[HNthrow22]

> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement

KPI for whose benefit? Shareholders or the 'public good'? Why would a for-profit entity optimize for the public good over profits?

Fox news is crushing all their competitors optimizing for engagement.

Who is winning optimizing for trust?

[tomnipotent]

And a vast majority of Fox's growth has been from talking faces, not news. Tucker Carlson has mentioned several times that he's "not the news", but an opinion commentator. I think this reinforces the OPs point.

Maybe we need to have more strict regulations on what can call itself a "news agency", when most of its programming is entertainment opinion commentary.

[raxxorrax]

Many journalists lobbied themselves into a position where they can only be seen as opinion commentators, so we have little else anymore. You just have to pick the opinion you like most. This is not an endorsement of Carlson, just for the record.

[intended]

The conversation here is missing this point and the actual market dynamics - news pays crap.

Advertising goes to the place with most eyeballs.

If you had to choose between the super bowl and Tucker Carlson, it’s not hard to guess where the ad will go.

The internet killed off the classifieds so that leaves even less money for news firms.

Add in consolidation and king making functions under Murdoch - and media firms like Fox have a very different purpose now.

The business of News is losing to the business of entertainment.

No one wants to pay to be bored.

The only people who will pay for boring news are people who get more value out of it than boredom.

This is a society level issue, not industry level issue.

[gfodor]

It goes back to what a company's value proposition is. Media companies certainly benefit from optimizing this KPI, but it means they are now going to become entertainment companies. This isn't necessarily "bad" from the standpoint of the media companies or their shareholders, but insofar as the people who make up those organizations still want the company's value proposition to their customers to be providing journalism, the company has failed. Given the culture of journalism being a mission-oriented pursuit, it's fair to assume that many people will feel remorse at these changes occurring within these organizations, even if those organizations become very valuable entertainment companies.