[Booktrope]

A shallow, one-sided take on what happened to the news business. I mean, here's a guy who quotes himself (!) saying,

"I’d go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet"

As his example of this, he appears to the New York Times as his exemplar of a company that's been relatively successful online. Relative to newspapers that have basically failed that is. Comparted to Breitbart, Fox News, and other non-fact based journalism, relatively, well, less successful.

Google is in a sense an aggregator but according to algorithms that it's careful to keep secret. Its main financial goal in doing this is to maximize ad revenue it can extract from the feed, and Google is more successful in that regard than any of the sources of the news it aggregates. Leaving other concerns aside, this does drain ever more revenue out of the business of creating news, since advertisers now choose between buying ads from the aggegator or ads from the source, and no, Google's work hasn't doubled marketing budgets of advertisers.

Facebook controls what people see -- it doesn't aggregate, it segregates. You see what Facebook has determined you want to see, and usually they're right (It would be much better for us as a community if they were wrong much more often and showed everyone things they don't want to see.) Facebook financial goal in choosing what to put in user feeds is maximizing ad revenue for Facebook. This has further drained ad revenue away from sources of content.

The piece claims, hey, the internet was making it harder on news sources before the ascendency of Facebook and Google, though as late as the 1990's newspapers were still a very profitable business. Yeah, Craig's List grabbed a huge share of the classified ad business which traditionally was a major part of newspaper revenue, and newspapers stupidly failed to mount any significant effort to get that revenue back. But Google and Facebook have vastly more effective methods of siphoning off revenue as they've dominated market share and therefore become indispensable for all news outlets.

It not only starves news sources of revenue but favors sources that tell people what they want to hear in a way that excites the audience. In other words, the current sorry state of our political world.

[pdonis]

> Comparted to Breitbart, Fox News, and other non-fact based journalism

You're assuming that the NYT is "fact based journalism". I don't think it is. They are pushing a point of view, just as every other media source is.

> indispensable for all news outlets

I know the news outlets claim this, but I find the claim to be either very stupid (highly unlikely) or very disingenuous (much more likely). If I want to know what the NYT published today, I can go to their website. If I want to know what CNN is saying today, I can just watch them (or go to their website). Everyone knows these news sources exist and where to find them; it's not like they're new startups trying to acquire users. So the idea that the news outlets need to be visible in Google searches or Facebook feeds for people to know what they are saying is ludicrous.

[Booktrope]

Google and FB have a huge share of the internet reading market; polls repeatedly show that over 30% of the population gets its news from Facebook posts, and another large share get info from Google searches. Twitter also plays a huge role, and soon to be added, stuff like Gab where no you will not be served up any liberal stuff. With the market dominated by a few "aggregators" it's not quite accurate to say, oh, news sources can just get their own following. Of course they can get some market share; the NYT has done better than most newspapers at that, and Breitbart even better, due I think to its much better alignment with social media (sensationalism, tribalism, etc.)

Just because you can find CNN(or even MSNBC) on your TV or go to their website, doesn't address the role of FB and Google in dissemination of news. Let me repeat, over 30 percent of Americans get news from their Facebook feeds. Facebook uses these feeds to attract advertising on a scale no media producer can even dream of, and it comes from the same advertising budgets.

I have to say, when you name call people who disagree with you (very stupid or disingenuous), it's a good indicator, your argument doesn't have a very solid foundation. You say, it's "ludicrous" to say news outlets need visibility in Google or FB for people to know what they're saying, you totally miss the point. Yeah, I can set up a web site with my opinions, and anyone can come and find out what I'm saying too. We're talking about how to make economically viable newspapers that provide fact-based reporting (no, not perfectly factual or "true" but a serious effort), and that does require having a presence where a huge share of the potential audience finds their news sources.

If someone could actually build a successful media business on the scale of a serious newspaper without relying on social media to send readers in today's market, why, they'd be the most successful newspaper exec since, oh, I dunno, Joe Pulitzer, who incidentally was famous for something called "yellow journalism," meaning sensationalized, not very factual stuff.

No, NYT isn't some paragon of "truth", but it does make a much more serious effort to report facts than the non-fact based media. Yes there's some slant to its reporting, but its not always the same (news tends to be less liberal than editorial, for example, and they publish quite a few right wing op ed pieces for variety. If you think the quality of journalism on Brietbart and NYT are equivalent, well, you must not think of "facts" in quite the way I do, you know, stuff that actually happened and can be verified.

[pdonis]

> Just because you can find CNN(or even MSNBC) on your TV or go to their website, doesn't address the role of FB and Google in dissemination of news.

Of course it's true that FB and Google play a role in news dissemination, but it's also irrelevant to the argument the news outlets are making. They are basically saying that they should be considered the "official" news, and should get a piece of the revenue from any other organization that has a role in disseminating news. And I think that claim is nonsense. It is up to individual people to decide where they want to get their news from. If they would rather get it from Google and Facebook than the NYT or CNN, that is the NYT's and CNN's problem; they either need to up their game or go into a different business. It is not a problem that needs to be "fixed" by law.

> when you name call people who disagree with you (very stupid or disingenuous), it's a good indicator, your argument doesn't have a very solid foundation

It wasn't name calling, it was calling a spade a spade. I am saying that the news organizations are not actually fighting for "equality" or "fact-based journalism" in news dissemination. They are fighting to preserve the privileged position they had before the Internet destroyed it. Sorry, but I don't care.

The Internet destroyed a lot of old business models and created a lot of new ones. That's how it works in the big leagues. You either adapt or you go out of business. And in any case I don't see either the NYT or CNN in any danger of going out of business, which just makes all of their complaining seem even more disingenous--it's just obvious that they aren't fighting for principle, they're just arguing that they should be allowed to siphon more money from other people's pockets into theirs, and they already have plenty of money, so I have no sympathy for them, and I certainly don't want the law to be forcing other companies to pay them money because they are supposed to be "news" outlets.

To be clear, I don't have any sympathy for Google or Facebook either. I am certainly not a fan of the ad-supported business model. But that just means that none of the sides in this brouhaha are the good guys.

> it does make a much more serious effort to report facts than the non-fact based media

I know the NYT claims this, but I don't agree with it. As I said, the NYT is pushing a point of view just like every other media outlet. That means I can't take anything they say at face value any more than I take anything Breitbart or Fox News says at face value. So, again, I don't see them as fighting for any kind of principle of "responsible journalism". There are no responsible journalists in today's world. It's not clear that there ever have been. We just couldn't see behind their facade before. Now we can.

[derefr]

> It would be much better for us as a community if they were wrong much more often and showed everyone things they don't want to see.

Tangent to this, "Tumblr is the best social media site of 2021":

https://phantomrose96.tumblr.com/post/639134013230088192/i-l...