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.
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.
> 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.
AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_.
> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
You're not wrong, but I wouldn't discount the power of inertia. There's a story Steven Levitt tells on his Freakonomics podcast about a retailer who wanted to measure the impact of print ads. He suggested not running print ads for a duration in order to measure impact, and was met with incredulity: "Are you crazy? We can't just do that. We'll get fired like Jordan was. Dude was so unorganized that he forgot to order ads for the northeastern market for his entire summer internship."
After analyzing the data from that mishap, there was no measurable impact, and yet they refused to run the trial for longer. 'We can't not just buy ads' was the argument, even though the data suggested you totally could. I guess if your department buys ads, until you have an alternative, arguing for a budget cut is arguing your department should all be laid off.
> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue
Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placement in the mag affected results, and how the size of the ad worked out.
For example, we learned to never bother advertising in August. Programmers apparently all went on vacation in August :-) but September would be a huge month for us.
I tried print advertising in the aughts, but there was literally zero return on investment.
Newspapers had a local monopoly on publishing to their circulation. If you want to communicate with 100,000+ people in your city tomorrow you had to pay. News, sports, comics, the content is bait to drive the circulation.
Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers.
Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.
The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.
Also, certain news stories will naturally attract more eyeballs and today's news has optimized for those stories - hence the torrential outpour of sensationalized clickbait. Today's headlines and stories aim to elicit an instinctive, visceral System 1 reaction, while System 2 articles that take a bit more thought are relegated to the back pages.
I run Thinking About Things [1], an email newsletter with one interesting link every day. Popular ideas and clickbait content always gets more views and clickthroughs, and I see the temptation that newspapers face to include only that content.
The old joke was "We know 50% of our ad buy money is wasted in newspapers, we just don't know which 50%."
Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher.
This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard.
Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles or even worse tweets) that directly compete with newspapers on advertising money and you have a very bleak environment.
My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. What funded them was a combo of full page adds and the classifieds. I remember paying $30 to post a garage sale. Since Craigslist expanded you could see each newspaper get steadily smaller and smaller over the years.
It’s anecdotal but the advertisements that work best on me are the ones hanging around public transportation hubs (I’m Scandinavian). I would never go to the movies if those spots didn’t inform me there was a new movie running.
> 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.
How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertisement per-viewer revenue dwindling compared to the past? I know the subscriber count is reducing and they have alternative income streams via subscriber fees. Is it that the ROI on television advertising remains higher compared to print simply because there are still a significant number of eyeballs?
> why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?
It isn't in a shambles; it's just shifted to a more efficient mode of delivery. Who is going to bother with ads printed on paper that readers have to shuffle through when they can get them delivered direct to the readers' eyeballs online?
As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't.
For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web.
> 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.
Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.
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.
Interestingly (to me), Edward Bernays is discussed a lot in Mario Vargas Llosa's latest book Tiempos Recios (Fierce Times), as the "most influential person in the history of Guatemala" due to his PR work on behalf of United Fruit. Unfortunately I believe it is only available in Spanish currently.
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.
I used to think it was a strange coincidence that Bernays was Freud's nephew. But it wasn't. Bernays promoted his uncle in the U.S., so the fame of the two has a common cause.
All you have to do is read the history of newspapers and journalism. Almost exclusively, they were created by financial, industrial and political elite to influence the population. They were never created to make money.
Alexander Hamilton didn't create the New York Post to make money. Henry Jarvis Raymond (politician) and George Jones (banker) didn't create the NYTimes to make money. Stilson Hutchins (politician) didn't create the WashingtonPost to make money. These newspapers were created to further their founders' political interests.
And in case you were wondering, Bezos didn't buy WashingtonPost to make money either.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember my dad paying subscription for Time magazine since I was a very little (Mexican living in Mexico). I always felt their journalism quality was very good. Are they still doing print?
* 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.
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.)
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.
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.
The $0.01 daily paper cost of 1898 would (based on 1913 dollars) today be about $0.26. The US dollar actually depreciated generally through about 1900, though at a fairly gradual rate.
On September 13, 1987, the Sunday Times reached its maximum extent: 12 pounds (5.4 kg), 1,612 pages.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
[+] [-] jawns|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jldugger|6 years ago|reply
AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_.
> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
You're not wrong, but I wouldn't discount the power of inertia. There's a story Steven Levitt tells on his Freakonomics podcast about a retailer who wanted to measure the impact of print ads. He suggested not running print ads for a duration in order to measure impact, and was met with incredulity: "Are you crazy? We can't just do that. We'll get fired like Jordan was. Dude was so unorganized that he forgot to order ads for the northeastern market for his entire summer internship."
After analyzing the data from that mishap, there was no measurable impact, and yet they refused to run the trial for longer. 'We can't not just buy ads' was the argument, even though the data suggested you totally could. I guess if your department buys ads, until you have an alternative, arguing for a budget cut is arguing your department should all be laid off.
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placement in the mag affected results, and how the size of the ad worked out.
For example, we learned to never bother advertising in August. Programmers apparently all went on vacation in August :-) but September would be a huge month for us.
I tried print advertising in the aughts, but there was literally zero return on investment.
[+] [-] 1998|6 years ago|reply
Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers.
Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.
[+] [-] vilhelm_s|6 years ago|reply
The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.
[+] [-] tathings|6 years ago|reply
I run Thinking About Things [1], an email newsletter with one interesting link every day. Popular ideas and clickbait content always gets more views and clickthroughs, and I see the temptation that newspapers face to include only that content.
[1] https://www.thinking-about-things.com
[+] [-] mrunkel|6 years ago|reply
Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher.
This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard.
Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles or even worse tweets) that directly compete with newspapers on advertising money and you have a very bleak environment.
[+] [-] im3w1l|6 years ago|reply
That just seems like common sense to me. The advantage of newspapers should be that they have more readers, not that their readers are any "clickier".
[+] [-] cwbrandsma|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moksly|6 years ago|reply
No one is gathering that information though.
[+] [-] kodablah|6 years ago|reply
How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertisement per-viewer revenue dwindling compared to the past? I know the subscriber count is reducing and they have alternative income streams via subscriber fees. Is it that the ROI on television advertising remains higher compared to print simply because there are still a significant number of eyeballs?
[+] [-] pdonis|6 years ago|reply
It isn't in a shambles; it's just shifted to a more efficient mode of delivery. Who is going to bother with ads printed on paper that readers have to shuffle through when they can get them delivered direct to the readers' eyeballs online?
[+] [-] pravda|6 years ago|reply
Because they lost their monopoly!
In most markets, there was one newspaper and that newspaper could charge advertisers as much as they wanted to.
When your monopoly rents go away, you go out of business.
[+] [-] vkou|6 years ago|reply
As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't.
For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web.
> 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.
Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.
[+] [-] mc32|6 years ago|reply
I believe many magazines (though not newspapers) had a “Reply Mail” thing. I bet they derived metrics from those.
[+] [-] vearwhershuh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Publications
[+] [-] bluejay2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IfOnlyYouKnew|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tambourine_man|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thorrez|6 years ago|reply
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
[+] [-] sacrificedcapon|6 years ago|reply
Alexander Hamilton didn't create the New York Post to make money. Henry Jarvis Raymond (politician) and George Jones (banker) didn't create the NYTimes to make money. Stilson Hutchins (politician) didn't create the WashingtonPost to make money. These newspapers were created to further their founders' political interests.
And in case you were wondering, Bezos didn't buy WashingtonPost to make money either.
[+] [-] blueyes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudosteph|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jldugger|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] excalibur|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
They're doing kinda/sorta OK with digital subscriptions but basically journalism is expensive to produce.
[+] [-] nickrubin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtracto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|6 years ago|reply
* https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of various subjects worldwide.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/ - good coverage of US politics
* 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.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bynkman|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
The Sunday Times ran $0.30 in 1969, which is $2.10 in 2019 dollars:
https://goodmorninggloucester.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/wo...
Price of the Sunday edition was raised to $0.20 in 1952, or $1.92 in 2019 dollars. 1974's $1 Sunday paper would be $5.21 today:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/29/archives/times-to-increas...
The $0.01 daily paper cost of 1898 would (based on 1913 dollars) today be about $0.26. The US dollar actually depreciated generally through about 1900, though at a fairly gradual rate.
On September 13, 1987, the Sunday Times reached its maximum extent: 12 pounds (5.4 kg), 1,612 pages.
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-the-new-york-...
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com
[+] [-] ip26|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarejunba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjparrott|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pacaro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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