
The pursuit of digital readership at the New Republic - strajkoski
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-silicon-valley-took-over-journalism/534195/?single_page=true
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pedrocr
It's a good view but fairly one-sided. I think the digital transformation also
showed some pretty severe flaws underlying the model of journalism. I can
think of at least these:

1) When the entertainment and information alternatives are much poorer the bar
is much lower. Newspapers were used to this and then the internet raised the
bar quite high. Whereas a bunch of friends might get their banter on by
reading a sports newspaper at their bar they may now get a steady stream on
twitter, or read a specialized blog if they're nerdier, or...

2) We romaticize journalism way too much. These days if I want the reality of
the government budget I'll more easily head online to a specialized blog or
read the well organized state stats page than read the newspaper. The
newspaper article on the same thing is often wrong, sometimes comically so
(e.g., missing the scale of the national debt by a factor of a 1000). If we
get to topics I really know about I'll definitely get _much_ better
information, and a nice discussion to boot, in a specialized forum like this
one than in a newspaper. And these kinds of places pop up more and more.

3) The kinds of things I'd really like an investigative journalist to do are
just not done and probably never were. I don't see anyone going through the
published laws explaining things, running through government spending and
explaining where the problems are, and a million other things that are now
_easy_ to do because the data sources are available. The closest they come is
doing "factcheck" articles which are nice to try and keep politicians in check
but are an extremely biased source of news. I don't want you to be driven by
whatever the current soundbite is, I want you to drive the news cycle by
picking the things that actually matter to people, running through them
methodically and reporting on that original output.

Pointing towards the current US president as an example of how journalism
shows its worth seems shortsighted. The challenge of Trump is what they are
actually setup to do. Challenge a few shallow narratives and keep pushing
until things unravel. It's the actual challenge of educating the population on
important topics that I don't see a way for journalism to get enough resources
to turn around and actually do. But maybe I was expecting too much from it.

~~~
_jtrig
Reminds me of an old tweet I made several years ago:

"The internet will do to society, what highways did to the landscape"

We see cheap fast food establishments scattered everywhere with bright signs
while healthy whole food is being quietly digested by individuals and families
amongst themselves after patient cooking (researching).

------
lvoudour
>Data have turned journalism into a commodity, something to be marketed,
tested, calibrated. Perhaps people in the media have always thought this way.
But if that impulse existed, it was at least buffered. Journalism’s leaders
were vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular
concerns of business

I understand the author's frustration with the current state of affairs but
let's be honest, the only reason journalism was not an aggressively marketed
"commodity" in the past is because competition was lower. 40-50 years ago very
few people could afford to own and operate widely circulated
newspapers/magazines. You could write anything you liked and you would have
guaranteed readership, the public had very few options. But as we saw in the
80s/90s when printing and distribution became cheaper and more widespread the
public turned more and more towards tabloids, gossip columns, sensationalist
stories and partisan viewpoints. Nowadays there are millions of sites offering
more or less the same content and the only way to stand out is to be even more
aggressive, viral, sensationalist, tabloid-esque than the printed tabloid era.

The problem is not data driven content, the problem is that everyone has
access to the same "stories" and the ability to publish it. Go to New Republic
website right now and see what the main stories are: Trump, even more trump,
the dnc, game of thrones, some bs liberal article about
police/sexism/hollywood, something about instagram, etc.

What insight will you get if you read the n-th article about the latest Trump
antics or the i-th article about sexism or social media? Does it matter if the
author is an intern at buzzfeed or an journalist with 30 years of experience?
You won't get any wiser on the subject even if the author is Ernest Hemingway.
The content is now trivial and no amount of good intentions, idealism or
journalistic craftsmanship is going to help you.

Want to stand out and not be tormented by "data"? Find a niche and write about
specialized subjects that few can write about. Trivial subjects are a mass
consumer commodity and there's no turning back

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sevensor
The Atlantic itself, where this piece was published, had its own rocky
transition to the digital world. I was a longtime print subscriber, and around
2012 or so I found that the cover of the book was becoming more and more
offputting. Not the art, but the titles of the articles. They were
deliberately provocative, to the point of being irrelevant to the actual
content. Clickbait without the clicks. I got so tired of that, along with the
shady antics of their subscription department, that I eventually stopped
renewing my subscription. By shady antics, I mean requiring a credit card for
subscription renewal, so they could auto-renew you every year thereafter. I
had been happy to send a check for several years' worth of the Atlantic in
advance, but I'm not going to sign up for automatic charges to my credit card.
Their attempts to grow or at least maintain their subscriber base cost them my
subscription.

~~~
augustocallejas
> By shady antics, I mean requiring a credit card for subscription renewal, so
> they could auto-renew you every year thereafter. I had been happy to send a
> check for several years' worth of the Atlantic in advance, but I'm not going
> to sign up for automatic charges to my credit card.

I've been a print subscriber since at least 2009. I see nothing shady by
requiring a credit credit for subscription renewal. This is standard practice
for recurring services like this.

> Not the art, but the titles of the articles. They were deliberately
> provocative, to the point of being irrelevant to the actual content

I have to agree unfortunately. Perhaps they are trying to get the attention of
airport travelers? They have my subscription, so they don't need to get my
attention that way. Either way, I pay for the content, and thus have been
exposed to many topics and ideas I wouldn't have otherwise.

~~~
sevensor
I'm probably being unnecessarily reactionary about the recurring credit-card
charge. I was a subscriber from 1999-2015. At the start, you paid by sending
them a check. For a long time, you could add three years to your subscription
at a low cost by paying in advance. I forget when I sent them my last check,
but it can't have been later than 2010 or 2011. The accumulated subscription
years kept me in _The Atlantic_ for quite a while after that. I know the
recurring charge is standard practice now, but it wasn't always so, and I
still think it's kind of underhanded. But that may just be me not keeping up
with the times.

I got a lot of value from the content, and I may subscribe again someday, but
they're going to have to win me back.

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cafard
Has the NR ever made money? It seems that for the first ninety or so years it
was owned by people who had made their money elsewhere and (I infer) at best
broke even.

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zafiro17
Good article, but the title is misleading. The article itself shows that new
leadership made poor decisions, "had an addiction to real estate in prime
locations, and top tier consultants." Those are poor choices in a dwindling
market, and show the relative youth and inexperience of the leader.

I do feel journalism will eventually recover, as we will always need
information. What will have to happen is the strengthening of new revenue
models. "Free plus adverts" has not worked for many journals, and where it has
worked, it has led to clickbait and fake news and all sorts of other
travesties.

We used to pay to buy newspapers and magazines. We may have to do so again.

~~~
kbenson
> The article itself shows that new leadership made poor decisions

The article is also careful to couch all those problems in the context of the
wider industry. _And so we found ourselves suddenly reliving recent media
history, but in a time-compressed sequence that collapsed a decade of painful
transition into a few tense months._

> Those are poor choices in a dwindling market, and show the relative youth
> and inexperience of the leader.

Yes, but how poor they are is defined by how deep his pockets are and how
willing he is to pay for them. _And for more than a year, he was willing to
spend with abandon._ Were his choices the downfall of the company as it
previously existed, or did they just hasten the transition?

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rdlecler1
The standard assumption is that you need to make money through advertising
which favors maximizing clicks and page views over quality. But at least in a
number of cases, thought(ful) leadership by platforms is overlooked as a
source of serious journalism. Goldman Sachs and McKinsey put out a lot of free
research because this thoughtful leadership help establish them as an
authority for their main business.

~~~
kbenson
> Goldman Sachs and McKinsey put out a lot of free research because this
> thoughtful leadership help establish them as an authority for their main
> business.

That is, those departments are the advertising and PR branches for their main
businesses. How can I trust the veracity of their claims knowing that their
ultimate goal is to give me a favorable opinion of their parent organizations?
This is the exact problem news organizations have always faced, but in the
past attempted to counter with different sources of income and spreading
advertising income between many clients.

What we have here is the equivalent of a technology newspaper fully owned and
subsidized by Oracle. How much should I trust their assessment of different
RDBMS systems? Should I trust articles in Facebook's equivalent that are
telling me that all the concern over React's license are overblown?

~~~
rdlecler1
Reputation and honest signaling.

~~~
kbenson
In general, or are you implying that I should trust Goldman Sachs because of
their reputation and honest signalling? Because if it's the latter, the
company as a whole has a _lot_ to answer for reputation wise[1], regardless of
how this division has behaved. I'm not sure I would be able to overlook what
appears to be a company management and culture problem of that degree and
believe it would leave other divisions entirely unaffected.

1: [http://fortune.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-doj-
settlement/](http://fortune.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-doj-settlement/)

------
MBCook
An article about digital readership.... from the site that complains about my
ad blocker so I can't read anything even if I turn it off.

Sigh.

