
Why media layoffs keep happening - spzx
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1088503510184927233.html
======
anticodon
I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I
see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country
where I currently live) I see lots of distortion, omissions of very important
news that don't fit the current media paradigm, or even obvious lies.

I don't see a point in spending my money and my time to read fake news. I've
just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better.

Social networks and Internet in general are much worse in this respect.
There's immense amount of bots/government agents (from every government in the
world) spreading all kinds of fake information. Then real people start
reposting that. You still can do fact-checking but if you'd fact-check
everything, it would require as much time as a full-time job. So I'm planning
on stopping reading the social networks also because in most social networks
there's no way of blocking reposts or filtering out the politics-related
messages.

~~~
untog
"all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole
thing drowns in irony.

I'm not trying to suggest that the industry is not without problems, but the
stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not
"fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens
they issue a correction. They also do themselves no favours (IMO) by
publishing absurd opinion columns alongside actual news in a way that devalues
the overall proposition. And yes, they have biases, because there is no such
thing as an entirely unbiased news report - that's why it is in your benefit
to maintain a varied news diet from different sources. None of this means they
are all "fake news".

I'm not particularly wedded to today's media outlets. If something new is
going to come along and blow them out of the water, bring it on. But I'm yet
to see an alternative that improves on what they offer. All I see is
amateurishness (Reddit crowd sourcing the wrong identity for terrorists
multiple times) and all-out propaganda efforts.

~~~
nostromo
It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-
existing narratives they want to tell — and they are always on the lookout for
facts to back up those narratives. Facts outside of the narrative are simply
passed over.

I wouldn’t call this fake news, but it’s also not good journalism.

And yes, Fox News and MSNBC have been doing this for years. But this form of
bias now seems to permeate everything, including formerly trusted titans like
NPR and the NYT.

~~~
solarwind
This. I used to think "fake news" was far-right baloney, but I've come to lose
all faith in the journalistic integrity of the New York Times and WaPo. This
recent piece for the NYT was a bizarrely flattering story about an anti-gay,
anti-Semitic hate group is a good example. They have a narrative to push and
will push it with any available facts and information.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/black-hebrew-
israelite...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/black-hebrew-israelites-
covington-catholic.html)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often
knowingly dishonest.

See e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter)

...Which was 95 years ago.

The difference now that is the rhetoric is often more obviously slanted and
more likely to be nakedly inflammatory.

The 50s/60s/70s had more of a tradition of restrained debate. But the
politeness was always superficial. Politics was at least as murderous and
corrupt as it is now. But the more measured tone, and the superficial respect
for critique and analysis, made it appear more civilised.

Now the tone is more likely to be extreme, which creates the illusion that
obviously manipulative "fake news" is more the rule than the exception - and
that this is historically different, when in fact it isn't at all.

~~~
weberc2
> There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often
> knowingly dishonest.

Perhaps, but surely the media used to be _less_ biased, and it’s worth
striving to get back to that place.

~~~
r3bl
When?

~~~
weberc2
In my lifetime less the last decade. For instance, during the Iraq war, it
wasn't uncommon for NYT or other publications to take a moderate right-wing
perspective. Now that's virtually unheard of outside of the opinion section,
and even there it's only token "conservatives" (quotes because "conservative"
means a lot of different things to different people in the era of Trump).

------
retox
The distinguishing factor for 'real' journalists over internet posters was
that they could be trusted, but they have single-handedly destroyed their own
credibility over the last few years. The glut of online magazines, newspapers
etc lead to the rise of click-bait just to make ends meet, which in turn lead
to the sensationalism we see played out now.

There is good journalism going on, but it doesn't pay for these huge media
companies that they have become.

~~~
pnw_hazor
We thought they could be trusted. Back when it was almost impossible to fact
check them or seek alternative sources.

Any given source have always been inaccurate or biased to one degree or
another.

~~~
iguy
Yes, this is true.

But there was also a business model in providing facts, when facts were hard
to get. Now that they are a commodity, the business model seems to be in
providing opinions.

~~~
pnw_hazor
More "Shouting" and hot takes for sure. But the bias driven inaccuracies were
commonplace. As well as plenty of malice driven inaccuracies.

------
sdoering
Regardless of the discussion on "fake news" or "not so fake news" or
"trustworthy news" I found the ration of signal vs. noise for my personal life
to just not justify news consume.

If I was consuming about 30 pieces of news per day (and that is not so much
actually) I would consume nearly 11.000 news pieces per year.

I was asking myself: "How many of the news pieces I consumed did actually
influence any relevant decision I made?"

The answer in that given year was three, max. four. So of nearly 11.000 data
points only 3 or 4 were actionable enough to influence a more or less
important decision?

This was the reason I switched from a "just in case" mindset (I need to know
this, just in case it might become important - also called "FOMO: Fear of
missing out") to a "just in time" mindset. If something is of any particular
interest to me - I start to investigate the context. To then be able to come
to a valid decision.

~~~
Faark
I emphasize with not having a good idea on what and how much news to consume.
Especially developing news... just reading the summary afterwards seems way
less time consuming. A digital counterpart to a weekly newspapers, doing the
selecting, would be nice. I haven't found a convenient way to do that, yet.
Would love recommendations.

But we cannot just ignore news at all... there must be some minimum time to
invest. Democracy can only work if your choice in the voting booth is actually
informed. For that, journalism seems to be the best of the bad options we
have. Most comments in this thread painting it as worthless or worse is
downright scary.

~~~
sdoering
> Democracy can only work if your choice in the voting booth is actually
> informed.

I am totally with you on that. But I also believe, that I am able to inform me
"just in time". When I read about the least years, read the party programs,
read the proposals and the essayists discussing them.

I do this in the weeks leading up to an election. And - we are imho lucky to
have this in Germany - am able to use an online tool to check all party
programs against the things important to me in a kind of "who fits best" tool.
This is done by an independent organisation and is nowadays kind of an
institution by itself.

------
rhacker
Back when I was growing up, we got the newspaper. It was kinda something you
just expected to be available. Then my parents one day just told the paper boy
to stop delivering. My dad was just getting into Yahoo news and getting his
wall street fix online. There was no longer a need for a paper.

The product was not the paper but just this entire morning experience - coffee
and newspaper. And the idea that different family members would grab different
sections. It was totally incredible.

Would I ever get a newspaper subscription? Nah, but I think there's a lot
missing from the good ole days of it.

~~~
flukus
> The product was not the paper but just this entire morning experience -
> coffee and newspaper. And the idea that different family members would grab
> different sections. It was totally incredible.

I don't think it's even the experience that mattered. What newspapers never
realized was that they're in the distribution business, people were paying
them to print out their content and deliver, they were never really paying for
the content itself. The internet made the distribution business obsolete and
now they have nothing to offer.

We saw the same with the music business, it wasn't the songs we were paying
for, it was for them to distribute the music in a format that's convenient.

Now we're seeing the same with online video, everyone keeps trying to make
proprietary content to get subscribers but people just want a dumb pipe to
deliver everything.

~~~
gaius
_What newspapers never realized was that they 're in the distribution
business, people were paying them to print out their content and deliver, they
were never really paying for the content itself_

Traditionally in newspapers advertisers paid for the paper, ink etc and the
act of buying the paper paid for the journalism and original content.

------
avivo
The OP is accurate—but it's missing two more critical reasons why newspapers
are dying.

1) Ad fraud. It reduces the value of advertising.
[https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advert...](https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advertisers-
lose-billions-of-dollars-to-ad-fraud.html) "The Interactive Advertising Bureau
(IAB) estimates online ad fraud costs advertisers $8.2 billion annually." And
I've heard numbers alleged much higher; as much as 30% of revenue for a news
site...

2) User tracking. If you have the choice of paying X for an ad for a user on
the NYT site, or (1/3)X for the same user on some clickbait site, which do you
do? (particularly as an advertising middleman attempting to maximize
impressions per $). This type of arbitrage—sometimes unwittingly coming from
user data from the higher quality sites—could significantly reduce their
revenue making them unprofitable.

------
pp19dd
There's a lot of shortsightedness here and I'm compelled to react to it (why
didn't the article cover the origin and nuances of yellow journalism and draw
some parallels?) But I'll pose a question to illustrate all these opinions in
hopes of adding something useful to the discussion.

How does a story get written?

\- Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and paraphrases it
(very often)

\- Someone reads a story from a legitimate news source and opines on it
(often)

\- Someone reads a press release written by someone else and paraphrases it
(often, esp in science)

\- Someone documents crowd behavior (trending reddit) and reports on it (very
very often since it's an easy kill with assurance of results)

\- Citizen or a whistleblower calls a newsroom and provides a tip to be
investigated (rare)

\- Agency reporter digs through a dataset (provided by a gubmit agency) and
derives a story out of it (rare)

\- Agency reporter compiles a dataset (scrapes, etc) and derives a story out
of it (rarer)

\- Gumshoe reporter, on their regular beat, catches a story and reports on it
(takes time)

Of all of those methods, only the last two have elements of first-hand fact
collecting and checking, and that kind of original reporting costs a boatload
of money to sustain. Like to the tune of $20 a story by some meter, which a
reasonable reader would never pay for to read a single story.

That mind-blowing cost was traditionally covered by print advertising - online
advertising never became a significant fraction before brick and mortar news
agencies started crumbling. If you consider what I have said, I think you'll
find that tons of popular stories are cheaply produced but not cheaply broken.

In other words, traditional news agencies and new-age ad-infested freelance
cabbage leaf sites both regurgitate stories and story ideas from others.
Sometimes a regurgitated story has supplemental reporting, but it's never that
significant.

When you run into a story ask yourself what the sources are and how they came
to be written by those reporters and try to classify it in the crude pantheon
I've constructed. I think you'll find that many stories that reach you weren't
broken by the place you read them on.

~~~
Eridrus
I think we need to seek new models for investigative journalism, not new
funding sources for an old model. I think journalism as a profession doesn't
make a tonne of sense, and the same function could be pushed out to the wider
community, with newspapers functioning similarly to scientific journals,
trying to add some amount of quality control. Many are already relying more
heavily on Op-Eds/contributed content, but I think they need to cast a wider
net, so that it attracts actual experts, and not just the natural self-
promoters.

------
threwawasy1228
One thing that I always find in these discussions is that a lot of people who
think that you can trust 'real' news outlets to accurately report anything
have never been on the interviewed side of the table.

I have never once been interviewed or had a project or event I've been
involved with featured in a media outlet that wasn't grossly distorted to the
point of comedy. I've had my age reported incorrectly, my title reported
incorrectly, quotes made up that are literally the opposite of what I said to
the reporter, reporters taking things out of context. And for this sort of
thing to be coming up on fairly minor everyday reporting?

Having experienced this in my life so many times I never saw any news on any
topic the same way again. When you imagine this kind of massive distortion on
something minor, it is impossible for me to fathom how distorted big stories
actually are.

~~~
GenerocUsername
This. Its similar to watching a tv show about something you personally know
very well. The errors, generalizations, narrative and even the facts can be so
far off you hope no one takes it serious. But people who do not know the
subject matter take the presentation of it as fact.

Imagine how many doctors cringe watching E.R. or House.

News is this, but for real life events.

~~~
CM30
Don't have to imagine, there's a whole YouTube channel based around an actual
medical doctor reacting to medical shows like E.R and House:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QHWhjbe5fGJEPz3sVb6nw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QHWhjbe5fGJEPz3sVb6nw)

There's also a very similar one showing a lawyer reacting to courtroom
procedurals/shows:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpa-
Zb0ZcQjTCPP1Dx_1M8Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpa-Zb0ZcQjTCPP1Dx_1M8Q)

------
amanzi
On a side note... Twitter seems like an odd choice for long-form writing. The
author had to delete and re-post some of the tweets to get them back into the
right order. What a nightmare.

~~~
Semaphor
Twitter is not just an odd choice, but a horrible one. TheReaderApp makes the
experience bad instead of horrible, which in all fairness, is a step up.

------
olivermarks
'This is a stab to the heart of democratic accountability.' Not convinced
about this - the internet is a fabulous source of information. Most
'newspapers' run AP service international 'stories' and local news, most of
which you'll find a lot quicker online

~~~
pryelluw
It is also a fabulous source of cheap disinformation. For every well
researched journalism piece, there are thousands of image based memes that
influence people's opinion on any subject. That's why social media sites and
search companies need to be regulated. Until there is no downside to
publishing and marketing disinformation, every organization (legal or
otherwise) will have the ability to do so.

~~~
olivermarks
I disagree with this: free speech is sacrosanct in the free world. 'Well
researched journalism pieces' are all too often written by salaried employees
of organizations with a mission to push a political slant and/or agenda. The
idea that the material published by these businesses is 'fair and balanced'
has never been true as the long a sordid history of yellow journalism proves.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism)
There is no shortage of good investigative writers but a dearth of editors who
will publish their work. That material is now largely to be found online
rather than under corporate 'news' mastheads.

------
hn_throwaway_99
I think this article's arguments are extremely weak. It brings out numerous
examples of how "things you thought killed newspapers", like the Internet,
Craigslist, etc., really weren't the root causes, but instead things like
"corporate greed" and "lack of innovation" were.

Yet there are no convincing examples of how the news business would have done
any better if these corporations were somehow less greedy or more innovative.
There was a fundamental technology shift that made the newspaper product much
less unique or defendable, and that would have happened no matter what the
newspapers did.

~~~
dredmorbius
David Simon's "The Audacity of Despair".

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw)

------
bashwizard
When the big mainstream media are pushing fake news to the left and right on
an almost daily basis and getting caught doing it, people tend to look
elsewhere for their news.

~~~
robertrobot
I was having this thought this morning in the gym, they had fox news blaring
and I thought, who still believes this nonsense? The US should bring back the
FCC fairness doctrine pertaining to TV and radio news channels,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)

------
Scoundreller
Meanwhile, a Salt Lake City TV and Radio company, KSL, grudgingly decided to
get into online classifieds in 2000, and now dominates their local market,
with 100 people working on the product:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ksl-c...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ksl-
craigslist-classifieds/521916/)

We saw the same thing at RIM/Blackberry. BBM was a flagship IM product, but
kept restricted to their devices. The strategy worked, until it didn't, and
the company is still worth less than half of what it could have been:
Whatsapp.

------
acslater00
This is ridiculous. "Greed" didn't kill newspapers. You think the classified
business would be any better today off if newspapers had artificially held ad.
and sub. prices down in the 80s and 90s? $0 is $0, and that's what people will
pay for classifieds now.

"Hedge Funds", everyone's favorite bogeyman. "Lack of Innovation", as if the
Chicago Tribune was going to save itself by opening a geocities page in 1996.

The 'news' business is a zombie because it sells a product that is basically
free to produce and free to consume. That's it! You don't really need a
newsroom to give you "the news" anymore, and so the market for a product whose
main feature is a professional, standing writing staff that simply yesterday's
events no longer meaningfully exists. No amount of investment in technology by
media companies in the 90s was going to do anything but _hasten_ that shift.

But, there's plenty of great media out there. You can sell good writing if it
is actually good; you can monetize your opinions if people will actually pay
attention to them; you can sell your access if you actually have it; these are
media business models with staying power. They might not be billion-dollar
properties and they might not report "the news" per se but they provide value
and they will be fine. My household subscribes to The Athletic, Foreign
Affairs, Tablet, The New Yorker, and The Information, to name a few. All
great.

~~~
rainonmoon
The real issue is the pervasive attitude in this thread, which you've also
exhibited, that news is "basically free to produce." It isn't, and it's
absolutely incredible to me how many otherwise intelligent people can't track
just how much of what they read online traces back to original reporting. If
this cost was passed to the reader, it would be absurd, and so it was
historically majorly subsidised by wealthy families and the advertising
business. The incentives have since changed; those media owners now see it's
more profitable not to report the news but increasingly use these channels
disingenuously.

Here's the great joke: if we would hold them to account for this, we could do
something about it. But nobody does. Nobody thinks to blame the ownership
(unless they're an established boogeyman like Murdoch.) Instead, as you can
see everywhere in this thread, the blame is put on journalists, who now have
to pick battles against corporate interest to get ANYTHING of value over the
line, under ridiculous deadlines, with zero job security. What's being lost
here isn't "good writing" or the ability to "monetize opinions" \-- it's the
institutional protection and resources required to hold power accountable,
examine and reflect on trends, and uncover essential facts about our world.

Okay, we can point to examples where institutions have gotten it wrong, and
they deserve holding to account for those instances too. But there are just as
many and more where journalists have put their health, families, jobs, and
lives at risk to ensure people aren't so easily hoodwinked by money and
authority. If all someone wants to read is Medium blogs for the rest of their
lives, fine, crack a beer and enjoy the end of journalism. But especially for
a community that prides itself on values like intellectualism, open
communication, and bettering the world, it's incredibly disheartening every
time a thread like this appears on HN and the response is "maybe newspapers
shouldn't be so bad then!" This is an information crisis that is being
celebrated by the people who should be fighting it the hardest.

~~~
dexen
_> [news isn't] free to produce_

Software also isn't free to produce, and yet here we are - in a world
dominated by freely available software. It runs on every computer, because
it's either "good enough", or in some cases, outright better quality and
supported for longer, than paid-for software.

And yet Microsoft and friends are alive and thriving in the ecosystem with
free competing software. How come? They re-invented themselves into billing
for related hardware, services & guarantees.

We are still waiting for the top-heavy media - including the _missing link_
"online newspapers" media like HuffPo and WaPo - to adjust to the current
market situation. If they can't, or won't, too bad.

The new-style online media, typically a one-man operation spanning several
channels, are already well established and turning profit. By publishing _for
free_ news that costed real money to produce.

~~~
zbentley
I don't think the analogy holds. Organization-backed news is not to
free/single-publisher news as corporate software is to free software.

Free, single-producer news is, if we want to try to adapt this analogy
(perhaps past the breaking point) more like free software _that only has a
single developer /maintainer_. We all know what those projects can be like.
There are some diamonds in the rough, but overwhelmingly they're hyper-
specific, difficult to modify, hard to question (file issues with), and often
of dubious quality.

Edit: The analogy also falls apart: I'm not sure how going from single-
maintainer -> multiple contributors has a parallel in the blogging/tweeting
world that is doable for many writers. Some blogs have informal editorial
boards and groups of publishers who edit each other, but most multi-writer
blogs I've seen are just separate threads that happen to appear in the same
place.

------
rb808
Yes I subscribe to my local newspaper. Most days I don't even read it, but
there are a few reporters there that report on the local city politicians. If
these reporters don't write, I don't think anyone will be keeping an eye on
these yokel city politicians.

------
gnicholas
> _Google and FB have something print newspapers used to have: a reliable,
> captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for, because they know
> people will be there._

Interesting observation, which raises the question: who will own the eyeballs
next?

~~~
Uhhrrr
AR

------
antisthenes
The media in the 21st century are simply what the textile workers were at some
point in the 19th century.

News reporting has an unprecedented level of efficiency now, that a single
website can serve hundreds of thousands of _global_ visitors in the span of
minutes. Compare this to the traditional methods of distributing news, such as
a printed newspaper.

How long would it take to distribute the news via newspaper to, say, a million
of readers spread out throughout the whole world, even if you used airplanes
and fast trucks? The efficiency improvement here is on the scale of 2 orders
of magnitude, at the minimum, perhaps more.

You can have 3 people in the pipeline now report an event to millions of
people (e.g. 1 reporter at the physical location of the event, the editor at
the news org. HQ, and, let's say a tech person to make sure it all works and
gets published correctly). 100 years ago this would be impossible. Hell, even
30 years ago it would be near impossible.

------
RickJWagner
Is anyone in the publishing business reading this? If so, I've got a personal
story to share.

I love cars. I'm a gearhead and I just love cars. I subscribe to several car
magazines. Except I don't get Car & Driver anymore, and my subscription to
Motor Trend is going to go unrenewed. Why?

In both cases, the car mags started running political commentary. If it were
balanced, I wouldn't like it but wouldn't quit reading. But it's not
balanced-- both mags express support for one side of the political spectrum,
disdain for the other.

I can't justify paying for that. So I wrote (not for publication) notes to the
editors, telling them I'd quit subscribing if they didn't stick to the proper
wheelhouse. Neither editor replied. That's enough for me, I'm not going to pay
for that kind of content.

I think ESPN has undergone a similar cycle. I believe their subscriber base is
greatly diminished, yet they seem to continue on with a politicized agenda.

I just can't understand why the business owners allow this to continue. It
seems counter-productive to me.

~~~
raleigh_user
Have experienced the same. Canceled subscriptions. Hell I use to ALWAYS watch
ESPN. Now I never do. It’s sad because the product use to be so good. Now
everyone in sports wants to be a politician and talk about the very stuff im
watching espn to escape!

~~~
shard972
At least men's razors are still non-political /s

------
rland
So, advertiser dollars in the "attention economy" have been redirected from
newspapers to ad-tech.

I wonder, who is a better steward of this money, and the control it entails?
Tech has been getting a bad rep recently; but there was a lot of crap in the
print newspapers from the old days, too.

~~~
rland
Immediately after writing that, I realized that "tech" is kind of a bad label
for our Googles and Facebooks. "Attention companies" is perhaps a more
suitable term, because attention is the product they're selling.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Information technoloy" is largely media. Media are information technology.

Google and Facebook are media companies.

------
conductr
> There is money out there. Google and FB have something print newspapers used
> to have: a reliable, captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for,
> because they know people will be there

Last paragraph acknowledged demand for the product of local reporting has
fallen way off and I’d argue it would have even if newspaper owners operated
on supermarket margins. It’s just a consumer trend, consumption of sustenance
in media is down because frivolous media is now readily available

------
robomartin
Insightful article from Politico in 2017.

[https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-
bub...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-
journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048)

------
ctdonath
Those media people laid off are in the incredibly enviable position of being
able to literally start a new high-demand news outlet overnight. There's
enough across the industry's spectrum who know each other that they could,
starting with just their cell phones, launch a business filling an industry
void: reporting objective news.

------
RandomInteger4
"And who’s moving in right now to pick through the scraps? Hedge funds.
They’ve destroyed several papers, and are working their way through some
biggies like the Denver Post."

Uh, wat? Am I mistaken, or does that not make sense? Since when are hedge
funds involved in corporate plundering? I think he's getting "hedge fund"
confused with private equity and venture capital, no?

That being said, is it that the venture capital firms are picking through the
scraps or that these web media companies are not grown organically, which is
why we're seeing massive layoffs. They operate mostly on venture capital and
haven't been making a profit ... at least not directly; who knows what stories
have been generated for the sake of some other business dealings elsewhere; a
sort of accounting trick where losses are incurred in one area for the sake of
profit in another area.

Conspiratorial? Yeah, but not unlikely.

EDIT: To add on to this, lately these brands have been tarnished, so perhaps
one could speculate that those wielding the venture capital are downsizing to
work on new brands going into the 2020 election season; brands not tainted by
a loss of trust.

------
gerbilly
I am not in the newspaper industry, but close to it you could say.

Do you have any idea how many people have worked on a print story before it
got printed?

It's not just the reporter, but fact checkers, copy editors, editors,
sometimes lawyers.

You can say what you will about the physical print medium being obsolete now
that we have the internet, _but_ can anyone argue that your average online
site is going to invest as much manpower in checking over their stories before
publishing?

------
robertrobot
No wonder, we must bring back the FCC fair doctrine act,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)

------
arcaster
Vice News is considered "journalism". Let that sink in...

------
simplecomplex
Small newsrooms have been replaced by Reddit, blogs, and a nexus of updates
from Facebook, mailing lists, and instant messaging.

News isn’t just what gets printed on paper. There’s nothing about printing
information on paper that somehow makes it special.

~~~
bloomer
Reddit, blogs, Facebook and the rest have not broken any important stories.
Actual news is broken by paid investigative reporters.

~~~
stale2002
This is absolutely not true. Places like reddit break news all the time.

At least in the subjects that I follow, those being gaming and livestreaming,
I see news stories break on reddit, because of something that someone posted
in the comment section, or as a top level original content post form a user
created clip, with extreme frequency!

Reddit is argueable the _best_ place to find developing news for these
specific subjects, at least.

And it only hits the "mainstream" media hours and hours after some rando had
just made a comment about it, and posted a video link.

~~~
matt4077
“Games and live-streaming” isn’t news.

------
yesplorer
Here's the thing. If you tell me traditional print newspapers are dying
because of falling subscription and display ad numbers, I get it.

But online news portals laying off is, in my opinion, more of a sign of
incompetence and less of falling subscriptions.

These companies like HuffPo and BuzzFeed came around when the problems facing
traditional newspapers were clear as day.

Indeed, they directly contributed to the problem of falling subscription of
newspapers with their chase for eyeballs as probably their sole metric for
success.

The onus lied on them to scale their business as their revenue scaled. Don't
hire expensive offices and hundreds of people just to churn out listicles and
a little bit of journalism a la Buzzfeed.

Grow with the growth in your revenue and metric growth in key areas.

Nothing has fundamentally changed in the news industry establishment of
Buzzfeed so they can't cry of falling subscription.

Regardless of amount of VC money you receive, businesses should have
profitability and sustainability in mind from day one instead of "let's build
they will come".

Of course chasing growth with revenue taking a backseat worked for Google or
Facebook but for every Facebook/Google, there are thousands of companies,
employee lives and millions of dollars wasted on such an unsustainable model.

~~~
_red
I find it odd timing that all of sudden, two paychecks into the government
shutdown, suddenly multiple online news sites are being shuttered.

Is it possible these sites were surviving on deep-state money?

~~~
chowells
No. "deep state" is a conspiracy fantasy used by some voters to blame someone
else for the obvious consequences of voting for people and policies which
destroy things they were relying on to survive. It's not possible that it's
responsible for anything, since it doesn't exist.

