
News Websites Are Dumpster Fires - bradley_taunt
https://bradleytaunt.com/2019/05/29/news-websites-are-dumpster-fires/
======
corodra
I found my own solution a while back. I started reading newspapers. The up to
the minute need for news is total and utter bullshit for like 95% of the
population. Being a day behind on news is literally no different to me than
knowing within an hour of it happening.

Someone is going to mention politics, I know it. Let me beat you to it. What
have you done same day when a politician you hated did something? Of
consequence of course. Angry twating on twitter doesn’t count.

Newspapers are fucking awesome. Easy to read. Easy as hell to skim. Headlines
are 95% accurate to their article. Ads don’t track you and in truth, aren’t
that lame in the paper compared to online. Granted I mostly read WSJ and
sometimes NYTimes. But never online. Only reason I check CNN online is to see
if there’s a catastrophe. Like when Notre Dame became an unholy gate to hell.
Other than that, the news is pretty useless to begin with.

~~~
richjdsmith
I couldn't agree more, except instead of newspapers, I got a couple magazine
subscriptions (Maclean's & Bloomberg). I love it.

I quit caring about what happened today, and instead I get my news a week
later. I take the magazine (only one, I browse the other over the week) to a
coffee shop on Saturday morning, have a couple coffees and read that weeks
magazine. By not constantly being 'up to date' outside of occasionally using
Twitter, I've found I'm a lot less stressed. I'd definitely recommend this to
anyone.

~~~
corodra
Oh, I totally agree to the magazine route as well. I actually like some of the
geopolitics ones. Even of views I don't agree with. They're at least
thoughtful essays.

------
dscpls
Do we have any evidence that these issues are really the causes of people
consuming news elsewhere?

\- Clickbait headings with misleading information

Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it
distasteful, do people actually resist clicking?

\- Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present

What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable
it to read the thing they were willing to click for?

\- Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts

Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web
users?

\- Taking massive performance hits (specifically on mobile due to huge
JavaScript blocks)

Maybe getting closer to what users actually care about

\- Pop-up ads

Again - any evidence this puts normal internet users off so much they'd stop
using a site? There must be a reason MEDIUM.COM and every single recipe blog
pops up their newsletter subscription as intrusively as possible.

\- Fixed headers or footers which leads to harder readability / accidental
element interactions

Here's again an actual deterrent - if someone physically can't use a site,
they might actually give up.

\---

I'm not saying news sites are not dumpster fires, but I'm a techie and love a
good boycott.

I'd question the premise of this article - it seems to be very much from a
techie privacy-active (not just concerned, but actually willing to take
action) perspective which I suspect does not represent the majority of the
internet.

I suspect that if people are actually using news sites less, it's because of
much simpler reasons...like that Google intercepts a user's attempt to read
news linking to their favourite publications.

~~~
asdff
What good papers have all this nonsense these days? I am subscribed to NYT and
LA times, I read the occasional article from the atlantic or new yorker, and
I've seen none of this. Good content is behind paywalls for a reason. It isn't
there solely to draw in your eyes for ads, its there just to be good and
informative content on its own right, and maybe if its good enough you'd be
willing to chip in a little for the salaries of the full time staff that put
that good content together for you. LA times and NYT are a dollar a week a
piece, a drop in the bucket and well worth it imo.

Maybe your local news 5 or something small market like that is a dumpster
fire, but publications that have shifted to the online subscription model are
absolutely fine as they bank on their quality alone (unless my ad blocking has
hid all this from me).

~~~
danielscrubs
Journalist rarely see two sides of a coin and are rarely educated in what they
write about. NYT is no exception. You can find professionals on medium though
with excellent articles.

~~~
asdff
Most of the time they will interview an expert in the field who will help them
sort the story if they are out of their depth.

~~~
danielscrubs
I think the results speak for themselves.

------
Dotnaught
"Partner with brands to create sponsored articles"

Are you f*ing kidding? Sponsored articles are ads. The ad industry-driven
conflation of editorial and ads is a major reason the media industry is
suffering. Many publishers have become indistinguishable from one another
thanks to their reliance on ad tech content – "native content" in Facebook
parlance and the false hope of social media-driven traffic. In so doing,
they've helped empower Google and Facebook and surrendered their own brand
power, becoming purveyors of generic sponsored slurry.

The original poster is not wrong about the problems with tracker-laden news
sites. But he hasn't given much thought to solutions.

"I don’t have a fix all band-aid to replace current revenue streams for news
websites..."

Do let us know when you figure it out. A lot of people have been trying to do
so without success.

Subscriptions...great for the publishers with huge audiences, not so much for
smaller news sites. How many news subscriptions will people pay for after they
sign on for the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal?
There's a limit to the monthly bleed people will tolerate.

And users donations are a bandage not a business model. People rely on
donations for unexpected medical expenses in the US – that's a sign of system
failure not a model for sustainability.

If an answer is found, it will probably have to do with weaning people off
social media. Or we'll just have to enjoy our cat videos while investigative
journalism withers.

~~~
repolfx
_great for the publishers with huge audiences, not so much for smaller news
sites. How many news subscriptions will people pay for after they sign on for
the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal?_

Well, does there need to be more than three? I'm not sure where the assumption
came from that news is broken if we're not all consuming 15 different outlets
every day. In the past it was normal for people to subscribe to just one news
outlet! Three is pretty good going, and not going to break the bank for many
readers.

~~~
chrisco255
The number of people subscribing to all 3 of those publications has to be
vanishingly small. But to your point: yes of course there needs to be more
than 3. None of the publications mentioned cover local news. There's also the
whole competition being a good thing. Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It
dies in uniformity.

------
nostalgk
I largely find that the majority of news sources really aren't worth the
adware tithe they enforce. Hell, these days I often just go to Wikipedia and
read the summary if an event is that important.

The only other news I really care about is local, and I'm lucky to have local
news sites that are pretty much plain text.

~~~
olivermarks
The problem here is that Wikipedia is written by a tiny minority of people
these days. (77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of
Wikipedia editors). [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-
editors-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-
elite-diversity-foundation)

'News' has always been problematic because the publishing business exists to
sell advertising, track you and push the news organization owner agendas.

Finding trustworthy reliable information has never been more difficult despite
the tsunamai of information at our fingertips online

~~~
ekianjo
> 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia
> editors

That's still a lot more writers than your regular newspaper in terms of
consumers:writers ratio.

~~~
BlueTemplar
Is it?

------
bovermyer
Part of the difficulty here is that the function newspapers are intended to
serve _isn 't_ to generate profits, nor even to be cost-effective.

Newspapers are meant to be a source of accurate, current information on topics
that are relevant to the continued health and progress of society.

This costs a lot of time and money. The government can't fund newspapers
without the perception of state bias. Where should the resources necessary to
achieve the above goal come from?

~~~
chunkyslink
There is no difficulty.

The BBC news.bbc.co.uk and theguardian.co.uk

are both examples of well funded, non biased news sources.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
The Guardian has taken a clear turn towards a clickbait approach in the last
several years. Much of the newspaper is now as as sensationalist as a tabloid,
although The Guardian has taken the opposite side of the culture wars from
most of them as its niche.

I still find some quality reporting in The Guardian, but it too is clearly
facing the same financial pressures as other newspapers.

~~~
jdietrich
I'd happily pay for membership of The Guardian if there was an option to block
all the opinion pieces. The actual _news_ part of their operation seems to
make a good-faith effort to report impartially, but it's being pushed out by
an increasing quantity of rabble-rousing opinion. I'd be more than willing to
support the former, but I couldn't in good conscience support the latter.

------
apo
The chumbox ([https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-
intern...](https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-
chum/)) used to be a good barometer of the spamminess of a site's content.

It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It
turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the
chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming
difficult.

It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around
to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume.

Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even
clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann
amnesia effect finally wearing off:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-
Mann_amnesia_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect)

~~~
Semaphor
We trialed a service that was supposed to earn us a lot more ad money
(yieldlove.com). Well, revenue did go up. But while I already complained about
the horrible quality of those ads (surfing everywhere else with Adblock), the
scammy ads that were shown were too much even for my boss. We went back to
just using normal AdSense.

------
jfengel
The article (and comments) focus on the sites, but I believe we should look at
it from the consumer end. Consumer behavior is far harder to change, but it's
more important. The news web sites could just up and vanish for all I care.

The question is, what do consumers need and how do we get it to them? The news
web sites can go ahead and flame all the dumpsters they want. They're
entertainment, and might as well be superhero movies or Angry Birds. "News" is
just the hook for novelty.

It's consumer behavior that has become quite terrible. Some of it is the
realization that most news _doesn 't_ matter. It's far away and of little
direct meaning to you. That's why the news sites need to dress it up to make
it seem interesting. There are things that might be relevant, but they don't
happen every 24 hours, and they require a lot of background to understand
correctly.

The politics are relevant in that you do in fact get to make a choice, though
our politics have become more about tribalism than good choices. Voters have
never been good about absorbing news and deciding, but mass media have made
them easier than ever to distract and derail.

We'd like to think a good news site would fix that, but you can't force the
horse to drink. Consumers don't want it. And I'd say that doesn't even matter,
except that they're making some terrible choices based on it. The best I can
think of is for each of us to model better behavior, which means shunning bad
news and thoughtfully discussing real news, but I don't honestly believe that
will succeed. I would love a better answer.

~~~
freehunter
>It's far away and of little direct meaning to you.

That's exactly why I believe small local news is far more important than
national or world news. It's important to know what's going on in the broader
world, but in terms of actual impact to your daily life, a road closure in
your neighborhood is more impactful than (and I'm just taking a headline from
the front of CNN.com right now) "Former Belgian king submits DNA in paternity
case". For politics, your local city council voting to allow or ban AirBnb or
Uber or marijuana businesses has more direct meaning for you than (another
CNN.com headline) "Analysis: Trump and Biden escalate their fight".

Especially when it comes to crime reporting... you should know about shootings
in your area, or car crashes or kidnappings etc. Things that could actually
happen to you or impact your life. But me sitting in Michigan reading about
stabbings in Japan or a sheriff's deputy being shot in Texas, or a 4 year old
boy attacked by a mountain lion in San Diego... what do I do with that
information? What is the expected outcome of me reading that story? When I am
done reading it, what should I do about it?

It's feartainment, fear as an entertainment. I don't need to know it, but when
I read it I become afraid and over time I become addicted to fear, and so I
check CNN more to see if there is more things I need to be afraid of. It
overflows into our local life too, we become addicted to fear and we know
others are addicted to fear too, so if we share the most fear-inducing stories
we become more popular as people become addicted to the fear we're spreading.

------
ekianjo
> These anti-consumer practices will only stop when these organizations start
> losing money.

Nope, I'd wage they will double-down on it even if they start losing money.
That's a well known spiral: don't expect anyone but the most useless employees
to remain until the end.

------
gregwtmtno
I won't look at any page that has autoplaying (even silent) video. It's too
distracting and it's not worth the effort to click the close button.

------
mlang23
In addition to the reasons listed in the article, I also notice (as someone
relying on accessibility) that the overall readability of news sites has gone
down dramatically in the recent years, especially considering accessibility.
With all this pop up ads and "we need you to accept cookies" nonsense, it has
become increasingly hard to just read a news bite. I notice in my own
behaviour, that I less regularily click on links that go to news sites, since
I dont want to waste my time unnecessaryil.

------
auiya
The solution is to hit F9 to enable reader mode using a modern browser. If it
can't render, I close the tab. There are extensions I'm sure which force
reader mode on selective lists of particularly egregious sites.

~~~
badfrog
What is reader mode? F9 doesn't do anything for me in Chrome.

~~~
swashboon
Firefox

~~~
Theodores
Safari too.

"Modern browsers". A pejorative term.

------
circa
At first, I read it quickly as "NEW websites are dumpster fires." Which is
also sometimes true. For lack of a better term. I hate the "tablet catered"
website look on a desktop. A lot of the news sites look this way too. I'm not
really sure how else to describe it.

------
vilaca
I have a mobile phone with a 4.5" screen and since most news websites have
chosen to have an huge fixed header and footer in every page I can only read 1
or at most 2 lines of text.

~~~
asdff
Throw them in pocket and enjoy your 4.5" of small font text from edge to edge.
I can fit sometimes two whole paragraphs on the screen of my SE.

------
mrtksn
The following business model works well in Turkey: Make your news business
loss centre, make money from government contracts that you are awarded in
exchange of positive news coverage of the politicians in power. A phone
conversation of businessmen discussing creating a fund for that purpose leaked
a few years ago, they are now the biggest government contractors in the world.

The outlets that do not depend heavily on government contract handouts utilize
all the tactics criticised in the article. Few more "prestigious" or
"independent" publications try the donation and subscription models with
limited success.

This time the democracy suffers heavily, government accountability is no more.

~~~
driverdan
That's pretty dystopian. Governments shouldn't be commissioning news.

~~~
mrtksn
Yes, it is.

Some try to do some journalism without stepping on government's toes too much,
others are pure propaganda.

The outlets that are functioning like government propaganda channels have very
low ratings, so they are not very good at directing public opinion so they
updated the business model to include unvoluntary ad purchases on the
absolutely pro-gov media, i.e. if you do not buy ads from these publications
they make your life harder even in the private sector. Someone at a popular
Turkish social media platform tried to compile a list of companies that
advertise on these extremely pro-gov media outlets, the list was taken down by
a court order.

Turkey sunk deep in the democracy and press freedom indexes. That's what
happens when you cannot have a profitable media business.

------
boltzmannbrain
News websites, if you're going to have a monthly limit of n articles (NYT,
HBR, etc.), let me first have the option of continuing to read after loading
the page. Too many times following some link (from Hacker News, Twitter, etc.)
leads to an article I don't want to read but counts against my tiny monthly
allowance.

~~~
asdff
open them in pocket and never fret again.

------
FerretFred
> _But They Need Ad Revenue_

"Local" online news in a lot of the UK has all but died a death. We have a
couple of big news outlets that basically publish a little local news in
practically no depth and then fill the rest with clickbait "news" items of no
value other than to generate clicks. There seem to be practically no real
journalists and readers are "invited to send in their pictures" \- without
payment of course. Hopefully these dumpster files will die out soon..

~~~
lol768
Completely agree. JPIMedia seems to be one of the big players, most of their
content is just from "the i newspaper". There's a little bit of local content,
and it's all locked behind a "turn off your ad-blocker or else" script.

Newsquest is another. Poorly written journalism which usually looks as if it
hasn't been proof-read.

------
ankit219
News needs to evolve. Right now, we are not frustrated with news websites, but
with the way they try to make money, and put obstacles in the way of users
getting what they want - news. Infact, for the most users, they are so used to
website that they wont even look at the part which displays ads. And there is
no point showing ads to the regular readers - unless the ad inventory buyers
are unlimited - as the same ad loses relevance over time. Right now, the focus
of the news sites is to get as many users as possible (not just views) without
focusing on the core users.

My feeling is that it wont be a tweak in the business model but more in the
way news is offered. One often talked about ideal case is that ads become so
relevant that they are not intrusive, but that is yet to take scale, and is
costly even for the ones who try to do it.

There are good websites which get enough money to live on donation and do
produce the content worthy of it. Then there are different ways of consuming
news which have worked. Like Inshorts - news in 60 words, mostly a jist
without clickbait - which works really well in India, and can survive on ad
model around relevant content.

Last thing I feel is bringing an offline model online, which for some reason
these websites did away with. Newspapers mostly worked because everyone had an
opinion after reading the news. News sites dont like community and moderation
and prefer to have them on social media, but that is where the opportunity
lies. Make room for discussion, get users engaged, let the author explain his
point, and then you dont have to show too many ads on the user's first visit.
Maybe this is an extension of twitter, or maybe it gets dirty (hence
moderation), I think it will work given how it works now on reddit and even
whatsapp groups.

------
keithnz
The local newspaper here (nzherald.co.nz) is trying to introduce a premium
level which you pay for.... but because they still want search engines to see
the content, they just deliver all the premium content to the browser and try
to hide it.... 5 minutes later, he presto, a plugin that shows the premium
content. ublock origin, and there are no ads.... they are really going to have
to find a better model.

~~~
kevsim
You’d think a short extract would be enough for SEO and then hide the full
article behind the paywall server side.

~~~
Nasrudith
Keyword/snippet SEO spamming for garbage ad pages was a thing that got cracked
down on hard for good reason. Some included even a few relevant seeming
paragraphs before heading into more "seeds". I wouldn't be surprised if any
snippetting hit their ranking hard.

------
tootie
I love [https://npr.org](https://npr.org) or, even better
[https://text.npr.org](https://text.npr.org)

~~~
asdff
Oh man that text only site is glorious good lord. Skim all the news in 2
seconds flat vs. carousel of images, scrolling, and things laid out in no
particular order at all.

------
yenwel
Newspapers are already losing boatloads of money since the ad market collapsed
because of the monopoly facebook and google have.

------
crazygringo
Sorry, but body text of _28px?_ The first 5 lines have a font size of _42px?_

The design of the site is a dumpster fire. You shouldn't have to zoom to 67%
just to make the article actually readable.

~~~
Andrex
> The design of the site is a dumpster fire.

Hyperbole can be used to good effect sometimes, but this isn't one of them.

This is a decently-designed blog which loads quickly but has text that's a
little too large. It is not a dumpster fire, especially compared to the news
sites the blog post was calling out.

------
dgudkov
The news media industry is a weird market. The media are trying to extract
constantly decreasing money from people with constantly increasing addiction
(overconsumption) to internet news by constantly decreasing quality of content
and increasing the use of shady tricks.

Both sides (media and consumers) are in denial. The media deny that most of
them produce shit content which is not worth a penny and the world would be
better without them. The consumers deny the addiction.

I personally don't want to be on either side of this market.

------
S_A_P
The quality of the internet is inversely proportional of the number of people
with the job of "digital marketing/social media strategist".

------
espeed
And thus the Google News Initiative, its journalism outreach program and $300M
Digital News Fund [1], which launched last year...

* Gooole News Initiative [https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com](https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com)

* Google Digital News Fund [https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/](https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/)

* Google News Lab (2017) [https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...](https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/news-lab-year-in-review/)

* Subscribe with Google (2018) [https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...](https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/introducing-subscribe-google/)

* The Google News Initiative, One Year In (2019) [https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...](https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/google-news-initiative-one-year/)

[1] "Google announces a $300M ‘Google News Initiative’ (though this isn’t
about giving out grants directly to newsrooms, like it does in Europe)"
[https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-
announces-a-300m-go...](https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/google-
announces-a-300m-google-news-initiative-though-this-isnt-about-giving-out-
grants-directly-to-newsrooms-like-it-does-in-europe/)

~~~
efa
Ugh. Google of course has to continue to own every bit of information on the
web. Them deciding what is misinformeation is also scary.

~~~
espeed
That's not what this is. Market forces will sort this mess out. There are
external initiatives under way, but it will take time to transition. Until
that happens, something has to be done to keep them afloat if they are meant
to survive. Look at it this way, the news industry has been turned upside down
since the Internet came to be. It's been like a polar shift. Now people go to
Google to search for news, and the old-media models don't survive because the
old revenue flows right through. Google benefits from keeping them alive --
sure it could do nothing and let them die, but that would be like killing the
host -- an environmental disaster and PR catastrophe -- if all the sources
went away there would be no more news for people to google. And no one wins in
that scenario.

Unless humanity is certain that's what it wants to happen, it's probably
prudent to save this potentially critical leg from decay. Google has the means
and if it's in everyone's interest for the greater good, this is a way to keep
one of its leg from falling off until market forces have time to sort the mess
out, something new emerges, and everyone has time to transition. In the old
days, the government would supply the subsidy to buy the time to transition,
but now market forces have aligned. Private industry has evolved and has the
means -- it's willing and able. Maybe this is how a healthy, well-functioning
system is supposed to work. Maybe this is a glimpse of capitalism at its
finest. Maybe it's progress, maybe it's not.

Who knows how this will play out? It's uncharted territory. A new chapter in
the American experiment. Whatever happens, we will see.

------
sound1
I think the 'news' have become a commodity in this information age. For
example, people want to get the time but they can use their smartphone instead
of paying for a wristwatch. Now a days there are so many channels to get news
it will be increasingly difficult for news outlets to monetize news, IMO,
unless there is some unique selling point (eg. live sports).

------
whalabi
Agreed, I set up a news site recently, currently focusing on the tech
industry. [1]

Very deliberately didn't include anything I personally found annoying (I'm
pretty easy to annoy with bad UX)

Absolutely despise chonky sticky headers/footers.

The problem is, these kinds of measures _work_. As in, if I put a footer that
pops up as you scroll down reminding readers to share or subscribe, I'd have
more of both. (I can dig up the evidence if required. Off the top of my head
there's a presentation from someone like buzzfeed or upworthy that showed
double digit percentage improvements with mildly annoying practices.)

I disagree with the author's contention that using those methods mean you
fail. Publishers use them because they work.

[1] e.g. [https://unlikekinds.com/article/uber-code-
text](https://unlikekinds.com/article/uber-code-text)

------
bryanlarsen
Blendle.com works fairly well for news consumption. It's the microtransaction
model, but they've got it fairly streamlined, they have most of the big names
signed up and their daily summary is nice.

~~~
fancyfish
Seconding this, I tried Blendle after seeing it mentioned here a year ago. The
UI is minimalist with no ads, and the publisher gets paid per article. As
someone who doesn't want to pay for separate full subscriptions to NYTimes,
WaPo, and other papers because I don't voraciously read enough articles each
day to make it worth the cost, Blendle has been a good alternative.

------
stickfigure
I'm surprised the article didn't mention the quick hack that improves the UX
on pretty much every news site: Disable javascript.

The chrome extension I use is one button that blocks JS on the current domain.
The page reloads in a flash and is replaced by an easy-to-read block of text.
Other websites are unaffected.

I am by no means a JS hater; I even tend to like SPAs on the web. It's just
that these news sites seem to _want_ us to run with JS disabled. It's really a
better browsing experience.

------
throwawaylolx
>not to mention most browsers have announced that future updates will be
blocking ads by default.

Maybe, but _most users_ are using a browser that will not be blocking ads by
default anytime soon.

------
duxup
>Switch over to a monthly subscription plan (if no one pays for it maybe you
weren’t as useful of a source as you thought)

That reminds me of the whole situation where Radiohead sold an album online
direct to users.

Someone wrote an article about how other bands could do the same: Step 1: Be
Radiohead.

>Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user
experience of course)

I have trouble understanding how that isn't an equally or worse idea when
compared to the existing problems.

------
empath75
I thought that news+ would help turn this around, but the experience of
reading a magazine on the iPhone is laughably terrible. It’s just a pdf of the
print edition!

~~~
auiya
A PDF of the print edition would be an improvement at least, no?

~~~
empath75
Not when it has small type and you can’t just scroll to read the article.

------
sureaboutthis
Maybe off topic but I hope everyone gets my point.

My soon to be niece-in-law (she's engaged to my nephew) has a journalism
degree from a well-known university in that field. She's now a news producer
for a large television station.

Last week, I caught her on camera reviewing dog toys with her dog and the best
blenders during the morning news.

Things have stooped to that level.

------
dbg31415
> Switch over to a monthly subscription plan (if no one pays for it maybe you
> weren’t as useful of a source as you thought)

You know what happens when you pay for subscriptions? They still hit you with
ads and perpetual reminders to turn ad blockers off. I'm a paying user of
about 10 different sites, and most all of them still remind me to turn off my
ad blocker (or don't work with an ad blocker running) even after I've signed
in.

News websites are dumpster fires because it's a race to the bottom. Let's say
NYT is a good news source... they'll still lose eyesballs to DIPSHITPOST who
doesn't spend time validating their stories before publishing them. And so you
say DIPSHITPOST will go under? That's fine, there's always another
IDIOTDAILYTIMES out there.

Tools like Facebook and Reddit and HackerNews are the sources we all go to to
find the content, some are curated better than others, but at the end of the
the day whoever gets to market first tends to be the winner. And NYT and other
"good" sources will inevitably fail because fast, good, or cheap -- pick at
most 2.

------
wishrider
I'm developing a very new approach to tackle this problem with my project
[https://wishpage.tv/](https://wishpage.tv/) Its still moving but a request
based approach to news might work for a small niche.

------
altitudinous
This is captain obvious stuff. You don't get a quality journalism experience
unless someone is paying. So - a govt funded news website - e.g. the BBC - or
a subscriber driven website. I subscribe to my local newspaper which has a
great news website.

------
smacktoward
It’s a bad sign when your “what’s the solution?” section starts off by
admitting you don’t have one.

Not to be deterred by this, though, the piece suggests a couple of shopworn
ideas anyway:

 _> Switch over to a monthly subscription plan_

For this to work you have to put up a paywall, and according to HN
conventional wisdom the only thing worse than ads are paywalls, otherwise
known as History’s Greatest Monster.

 _> Partner with brands to create sponsored articles_

Which is a nicer way of saying “just get out of the news business and go into
marketing.”

 _> Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions_

So, pledge drives! Hope you like tote bags. Public broadcasting already does
this, of course; it doesn’t come near to covering all their expenses.

Look, here’s the thing. It’s true, news websites _are_ dumpster fires! But
they’re dumpster fires _for a reason_ , namely that nobody has yet come up
with a reliable business model that allows them to _not_ be dumpster fires.
They’re dumpster fires because that’s what happens when the only choices
available are all bad ones.

If you’ve got an actual way to cut this knot, lots of people in the news
business would be very interested in hearing it. But just telling them to
_stop sucking so hard, man_ isn’t particularly helpful.

~~~
jonheller
Yes, I found this to be a shallow article with a clickbait headline (oddly,
one of the things he criticizes in this very article) without anything new.

Surprised to see it so highly voted on Hacker News.

------
PaulHoule
That blog post is a site for sore eyes. My immediate complaint was "the fonts
are too large" viewing it on my big screen computer, then I remembered to
scale it with Ctrl-Minus.

------
0x5002
It's not just news. It's ever website, with some notable exceptions, such as
HN (minimal, curated, informative headlines, no bloat) or some private blogs
(as the one linked - 2.2KB, 0 trackers, yet questionable headlines).

Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies)
give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads,
and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data,
and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based
blocking) already blocked _42%_ of the website's content. Not to mention a
plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter
popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with
a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators.

And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20%
blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to
call "the stage before clickbait" \- the ones addressing the user directly,
presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest
("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or
headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and
wonderful again").

Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the
content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows
up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is
not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once
in a while.

One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the
WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful,
traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are
their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by
bothering me with paywalls.

------
ThinkBeat
Kinda clickbaity headline, criticizing click bait headlines

~~~
pferde
Is it still a clickbait if it's true?

------
wstuartcl
Clicked on the post and read the first "reason":

\- Clickbait headings ...

Acknowledged the hypocrisy and closed the tab.

------
sizzle
The annoying auto playing videos and bright red BREAKING NEWS alert spam are
also UX fails

------
astazangasta
I have a solution: bundle. I will never pay the NYTimes, WSJ ot Washington
Post for a digital subscription. I don't read these things intentionally; i
read them because someone links me to them. To then be told i need to pay to
read just makes me turn away in disgust, because my experience of the
internet, fast, fluid, has suddenly been interrupted. Shall i go get my credit
card, fill in some forms, remember a login etc. just to read some shitty link?
Fuck no.

This much is obvious and the paywall model these people are using is obviously
terrible as a result. It will never work because a website is not the same as
a print newspaper. Case in point: i have a subscription to several print
newspapers (the FT and the Economist). But i don't read either online, even
though i could, because the experience is too painful. I am not going to dig
around for separate credentials for each online publication i want to read.

The solution is obvious, and has already been employed to great effect by
streaming media companies. A media bundle company offers access to 50 or 60
news sites. You get one login; you pay $8 a month or thereabouts. In return
you can read the Washington Post, WSJ etc., and each media company gets a
payout based on impressions (or better yet, as a share of total consumption,
e.g. if i read 2 WSJ and 10 ny times, WSJ gets $6 * 2/12 and NYT gets $6 *
10/12.

This gives me what i want: freedom to browse without having to negotiate each
link i click. It gives the media companies a revenue stream from satisfied
readers. The media pass company gets a fee for a valuable service. Win win
win.

All that is required is for someone (hint, hint, HN) to successfully negotiate
a content agreement for their media pass with a few big players. If you got
WSJ, WP, NYT to sign up that would probably make this fly.

------
agentofoblivion
The author doesn’t seem to have any self-awareness of the total irony of this
article.

------
georgehayduke
This has been a long slow process. I thought there would be some business
model innovation before now, but it apart from subscriptions it doesn't seem
like anyone has cracked it.

Subscriptions are a solid business model, and I think it's important for fund
serious newspapers / investigative journalism. However, by putting them behind
a paywall, these important stories may no longer have the impact they once
did.

------
Shaddox
I'm currently contracting for a rather large news outlet and I had a talk with
the VP of Engineering about why every media outlet is like this and he shed
some light on me.

The print edition is losing money for them and business decided to start
giving them away for free to increase brand awareness.

The paywalled stuff is making them modest revenue, definitely not enough to
make a living for now but they're still experimenting with the model.

The ads and user tracking is where the real money is. The bidding ad network
stuff is okayish, but it seems the big money is in the sponsored articles and
in skins (custom stylesheet designed for a specific brand). The former two
seem to make even seven digit figures per contract for them.

Looking at the backlog and their style of organizing work you can obviously
tell that the users actually visiting the site are treated as second hand
citizens while their partners are kings.

This leads me to the conclusion that this is what people might not really
want, but it's what they got used to. Finding a sustainable high quality news
media business model is an interesting problem worthy of a startup I'd say.

------
Funes-
>[...] the news industry has become a cesspool of anti-consumer and blackhat
practices that has eroded trust for the sake of money.

You could say something quite similar about capitalism as a whole, in the
sense that it looks like those practices are what any industry within that
particular economic system ends up devolving into, for the sake of monetary
growth and under the pretext of "being competitive" or "cost-effective." I
guess it would also apply to economic liberalism in general.

Here's my opinion: news outlets are not necessary. Their content is mostly
irrelevant, biased, and dependent on a very harmful revenue model--
advertisements. Uncensorable, decentralized platforms, on the other hand,
could provide communities with a means to inform others, express opinions and
denounce any issue at hand, if well-designed.

------
redleggedfrog
Ctrl-0. Ctrl-0?! Back button...

------
return1
> If your business is solely dependent on tracking scripts, tricking users
> with clickbait titles and using archaic ads - then you’re destined to fail
> regardless.

If that were true, they had 2 decades to fail and they didn't. People like to
read the news.

~~~
jnty
News websites are failing every day. Even Buzzfeed had big layoffs a few
months ago. If your revenue model relies on making your website increasingly
less user-friendly, it might have kept your head above water for longer than
some competitors, but it can't be sustainable.

~~~
return1
The real reason they are failing is not user-unfriendliness or tracking
though. It's the intense competition and the broadening of the publisher base
by 1000x with the advent of the internet, and the natural supply-demand
adjustment to very low rates of return from advertising. This leads them to
increase the advertising load in order to make ends meet, hence using more
trackers.

------
jasonlotito
Blog post complaining about news sites using clickbait headlines uses
clickbait headline to attract views.

> I could write up an entire essay about all the shady practices that most
> news sites are guilty of, but here are just a few top level issues:

Proceeds with a random list of complaints you could apply to most sites in
general.

> using archaic ads

I don't know about you, but archaic ads didn't track me, use up many
resources, and were just fine.

> Partner with brands to create sponsored articles (without ruining the user
> experience of course)

Article writer then offers a suggestion that has been tried in the past, and
something people frequently complain about news companies doing.

> Place a larger emphasis on user donations or promotions

Promotions? What are "promotions?" Promoting a product? You want news agencies
to place a larger emphasis on advertising?

And all three suggestions literally fly in the face of:

> Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present

All these things are "advertising" so the user would be blocked from reading.

> News outlets should not be spamming their main revenue supply (the users) or
> misleading people with false information.

Like you did? Your headline is as much a lie as many of the headlines you seem
to hate on news sites.

