
Thoughts on Business Insider - dnetesn
https://medium.com/@shaneferro/thoughts-on-business-insider-ad4bc291ad8a#.a6msu4u4v
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calciphus
Wait, BI is a click-bait content farm with little substance? I can't believe
it, with such quality headlines currently on their front page:

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

* 'Even I would've helped her': Donald Trump rips Ted Cruz after Carly Fiorina falls off stage at event

* Intel admits Defeat

* A historically popular senator's approval ratings are tanking after blocking Obama's Supreme Court nominee

* Too many millennials are facing buyer's remorse over one of the most expensive purchases they'll ever make

 _edit: list format_

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cwilkes
To edit your list to make it more believable:

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

* Intel admits Defeat

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

* (some other articles)

* Apple just did something for the first time in 18 years

For laughs I go to BI and scroll down just to see how many times an article is
repeated. Because, you know, making a rule that an article only appears once
on a webpage is hard.

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hkmurakami
They probably (hopefully) have the data that says showing a top performing
article more than once in a scroll feed is a net positive for page views.

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avitzurel
Every single news source I can think of these days that is free serves pure
garbage to infuse traffic to get more money from Google ads (or any other).

I don't even click on BusinessInsider links on HN anymore. I prefer the
reports to be more in depth and have more of the author in the report. If you
are pressured to puke 5 of these a day, it will show in the content.

These journalism meltdowns are coming more and more now. I wish it will make a
change.

If we don't have quality investigative journalism, were doomed

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entee
But as you rightly point out that costs money. I've been thinking about paying
for some of the sites I use frequently but if you add up $5 a bunch of times
you get to pretty big numbers per month. Also $5 for one website? That's 1/2 a
Netflix subscription and for that I get an insane amount of content! There has
to be a way to pool these fees in a sustainable manner so that I can buy many
quality news sites at once.

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jey
Micropayments would be ideal. I'd be willing to pay $0.25 each time I wanted
to read a WSJ article. I'd probably grumble that it "should" cost $0.05, but
I'd pay anyway.

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im3w1l
I suspect the real problem to be solved in that space is how to do that
without the slightest hint of friction.

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jey
Their paywall is already friction. This would be a paywall that could be
dismissed with a single click that costs $0.25.

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morgante
I'm going to risk the down votes to say that I sometimes appreciate what
Business Insider does. Yes, it's all about quantity. But in practice I find it
helpful to have a bunch of quick summaries of the day's news accessible for
free.

Realistically, I cannot read the whole front page of the NYT every day. But I
can keep up to date on Business Insider pieces because they're short and
punchy. If I actually want to go into depth on something, there are plenty of
places to read an in depth article.

Plus, all the quick articles subsidize the occasional in-depth one.

Also, one really shouldn't underestimate the effort and intelligence which
goes into writing these articles. We might dismiss them as "clickbait" but it
is in fact a skill to be able to quickly process and summarize information (as
a former debater, I definitely appreciate it). Joe Weisenthal is one of the
smartest _and_ hardest working journalists out there.

Disclaimer: I used to work at BI.

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ak39
You can extend this type of brinkmanship race to the bottom thinking to the
practice of writing code. There was a time when LOC (volume) was deemed
synonymous with quality and efficacy. That's clearly not the case for
software.

I loved the way the writer admits to her personality requiring time and space
to produce works of quality - she refused to churn out garbage (in her mind).
She speaks about a middle ground but I'm afraid she's being too humble.
There's no middle ground to quality.

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chris_wot
Given that pretty much every time I have clicked on a Business Insider link
from HN it has redirected me to 404, you can colour me unsurprised.

The reason this happens is - I'm from Australia and so OF COURSE I wouldn't be
interested in U.S. content! Not at all. Evidently they assume I can't see past
Australian issues, so they tend to redirect to a page in the Australian
edition that should contain the article, but of course it's not published in
Australia so no article for me!

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unabst
> It took my mother, my boyfriend, and my therapist together to convince me to
> stick around until I found something new.

When you're crying every day and your closest people are forcing you to keep
working... Something has to be wrong. And BI of all places...

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wimagguc
It's a difficult situation for the family though: all they want is for you to
be happy, but the core assumption is that you're happier with a _crap but safe
job_ , than with no runway left and no job at all.

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wimagguc
How long till the journalist-AI that writes click bait news? Then the whole
internet will be like Twitter: 99% written by robots & consumed by robots.

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jakub_g
Already happening to some extent (though not for clickbaits, but financial
data):

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-
auto...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-automation-
robots-financial-reporting)

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wimagguc
I ended up searching for AP Stylebook, and I'm very glad I did:
[https://twitter.com/APStylebook](https://twitter.com/APStylebook),
[http://www.apstylebook.com/](http://www.apstylebook.com/)

Plenty help if you want to be a journalist (or even better, write a journalist
AI).

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joelx
I am not a fan of clickbait content written to meet quotas, but this article
strikes me as a bitter employee spewing up on their former employer.

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Touche
Apparently she works for HuffPo now, aren't they in the same volume driven
industry? Wondering how she feels about her current gig.

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rhizome
It may just be that BI is 5 articles per reporter per day, while HuffPo is
overstaffed (5 reporters per story, say).

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oli5679
Interesting contrast to academic economists, where average output is probably
less than 1 published paper per year.

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jagermo
Axel Springer invested in it. A sure sign of a shitty publication.

