[shipscode]

Let me break down how the media industry works nowadays since there’s a lot of confusion in these comments.

Most media organizations have a small number of in-house journalists on verticals that make sense.

The rest of the content is curated and brought in from content partners and written outside of the news organization.

In practice they function more like a social media feed than traditional newspapers. I’m no fan of CNN, but this isn’t exactly a scandal, media had to adapt to keep up with so much being on social media these days, they all do this.

[beejiu]

The context is that Google has a new "Site reputation abuse" policy that some argue isn't applied fairly between small sites and massive media sites. The policy states:

"Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site."

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.

[kube-system]

> That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.

I think a much more simple answer is that syndication has always been hush-hush because branding and brand trust is a key part of media marketing. Your local newspaper in the 90s had a ton of syndicated stories too but it was all published under your local paper's hometown moniker.

[donavanm]

I literally worked for a “home town” newspaper in the 90s and knight ridder in the early 2000s. This is not in any way comparable to syndication. Syndicated stories have an accurate byline, the publishing paper paid for syndication/content, advertising is not involved in syndicated content, and the costs are not tied to duping end readers.

Moreso this (at the time) was literal school content on media literacy. High school english classes would _get newspapers_ in order to talk about the different types of articles and content.

[wbl]

Every syndicated story had a byline indicating syndication.

[kube-system]

Major US newspapers in the 21st century did. But regardless, many of them were opaque in nature. "Via AP" may check the box of attribution but is lost on a reader of average literacy.

[xbar]

Newswires were well understood entities for all newspaper readers for more than 100 years.

[sokoloff]

That’s giving an awful lot of credit to “all newspaper readers” there.

Certainly as a kid/teen, I didn’t understand it; I suspect plenty of adults didn’t either.

[x0x0]

This was not used to commingle authority vs the stories they reported themselves, and is in no way comparable to what cnn is doing, ie leveraging their site rank to juice traffic to trash content for ad dollars.

[hedora]

Yeah; and they were generally extremely high quality.

[mike50]

40 years ago maybe. Now it's written to a 5th grade level and bloated with explain like I'm five filler.

[refulgentis]

I wonder about the relationship between those two, column attribution in 90s newspapers doesn't have much to say about the incentive to stay quiet to avoid publicly announcing you're violating Google's rules in 2024.

That aside, I'm not sure the assertion about 90s papers is accurate. There was syndication, of course, but that was attributed. Let's say there were articles written by other people published under the names of local writers. That sounds theoretically possible, but something that'd be well known. Let's say there were articles attributed to the paper at large. I don't recall that.

[kube-system]

Syndicated material was disguised all the time. Ask most people and they think that most of the stories in their local newspaper are written by people that work there.

> The average American reader didn’t necessarily notice the way syndicates and chains had come to dominate the news. Syndicates were careful to sell their material to only one newspaper per city. While syndicated features usually carried a small copyright symbol, the name that followed that symbol could be deliberately opaque. Readers wouldn’t automatically know that “King Features” denoted Hearst material, or that “NEA” indicated content from the Scripps chain. Local papers sometimes purposely disguised syndicated material. The Milwaukee Sentinel bought a comic strip from the New York World syndicate in 1918, for example, but retitled it “Somewhere in Milwaukee.” The same paper told readers to send in their letters for Dorothy Dix as though she could be reached in Milwaukee, and not in New York City, where she lived and sold her work to the Ledger syndicate.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-syndicated-column...

Local newspapers didn't want to plainly advertise that a gigantic chunk of their content came from thousands of miles away. It undermines their value proposition.

Likewise, CNN probably likes that a huge chunk of featured content on their page is driving them revenue but doesn't look like a big ad to their audience.

[hedora]

That might have been true in the early days of the telegraph, but for as long as I can remember (and up until we cancelled our subscription), the bylines in our local paper were extremely clear on this point. Anything that was not local had a byline with the name of the reporter, their city, and “via Associated Press”, or similar.

[ghaff]

I was a longtime newspaper person and I agree that things like AP attribution were generally pretty clear. I doubt the average reader noticed.

[kube-system]

"King Features" in the above quote is a contemporary example. Regardless, my point is not that these syndications are impossible to identify (as is the same with CNN's featured links), but that they are similarly opaque. Syndication as a concept isn't something that is obvious to a person of average media literacy, and neither is a tiny byline that states "via AP".

[hamilton1232]

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[grues-dinner]

Also for non-print media, famously exemplified by Sinclair and This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5mlx_DnIEo

[WD-42]

In the authors previous post he goes into Forbes marketplace which is the same company doing this garbage content farm for CNN that they have already been doing for Forbes.

The content farm company is now trying to buy the original Forbes company.

So when our media companies become small subsidiaries of affiliate content farms then yea I think it’s a bit disturbing.

[weard_beard]

The news is the news: it isn't news that the news isn't news anymore.

[toss1]

Au contraire, the fact that news is no longer news is the biggest news there is.

Sure, the mere fact that the news is no longer news, is old news. But how and why it is happening is big and un-reported news.

When six companies control 90% of the news outlets, that is unprecedented concentration and loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society.

When those corporations which normally sell-off any lossmaking division instead hold loss-making 'news' divisions in a now-chronically lossmaking industry, the payoff is not some potential future profits; the payoff is in influencing public opinion to favor policies advantageous to your larger corporation.

So, of course the how and why it is happening is unreported by the organizations that are making it happen.

[janalsncm]

> loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society

This isn’t wrong but let me put a finer point on it: when BigCompany Inc starts dumping sludge into your town’s lake, you need independent journalists to figure that out. Corporate talking heads aren’t going to do that. And certainly not the people running a link farm.

What news is reported is as important as whether the facts are true. The easiest path to propaganda is to simply report other, more convenient, facts.

[coliveira]

The news industry was always a low profit business even in the best times, so one should ask why it is so interesting for powerful people. The answer is the same in the past as it is today, it just takes a little of critical thinking to understand.

[WillPostForFood]

Good old days?

https://todayinhistory.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ea30f...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGLtwVmWwAAia-Y?format=jpg&name=...

[datavirtue]

Yeah, a lot of people pay for deeper content. I basically hang out on yahoo finance all day (crazy awesome site), and they make a lot of news feeds available to their subscribers. But it takes quite a big commitment to subscribe at a level where you get all the news and analyst reports in a timely fashion. Google News feeds have been declining in quality and don't find them valuable anymore. Hacker News is one of the sites I scan for news. I check it all, and I belong to Ground News as well.

[magic-michael]

Can you show me where the garbage content is? They seem to all have experts that have written in these areas for decades.

[alwa]

Well… that’s the crux of the discomfort. These brands’ newsrooms do in fact have those people. That’s the reason their names inspire trust.

Now, they’ve decided to cash out that trust by lending their names to sleazy content farming affiliate marketer types.

For now, that’s valuable, since people (and Google) trust the names based on what they used to do—and they distrust the rest of the endless chorus of hucksters. But sooner or later, the world realizes there’s no longer good reason to trust those names. They’re just snake oil (and CBD gummy) salesmen like the rest.

And then we’re left without popular institutions that are trustworthy when we need to understand complicated and true things about the world. And we’ve punished people (and Google) for even trying to place more weight on honest reportage and institutional signals of expertise.

[itishappy]

Top google result for "best pet insurance" and "best CBD gummies" are Forbes (actually Forbes Marketplace), and they've moving into sports betting.

https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/

[magic-michael]

That's what I mean, he doesn't look at the content itself

[hedora]

There are still counterexamples:

https://www.propublica.org/

Traditional newspapers would get stories from things like AP, and then the editors would decide what to run. They’d also have reporters that wrote local stories, etc.

I’d argue that any news site that has eliminated all those roles is already out of business and is simply burning down their brand at this point.

[ArnoVW]

As Obama famously quipped during his last Whitehouse Correspondent dinner:

     Even reporters have left me. Savannah Guthrie, she has left the White House press corps to host the Today show. Norah O’Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS This Morning. Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN.

[dialup_sounds]

These aren't news sections that are being outsourced, they're things like "The 9 best leggings on Amazon, according to fitness experts¹" and "Best pet insurance companies of September 2024²".

¹ https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/fashion/best-leggings-on...

² https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/pet-insurance/best-..., https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/best-pet-insurance

[smolder]

I'm pretty sure I saw a "Forbes" guide on how to beat some video game quest at some point, or some other video game thing people would have been searching for at the time. I understood it to be SEO spam but this whole comment section puts it into better context.

[hedora]

Click forbes.com, then hamburger icon, then scroll the list to the “advisor” or “health” news sections.

Sample sections from advisor:

- Cheap Car Insurance

- Pet Insurance

- How Much Is Pet Insurance?

- Cheap Pet Insurance

Under health, they have a sub-section “best cbd gummies”. I clicked on a few articles and they’re outsourced(?) amazon affiliate spam that claims Forbes actually tested the products.

The health section is served from forbes.com, but the navigation is different and includes a “back to forbes.com” button.

In some other parts of forbes.com they have clear disclaimers, like:

Innovation -> SAP Brand Voice | Paid program

So, they’re definitely trying to pass off the marketplace content as legitimate news sections.

[magic-michael]

Your deduction from this that they are trying to pass of the content as news is actually crazy.

[dialup_sounds]

I don't buy the claim that this is trying to pass as news. It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet. Here's what I'm seeing:

At the top of the page I see an Advertising Disclosure link. After that I see a byline for the actual human freelancer that wrote the article.

After that I see a huge call-out that "Commissions we earn from partner links on this page do not affect our opinions or evaluations. Our editorial content is based on thorough research and guidance from the Forbes Health Advisory Board".

Below that is a "Featured Partner Offer" with an info popover that reads "Partner Offers feature brands who paid Forbes Health to appear at the top of our list. While this may influence where their products or services appear on our site, it in no way affects our ratings, which are based on thorough research, solid methodologies and expert advice. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services". The offer contains no rating or editorial text.

Below that are the reviewed items, which have ratings and editorial text. Some of the text is linked to full reviews of specific products (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/health/cbd/cbdfx-gummies-review/).

Below that is the methodology: "To determine the best CBD gummies, the Forbes Health editorial team analyzed data on over 100 CBD gummy products ... then ranked the CBD gummies based on price, potency, flavor options available and whether its ingredients are all natural, organic, gluten-free and/or vegan-friendly." They don't claim to have tested all of them.

Again, this looks like 90% of the other review pages on the web, including things Forbes already publishes (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article...).

[fsckboy]

>It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet.

90% of websites are not in the top 10% of mainstream media big budget brand reputation... so if the top 10% look like the other 90%, that says something, and it's not good.

[dialup_sounds]

That sounds like an obfuscated way of saying that pre-internet brands shouldn't be allowed to compete with tech bros.

[pishpash]

News sections are outsourced to AP's essaybots.

[kube-system]

These sort of pay-to-play review marketing didn't originate on the internet. These are copies of arrangements that print media invented. My hometown newspaper had this kind of stuff too.

[ghaff]

Many publications have long relied on outside contributors with various degrees of transparency and conflicts of interest. When blogging was the hotness, as an analyst, I contributed to CNET (unpaid; they paid some bloggers but I didn't want that conflict of interest). After CBS bought them and the whole blog climate changed (and I moved to a vendor), I stopped doing that. But a ton of that sort of thing went on in the tech trade press--some good and some almost certainly not so good.

[input_sh]

The key difference is that ProPublica is a non-profit. There are very few non-profit investigative journalism orgs in the world, but their funding is fundamentally different than for-profit news orgs. They rely on public grants to keep things running, so therefore, they don't have to abuse their brand in similar ways.

That's also why they publish only a couple of stories per day instead of hundreds, why they never cover breaking news, why there's a donate button (as opposed to now-standard paywalls), why there's no ads, why the interface appears cleaner etc. If we were talking about tech companies, it'd be like comparing Wikimedia/Mozilla/Internet Archive to traditional for-profit tech companies. To an untrained eye there is no difference, but a somewhat trained eye quickly realises that their incentives are completely different.

(Disclaimer: I work for a different non-profit investigative journalism organization.)

[SAI_Peregrinus]

It's also why ProPublica's content niche is so small. They don't cover anything except corruption and abuses of power. No sports, no celebrity news, no news about new movies or music, etc. They can't afford more, and their charter doesn't allow it anyway.

[coliveira]

They are funded by NGOs controlled by billionaires, so in the end there is a number of things they cannot investigate if they want to maintain the NGO money.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Hopefully there are multiple organizations with different funding sources who aren’t beholden to each other, so they can fill whatever gaps in coverage they see. That would be a better outcome than everyone refusing journalism as a career because you will always have a conflict of interest with whoever is paying you.

[input_sh]

That's not how grants work, they don't come with a "you can't report on us specifically" clause.

[klyrs]

While this is technically correct, it is the wrong response to GP.

Yes. ProPublica is biased to look in certain directions. Every single reporter, editor, publisher, is biased in this way. The answer to this is more, not less.

FIRE rose from decisions the ACLU took about representing cases. This is a fundamentally good thing, speaking as a diehard ACLU supporter.

Speaking as a huge fan of ProPublica, I'm hoping that they're investigating all of the supreme court justices (for example), because we won't pass laws to reign in judicial corruption without bipartisan action. But if they aren't, I desperately hope that there's a market for a conservative-focus investigative outfit that can stick to the facts like ProPublica.

[coliveira]

There is no such clause because that would be unlawful, but there is certainly the "unwritten clause" of whether the NGO likes your work or not.

[TheCoelacanth]

It's common wisdom that you "don't bite the hand that feeds you".

[chihuahua]

But it could be that if you don't follow the unwritten rules, you don't get another grant next year.

[pyuser583]

I’ve seen a lot of non-profit journalism outfits coming out of the woodwork.

[chrchr]

I think you're misunderstanding what's happening here.

In traditional journalism using wire stories (or "curated content partners"), the publisher (Forbes, CNN, etc.) pays for the content.

In the case of CNN Underscore, the "content partners" are paying CNN to use their good name to peddle advertorial content. Like if I want to run a cryptocurrency scam, I can pay CNN or Forbes to run a story on their website touting the benefits of my fake product. To a non-observant reader, it will appear to actually be coming from CNN or Forbes.

This is a long way from CNN running something from the Associated Press or Reuters.

[dawnerd]

Isn’t even new. Demand Media was doing this 10+ years ago and sites like USA Today were buying content. These days you have companies creating their own sponsored content with platforms like Ceros and the sites just embedding it and cashing the checks. Of course the sites do the bare minimum legally required to disclose its sponsored content.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Let me break down how the media industry works nowadays

How free* media works. The media landscape has sadly divided into assuming only those who can pay for news want to be informed or have their views challenged. The poor get ads and echo chambers.

[dialup_sounds]

Lots of people pay for The New York Times and they still operate their affiliate link site Wirecutter.

[Spivak]

Who is the mythical non-echo-chamber informative challenging news source?

[janalsncm]

propublica.org is pretty good.

[carlosjobim]

They wrote that these things can be found in paid sources.

[dingnuts]

I had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal for awhile and while I can't say that's what the GP is referring to, it absolutely sounds like the kind of deluded crap a WSJ subscriber would say to justify spending $40/mo on that crap to themselves :D

[alexandre_m]

That would be an aggregator, like allsides.com

[tensor]

I think "non-echo chamber content" is only valuable as long as all of it is similarly high quality. In my opinion, reading diverse but low quality content (e.g. filled with misinformation, a lack of concrete information, and a lack of sensible reasoning) is not helpful.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

Even prestige publications like The New Yorker use freelancers. This is the same thing, it’s just lower brow content.

[ryandamm]

That’s not a fair comparison, The New Yorker has always had a different relationship with its writers. A freelancer who writes for The New Yorker is likely a highly respected journalist/author/other luminary. Their staff writers are, I believe, technically contractors as they’re not W2 employees.

Contractor-written slop at these content farms, as described by TFA, have nothing in common with how content works at The New Yorker.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

The New Yorker gets high tier freelancers, other outlets get dogshit freelancers. It’s the same underlying model.

[chrchr]

This is not at all the same thing. The New Yorker pays its freelancers. In the example in the article, the money is flowing from the content producer to the publisher, meaning it's an ad.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

They have literally run “native ads” for a decade which are ads specifically designed to appear to be content from New Yorker writers.

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/the-new-yorker-jumps-into...

[chrchr]

Also not good, but also not at all like freelancing. Freelancers are paid. Advertisers pay for placement.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

You mentioned what is or isn’t an ad, my point is the distinction is a lot less clear than you think, and it always has been.

While it’s good more people understand the business of news, this is all out in the open and has been for years.

[tiffanyh]

Isn't this literally the business model of AP News (Associated Press)?

https://apnews.com

They sell stories to other news outlets to publish on their own website.

[dragonwriter]

No, AP sells stories that other outlets choose to buy and run based on editorial judgement, Marketplace buys access to brands with reputation and publishes its own material under those brands; its not at all the same model.

[seizethecheese]

Yes, and Reuters, and this predates the internet.

[badlibrarian]

The contract reporters are also personally liable for what they submit. So there is absolutely zero incentive to risk going deep on a topic, let alone investigate anything.

[thekevan]

I disagree that it does not venture into scandal territory due to the fact that CNN is a news organization that is constantly defending their integrity.

They are presenting content as their own under questionable sources that they don't reveal. It proves they are being less genuine when doing so makes them money.

[KoolKat23]

Yes, and to add there's nothing wrong with it. The editor is responsible for curation. This has been a practice for many decades, there are news agencies primarily focused on selling syndicated content produced by their own journalists such as Associated Press or Reuters. You'll find this content in all newspapers even the best. Generally unless it's an exclusive or breaking news, there's a good chance it'll be syndicated at some point.

[reaperducer]

Let me break down how the media industry works

It looks like you mean: "Let me break down how a certain portion of the media industry that I'm familiar with works."

"The media industry" is vast, complex, diverse, and far more interesting than internet content farms, poorly-run legacy brands, or even most of what's on the internet.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

Freelancers have existed since the dawn of journalism.

[yamazakiwi]

"interesting" isn't the word I would have chosen

[tolerance]

What you’ve described does indeed sound scandalous irrespective of its scope.

[nonplus]

It's a scandal that a single website is masking multiple privacy policies behind different pages, making it impossible for their users to understand what they have consented to.

[ddtaylor]

This doesn't make it acceptable. We can want better.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Yeah, I read this blog post and thought throughout the whole thing, "Is this person just completely unaware of how the media and branding industries work?" He tries to make it out to be some great "scandal" when literally tons and tons of media brands outsource sections of their website.

Now, to be clear, I'm not exactly excusing CNN for this, but literally for years now I've rolled my eyes at the extremely spammy/low quality/clickbait ads that have appeared on CNN articles online. The fact that they've outsourced part of their "Underscored" site, which isn't exactly journalism to begin with, is not something I care about. And in case you missed it, journalism has had a blood bath over the past 25 years. While I think what CNN is doing in terms of affiliate ads is scammy, can I really blame them? Hardly anyone wants to pay for journalism these days, but journalists still want to eat. At least with these clickbait ads I find them so low quality that they don't confuse me into being "real" articles.

[anigbrowl]

'They all do this' isn't a good excuse when 'this' is deceiving the consumer. I am so sick of marketing/branding people faking everything, and wish they could all be shipped off Golgafrincham.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

I’m super confused as to why this is worth a blog post, let alone the conspiratorial tone.

This seems to be a case of knowledge without context being a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.

[ClownsAbound]

You’re omitting how much influence / censorship our government have over these institutions now, and how much they apply pressure to prevent dissenting voices and opinions from reaching the main stream.

[FactKnower69]

The passive voice shit from the past couple years has gotten truly audacious and increasingly infuriating