
Digital Media: What Went Wrong - dsr12
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/business/media/buzzfeed-digital-media-wrong.html
======
exogeny
I mean, is it really this difficult?

Cost of production plummeted to zero, vastly increasing supply. That increase
of supply combined with additional sophistication of users meant that ads
became exponentially less valuable. Getting desperate, they hitched their
wagon on Facebook - and anyone who has lived through any era of the Internet
knows that you never build your house on someone else's land.

Most of them raised way, way, way too much as if they were tech plays and
could scale like it. Vox only gets around it because they don't pay 90% of
their writers.

~~~
quaunaut
> Vox only gets around it because they don't pay 90% of their writers.

Is this true? Where can I learn more?

~~~
exogeny
It's unequivocally true in the case of SBNation, which is their most
trafficked property. It follows the model originally brought to market by
Bleacher Report, which used unpaid "contributors" creating low-grade SEO chum
content in exchange for the nebulous concept of exposure.

See more: [https://deadspin.com/how-sb-nation-profits-off-an-army-of-
ex...](https://deadspin.com/how-sb-nation-profits-off-an-army-of-exploited-
workers-1797653841)

------
alexashka
In my mind - if you treat news as entertainment, you're finished.

There are just too many entertaining things to do, that are free or almost
free.

The only news I'm interested in surviving, is intelligent, well educated
people, talking to domain experts.

HackerNews is a good example - I'm far more interested in getting the
occasional insight from a quality comment, than anything that's actually
posted on here. If only I didn't have to sift through 100 comments to
encounter 1 gem - that should be the journalist.

Trouble is - people view journalism as a job, it's not. Having education and
life experience in a field, combined with decent journalism, is a job.
Journalism on it's own is just not interesting - being a wordsmith is not more
valuable than actually knowing what you're talking about.

~~~
jancsika
> Journalism on it's own is just not interesting - being a wordsmith is not
> more valuable than actually knowing what you're talking about.

Knowing what you're talking about and informing the public are two different
things. Both are necessary parts of journalism, with neither sufficient alone
to fulfill the vital role of the press as a check on the three branches of
government.

------
remarkEon
>For years, BuzzFeed seemed to be leading the journalism industry toward a
brave new future.

Serious question: did anyone honestly believe this to be true?

~~~
RandallBrown
Buzzfeed's actual journalism (not the goofy lists and quizzes) is pretty good.
Buzzfeed news also posts all their data for their articles on Github.
[https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews](https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews)

~~~
djohnston
they didn't start with actual journalism though. they started with complete
trash, and then used that clickbait revenue to fund actual investigative
journalism

~~~
kyriee
Well, that was always the plan. A little bit like the classified and sports
sections were paying for that Bagdad bureau.

------
Nasrudith
Really from what I could tell the news was always largely pretty crappy just
judging by all of the stupid moral panics they were pushing along with the
well known phenomenon that anyone who knew their field knew they were getting
reporting on it deeply wrong and not just in a 'only knowledge of the basics'
way.

The reason why bloggers could compete with them wasn't because bloggers were
inherently awesome (although there are a few high quality writers) but because
they were essentially crap.

The internet made fact checking easier and they didn't take the opportunity
instead just keeping their pipeline of crap going.

------
mudil
Legacy media such as NYT and WSJ are refusing to properly cover the real issue
of surveillance capitalism duopoly of Google and Facebook. When Candy Crush
knows your hometown and your hobbies, there is no need to serve ads on your
local newspaper's website and there is no need for hobby websites, or
professional sites, or smart sites for kids. So we have no content creation on
internet outside of WSJ, NYT, Youtube, etc. And there are no investments in
media. And there is no money in media. In turn we have a static internet and
privacy scandals and fake news on a few swampy platforms. It's really bad for
democracy and for us. And it's bad for startups.

~~~
Analemma_
Half the comments on HN lately are complaining that the NYT covers Facebook
_too much_ and that they’re reading it less as a result.

~~~
sametmax
Personnally, I think it's too little too late.

They should have told people that 10 years ago, when the IT community started
to feel it would go this way, and begun to warn everybody about it.

That's what journalist is about.

Now, they are just repeating what's in everybody's mind.

But society doesn't need parots as journalists. Surprise, we have social
medias for that. It needs analysts, reporters, people that help them decrypt
the world better.

They completly failed at decrypting the IT world for the last 2 decades, and
only started writting about things when a lot of people already understood it
and paid the price.

Basically, they don't do their job, and complain we are not supporting them
anymore. Sorry but not sorry.

~~~
Angostura
> They should have told people that 10 years ago, when the IT community
> started to feel it would go this way, and begun to warn everybody about it.

10 years ago, you say?

[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html)

[https://www.chron.com/sports/longhorns/article/Longhorn-s-
ex...](https://www.chron.com/sports/longhorns/article/Longhorn-s-expulsion-
shows-need-for-caution-on-1774465.php)

[https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/does-google-flu-
tr...](https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/does-google-flu-trends-
raises-new-privacy-risks/)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7196803.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7196803.stm)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7375772.s...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7375772.stm)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16ping.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16ping.html)

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=887486...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88748673)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/exclusive-the-next-facebook-
privac...](https://www.cnet.com/news/exclusive-the-next-facebook-privacy-
scandal/)

Journalists were writing about privacy concerns in mainstream media quite a
lot.

~~~
sametmax
You are right. I have to think about this more.

