Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.
I'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.
If the ad-tech sausage factory needs 49MB of JS for a clickbait article, that is not "earning" a living. They are just externalizing costs to users and ISPs. You can defend the hustle, but the scale of waste here is cartoonish.
If you need a CDN and half a browser runtime just to show 800 words about celebrity nonsense, the business model is broken. Everyone else is footing the bandwidth bill for nonsense they never asked to recieve.
This is what killed my willingness to subscribe to most outlets. If I'm paying, I expect the page to load in under a second with zero tracking. Instead you get the same bloated experience minus a banner ad or two.
Reminds me of the recent discussion about how news websites have to get more shit as they lose users, but wait no they don't because nobody heard of a restaurant making worse food because people didn't want to eat there, because that would become a death spiral very quickly.
(Can @dang explain why he decided to rate-limit me now?)
This argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.
I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.
It is an interesting view point. The core issue is journalists have just become middle-men in a free information era and demanding money for it. Like I said, what's to stop me (or someone) to simply write a crawler/agent that just gathers data on a bunch of sites where information is curated (like X, HN, Reddit) and presenting it to me in a readable format? I think people see this and hence the reluctance to pay. The average Joe gets his news from social media (Facebook / Instagram / X / etc.) and doesn't think any online news journal is worth paying $20/month for.
It only proves my point - if journalists really added value - like reporting on something that you can't just find out by browsing social media, maybe they would have a chance. But, what we see and have is only just sloppy reporting.
Not all information is out there for free, monetarily and in terms of personal liberty. News articles frequently quote "sources inside" some three letter agencies or major corporations who will face consequences if they speak to the public under their real names, and will be rightfully dismissed if spoken anonymously without a journalist being able to ascertain their identity. There is also information that is only spread behind closed doors — trade shows, conferences, sometimes even governmental meetings — where the participants may not want the public to know what they are doing. Then there is the investigative digging, knowing who to ask questions and what questions to ask…
I understand you may think all journalism is just reddit and twitter compilations but it was not always the case. Most people, you likely included, do not even know what they are missing out when their local journalism collapses (again, due to loss of newspaper sell and classified ad revenues) and leaves everyone in the dark about what is going on in local politics.
I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.
Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.
> if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry)
Then the industry itself would not be very sustainable, wouldn't it? In that case, I would expect the industry to radically change or to disappear like many other industries whose expectations were made unsustainable by tech progress. For some reason, we're incredibly excited of it happening to coding, music, art, but not to journalism. Journalism must survive in its current form at all costs.
