[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