[acslater00]

This is ridiculous. "Greed" didn't kill newspapers. You think the classified business would be any better today off if newspapers had artificially held ad. and sub. prices down in the 80s and 90s? $0 is $0, and that's what people will pay for classifieds now.

"Hedge Funds", everyone's favorite bogeyman. "Lack of Innovation", as if the Chicago Tribune was going to save itself by opening a geocities page in 1996.

The 'news' business is a zombie because it sells a product that is basically free to produce and free to consume. That's it! You don't really need a newsroom to give you "the news" anymore, and so the market for a product whose main feature is a professional, standing writing staff that simply yesterday's events no longer meaningfully exists. No amount of investment in technology by media companies in the 90s was going to do anything but _hasten_ that shift.

But, there's plenty of great media out there. You can sell good writing if it is actually good; you can monetize your opinions if people will actually pay attention to them; you can sell your access if you actually have it; these are media business models with staying power. They might not be billion-dollar properties and they might not report "the news" per se but they provide value and they will be fine. My household subscribes to The Athletic, Foreign Affairs, Tablet, The New Yorker, and The Information, to name a few. All great.

[rainonmoon]

The real issue is the pervasive attitude in this thread, which you've also exhibited, that news is "basically free to produce." It isn't, and it's absolutely incredible to me how many otherwise intelligent people can't track just how much of what they read online traces back to original reporting. If this cost was passed to the reader, it would be absurd, and so it was historically majorly subsidised by wealthy families and the advertising business. The incentives have since changed; those media owners now see it's more profitable not to report the news but increasingly use these channels disingenuously.

Here's the great joke: if we would hold them to account for this, we could do something about it. But nobody does. Nobody thinks to blame the ownership (unless they're an established boogeyman like Murdoch.) Instead, as you can see everywhere in this thread, the blame is put on journalists, who now have to pick battles against corporate interest to get ANYTHING of value over the line, under ridiculous deadlines, with zero job security. What's being lost here isn't "good writing" or the ability to "monetize opinions" -- it's the institutional protection and resources required to hold power accountable, examine and reflect on trends, and uncover essential facts about our world.

Okay, we can point to examples where institutions have gotten it wrong, and they deserve holding to account for those instances too. But there are just as many and more where journalists have put their health, families, jobs, and lives at risk to ensure people aren't so easily hoodwinked by money and authority. If all someone wants to read is Medium blogs for the rest of their lives, fine, crack a beer and enjoy the end of journalism. But especially for a community that prides itself on values like intellectualism, open communication, and bettering the world, it's incredibly disheartening every time a thread like this appears on HN and the response is "maybe newspapers shouldn't be so bad then!" This is an information crisis that is being celebrated by the people who should be fighting it the hardest.

[dexen]

>[news isn't] free to produce

Software also isn't free to produce, and yet here we are - in a world dominated by freely available software. It runs on every computer, because it's either "good enough", or in some cases, outright better quality and supported for longer, than paid-for software.

And yet Microsoft and friends are alive and thriving in the ecosystem with free competing software. How come? They re-invented themselves into billing for related hardware, services & guarantees.

We are still waiting for the top-heavy media - including the missing link "online newspapers" media like HuffPo and WaPo - to adjust to the current market situation. If they can't, or won't, too bad.

The new-style online media, typically a one-man operation spanning several channels, are already well established and turning profit. By publishing for free news that costed real money to produce.

[zbentley]

I don't think the analogy holds. Organization-backed news is not to free/single-publisher news as corporate software is to free software.

Free, single-producer news is, if we want to try to adapt this analogy (perhaps past the breaking point) more like free software that only has a single developer/maintainer. We all know what those projects can be like. There are some diamonds in the rough, but overwhelmingly they're hyper-specific, difficult to modify, hard to question (file issues with), and often of dubious quality.

Edit: The analogy also falls apart: I'm not sure how going from single-maintainer -> multiple contributors has a parallel in the blogging/tweeting world that is doable for many writers. Some blogs have informal editorial boards and groups of publishers who edit each other, but most multi-writer blogs I've seen are just separate threads that happen to appear in the same place.

[matt4077]

Microsoft is doing fine because they are protected by copyright. The New is not: th specific words fall under copyright protection, but the work is in the investigation, and that work can be reappropriated by just rewriting the story “in your own words”.