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by rchaud 2556 days ago
What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this.

Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014). This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0]. In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked journalists to take photos as well as provide the research and writing [1]. How would the quality of your work be affected if you had to do the job of 2 people?

The classifieds ads business is dead, and subscriptions have been declining for years because "news on the Internet is free". The only "media" that makes serious money is talk radio, which isn't journalism so much as diatribes of political invective.

As it turns out, that's what people are willing to pay for, or at least sit through ads for. If anything, "the media" is giving the people what they want.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-su...

3 comments

The idea that the internet transmorphed media from oracles of truth to professional manipulators is taking the whole situation inside out. The fact that people used to trust media more is not an indicator that media used to say more truth in the past. Journalists lived in a high tower pretty much unreachable by an average reader, so producing rubbish, or being manipulative was billion times easier. In the past only an important journalist was able to stand against another important journalist, and even that was a slow inconclusive pushing. Nowadays, bullshit, and incompetence can be revealed in hours, and even small mistakes are publicly noted. Everybody can be media now. Naturally journalists has lost their semigod status. But it's important to understand that they weren't semigods before, it's just that you looked at them down up. And now you don't.
> The only “media” that makes serious money is

...

> Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new...

Hmm

Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case, the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other people's work.
While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with this picture.
Google made $4.7B off of the news industry, by aggregating other people's stories and advertising on them. None of that money actually went to writers or publishers.

Which is the entire point of the article you linked. If you're gonna be snarky, you should really check to make sure your information is accurate.

That article -- and the lobbying group "study" it is based on have been pretty roundly condemned even by other journalism organizations e.g. https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/nyt-google-media.php

tl;dr the number is total fabrication

Which only cements the claim that no one is making serious money off of proper news media.
Has the news industry's economics ever been truly separate from entertainment industry economics? Is the only reason news ever made money was because it offered people a novel form of entertainment?

Did people ever buy news because it was news? Or was this decline inevitable as actual entertainment was always going to eventually be able to offer a better match for what people actually buy?

Most newspaper articles don't have or need a photograph. Did the Chicago Sun Times really have a 1:1 ratio of journalists and photographers?