All right, playing two-month-old catchup here; this thread started three days before Dad had his dog put down, so uh yeah I was a little preoccupied.
Newspapers cost a quarter unless you buy a subscription and then they cost like a cent, and make their money mostly off ads and personals. Online newspapers cost nothing unless you have to buy a subscription and then they cost like a cent, and make their money mostly off ads and personals. The difference is you can't pick one up to read if you're stuck at a gas station or something, unless of course you've got a notebook or something.
The problem hasn't a god damned thing to do with technology, that's just a convenient thing to blame (see also: music.) The problem is that the mainstream is succumbing to entropy while remaining so consolidated that it's rare for anything to be able to replace its falling-off pieces.
True for the most part, but Craigslist has pretty much killed the classified section. That's hurting mainstream papers, and killing altweeklies.
Tom Tomorrow commented a few months back, "All of the crazed ubercapitalists running around during the days of Web 1.0, and my industry gets shivved by the lone idealist."
I mean, web or not, it's these people that have the Method to find news and report them down pat - at least news as they're commonly understood. Remember all the complaints that newspapers don't cover science and whatnot? Now web-based publications can fill those holes (see just how popular Slashdot is)
And when the hell has Slashdot ever actually broken, not linked to but actually BROKEN, an important story?
This is exactly what Bongo was saying -- sites that link to articles from mainstream sources are great, but they're not going to do a whole lot of good if the mainstream sources go under. If Slashdot points me toward a good science article in Wired or Nature or wherever, great, but if those magazines go under, Slashdot's not going to be able to link to their stories.
The aggregate-and-link model simply suggests that, in order to earn a profit, a news site must actually report on articles that are worth reading. Tying profit to actual quality isn't a terrible thing for most of us, just those who have coasted too long on being able to turn in crud and making a buck anyway for being the only game in town.
True too. There's no question that a big chunk of the problem is self-inflicted by lazy, infotainment-focused MSM abrogating their standards and responsibility. But if people can't make a living reporting the news, well, we're pretty fucked.
I need to point out that I still believe strongly in organizations such as the BBC, and the case for public-funded, independent news casts whenever possible. Ditto for the CBC, although I really couldn't care about the fiction they produce short of the tradition sketch comedies. These outlets report where traditional private-owned media falls short.
In the US, we've got PBS and NPR, which are theoretically government-funded but in practice survive by begging their audience for money every couple of months.
So if we take away the valuable corporate money backing of news sites, we will somehow be worse off for losing the news we got from those corporate money backed news groups.
Nobody's saying the MSM's perfect. But it takes an outlet with the resources of the Washington Post to break a story like the Walter Reed scandal.
I'm not following this argument at all. Question: are you under the impression that aggregators are directing traffic away from the sites that they are feeding from?
In the case of aggregators that reprint all or most of the text from the orginal articles, yes. I agree that a fair-handed aggregator will simply provide links.
This is an important distinction. The AP has gone into full-on RIAA "sue everything in sight" mode, to the point of actually
shouting "Copyright infringement!" when its paying affiliates embed YouTube videos from the official AP YouTube account which fucking allows embedding.
Right now there are publishers taking Google to court saying Google News is hurting them. This is fucking asinine. Google News is the best thing they have going for them; we've already seen what head-in-the-sand attacks on technology do to an industry.
I'd say the issue is more the echo chamber -- blogs repeating other blogs repeating other blogs about a story so that most people hear about it from a source other than where it originally appeared. That's not illegal (except in cases like IM mentions where the articles are actually plagiarized), but it's certainly problematic; if those sites don't get the traffic, they don't get the revenue, and then who's going to actually report the news rather than just repeating it?
And again, there's Craigslist -- also not illegal (well...there's some debate over the whole "erotic services" part), but has gutted for-pay classifieds. The industry needs to find a new way to make money. Banner ads are a start, but banner ads alone aren't going to pay many salaries.
See above. I guess I am a naive fool with high-minded ideals but there should be a strict definition and separation of news as a business and news that engages in business. You have to sell out-dated tree-based pamphlets to suckers, sure, but maybe you can see why we'd all be a little better off if Fox News was abolished entirely. They can still show cartoons, I guess.
But Fox News isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about news media going out of business because they can't make money. Fox News isn't doing as well as a few years ago, but it's still the most successful "news" source of its type.
I'll take an honest "amateur" over a professional hack any day. Cool position assuming that everyone not associated with a big professional news organization cannot possibly speak the truth any better than they could, I guess!
Are you being deliberately thick?
Find me an amateur blogger who could have possibly dug up, say, what was going on at Abu Ghraib. It's not a question of integrity, it's a question of resources and access.
Reporting the news well takes resources and, as with any profession, a degree of professionalism. Therefore, only the funded can tell us the true news?
YES!
How the hell are you going to fly to a foreign country without money?
How the hell are you going to pay your RENT without money?
Journalists need to make a living. If they can't make a living as journalists, then they're going to have to get income somewhere else. Working another job means a lot less time to spend breaking important news stories.
And maybe playboy.com and a pair of "unprofessionals" broke the Tea Party origins.
Playboy is an internationally-recognized brand with a 50-plus-year history IN THE FUCKING PRINT INDUSTRY, THAT IS CURRENTLY HAVING TROUBLE STAYING IN THE BLACK. It is PRECISELY THE FUCKING THING IM IS TALKING ABOUT when he refers to quality traditional news sources that are currently having trouble staying afloat.
...okay, I've written enough and frankly there's a vein starting to bulge in my forehead. I'll stop there and get back to the rest of the thread later.