that come with that.
I got so angry with my local paper with their email newsletters. I'm a subscriber. I pay a whopping $9 a month. I shouldn't be emailed newsletters with ads about weird ointments or tonics or other conspiracy theory things "doctor's don't want you to know" right there in line with the major headlines. I get hosting classifieds and taking out ads, but the ads that are placed on the website and in the newsletters are straight out of tabloid rags. They wouldn't ever print ads like this in the actual paper. People would get fired if they ever did.
Have you canceled your subscription, or at least written the editor to let them know how gross this is? If not, that's tacit approval -- or at least tolerance -- of what they're doing.
A couple times on HN there's been an article by a person that took one of those giant b+w LCD displays, married it to small computer, fixed it so it displayed the current front page of the newspaper, and hung it on the wall.
I'd love to have such a thing, though I don't want to spend the time building it. I just want to buy it.
The relevance here, though, is your site has to look attractive, like a real front page of a newspaper, or nobody is going to do this for your site.
I like that idea a lot. Make an instagram account named "Beautiful Newspapers" and post a picture of the framed homepage of some newspaper every day. Sadly I think it would be a parody account in practice.
People will really go to lengths to spend hundreds of dollars on a frame for a website but still complain about paywalls that cost a few dollars to get through.
It seems disingenuous to claim that the commitment level to get through the paywall on many of the newspaper sites we refer to is just "a few dollars" when there have been widespread and numerous reports (even on this very website) of nightmare-inducing subscription cancellation practices.
But your comment misses the point entirely: An organization's home page is its face. They should at least try to make their face look attractive. Even a newspaper stand shows a nice view of above the fold through the window.
The idea that the homepage is a publication's face is woefully outdated. Traffic flows to stories through social media and SEO, distributed entry points that don't touch the homepage. It's not irrelevant, but this is a disproportionate emphasis to place on it.
I never have any trouble reading the news. I never get harassed or blocked. I use a text-only browser.
The problem with online ads and tracking arises because 1. ads are permitted on the network and 2. "tech" companies rely on them to make money. Newspapers are not driving the development of the online ads business. They may be customers, but it is "tech" companies that write the browsers and websites and a gazillion lines of Javascript (collectively, "ad tech") that make the web extremely ad-friendly, at the same time lining "tech" company pockets, while newspapers die on the vine. "Tech" companies facilitate online ads in exchange for money. They sell nothing else. They purport to offer value for "free". This is just bait to lure in ad targets.
Newspapers produce journalism. They hire people to produce journalism. "Tech" companies just sit on the web as middlemen, lapping up user data and marketing their "business" to advertisers. "Tech" companies do not hire people to produce journalism.
This "but look, they are using ads themselves" argument is really getting old. It does not change the message. The journalist is not equal to the media company that employs her. It's like arguing that newspapers cannot write about the newspaper business because they are a newspaper.
If anything, we should be marvelling at how for the past 20 years newspapers routinely drove traffic to the web (away from print) by reporting on it ad nauseum, and how they now are reporting on privacy issues even though they themselves may benefit from using privacy-invasive "ad tech".
And you didn't even touch on the nastiest of the bunch: the "GDPR" dialogs which give you a button "I allow and accept every single piece of tracking" and 600+ individual switches which have a timer of 1 sec on each switch so it would take you hours to opt out of tracking.
Usually you get those over those NYT & Co. articles blasting Googles, Facebooks and others for privacy and tracking.
Most of them seem to allow you to select minimal tracking if you click twice.
Typically there's a button to allow all tracking and one that's non-committal, something like "see my settings". The second one, as you say, brings up 600 switches, but usually the "non-essential" ones are turned off and all you have to do is scroll to the bottom and click "save settings" or something like that.
They are obviously making it more difficult than it has to be, and probably that causes a lot of people to allow all, but once I got the hang of it, it isn't too much trouble.
Yep... and the "by continuing to use this page, you agree...".
"reject all" should be the default option.
But this was messed up horribly from the beginning. Cookies should be disabled (or deleted when closing the tab) by default at the browser side,, with a small button somewhere to enable them for that specific site, and a opup notification to enable them, if the browser detects a login.
This is because it is a prisoner's dilemma: quality news sites would prefer no one to track, but if everyone does, they have to in order to make any money.
You forgot the “stay informed by giving us your email” banner with a guilt trip or hidden “no thanks” button, which pops up if you either scroll down too far or motion towards the back button
So, I'm sorry, I used to have a very high opinion of the NYT, now I just don't. The consequence of their model wasn't better journalism, it was polarization-as-a-service (I didn't invent that term for them). Preaching to the choir means people in the choir very excited to sponsor you, thinking that you are reaching someone who is undecided (they're not).
I agree there's a big problem, but NYT does not seem to be a good example of a solution. If ethical ads resulted in more NYT-like behavior, given our current state of nearly-violent-polarization, I can't say I'm sure it sounds like an improvement. More polarized (and polarizing) news is definitely not what we need.
I have some sincere questions. Can you elaborate on what you mean by polarization as a service? Is this unique to NYT or can the same be said of other media? Does that include social media (where people like to say polarizing echo chambers form)? Are you referring to the article's argument that ad tech promotes click bait which is polarizing? Where do you get your news?
"...unique to NYT"? Not unique to them but they seem to be one of the worst cases, in part because of how far they've fallen but also they seem to be an extreme case.
"include social media"? FB and Twitter definitely also have echo chambers, but they don't really pretend to be otherwise, whereas news sources should be.
"Where do you get your news?" The email newsletter 1440 seems to do a decent job of curating; even if the sources they use are polarized, they are picking out the more informative ones for me so I don't have to dredge through a bunch of ideological preaching.
Every single one of their links is behind a redirection service. It's possibly their own service. But that's not a whole lot of difference. It's kind of ironic that you suggested this in a thread about invasive targeting.
This also precludes me from evaluating the quality of their sources - at least not without clicking through a buttload of redirects. F that. I'll assume they've got something to hide.
There's kind of a swindle going on here. Before, if you were the NYT, and someone wanted to target your audience, they'd have to come to you (and honestly you'd prob get ripped off by the NYT).
Now, you don't need to go to the NYT. NYT's users are tracked, you just have to set up the right targeting on one of the big ad platforms and you reach that same audience for a fraction of the cost.
The other major player here who benefits is Facebook. They are tracking folks across the web, and serving ads based on that data. Another huge issue that isn’t touched on in this article, but is a similar vein.
Reach the same audience, but I imagine ads that are "vouched for" by being located on official NYT property convert far better than the same ads but on unrelated websites but targeted to NYT readers.
I think focusing just on the funding aspect alone is a mistake. A much more glaring issue stares the industry in the face: the people don't really want journalism.
Meaning, they don't have the attention span for it in a world that is overloaded with information. We've been conditioned to snack size news for a long time now. And the trend is accelerating. Look at "stories", "fleets", Tiktok...all inventions for the viewer/reader to require even less effort to consume it. Extremely short form content, preferably even auto playing the next one.
Further, in highly polarized times, few have the critical thinking skills to appreciate high quality journalism that questions their position or beliefs, it's much easier to see your bias confirmed. Nuance is for losers, outrage goes viral.
I think that is not true. People consume "complex" media, series with deep characters and huge arcs, personal and even with whole societys/communities. Journalism is just not willing to go the extra game-of-thrones mile.
Fiction holds people's attention in ways that non-fiction isn't always able to, and that's true more for some people than for others, but works designed specifically to entertain tend to have wider appeal than works designed primarily to inform. Journalists have increasingly tried to present information as entertainment often at the expense of their own message and integrity. I'm not sure more infotainment is the solution.
I agree, I think news media is to fixated on generating blocks of text that they can dump on a page or screen somewhere and forget.
I would like to see news organizations build tools that help us understand and follow some of the most complex issues in our society.
If my local news paper reexamined how they stored and then presented the information they already collect day to day, I would have an essential tool learning about and keeping track of what is going on in the world around me.
The desire to maximize ad revenue drives the decisions to make these platforms more addictive and less substantial. So this is arguably something that's been done to users--not something they wanted. Sure, some people are more interested in substantial and nuanced content than others, but putting the blame on consumers here feels a bit like blaming patients for the opioid epidemic.
Blame is a strong word, it's massive shifts in consumer behavior.
I assume you know news rooms got decimated? When I grew up, every household had a newspaper subscription, costing the equivalent of perhaps 200$ per year.
Virtually all that revenue is gone, replaced by extremely difficult to monetize internet users.
News organizations typically are tiny and poor now, not rich and powerful. The ecosystem of smaller local news organizations nearing extinction.
Ads combined with maximizing views are the last thing to leave the lights on.
Are consumer to blame? No. But they stopped paying for news for sure.
It's not just subscriptions, but the classifieds - which were considered 'rivers of gold'. The business model of the news industry was hollowed out by the internet.
In the paper news era, people were much more likely to read in-depth articles. Not necessarily because people were smarter or more intellectually curious, instead because...well, it was pretty much the only information available for the day.
You utilize the information because you consider it valuable based on it being scarce.
Needless to say, we have the opposite problem now. There's an information overdose and we're extremely selective in what we chose to read. And quite obviously, snack-size wins.
Most people now would find it a massive commitment to spend an hour to read and process a detailed article. The few that do, likely check their phone 10 times during this enormous investment of their time.
I'm not sure why the article segues into talking about SEO content farms. They will continue regardless of whether a publisher chooses to show personalized / invasive ads or not.
My feeling that the worst ads are not ones that track you, but the generic "outbrain" ads that are pure clickbait. Stop those ads please.
SEO content farms definitely aren't going away. In some specific cases, they aren't even that bad. However, they are enabled by the fact that with modern ad tracking you can target the same people there as on a premium site. This causes quality to decrease. Just to give an example, this[1] is how this dynamic affected Recode:
> "I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies ... helped him to track our desirable audience [he'd] begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites"
Their argument is that (a) historically, to reach people interested in cats you would advertise in publications about cats and so (b) that it is now possible to advertise to an NYT reader while they browse another site hurts the NYT.
This is wrong: sites that provide general high-quality journalism do not give a strong signal about the user's interests. If I'm reading an excellent, well researched article about the origins of the fire crisis in the American West, there is no strong commercial tie-in. Highly commercial journalism is in good shape, it's local and in-depth generic reporting that's struggling.
Additionally, advertisers will pay far more to advertise on a prestigious site than to advertise to the same users elsewhere. The article is worried about something that high paying advertisers aren't interested in, because they care about prestige and association, and not just which particular users see things.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
> it's local and in-depth generic reporting that's struggling.
Exactly. And what's killing it is the big news companies like the NYT since they get preferential treatment by social media and search.
If you search for wildfires in idaho or california, you will most likely get links to NYT, WSJ, CBS, NBC, etc articles first instead of local news sources. People aren't going to click or scroll down to get a more accurate or indepth local source.
As more people use search and social media for news, it will be the local news that will suffer as tech caters to the biggest news companies.
I bet an idahoan who searches for wildfires in his state will more likely get an article from the BBC rather than a local source from idaho.
Seems like we are in an era where only the biggest survive in all industries.
There has been a move toward boosting 'authoritative sources' in the tech industry the past few years. Of course after intense pressure from the 'authoritative sources' demanding preferential treatment on tech platforms.
This is a blog from the ceo of youtube, but it isn't just youtube. It's a priority of alphabet, the parent company of youtube, google, etc and all major tech/social media companies - apple, facebook, reddit, etc.
What local news source is more 'authoritative' than the NYT, WSJ, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox News, etc? When the george floyd incident happened, what sources were you presented with on tech platforms? Local news from minnesota or NYT, CNN, BBC, Sky News, etc?
Not wrong, it's actually the only part of the article that's correct. The entire adtech industry has seen a race to the bottom due to 3rd-party cookies and audience-based buying of highly-targeted impressions. Things like retargeting and data leakage are endemic problems and basically the entire reason trade groups like DNC exist.
These "high paying" advertisers don't exist. Campaigns aren't sold or activated like that. There are brand safety and inventory quality issues but "prestige and association" is not as important as you might think, and all media agencies have been focused on backing into the lowest CPM for the last decade.
It's finally being (forcefully) solved through cookie blocking and privacy regulation leading to the rise of first-party data again, however that makes walled gardens like Facebook and Google stronger too at the same time which brings a whole new set of problems.
High paying advertisers definitely exist: they're focused on brand building and they make direct deals with publishers. Prestigious sites often make the majority of their ad revenue from direct deals.
I would also note that by only advertising to those already looking at cat websites, advertises are missing out on those customers that are not giving off strong cat vibes. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that don't think about their cat enough to search for cat stuff, but that still buy cat food every week.
If an advertiser were to run an ad alongside an article about the wild fires, they might reach a wider market. Who knows, they might even convince some folks to get a cat who were not even thinking about it.
p.s: And isn't that what marketing is all about - solving problems you don't even have!
p.p.s: When you know you have a problem you look at a catalog, not ads.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
So with the internet ad market exploding (see Google's 69% growth in ad revenue to over $50B for the QUARTER) but somehow the NYTimes, with their "prestigious site" saw ad revenue DECREASE by 8.5% (1).
Perhaps someone can name a publisher that practices "highly commercial journalism" and "is in good shape" for us? Ideally there'd be 100's for a diverse ecosystem of free press.
If one does not see the threat to journalism one must be well paid not to.
Very little of the NYT is an example of what I was trying to talk about with "highly commercial journalism" -- that is writing about things with a strong tie to commerce. Sites like The Wirecutter or The Points Guy.
The NYT is famous for high quality deep journalism, where reading their site doesn't tell you very much about the visitor, which is the category I described as "struggling".
NYT owns Wirecutter. They paid $30million. That seems pretty low for a site linked to commerce, but if someone offered me 8 digits for one of my sites I'd already be in Hawaii.
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when they don't realize they are completely ignorant about the topic, but instead of learning about it they post ad hominem attack quotes instead"
My very rough and subjective measure for if a site is throwing me to the wolves: If loading ads burdens my cpu, connection, and my brain's blood vessel carrying capacity, then that site is selling me out.
I pay to subscribe to the NYT. Once in awhile, like with a new laptop, I'll visit without blocking. After an indecent interval, I turn blocking back on.
I never minded advertisements in print. I read them, or I didn't.
We hope to expand into a larger audience in the future. Because we don’t do user targeting, we have to focus to start to ensure we’re serving quality, focused ads. We have a lot of room to grow in the dev market, but hope to expand some day.
Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control?
All the ad tracking in the world isn't going to save your company when the generation who grew up thinking your websites are just a bunch of cookie and begging banners don't have the act of going to your site inbuilt in their habits.