Reuters used to be the gold standard (in my view) of objective, un-opinionated journalism. Not sure what changed in the last 2-3 years. Now they heavily editorialize titles and miss important facts in order to sway readers.
Also lol:
> A Reuters spokeswoman declined to comment on the investment figure.
Reuters journalist contacting a Reuters spokesperson to get a statement.
Most people misunderstand how news organizations work. Reuters was a "gold standard" because they enforce a division between the business side that makes money, sells ads, and cooks up a business strategy, from the journalists who are shielded from those concerns as they attempt to report objectively. In many good news organizations, the two sides of the organization barely know each other, work on different floors, and do not share a cafeteria. So yeah, you get situations where a spokesperson for the business side refuses to comment for the news side (all news orgs cover their owners poorly if at all, including other orgs like Bloomberg).
Reuters has been running a distance second to Bloomberg in both financial news and data for well over a decade. It is a much older organization, and got its start when the British had an empire. You could say it covered the empire that covered the world.
I doubt that it has gone from "gold standard" to opinionated journalism in the last 2-3 years. In fact, the quality and veracity of its copy and reporting always varied from topic to topic, country to country.
This narrative of media decay is a weird euphoric recall for better days that did not exist. The press was always flawed. But now we attack it more amid the information chaos of social media.
I feel that they prefer to have 'select' readers to which they can sell (they or their advertisers) far more than the $35 per month.
Right now they got (guess) 20m(?) readers per day, and they know nothing about majority of them. With this, they cut our all the slackers/freeloaders (such as myself) and they get to focus on the 5m? 1m? 500k? To which they know are not freeloaders and they can go on to sell other services.
Edit: this is my interpretation of this move, a nice way to create the sweet spot on the pricing structure, and increase vertical sales.
Up until now Reuters has had some of the most shockingly invasive banner ads I've ever seen, exploiting every CSS and Javascript trick in the book to force its ads (quite successfully) past all major ad blockers.
They'll have to compete with AP News, which remains free at https://apnews.com, and has a much nicer site.
AP News has been my go-to source for the last year or so. But over that time I've noticed it seems to be down or not handing requests properly a staggering amount of time.
I find AP news somewhat biased compared to Reuters, although still one of my few regular sources. But I think their website issues stemmed from using google amp. They appear to have been fixed in the last month or so.
Aljazeera English on the other hand has almost the same content than Reuters (like literally, exact same articles), has RSS feed, and also has interesting news about Africa, Asia and Middle East.
AP News is the gold standard. If AP News get allured by investors, we're done folks. It's a wrap, let's go home. Journalism would be dead. Please put a donate button. I am happy to chip in $50 year to keep this thing alive.
Anyone execs here working at AWS, Azure or GCP? Can we get AP News some decent hosting, yall?
I’m not so sure. I think AP itself is subject to the same institutional capture and biases that have swept the rest of the journalism industry. You can see the cracks in their “gold standard” in the All Sides article about how they rated them (still Center but with reservations): https://www.allsides.com/blog/updated-media-bias-ratings-ass...
You can also see AP’s bias in their stylebook and guidelines on how to describe certain events - for example when do they use the word “riot” instead of “protest” or when should they label something as a “crisis”. The creeping bias at AP has been covered a few different times by other news outlets - here’s a random article I pulled from Google on the same: https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/aps-orwellian-push-to-change-t...
Many of us have been warning of these stylebook changes for years. They've been making them quite regularly, and usually serve to set major biases in the initial framing of a subject.
> Up until now Reuters has had some of the most shockingly invasive banner ads I've ever seen, exploiting every CSS and Javascript trick in the book to force its ads (quite successfully) past all major ad blockers.
I’ve never seen an ad on Reuters. I’d call uBo and uMatrix pretty major.
I'm as empathetic as anyone to the loss felt here, but I genuinely have no answer to the question of how Reuters can otherwise sustain itself, if not by charging.
I'll be paying. I don't like it, but I like a world without Reuters even less.
Personally I like to support news with subscriptions. I do so across the political spectrum, both so I’ll be better informed and so we can have high quality news from each worldview, free from bad incentives, instead of noise on all sides. So far, I’m not sure that subscription models have successfully prevented bias in either left or right leaning news media, so I’m not sure it’ll help here either. But it is probably worse to not have subscriptions at all and have either an unprofitable or ads dependent news industry. We’ve already seen how activist can campaign against advertisers and bias corporations in these last few years, and the same could happen to tenured that outlets like Reuters.
So even if it isn’t the whole solution, it may help in part, and for that I’ll subscribe and support it if they stay true to the sacred role of neutral journalism.
There really needs to be some sort of 0-/1-click micropayment system for at least journalism (or better yet the web) to complement subscriptions. I think such things have been attempted unsuccessfully thus far :(
It's simply not feasible for me to subscribe to every quality publication I see online for reading a few articles here and there.
(Note that such a system could presumably be gamed and would need oversight, curation and responsible use.)
Reuters' news service is a division within Thomson Reuters that complements much more profitable divisions. As such, I can't imagine this paywall addresses any question of sustainability. For a financial, accounting, and legal services company like TR, it helps to have a popular mouthpiece from which to champion your agenda. I suspect this move is less about profits and more about prestige and market norms - Financial Times, Wall St Journal, Bloomberg, etc., all gun for business readership behind paywalls, and so why shouldn't Reuters? And it's not expensive compared to the very expensive journals and newsletters (e.g., mining industry research journals, newsletters like Gartner's, TR's own products) subscribed to by major financial institutions.
News organizations are PR outfits by their very nature. I'd just be parroting Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, though, to explain it. If you disagree with them, you'll disagree with my perspective.
The interesting take I've seen about this is that disinformation and lies are free to consume en masse, but current events and real facts cost money.
I understand Reuters' need to make money, but with all the quality journalism and news costing money per view, we should expect further problems arising from disinformation.
The news industry has been suffering for a long time now and most writers make a pittance. Local papers are going out of business right and left, which actually is harmful to democracy and local politics, and a lot of stuff is written by freelancers rather than staff. It hurts the quality of the writing.
I don't know how to solve it, but it's a genuine problem. If we value this kind of work, we absolutely must find some means to make it pay adequately.
People use as blockers, etc, and the industry is just bleeding out. It's hurting all of us.
I’m curious what HN people view as the gold standard of journalism. For my part, I pay for The Economist and, until a few months ago, the NYT (I’ve seen their quality in reporting and practices as a company drop consistently over the last few years, so had to pull the plug, though I absolutely love all of their interactive work).
I've been using Brave since the redesign of firefox mobile, initially on android and shorty after on my laptop too. I came for the built-in ad blocking but have come to really love their alternative to the paywall/advertisers/user-data monetization schemes. Advertisers can purchase unobtrusive text ads or new-tab background image ads. Users can choose to see either of those ad streams or not, and can choose how frequently they'd like to see them, in return they are compensated in BAT (basic attention tokens). BAT get their value because ads on the platform can only be purchased in the token, all of which are already minted and in circulation. Websites like Reuters can opt in to receiving micro transactions from each brave user in exchnage for the content viewed. Contributing for content is optional, and you can set the split how you like, or turn ads off entirely.
I turn them off when I'm coding, but have them on when I'm just reading hn or wikipedia. Over time, if adoption grows, the value of the audience will too, so there is speculative value in the token, which creates a feedback loop incentivizing more and more users to switch to Brave. I hope it can be a real business model for monetizing content soon.
> Reuters.com will remain free for a preview period, but will require users to register after five stories.
Yeah, how do they know you viewed 5 stories? Block cookies or clear cookies on exit and they have basically no way of knowing. Use an VPN to the EU and they have to comply with GDPR as well so they can't fingerprint you.
(Or use AMP if they offer it. Sometimes that helps circumvent paywalls.)
Or, just don't be a dick. You can easily, and legally, leave a restaurant without leaving a tip -- but most people don't because they feel it is appropriate to support the waitstaff financially. It's not hard to sneak into the back door of a movie theater, but most people don't because they realize it's the same as stealing.
Paying to get through a oaywall doesn't mean they don't collect and sell your data. Quite the contrary. They actually know who you are, they know your bank account/credit card, ...
I am not willing to share this data with media agencies.
Because a couple of years ago, showing a couple of non-invasive ads was a good enough business for everyone. Now I have to pay for content, my data gets collected and sold, and I get personalized ads LOL
Maybe it's because the move into the public cloud is more costly and decision makers are incapable to admit they made a mistake.
Quality journalism will become a commodity for the wealthy.
Reputable news platforms are moving behind paywalls, while propaganda/quasi-propaganda networks remain free.
This is bad for society, for politics, and in the long term for our way of life.
It is not reasonable to expect the average person to validate the news they see on low quality news platforms by cross checking with other sources, even if quality sources were free, which they are increasingly not.
I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the budget.
As the Trump years have shown, misinformation and the distortion of facts can have real life, hard consequences. Trump owes his 2016 victory to 80,000 votes in three states. How likely is it that his democratic opponent would have won had the social media storm of combined conservative-Russian propaganda been a degree or two lower? Extremely likely.
Four years later, half a million Americans have died because of Covid-19. This would not be the case if the 2016 election had turned out differently.
To circle back to the original topic. The paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
The BBC is no better or more "neutral" than commercial news outlets. If you're looking for an outlet than can "validate" the news, and you're suggesting that it should be fully funded and operated by the government, that becomes scary quickly. It will just be an administration tool, and as an administration tool it will ultimately be run by the family and friends of the people who finance the election of administrations.
The overgrown mutant NPR that centrists imagine government's media department would, under your nightmare Trump administration, become the Trump Network, operated by a bunch of smirking Faucis so much better than the system that feeds them and they help run. NPR gets all of its money from giant investment funds, extractive industries, agribusiness, military contractors, and foundations named after families of multigenerational wealth acquired by doing terrible things. It was editorially destroyed during the first Bush administration out of simple Republican vengeance, even though they weren't even getting a majority of their financing from the government.
A lot of times when I hear this take, NPR and the BBC are the models. I don't think they're good ones.
> I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the budget.
HN's audience will hate the idea, but such things already exist in most developed nations, like the BBC in the UK or the ABC in Australia. They're generally the best news sources with little opinion dressed up as news and much less clickbait and are freely accessible to all in a variety of forms.
It's like socialized medicine, it just works better.
ABC in Australia is the opposite of objectivity, considering they take over a month to issue retractions on false reporting. I've reported dozens of issues with false reporting in a broad range of news outlets, and ABC is nearly the worst.
ABC corrects mistakes in a month on a good day (worst case 2.5 months).
Contrasted with the private sector, Fairfax and News Corp both issued retractions to my complaints in a timely fashion, at 3 days for Fairfax and 15 minutes(!) for News Corp.
ABC simply doesn't care about journalism, why else would they have such lazy policies that ensure incorrect information is distributed as widely as possible?
Don't know about him but I used to do it at a time when I felt obsessed with making information correct. It was a bit compulsive.
But on the bright side, that's how I knew Bloomberg News was bullshit and that despite HN's frothy comments about how they always knew SMCI was backdooring chips I just grabbed some long options on the cheap and partied it up.
This is no solution, and the reason is obvious: such an outlet is beholden not to the tax payers whose dollars are being used, but to the government who allocates those dollars. This puts an explicit limit on what they can say and criticize, and what their bias will be: the ones holding the purse strings. Even if a majority of tax payers discard it at that point, the institution would have no incentive to change its messaging.
This is very easily seen already in the existing public news and media organizations that have been formed.
> This is no solution, and the reason is obvious: such an outlet is beholden not to the tax payers whose dollars are being used, but to the government who allocates those dollars
It's not an employer vs employee situation.
In societies with rule of law you can endow public entities/broadcasters with rights that protect them from such influence.
This, with a well-defined duty to inform and culture of journalistic integrity should go a long way.
Having rights is orthogonal to receiving funding. Whether it should be the case or not, it is within government power to withhold funding from a public entity if it, say, puts forth journalistic effort to uncover a majority party scandal. And that is unlikely to change in any other nation's context.
As for journalistic integrity: take America as an example again, where integrity has been overridden across the board in favor of party line messaging. Very little journalistic work is now done, public or private. And indeed, again, the public entity would have even less incentive to poke the bees' nest that makes its honey.
The paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
Even paper newspapers had to be paid for though. And who’s going to pay for those quality journalists writing the quality journalism?
Paywalling of corporate media leads to less deaths, considering Reuters regularly beats the war drums along with CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post.
Remember when they lied about WMDs in Iraq? What about when they lied about Russia hacking critical US energy infrastructure? What about when they lied about Russia placing a "hit bounty" on the heads of US soldiers?
For those not paying attention, Reuters was also engaged in propaganda around the time of the Turkey coup, which was assuredly backed by US intelligence. Reuters falsely reported that Erdogan had fled during the coup and tried to seek asylum in Europe -- which was US intelligence propaganda and false.
The only sustainable solution is to abolish copyrights. Stupidest fucking laws on the planet. It's intellectual slavery—restricting people from peacefully sharing and building on information between each other. Propped up by billions of lies pitched daily by industry. It's the big dirty secret propping up big tech, the media, et cetera.
While Bill Gates had access to the world's best information growing up attending elite institutions, a significant number of Americans weren't even able to vote or attend their local libraries, or outside the country you had places like South Africa with apartheid preventing access to education. The charity work of these assholes is a fucking farce, as long as they are pushing #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. You want to improve the world BG—stop preventing people from educating themselves! (I pick on BG just b/c he's the most famous, but really goes for all these tech assholes who don't realize the #IdeaPrivilege they had, which they deny to others via their support of copyrights and patents, and whose outlier wealth is dependent on these laws which put chains on people and ideas).
How does this help with journalism? Facts are not subject to copyright and articles about what other articles say or that are rewritten to share the same info are common.
I'm sorry, I veered horribly off topic in that comment. Hard
to edit on a phone.
The only sustainable solution to fix journalism is to
abolish copyright. That's it. That's the only thing we can
do to fix journalism.
For some context, journalism has not signicantly improved in
roughly 150 years, perhaps longer. Perhaps it some slight
areas it has gotten better, in others it has regressed. You
can test this for yourself. There's a book available right
now used on Amazon for $3.51, called "New York Times: The
Complete Front Pages 1851-2009" ^0. Get that book, read some
of the front pages from ~170 years ago, and compare to
today's paper. It's a toss up which is better.
So I will conclude in part from that the field of journalism
has plateaud for at least the past 100 years. This is
surprising, as technology has improved dramatically. You'd
expect the quality of the news should have gone up.
What else has happened in the past century? Well we
know governments dramatically extended copyright laws. So
now our prior should be that increasing copyright has not
improved journalism at all, and probably has had a
significant negative effect, enough to offset the
improvement we'd expect from better technology.
Why would moving away from copyright lead to better
journalism?
Let's talk about 3 parameters that will change.
First, collaboration will go up. Lots of people who are now
prevented from seamlessly collaborating to improve the news
would now be free to do so. Articles will be developed on
git. Instead of constantly sucking everyone's attention to
show frivolous novelty covered in ads, more important long
term stories will be iterated upon.
Second, trust will go up. If one paper starts lying and
someone knows the truth, they can fork that article/paper
and offer the better version. Over time sources that
prioritize truth will win gravity from tabloids. Every
article will be backed by git (or similar) and the chance
history and authors will be visible at every step of the
way.
Finally, distribution will be improved in myriad ways.
Starting a publisher will be easy for everyone, and you'll
see a resurgence in regional and topic specific publishers.
You'll have lots of innovation around customizing content
for specific kinds of devices and readers.
So collaboration will increase and the cost of doing great
journalism will fall dramatically, trust and auditability
will increase, and distribution will increase.
It will be a dramatic win for journalism, and journalism in
10 years (or 100, if it takes society longer to wake up to
the obvious), will be a big delta different compared to the
delta in the previous century.
The only way out that I can see is to follow particular authors, not particular media. Find a set of authors you trust, who deserve your attention. Ignore everything else.
That's basically Substack, right? There is a lot of buzz around it right now. I haven't formed an opinion, I see a lot of potential good and bad in that model.
Exactly what newspaper is worth a monthly subscription?
(I should have worded this differently. I did not mean it to be aggressive. I'm just wondering what news source is worth a monthly subscription at this point in history? And no on The Economist. My question is for every HN'er.)
Discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053