
Journalists won't report news unless it can drive page views - monkeygrinder
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2010/05/mediawatch_mond_7.php
======
hugh3
Any niche will eventually get filled, even the niche of "actual serious news
stories for people who want to read actual serious news". In fact, the
relative wealth of this demographic makes it a very attractive niche to fill.

Don't forget in all this fun handwringing that we're still a lot better off
than we were just fifteen years ago. Back then it was a serious challenge to
hear any news that didn't appear in a newspaper printed in your town, or
didn't show up in one of the handful of TV/radio outlets you could pick up.
Now you're two seconds away from reading any newspaper in the world.

... or maybe four seconds if you don't speak whatever language it's in and
need to click Chrome's "yes, autotranslate this" button.

~~~
DenisM
>Any niche will eventually get filled, even the niche of "actual serious news
stories for people who want to read actual serious news".

No true - the people capable of filling that niche might find a more
profitable job elsewhere leaving this one niche dry. It will play out like
this:

1) start a "serious" newspaper

2) realize that you have plenty of people who are not in fact serious but like
to think of themselves as "serious"

3) realize that above people like pseudo-serious fluff

4) realize that above people are generating you plenty of money

5) realize that fluff is easier to produce

6) start producing fluff, click-bait headlines etc, but try to retain
appearance of serious

7) Slide into being a second-rate publication, but keep riding the reputation
wave until it's dead.

8) Rinse, repeat.

This path is unavoidable, for anyone who made it to step 2 will follow through
the end, or get ousted by profit-seeking shareholders.

~~~
anamax
Bloomberg and WSJ seem to have avoided 1->2 aor 2->3.

Note that public media companies are relatively new, and their biggest problem
is Craigslist, which is deliberately not maximizing revenue. (CL isn't public,
so it isn't legally obligated to do so and Newmark has control.)

Also, the "fact" that incumbents will tend to leave a niche does not imply
that new players won't enter. As a result, the niche can stay filled even
though the occupants leave.

~~~
DenisM
Yes, it's not impossible to slow down the process. I'm not reading either of
the two papers you mentioned, but I used to read another serious paper -
Harvard Business Review, and they were producing 50% fluff plus 50% great
reading material. I recon that's their deal with the devil, and not a bad one.
However I am strongly convinced that it rests solely on integrity of the old-
school journalists and once they retire so will the relevant news.

------
DenisM
This directly applies to hacker news readers - if you read about a successful
or even a failed startup founder, do you read that submission because it was
useful and educational, or because it had a compelling _story_ in it?

There is a large group of people who don't do startups but only think about
doing startups. Since they lack the requisite experience they will upvote what
looks compelling and inspirational to them, rather than what's useful or
representative (the latter looks dull and muddy). And since this majority will
upvote the sexy narrative, the rest of us will end up reading it. It's what I
call "a narrative tar pit" and it's why I never look at the front page, only
at the RSS feed. Frighteningly, at some point a _random_ sample of submissions
is bound to produce more useful reading material than the front page.

It would be even better if I could only see stories upvoted/commented by a
couple of people here whose taste I trust, but whose names I will not call out
to avoid another stampede. I hope that pg considers this modest proposal.

------
ZachPruckowski
This seems to be a crucial problem in all facets of the news media - people
incentivize the news they want to hear, not the news they should hear. Back
when advertising was bundled across a whole paper or a whole news program, you
could balance "Lindsey's Legal Troubles" with something informative that
served the public good.

But now that viewers "pay" by the story with advertising, we hit a Tragedy of
the Commons - everyone incentivizes the fluff, and hopes someone else will
incentivize the important research. We've removed the "all the news _that's
fit to print_ " standard and traded it in for "whatever you want to read
about".

------
chc
An alternative way of phrasing this would be "Journalists try to write things
that have a chance of being interesting to readers."

Put this way, it seems less like a new development, and a lot less surprising.
Nobody ever voluntarily wrote a story with the idea, "This will be totally
uninteresting!" True, a lot of stories _are_ totally uninteresting, but that
is usually a mistake, not a moral stance. Editors and publishers have always
wanted stories that would attract readers. (And, of course, this is also what
readers want.)

If you print more stories that people don't read, you really are just wasting
your time.

