I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it is almost a free speech issue. If I can't refer to what you are saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to criticism and debate. It's effectively an extension of copyright law to expand copyright holder's rights.
Obviously all this is hyperbolic based the actual text of the law. The law doesn't directly apply any sort of link tax, and it is shamelessly targeted only at Google and Facebook (to the point that they wrote Facebook in there by name, which is kind of stupid if you ask me). But if you drill into the reasoning it hits at the foundational level on this basic logic, and it's pretty concerning if we assume then that this will be significantly extrapolated and expanded - as has been the history with all other aspects of copyright in the past.
Honestly I would rather that governments come clean and just admit that the problem they are trying to solve is actually a "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves. Trying to artificially construct that through introduction of significant new precedents in copyright law engenders huge risks of unintended consequences and potential future extrapolation and abuse of this principle.
i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem.
yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.
As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that:
1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.
2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue.
3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril.
4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news.
The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.
RE: 4, NPR seems to do OK, same with the BBC.
You're choosing to implement all of these terrible things by continuing your employment, so you "not wanting them" is kind of moot. Find a different job if you genuinely don't agree with what you're building. I'm a firm believer that companies would stop doing this kind of crap if we, collectively as tech workers (even better as a union!), stopped implementing it.
NPR is very biased: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/business/media/npr-critic...
And to be honest, I don't think most of these things are terrible per se, albeit mildly annoying. Also, I don't see what you're suggesting as realistic, but idealistic. You can try to unionize developers, but good luck with that because you'll just be replaced with overseas contractors. I'd rather keep my job and feed my family, thanks.
Do you call that NPR story proof of a bias worse than what happens at other institutions? Or because it's biased in the direction that doesn't align with your views?
I think the biggest complaint about NPR having a bias - any bias - is that it's publicly funded.
Mostly, NPR isn't publicly funded. It gets about 1% of its funding from the federal government. Public radio stations that carry NPR shows get more, but it's only about 17% from federal, state, and local governments. Some of them are also funded by universities, some of which are public.
If donating to NPR is a tax write off, it is publicly funded. If the majority of those donors are politically biased, they will create a feedback loop where news is catered to those donating to them. This isn't wrong per se, but just what it is.
If NPR only represents a fraction of our nation’s viewpoints, they are not living up to their namesake of national public radio. If they wanted to call themselves progressive public radio I’d take no issue.
NPR used to be a very good news source, but during the Trump presidency it became an advocacy organization: https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
If it’s lucrative enough for the company, they will find an apathetic contractor who will put $LOVECRAFTIAN_HORROR_JS on the site, cash their check, and move on to the next thing.
This is absolutely true.
NPR stopped being government funded years ago. they're closer to a donation and syndication based NYT than they are to the BBC. https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
Sure, stand your customer base in a mine-field for some minor short-sighted profit. Implement this at your own peril.
Taboola is used by USA Today, NBC, Business Insider, MSN, Yahoo, Bloomberg, CBS News, ABC News, and more. Also, I wouldn't call Taboola revenue minor.
You also have to understand that half of our customers are advertisers, not just readers.
When you've driven away your reader base, any profit you made while doing so will seem minor, compared to total revenues from keeping those readers happy and around for years to come.
Of course you can also view it as a major source of income immediately, and just ignore that it's driving away your readers. With the readers dwindling, you've lost leverage, and the advertisers are able to offer you worse and worse deals on the ads, which compounds with the dwindling reader base.
Scam ads are a choice that only makes sense in isolation. The advertisers are only your customers due to your reader base. You need to keep the reader base around.
It's a balancing act, of course, and as long as the optimization function of churn and revenue is trending positively it will remain. There are dozens of data scientists working on this problem. Taboola ads are at the bottom of pages away from the main content.
Taboola and Outbrain should be the subject of a Department of Justice inquiry. Their whole business model seems to be facilitating scammers.
I'm all for it, and while we're at it let's break up Google's ad monopoly, which is partially why we need Taboola in the first place.
So much of news today is not even worthy of my attention, let alone my money.
What about news specific to your locale?
Definitely not. Nothing noteworthy happens locally, and if it does it will be on the national news.
You have no interest at all in if cronyism is affecting your local politics? Do you care about how your taxes are spent?
Not enough to invest money and time, no. And my preferred party isn't in power, so it's not like knowing the current leadership is corrupt would change my vote - I don't vote for them anyway.
I'll pay $50 a year, but I better be able to cancel with a single click and no criminal shenanigans with fraudulent charges thereafter.
My local library system offers digital access to WSJ, NY Times and many other periodicals. You may want to see if yours does too.
I pay 60 a month for the FT and I'm pretty sure that money isn't the full cost.
Good journalism is really expensive and the internet had destroyed their business model.
In some states it is the law to single click cancel. In others it is not, and requires a phone call to cancel. It's not impossible to cancel, but they bank on people not wanting to call in. They'll also try to negotiate down your rate if you call in wanting to cancel.
Last time I checked if you went in front of investors and said “hey, I want to make a business where nobody wants to pay, not even a dollar a year” you would be laughed out of the room.
So. I think that is your problem. Maybe make a business where people are wanting to pay for the content? Think about how much more money you would make!!!
I agree with you completely, and there are voices within the organization advocating for that as well. Big legacy mainstream media companies move at a glacial pace and making that kind of change takes a lot of time and buy-in throughout the whole org chart.
And, somewhat counterintuitively, I think it's also important to note that sometimes what the journalists want to cover and content that people want and are willing to pay for aren't always the same thing. Additionally, sometimes what people want and are willing to pay for doesn't sit well with advertisers, so it is always a nuanced balancing act.
Alternatives to increasing advertisements have been tried and found to work. However, these approaches may not be feasible for all publications—especially local news outlets that may not have as many resources. These approaches are to:
i) Start selling other services besides news. The New York Times—one of the most currently financially successful newspapers—has found a lot of success in its Games section. This was famously seen in their acquisition of Wordle, though this has already been popular with their Crosswords section. The company has also found success with its Recipes section. (This is not the only reason behind their financial success, but it's a significant part of their strategy.)
ii) Focus on financial news, which lets the publication frame their reports as having a financial value that arguably exceeds the subscription price. The Financial Times is also a highly profitable newspaper today, with one of the highest-priced subscription prices that can be about $500 USD a year for a standard subscription (depending on one's region). The Wall Street Journal similarly charges a high subscription price. Both are seen as important resources for well-funded companies to buy group subscriptions for. (Once more, this isn't the only reason for their success, but it's a major factor.)
iii) Focus on a specialized, niche area of reporting that other publications can't or won't cover—ideally appealing to institutions or large audiences willing to spend money. For example, several publications in Canada focus on providing detailed reports on federal politics (such as The Hill Times and iPolitics), which is useful information for their readership that fills a gap by less-frequent reports from the country's main newspapers—this lets them charge high subscription prices. The Athletic also used to be financially successful by standing out with its sports-only reporting, which led to its acquisition by The New York Times. These specialized publications can charge more, because certain audiences find these reports financially valuable.
---
However, a major drawback to thinking about news through the lens of financial value is that many important news stories don't have financial value. While an outlet can attempt to use one of these approaches to subsidize the rest of their stories, it's also costly. It's usually not feasible for many local newspapers to fund the software development of a Games section (especially as this would need to compete with all the other online alternatives for one's attention).
It's also pricey to offer competitive enough salaries to create a newsroom to compete with The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. However, it's not impossible—there have been a few alternative publications that have found success by focusing on a niche, such as business news in a country outside of the US, or focusing on a sector such as biotech for the publication STAT.
It's a tough problem to try and fund local news. There is civic value for one's community to have a platform for providing a check against corruption by various institutions—yet in practice, oftentimes not enough for most local residents purchase subscriptions. Alternatives to support local news can include funding (such as through taxes), but that makes the outlet reliant on government funding, which is subject to change (and the perception, real or not, that the outlet is less independent from the government).
Increasing advertisements seems like a short-term solution for local news outlets trying to stay afloat, but it's hard for me to see this as a long-term solution for sufficient funding.
Philanthropy and donations seem to be making headway here.
The main problem the news industry faces is they're trying to run for-profit businesses when they should see themselves as a public service that seeks to break even or produce sustainable losses.
News should be subsidized by people who want to inform the public whether out of public-spirited motives or out of a self interested desire to influence the public debate and, indirectly, the government. That means allowing people who want to support the news outlet to donate or to purchase a print version of the outlet's reporting. If I was a millionaire, I'd probably start or purchase my own media outlet to influence public opinion. Controlling the media is probably a better ROI than directly buying politicians so I'm surprised rich people mostly seem to opt for the latter. Even those who buy media outlets, such as Bezos buying WaPo, often don't noticeably change their editorial line or move away from the "we have to be a profitable business" paradigm.
It also doesn't help that journalists are, on average, well to the left of public opinion or that colleges offer degrees in journalism which was traditionally a blue collar profession that anybody could do. Journalism schools mean journalists are unnecessarily stuck with debts they probably can't ever repay and unable to pivot out of their profession if there's a lack of people willing to pay for it.
I think part of the issue is that news does not seem to equal valuable information. Subscriptions, where a person has paying followers due to expertise in his particular domain do exist though. The difference is that they apparently offer value to the followers.
The issue is value. 1$ is too high, because most of the news right now are, and I am being charitable, opinion pieces. I have an opinion too. In fact, there is no shortage of opinions on the market. The market has spoken that opinions are worth less than 1$ a year.
Now, media companies do have an opportunity now to distinguish themselves as gatekeepers ( and a source of truth ) from AI generated stuff, but I am too cynical to seriously consider it as a possible outcome.
To appease Google…
Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets
You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality.
Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now:
The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex
Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now.
New Zealanders Are Crazy for This Fruit. It’s Not the Kiwi.
Salt Is Hiding Everywhere. Can You Spot It?
What’s the Best Way to Get Rid of a Hangnail?
Where to Buy Plants Online
Unfortunately the more news-worthy stories also suffer from a severe lack of viewpoint diversity.
Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.
Which "ideological narratives"? This is such a vague description that you could interpret it to mean anything, especially since the NYT has been getting blasted from all directions lately. Conservatives think it's left-leaning drivel, and progressives think it capitulates too much to viewpoints on the right.
Progressives are 6% of the population: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-.... The NYT could be very left leaning and still get criticism from a small percentage of the population that’s even further left.
One example: the NYT fired its opinion page editor for publishing an article by Tom Cotton calling to suppress the George Floyd riots with the National Guard. For context, calling in the Maryland National Guard to stop the Freddie Gray riots was one of the most popular things Larry Hogan ever did in that blue state. Cotton’s opinion was squarely in the mainstream, and by firing Bennett the NYT revealed itself to be quite far to the left.
Another example is anything touching on affirmative action. Americans oppose taking race into account in hiring to increase diversity by a 3:1 margin. It’s an extremely unpopular and out-of-the-mainstream position. But the NYT engages in such hiring practices. And when you read the NYT’s coverage of such issues, including the supreme court’s decision in SFFA, it’s clear where the paper’s bias lies.
This bias manifests in the way articles talk about events. For one thing, it’s quite obvious from the tone of the article what the author thinks about particular policies or events. An article about Biden’s declining support among minorities, for example, might be framed as a bad thing, instead of a positive development. You will also get selective use of what policies are labeled as “liberal” or “conservative.” Restricting abortion gets labeled as a “conservative” position (which it is), but affirmative action doesn’t get labeled as a “liberal position (which it is). You’ll also see a difference in when public opinion polling is disclosed. Articles on Dobbs heavily featured public opinion in favor of legalized abortion. But articles in SFFA usually didn’t mention longstanding polling opposing racial preferences.
Your link is to “progressive left”, a subcategory that makes your claim of 6% extremely misleading. A much broader picture can be seen at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
These complaints are always funny to me, because the "viewpoint diversity" referred to is usually right-wing rhetoric which not only already has a voice in NYT, but also has several dedicated outlets that are elevated to "paper of record" sources among conservatives. What doesn't get much play is, say, PoC and lower class youth perspectives on topics like foreign affairs and economics. There a plenty of eloquent voices among that cohort (that you should have to be eloquent to be heard), but that would disrupt the manufactured consensus around what government and private enterprise do here and abroad.
If that's what you're arguing we should be hearing more of from the NYT, though, I'm all for it. Not, say, another half-baked article about "crime waves" so that the NYPD can get another billion in overtime or whatever. Or, on the hysterically liberal side, not another article about "Biden wiping out student loan debt [which he was obligated to do under already existing statute]."
Would you recognize a “PoC” viewpoint if you read it? I mean the term itself is a fake label that is basically only used by white people and elite non-whites who must navigate white spaces and institutions. My whole family is non-white immigrants, and I never even heard the term “PoC” until I went to graduate school and encountered far left white people. I think you probably have to be in the leftmost 10-15% of the political spectrum to use “PoC” unironically.
The funny thing is that, insofar as you’re talking about what the US is doing “abroad,” I’m very plugged into that political sentiment, since my home country was on the receiving end of some stupid American foreign policy choices, and my dad works in international development. I know lots of Nigerians, Palestinians, etc., but nobody would call themselves “PoC.” It’s an utterly non-sensical and reductive label.
The NYT certainly platforms self-identified “PoC,” but as far as I can tell, their viewpoints are limited to ones that flatter white liberal NYT readers. Would the NYT ever platform all the Bangladeshis I know that begrudgingly credit Trump for pulling out of Afghanistan or opposing the war in Ukraine? Would they publish my parents, who think affirmative action is a threat to Asians and want the state department to stop flying pride flags in Muslim countries? And would you even recognize that as a genuine “PoC” view if you read it?
I too have a very different New York Times:
Top Stories:
Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll
At Least 6 Dead in a Mall Stabbing That Horrifies Australians
China Had a ‘Special Place’ in Modi’s Heart. Now It’s a Thorn in His Side.
The O.J. Simpson Trial Served as a Landmark for Domestic Violence Awareness
And then there's side bar and below the fold type stories. Generally still leaning very heavily on the news/politics side though.
The New York Times is not a news site I regularly read, but I see quite a different set of headlines highlighted on the front page:
Johnson, With His Job Under Threat, Gets a Lifeline From Trump
Biden Wipes Out Another $7.4 Billion in Student Loan Debt
5 People Killed in Stabbing at Busy Mall in Sydney, Australia
Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on Collision Course
Republican Women Are Divided on Abortion as Bans Spread
Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now.
You also list one of these (the last), but the others seem fairly standard things that a newspaper would report, and not clickbait rubbish at all.
It's disingenuous to claim those are "front page" stories. The NYT main webpage has the first pages of the different paper sections as you scroll down. The "front page", or most important news of the news site , is at the top, which is exclusively (right now) dealing with US politics, an Australian attack, the Middle East and Chinese/Indian foreign policy. Meanwhile, to get to the hangnail article you have to scroll 75-80% of the way down. Past the other news, the op-eds, the sports, all the way to the lifestyle section and right before the cooking section.
Half of those are opinion pieces which are never on the front page.
uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world
none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.
They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....?
Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit?
You can see the Core Web Vitals. What modern day news organizations are doing is nowhere close to that.
Google rewards them by ranking them so high. In any case, Google doesnt actually give a shit about any core web anything when they’re raking in the adsense monies. These are simple distractions, they know which side of the bread is buttered.
It's the advertising arm of Google rather than the search part that incrntivises this stuff.
I opened the Google app on my phone to read the news feed, 9 out of 10 articles were unreadable under the cookie popups, floating videos I didn't even click to start playing, and other helpful offers getting in the way. It's shit, utter shit. Why don't they have "reading mode" to show only the text, I bet they are afraid of getting sued if they supported clean text like the HN app I have installed. On the laptop I always use ad blockers and don't see the whole scale of the disaster.
I've used firefox with adblock/ublock since I first learned about it 20-ish years ago. I have a vpn on my phone primarily because I can do dns adblocking. I gave up most news and social media around COVID times, and haven't watched ad supported tv in 10 years (oh god, I sound like the uni-bomber; lol) - so I forget how bad the cacophony of advertising is for normal people. That everyone who can doesn't instantly install an adblocker on their browser (I think its like ~30-50%) still blows me away...
/rant
Since they sued OpenAI for copyright infringement I actively avoid them. I don't find them reasonable anymore.
What is unreasonable about not wanting your news organization to be ripped off for free?
What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?”
Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, and they’re so new at teaching, you wind up teaching them. Seems legit
I agree; moreover, I don't even understand why there's any controversy. A set of weights for a network trained using a particular document is a derivative work.
When I attended college and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, that didn’t make all my future design output a derivative work (legally).
I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)
Certainly not all of it, but if you were to cut and paste some words from one of your textbooks, maybe change a few words, and then pass it off as your own, I would call you a plagiarist or a thief.
The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you might do after 10 years on the job.
I’m pretty sure I wait through/ignore/click past an ad every time I play Connections.
A matter of opinion. Sure, maybe NY Times ain’t NY Post yet, but it doesn’t take that long for a frog to come to full boil, even on slow simmer.
Eh really? I’m a paying subscriber to the NYT, and every now and then I browse the site without an ad blocker, it’s unbearable.
But maybe we’re grading on a curve here.
Also they have a mix of comically bad articles and really good ones. Whereas in the past there was some level of baseline journalistic integrity.
Now I frequently read articles where at least once a week I have to check if I’m accidentally reading an op-ed, because it’s so opinionated. And this is even when I happen to agree with the political slant they’ve clearly taken.
I don’t want any slant. I want factual, objective reporting, whether I like the outcome or not.
I subscribe to the NYTs, and one thing that drives me nuts is their animated graphics which play in a loop on some articles. They aren't ads - they are artworks created for the story, but I find it really distracting to try to read text when there's some dancing cutesy image looping endlessly in my field of view. They really should add an option to let the reader opt out of that crap.
NYT mobile app is busted with ad blocking. It tries to spam refresh the ad and freezes the whole app for multiple seconds every time it tries to show one. I already pay for a subscription, why should I be forced to see ads?
Maybe if Google ignored news sites, things would improve.
Look at the Washington Post site. One good article above the fold, a right column of clickbait, and more clickbait when you scroll. Then crap "lifestyle" articles. Pathetic.
To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.
I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.
Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?
The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.
Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage.
Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either.
Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.
Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply.
I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome.
I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?
If AMP had stuck around, we wouldn't have the quagmire of terrible UX on news sites today. The hostility towards AMP was wholly undeserved.
It was absolutely, 100% deserved.
It was definitely not. AMP was mostly a standard for how you should build performant websites. Then you could opt into what was effectively google caching and serving your AMP-enabled webpages for you. This is good actually.
No, AMP was a way for Google to increase their ad revenue and try to prevent people from leaving Google.
AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.
You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them.
There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it.
You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view.
You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.
AMP was great. All the anti-AMP (and signed web bundles) advocacy was profoundly user-hostile
Google is DEEPLY and directly involved in the ecosystems that:
* pay publishers more for showing video ads than showing text or image ads
* encourages and creates invasive tracking Javascript and cookies-and-similar tricks
* rewards SEO/spam tricks with higher placements in search
Remember when google first launched and it was so great as it was just some text adverts rather than things like punch the monkey.
I remember when google first launched and didn't have ads because the founders wrote a whitepaper about how ads would inevitably ruin google
Advertisers have wanted moving ads since the dawn of the internet, and I'd be shocked if they weren't always willing to pay more to get them. But the big selling point of Google, and one of the drivers that got them to where they are today, is they looked at that money and said "no, it isn't worth it, this will compromise the user experience". Then they went with text ads on Google search.
Over the years I assume they've changed that decision along with the general cultural rot that comes to large companies, but there is a clear precedent. Publishers didn't have to take money to make their own product worse. They could have made their product good and tried to make money that way.
Although realistically these media companies are probably going to go out of business with the current model whatever they try. The internet has made a mockery of their credibility; the future seems to be podcasters with dedicated audiences going it alone or blogs - the costs are lower and the quality is generally higher.
You know that with Substack all these actual journalists are having no issue getting paid very well.
I'm not sure why we'd want to expand NPR or make more NPR's. We need less of their low-quality and biased journalism IMO, not more.
NPR is pretty high quality. You just don’t like what they publish.
I guess you missed the op-ed written by a senior NPR editor recently. He admitted that NPR suppressed stories because they might help Trump and pursued poorly sourced (and ultimately false) stories because they would hurt Trump.
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
What more could NPR say about those slap fights (Hunter Biden, COVID-19) that wasn't already beaten to death by the credulous corporate media? Is every news outlet required to be subsumed by the right-wing noise machine's narrative?
Uri turning to Bari to air his grievances is pretty much all any one needs to know about his POV.
"But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming."
That's no slap fight, those were serious allegations and the fact that they were false is equally important.
NPR happily participated in spreading those left wing falsehoods, but was unwilling to spread the truth with equal vigor.
I agree it's a shame that Uri had to turn outside NPR to discuss this. But you know as well as I do that NPR would not have published this.
And while COVID-19 was certainly a controversial topic, it was no "slap fight" either. It was the most important issue in the nation for two years or more.
You're dismissing important issues as "slap fights" and dismissing serious discussion because you suspect someone has a different point of view. Does that tell us all we need to know about you?
What could NPR possibly add to any of those 3 food fights? In addition to the 100s of hours and 1,000s of column inches already wasted? New evidence, witnesses, analysis, pizza toppings, anything? Nope.
Was yet another rehash more important than every thing else? There are 1,000s of newsworthy topics and issues every single day. Was relitigating the precise definition of "collusion" really the most important topic? Again?
Was there any risk that any one any where wouldn't have already been fully immersed in those jello wrestling matches? (Benghazi!)
Are you familiar with Project Censored? Were Hunter's nude selfies and expired (?) concealed carry permit more important than any of these: https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-news-stories...
FWIW: Every side have long claimed "the media" censors their favored tickle fights. aka "Working the refs", public relations. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent explains how that endless meta-slapfight works.
To their credit, the right-wing noise machine created their own media ecosystem. (Though it's weird they continue to say they're being ignored, when conservatives dominate every medium.) The left, greens, socialists, grannies knitting for world peace, etc should all do the same.
Gods, I certainly hope so. Firstly, that the "news" actually be "new".
You're proving my point there. Those are all relatively fringe groups, outside the mainstream of the Democratic party and the majority of elected officials. Prominent elected Democrats can rely on "the media" to get their message out and to protect them from criticism. (Both from the far-left and from the right, as we saw from their treatment of Bernie Sanders.)
The "right wing" (meaning mainstream Republicans and elected officials), had to create their own media because the "leans left" media will not report fairly about them. Twitter banned the POTUS. The NY Times forced an editor to resign for publishing an op-ed from a sitting Senator. And NPR targeted the President, according to that senior editor.
No one claimed they're being ignored. They're being attacked. When the left-leaning media, like NPR, covers conservatives, it's usually to take their statements and actions out of context and criticize them.
I agree completely, but we don't see much of that these days.
What we see is the neoliberal media chanting the neoliberal chorus, trying to silence both the right and (as you pointed out), the greens, socialists, and others to their left.
Agreed.
Most people misunderstood the role of NYT, WaPo, and NPR. They aren't left, right, up, widdershins, liberal, conservative, whatever.
Rather, their (self-appointed) role is to defend the status quo. aka the establishment, the beltway, the village.
NYT only looks "center-right" to me because I'm way far to the left, "left wing" to you because you're conservative. But those views aren't really helpful for understanding them. Those labels don't mean anything inside the bubble. (As revealed by their evergreen appeals for "bipartisanship", "compromise", and "consensus".)
--
Not that you asked, but there's a similar disconnect between the folk understanding of politics and how politicos behave.
I've run for office. Dialing for dollars, campaigning statewide, door belling, interviews, endorsements, messaging & framing, debate prep, costumes and makeup, all of it. Very illuminating. And now I totally get why everyone in that ecosystem behaves as they do.
Everyone should run for office, do some policy work, try to get published, etc. We'd all be better off if more people had first-hand experience in the sausage factory.
I'm not educated enough in journalism to distinguish high quality from low quality, but as a listener/reader, some of NPR feels like good, original journalism (my ears perk up whenever I hear Eleanor Beardsley, for example); other content feels like it is just parroting the NY Times (which itself is a weird mixture of thought-provoking articles and clickbait headlines).
It used to be. Now they focus on identity politics of journalistic integrity. Only really high quality news program at this point is PBS NewsHour.
The problem with this is the problem with every scheme I have seen so far alongb these lines.It gives the government more control over what is and isn't "journalism." Either you give money to spam farms and watch dogs equally, or you wind up with cronyism.
If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you.
Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them.
The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere.
It's worse in places like Facebook where they actively don't want you to actually follow the link. Facebook wants you to leave a like or a comment right there under the preview, then keep scrolling.
To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize information happening elsewhere.
Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.
If Google was doing what news sites did, it would have journalists writing articles, researching data, investigating, etc. Yet they do none of that.
Your statement is absurd.
I kinda wonder at what point would Google enter the field by sucking AFP's feed, auto filtering it and AI generate articles.
Yahoo News wasn't that, but a search engine getting into the news business would not be unprecedented.
All of this still requires actual journalism to happen at some point, though. Someone needs to conduct interviews. AI isn’t going to do that any time soon.
Yes, that work would still happen under AFP or any other aggregator that deals with sourcing the news, syndicate it and manage the revenue sharing.
I believe they're working on it
https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unrele...
At some point someone is actually doing journalism though (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements which pay money for the information. You could reasonably argue that google should be doing the same, right?
Whoever is doing journalism, it's not those sites that now want a governmental tax handout to continue being bad.
It often is though. Many of these sites are employing the journalists who are uncovering the original story.
I think the reality is that journalism was a ridiculously inefficient business.
A big national event happens. News organizations collectively send 30 different reporters to the scene.
Those 30 reporters each write up a firsthand story. Now hundreds of smaller news organizations (local papers, local TV news stations, etc.) rewrite it in their own words and put it in their version.
In the end, for any major story you end up with hundreds of articles being written, but out of those there are only a handful of genuinely different narratives, each retold in slightly different words hundreds of times. It's rare that a local news organization adds any significant value.
In my opinion, NPR is the only organization that gets it right: there's a single national organization that does the news at the top of every hour, and local stations then come on to give local news following that. A single national organization does morning and evening long-form news shows with the national shows, and each local station does its own long-form shows with local news. Very little redundancy.
I don't think the law (from what I read of it) actually does target that though. Might as well cite it rather than refer to it in the abstract:
Google can remove all the summaries and the law will apply just as much. In fact, from my reading of it, in other parts they are actually referring to "impressions" as the driver; that is it's explicitly the click through that they are asserting provides the value to Google, not the prevention of click through.
I get that emotionally, it's the prevention of click through that feels injurious, but it doesn't read as the spirit of this to me. I think possibly they know that if they didn't fully scope in links here Google would immediately just reduce it to raw links and this would reduce click through and it would hurt the intended beneficiaries of this more than it helps them.
From the article, the overall point seems to be on Google making significantly more money from news than the news providers, and the providers trying to find a better balance one way or another.
I think you're right on raw links also part of the target, but it's also in the context of Google providing an overview of the news and profiting from it, whether the links are clicked or not (Google's clearly covering all the spectrum of where money can be made on the pipeline, until it hits the target site)
There's nothing wrong with that. Only expression is covered by copyright; re-interpretation/summarizing isn't.
If your definition of "wrong" is merely "what the law currently says", California has released a patch update to your moral code.
I'm looking at news.google.com right now, and I am not finding any summarization being done by Google. Where are you seeing that?
There used to be audience caps that prevented news outlets from holding a monopoly over news in any given market.
Those should be brought back and applied to content moderation platforms.
This is so backwards. This is a terrible experience. Embedded summaries are great, they make everyone's life easier. If embedded summaries are killing journalism, then journalism is already dead.
Should we be forced to have a worse user experience because the websites don't like it?
Having any government fund news journalism is a bad idea. In any event, you can be certain the revenue will be redistributed to fund the war machine in another country.
Surely you're speaking about your own country of residence here?
In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's collective anxieties for larger quarterly profits.
I suppose you could argue that it indirectly supports the "war machine" in Ukraine, but I don't really consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense, especially given the national security implications at home.
You are Estonian?
Few would consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense. But self-defense is not a clear term, see for example the Bush Doctrine and preemptive war. America has a historical habit of funding its future enemies, and in more current wars of simply maintaining the status quo.
Not exactly, but I'm an American citizen who has lived in Estonia for the past ~5 years (and often read Estonian language media).
One of the more unfortunate political outcomes I've noticed from the Bush era is a tendency for people to take the tragedies of US foreign policy in the Middle East and project them onto every conflict involving the US since then (this is not targeted at you).
So you end up with well-intentioned individuals who strive for peace and opposed the Iraq War (or eg Vietnam), who find themselves siding with the autocracy invading its sovereign neighbors, for the simple fact that it positions itself as a force against American hegemony and must therefore inherently be "the good guys".
Either way, I sympathize with your point more generally, and also wouldn't like to see my tax dollars spent on drone striking weddings.
Fascinating and unusual path you have taken. There are so few people in Estonia, I wasn't expecting you to actually be there.
You have an interesting point of view and given me food for thought, thank you.
Wrt to the present, I think the current (US) military actions are simply a means of moving wealth from one segment of the population to another without a need for transparency. Hence, less tax dollars should go in.
I'd prefer to regress to the time when our government needed to fund war by asking people to purchase liberty bonds.
The BBC...?
The standout institution of British propaganda and intelligence gathering?
I can see why the British might be very happy with them and they're often intelligent and classy about the whole thing. But they aren't a counterexample of public money being used to grease wheels in the war machine.
Maybe this isn't quite the same thing, but I had been threatened with legal action in the past for linking to a site's public assets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26550846
How did that story play out?
Ultimately I removed the deep links that allowed you to use third-party clients to stream the videos (e.g. VLC), so now you just have to use their very poor UI.
My site does still support searching, though, which they still haven't added after... four years.
I see a parallel between the news linking case and AI training on copyrighted content (without regurgitating it back later). If AI can't use ideas from copyrighted works, then nobody can. Because anyone could be secretly using AI we have to apply the same strict standards of attribution to all human works. And that would lead to a chilling effect, any creative act takes the risk of incidental infringement.
Should copyright owners control the external discourse about their work, or own the ideas in their works? Should we upgrade AI from protected expression to protected ideas?
Yes, we should be applying strict standards of attribution to all works, human or otherwise.
IMO one of the biggest defects of language models currently is lack of attribution; if sources are not properly cited, there is no way to verify the veracity of what is written. Unfortunately, apart from the technical difficulty of implementing attribution, the exact combination of sources is part of a model's "secret sauce", so there is an economic incentive to not cite.
Copyright is the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, this law has nothing to do with copyright law.
That's an extremely narrow view. Federal copyright law is Federal jurisdiction. States have the power to make their own non-conflicting copyright laws.
This generalizes to copyright and patent IP in general; we want to encourage the creation of valuable art, inventions, and other cultural artifacts, but instead of rewarding their production in a more direct manner we instead imposed a huge restriction on the behavior of all people when interacting with media or technology in order to carve out a reward for the creator. And now this law once again restricts the freedom of others to use or share information in order to carve out a reward by way of exception to those restrictions. Creating rewards by removing freedoms from the majority of people is extremely backwards.
Why? They are the most spoiled, privileged and entitled group out there. Not only did they force google, facebook, etc to give them preferential treatment in search/algorithm/etc, now they want google, facebook, etc to pay them for the 'privilege' of giving them preferential treatment. Not only do they want google/facebook to send users to their sites, they want google/facebook to pay them for that privilege. The shameless hubris.
No. That's for authoritarian countries like britain and china.
But government funded news has no risks?
What we need is to break up google/facebook/etc. We need competition in the search, smartphone, social media, etc space. The fundamental problem is that two companies control so much of american mindshare.