[kmlx]

> Google displaying story snippets on the search pages obviate the need to actually visit the site itself (and load ads, content, etc) and by doing so materially harm news sites.

no, the real issue here is that news sites had their business model broken for the past 20 years. they don’t know how to fix it. they are now click baiting machines. which is deepening their broken business models as trust in them is gone. this new scheme is them gasping for revenue.

[bcrl]

Maybe you missed out on all the concentration of media assets that has happened over the past 40 years. We went from every small town having their own newspaper and small cities having their own TV stations to having moguls like Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch buying up newpapers and TV stations to form giant empires. Naturally, one of the first steps in making your empire scale is to start cutting the excess "fat" in the form of local reporters, as your media empire can use reporters in the bigger cities to cover the entire region. Then your regions start getting bigger and bigger. All the local content is now gone. This process was mostly complete by the end of the 1990s.

Then advertising on the internet took off in the 2000s, further depleting the pool of local advertising dollars available to many media organizations. Today most media organizations are a hollow shell of what they once were.

Without local news, democracy can't work, and it's sad that many places no longer have it. And quality reporting takes time and money, exactly what we don't have in today's internet. Sure, plenty of niches previously ignored are now well served, but there's a glaring gap in quality local news these days in most places.

[chownie]

Did you respond to another comment by mistake? The section you quoted doesn't make mention of the quality of news, that's entirely orthogonal