[marcus_holmes]

They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.

The rise of the tabloids in the UK is a good example: highly-partisan papers that appealed to specific demographics with stories that aimed to evoke an emotional response (usually a negative emotion).

It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.

[blaser-waffle]

> They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.

"Yellow Journalism" was a thing as long as we had newspapers and a free press. The term was coined in the 1890s, but was almost certainly around long before then. William Randolph Hurst did what Rupert Murdoch does now, just with slower turnaround time. If you assume Fox News help make Iraq happen, then they've both caused the same amount of wars.

> It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.

It was already there, by a long shot. Internet social media just made it omnipresent, automated, and responsive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

[bostonsre]

Yea, they were definitely ahead of the curve. The rest of the industry still had some soul and dignity for a while there. The hacker news links to news sites with sliding bars for left or right bias are nice and all, but I'm not sure they're doing anything but preaching to the anti tribe choir. Not sure how we go about uniting or at least going the other direction without some horrible disasterous tragedy like a world war or an alien invasion. Would have thought maybe a global pandemic would have done the trick, but not bad enough I guess.