
We Never Paid for Journalism - foxfired
https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism
======
jawns
Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago
because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and
hope it finds a viable business model.

I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind.

There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising
market hasn't dried up.

So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?

Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many
more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to
advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on
Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and
other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise
on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So
newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way
they didn't have to do in previous generations.

But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really
get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every
view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to
realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment
marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't
have the metrics to prove it.

What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not
substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog --
but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments,
like search.

So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a
battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off
advertising elsewhere.

~~~
Nextgrid
As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed
to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy.

No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a
reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the
advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal
liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake.

This means I can be confident an ad in a magazine won't be an outright scam
and I can somewhat trust it (sure, it's still trying to sell me something that
I wouldn't have otherwise bought, but if it's relevant and I'm confident it's
not a scam or low quality crap, then why not?).

The same does not apply to digital advertising where there's plenty of shit,
no human actually reviews the ads and given the ads are very targeted there's
little chance anyone else sees the ad (in a magazine, everyone sees it, so an
expert in the field can speak up, unlike for a targeted ad where only the
people in the targeting criteria - who often lack the knowledge to make an
informed decision - see the ad).

The other advantage of the lack of tracking is that I get exposed to ads
outside of my daily workflow. I work in IT, and if I were to browse without ad
blockers (cancer blockers as I call them) I would just see IT or business-
related ads all over the place. I don't want to see those - I already know
what products I need for IT and have the knowledge & experience to do my own
research. On the other hand, a print ad which knows nothing about me might
show me an ad for cat food - I want that; I know nothing about the subject and
am willing to trust the magazine's reputation behind it.

~~~
sacrificedcapon
I hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam".
It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need.

Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think.

[http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable
the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of
the platform to begin with. The easier you are to be duped.

~~~
friendlybus
How do you find the stuff you need then? Go to the big product box in the sky?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade
shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything
that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about
products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering
sales tactics).

\--

[0] - See this subthread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886).

~~~
friendlybus
I agree with the dislike for over-extended advertising techniques online. But
those are all ads, as such don't really answer my challenge to the parent
poster. Ads on some fundamental level provide a service to the recipient.

~~~
nitrogen
I feel it's a bit disingenuous on the part of advertisers to claim that any
commercial information source is an ad. This basically makes any discussion
impossible because if everything is an ad then nothing is. It's a dirty trick
of the ad industry.

did the creator of the X pay a third party to present X? is X an essential
part of its context? is the recipient of X seeking X itself or something else?

------
vearwhershuh
I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through
both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader
for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market
dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is
almost never the idea.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
That's a somewhat conspiratorial take. While there are publishers that heavy-
handedly tell their newsrooms what to write (i. e. Murdoch), the vast majority
does not.

Many publishers are typical corporations, with a large number of shareholders,
none of which get to even talk to the journalists.

Even among those owned by individual billionaires, the evidence is lacking.
The Washington Post, for example, has broken quite a few (often negative)
stories about Amazon. The Seattle Times recently broke much of the 737-MAX
scandal, even though they are faily dependent on Boeing. The New York Times
doesn't even write much about Mexico, let alone topics related to Carlos
Slim's financial interests.

The motivation to own these reputable papers seems to be far easier to explain
as a status thing. Kinda like NFL teams, but for the more intellectual
billionaires.

~~~
RaiseProfits
As laid out in Manufacturing Consent, the understanding is implicit, not
explicit. I would classify this as ideological, not conspiratorial.

------
blueyes
While the 50 cents per edition that newspapers charged was not enough to cover
their costs, it sent a signal to advertisers that they were getting a certain
type of eyeball. An eyeball that had 50 disposable cents per day to buy
packaged news in a local market. That 50 cents was an important signal.
Newspapers would find other ways of getting those same eyeballs, by striking
deals with hotels and airlines and essentially supplying papers at a deep
discount, but making it up with the fees they could charge to advertisers
based on their access to travelers, who have a lot more than 50 cents to
spend. Some publications took it one step further: they covered business and
their readers could put the subscription on their corporate cards as a
business expense. Personally, it cost them nothing. This is the strategy of
the WSJ, the FT, and what the NYT would like to be with DealBook, etc.

~~~
ninth_ant
Is that the 50c really signalling disposable income? Or just that it signalled
that the newspapers were being read by humans and not just sitting in a pile
somewhere?

To my intuition 50c per day doesn’t signal a useful amount of disposable
income even in 2006 dollars.

~~~
ggggtez
This is more than a Netflix subscription. And people still share their
subscriptions with friends and family to reduce costs.

$0.50 a day is real money, even today.

------
sudosteph
> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189
> papers daily.

Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back
then.

I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by
leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before
Amazon.

I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently
sized product and how much abuse a newspaper can take, but still wonder if any
papers took a stab at delivering other print products before the internet era.

~~~
jagged-chisel
The other major distribution network already visited every addressable
location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service.

Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' \- it was printed this morning,
and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper
routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper
delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, weighing more, for
various customers.

~~~
jbattle
I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a
distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around
neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles
shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable
workers.

Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers
have been honed to a razor's edge

~~~
akgerber
Outrage about child labor in the bicycle delivery business is well over a
century old, and for good reason [0].

Newspaper delivery, on the other hand, was a short before-school/after-school
job (back when evening papers were a thing) that didn't particularly interfere
with schoolwork, and had already been displaced by adults in cars in the 90s
after our society ceded street space as automobile death zones instead of
treating it as public space that children could be expected to ride bikes
along safely[1].

[0] [https://mashable.com/2016/07/20/bike-
messengers/](https://mashable.com/2016/07/20/bike-messengers/) [1] there was
plenty of resistance, but ultimately American society evolved into a
technological dystopia where we permitted a new technology to be introduced to
public spaces in spite of massive safety issues, ultimately overwhelming
traditional uses [https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/10/street-safety-
am...](https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/10/street-safety-american-
history-dutch-cities-traffic-protests/599566/)

------
jldugger
This is a somewhat obvious take on the decline of paper journalism. Yes, you
paid for that newspaper / magazine, but the majority of money is in the ads
space. Even that payment? A screening tool for advertisers -- if you don't
read the paper or more importantly see the ads, you'll presumably cancel and
save the money.

There was a tweetstorm by some journalism prof I can't recall that was
basically saying newspapers killed themselves, by consolidation, mergers and
over-reliance on classified ads and news-by-wire. By the time Yahoo! news came
along started publishing AP news wire feeds, and Craigslist allowed free
listings, they had already cost optimized away local news they'd need to
compete against new entrants. Perhaps someone will find that twitter thread
for me.

~~~
jldugger
Found it!

[https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184...](https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233)

A few choice quotes:

> For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or
> think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot
> more going on.

> Classified ads were a damn boondoggle. $500 in a mid-metro to place a car
> ad. The more expensive your item, the more you got charged. No wonder people
> rebelled the minute they were offered the ability to do it for free. Newmark
> didn’t kill classifieds; news publisher greed did.

> Profit margins for companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder were commonly
> around 30-40%.

> So chains started gobbling up papers all over the country in the ‘80s and
> ‘90s. They took on debt to do this because with 40% margins, there wasn’t
> much downside in that model.

------
excalibur
> Today, the advertisers see's exactly how many times their ads have been
> viewed, and pay accordingly. The rise of Ad blockers did not improve the
> situation.

I eschewed ad blockers until around 2016, when the (relatively mainstream)
sites I was frequenting started getting hit with a lot of malicious ads. I'm
happy to support content I enjoy, but not at the expense of my own security.

~~~
CrazyStat
I started strongly encouraging my family and friends to use adblockers around
the same time, when nytimes.com was hit by a malvertising campaign.

I understand the economic model of free access with advertising, but I'm not
going to put my computer and data at risk for it. Allowing ads to include
executable code was idiotic.

------
jld
It used to be that the "profit" from advertisement paid for journalists to
write stories that would get you to look at them.

Now the profit from ads largely goes to engineers to build products for the
web, (and shareholders of tech companies).

Both journalism and web stuff provide public good, but we need to figure out
how to replace the revenue that financed journalism. The public was getting it
for "free" before, and when it moved online we continued to want to get it for
free, but the advertising model did not survive the transition.

~~~
RhysU
What would it look like to "engineer" journalism?

------
Reedx
Journalism is in such a disastrous state, I feel like/hope there's a growing
appetite for a source that is of genuinely high quality and has an
uncompromising approach.

No ads, no clickbait, no partisan nonsense, no dark patterns, no hit pieces,
no mixing of news and opinion.

Just uncompromisingly focused fact-based journalism (of course there will
always be some bias and mistakes, but there's a lot you can do to mitigate
these things).

I wonder if there are enough people that would pay $X/mo for this to make it
viable. I'd happily pay at least $20/mo.

~~~
ghaff
You pay about $20/month today for a digital subscription for one of the global
brands like the New York Times, Economist, etc. which still have ads to a
greater or lesser degree.

They're doing kinda/sorta OK with digital subscriptions but basically
journalism is expensive to produce.

------
davidw
I subscribe to:

* [https://www.economist.com/](https://www.economist.com/) \- good coverage of various subjects worldwide.

* [https://www.washingtonpost.com/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/) \- good coverage of US politics

* [https://www.bendbulletin.com/](https://www.bendbulletin.com/) \- because I live here and they're the only ones that always have someone at things like city council meetings, county commissioner meetings and the like.

------
bynkman
The rise of Craigslist is one factor. But I'm surprised that nobody is talking
about local advertisers vs national. National business and websites are more
likely to advertise on a (local) news website, compared to your local
business. For example, twenty years ago a local mom and pop pizza joint would
be apt to advertise in a newspaper, due to a captive local audience. But
today, they'd be less likely to advertise on a local newspaper website. So
there goes that revenue. And you're not going to find them pushing ads to the
Huffington post.

Also the rise of online business review websites (Yelp, Google Reviews, Trip
Advisor, ect) are now more useful and specifically targeted to an audience
looking for local eats. (And also killed the Yellowpages.)

------
ravenstine
The actual content begins in the 4th paragraph. The first part made my eyes
glaze over.

~~~
Nasrudith
Reminds me of the one snark that said "style" is because the journalists
really want to be novelists but can't finish a full length one or get
published so they slip it into their day job.

In all seriousness it seems like an attempt to fill a minimum word count
without much research or math like say percentages of revenue by ads vs
consumer sales over time.

------
imgabe
I was going to buy a physical newspaper recently thinking it would make for
cheap packing material, only to find that the Sunday edition of the NY Times
is like $6 now. It's not as fat as it used to be either it seems.

~~~
excalibur
Someone keeps leaving physical papers in my driveway despite me never asking
them to or subscribing to anything. They usually go directly in the bin, but I
also usually feel guilty that I'm not saving them all for some unknown future
project.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
You're playing an important role in the economy of unread newsprint. Just keep
throwing it away and someone gets to keep their job.

------
ip26
The model I've wished for is a large micropayment network covering many to
most online news sources charging, I don't know, a penny or two per article.
Maybe no charge if you close the page after two seconds. Ad views are worth
less than that, and I can easily afford ten or twenty cents a day to read the
news across a variety of sources.

I want to pay for news. But I don't have the budget to pay $20/mo each to six
great newspapers all equally worthy of my attention, and nor do most other
people.

Ten or twenty cents a day is lower than the fifty cents for a paper copy- but
the marginal overhead is also zero.

~~~
ghaff
$20/month is pretty much the rate in current dollars to pay for (at most) one
"great newspaper."

~~~
ip26
Sure, but I think it's just one local optimum. The price is so high that few
people will pay it, which means the price has to be high. But if the price was
low and paying was painless, far more people might pay and generate the same
or better revenue.

------
3xblah
"At the end of the day, the price that you and I pay, whether it is for the
print copy or digital, it is only a very small part of the revenue. The price
paid for the printed copy was by no means sustaining the newspaper business.
It was advertisers all along. And they paid the price for the privilege of
having as many eyeballs the newspaper could expose their ads to."

Is it possible to keep a newspaper in business by purchasing subscriptions.
Think about that the next time someone suggests subscribing to some popular
newspaper to counter the effects of declining journalism.

------
cm2187
As an unrelated note to the author if he reads this, it helps readability a
lot to not write large amounts with all digits ($3,260,060,000) but
abbreviated ($3.26bn). Think what you would do with file sizes.

------
scarejunba
Most newspapers are just the equivalent of retweets - as mediocre journalists
rewrite AP and Reuters reports. These jobs are going to go away. Real
journalism costs money. And it will go to the real journalists in time. I
predict that in the next 30 years we'll have the Taylor Swifts, Kanye Wests,
and the Beatles of journalism suck up all of the revenue while the low-effort
rewriters are demolished by machines.

------
mjparrott
Why read news at all? [https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-
informati...](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-information-
diet/)

------
pacaro
The same is true for TV in most places, shows are/were carefully constructed
to maximize the odds that you wouldn't change channel during the commercial
break

------
frogpelt
The 50 cents probably covered delivery of the paper, right?

------
gitpusher
TL;DR - Advertising was always the primary business model, even in the print
age.

------
EGreg
We need to have a way to pay for digital content with micropayments. Anyone
remember Xanadu?

Here is what I plan to get done in 2020:
[https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-
CONT...](https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONTENT)

