Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they’re all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that’s even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.
Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.
it cannot be sensationalized. It cannot even veer mildly from the found facts.
it cannot be filled with agenda bias
it cannot hold any false, non peer reviewed information
they have to pay their sources. And They have to pay their sources well. Especially the ones who are expected to uphold to peer reviews (science journalists, I’m looking at you)
There are tons of countries that already have national and local publicly-funded news networks. Is your solution to move every currently private network to a public-funded model?
Cause to me that sounds like it sounds very expensive, and more importantly, very dangerous to give governments such extreme levels of control over information.
The same issue applies to government-run news too. You see it with the BBC as a government owned and funded institution. It’s domestic UK news is pro-Monarchy, pro-Tory, and this is because of how it’s set up.
Private news media, when there’s a lot of it, tends to be less biased in the end because they’re trying to compete with each other, meaning they can’t go too far in one overt political slant. When one person controls more and has a wider reach, that dynamic becomes less important as they gain greater control over where journalists go and what events they cover.
I support public news media, but community-owned papers would avoid the monopolistic issue of either corporate consolidation or a government funded alternative.
I think the best solution would be to just have the best of both worlds, wouldn’t it? We could attempt to create a balanced environment of specially funded public media and nuanced private news companies.
Removing the need for existing newspapers to rely on advertising to keep costs low enough for the consumer to be able to purchase an issue would go very far.
The problem has always been that the academic or “platonic” ideal of journalism as this “objective, 4th estate” that “speaks truth to power” has always been at odds with the costs of doing business. In fact, the first newspapers were owned by Political Parties and wore their affiliations on their sleeves. Switching to advertiser-supported models enabled more independence from political parties in the 1800s.
What’s also true is that most local newspapers (heck, papers in general) are at least on paper, objective in the sense that their journalists are free to pursue and write the stories they want using their professional judgment.
You can avoid the risk of tax-funded journalism by making it so that even though they’re government subsidized they’re still independent. There are multiple potential ways to evaluate which journalistic entities qualify for government funding, all with pros and cons, but it could work.
Here in Finland we have YLE, and it has news, movies/shows, documentaries, radio/podcasts etc. It is funded with tax money, and I consider the two biggest pros to be that news and more are easily accessible for free to anyone and that since YLE isn’t trying to profit from journalism, there are no clickbait headlines. Though, the worst flaw is that goverment-funded journalism is prone to propaganda, and once you control the media, you control the whole country, so people need to be very careful.
You can always have it be publicly funded but managed by a non profit designated by the government, and make it organized in such a way that if a politician or government institution had a problem with some reporting, there’s nothing they can do.
The same concerns about editorial independence and human fallacy apply in the private sector top. There has always been pressure between the editorial, marketing, and journalist parts of newspapers.
The problem with this is that a government could simply decide to cut the funds for public media if there are views contrary to the executive branch and thereby establish a degree of control. An approach to mitigating this attack vector would be to do it like Germany does, collecting a special fee independently of the taxes that goes directly to the news organisations. This means that the parliament cannot control or withhold the funding of the public media unless there were a major legislation change, which would have to be the will of the majority of the population.
I think you’re missing a potential 4th one, though I’m not 100% convinced as to its feasibility, but a Universal Basic Income and greater societal wealth redistribution raises the bottom so much that everyone can easily afford 30 news subscriptions.
Though personally I think more arms length public funding is the better option since the incentives of capitalism often don’t align with the incentives of high quality journalism.
I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I would be useful in productive ways. I went through a period of every nerds’ dream of staying home and playing video games all the time and it drove me nuts. Yeah, it was nice for a little while, but not having the money to go anywhere or do anything made me look forward to working again. If I’d have had money, I would not have been home very much.
I think/acted similar to you… which is why I think we might all be common minding.
That said, people that aren’t motivated to do good things are most likely motivated to do nothing… so it might not be a big deal if they don’t show up for a job.
TLDR: fewer workers at Burger King probably would t make service worse
Very few people honestly want to do nothing. Even the image of the unemployed pot smoker who watched cartoons all day, maybe that person would find fulfillment in art? Or maybe they’re passionate about something important in their community.
My love for UBI assumes that idle hands will make themselves useful in productive, please or at least non-destructive ways.
There’s still an incentive to work and make more money to better your living situation and contribute productively back to society, but you wouldn’t be as beholden to it.
Another way to think about it was that in the 50s a single worker could make enough to support a family, whereas these days both parents have to work full time. Providing UBI would be a more equitable way of reducing the reliance on work and increase individual families’ health and well being by providing the baseline financial assistance that would allow one parent to take time off work (or both parents to reduce time at work) to better support their family, community, and social structure.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
It’s not quite that simple with PBS or NPR, but that’s the basic idea. Open public funding with no political or corporate control sounds like the safest bet. It’s as viable as people deciding to support it.
Not sure why you’d think “publicly funded” would seem like the “optimal” option. Same thing structurally as “state-run media”, just friendlier phrasing. If we had direct democracy or something, that might be fine, but the fact that it has to run through politicians and bureaucrats with their own interests/agendas, that completely changes the picture. If you have that federally funded in the U.S., that basically just tucks under the executive branch like almost everything else, meaning it’s just managed by the President, with basically only a paper tiger of regulations preventing interference in place.
In Germany, the independence of publicly funded media is guaranteed by the payment of a special fee that is collected independently of the normal taxes, and is distributed directly among the public media institutions. No parliament has to approve any funding, the only attack vector would be to change the legislation behind this financing but that would require a parliamentary majority and would therefore have to be the will of the people.
This is because the Internet killed journalism’s revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn’t get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it’s just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.
One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don’t.
I work for a plant that prints local papers. They are an invaluable source of local news, and you are correct, the internet is slowly killing them. It’s a real loss for civic engagement. People really need to pay attention to what’s happening locally. National stories are sexier, but we actually have much more control over what happens in our own neighborhoods and towns.
But what keeps a local newspaper from creating an online service over which the papers can be bought, maybe even for a lower price because manufacturing costs are no longer extant?
In a word the answer is cost, or economic viability. Local papers can’t operate for free, even strictly online. It costs money to hire and maintain a functional staff of college-educated reporters and editors who are willing to live and work in small towns and rural communities.
Without classified ads/advertising, a physical subscription base and real newsstand sales, where is the money supposed to come from?
The answer is that it’s not there at all, and that’s why local news has basically died over the course of the last two decades.
If you can think of a new workable revenue model for local news, by all means please do tell. The entire nation is screaming for a solution, though many of us may not know it.
Back before VCRs were a thing, movies like ‘Deep Throat’ were only available in theaters. The local theaters ran ads for XXX movies on the same pages as the general stuff.
Newspapers used to be full of ads and were also subscription based. You could buy a one off from a paper for relatively cheap, but their primary income was ads and subscribers.
This seems like a common theme. There are just so many things to subscribe to: Netflix, Spotify, New York Times, Amazon, Audible, individual app store applications, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, NPR+, Disney+, etc. Just keeping track of it all is complicated. And all content producers want to maintain the subscription framework, too, passing the costs on to us. This is a little off topic, but it still bugs me that Netflix became a content producer. I think it would have been a cleaner/cheaper arrangement if they’d remained a subscription service only.
With so many shows getting canceled, or even un-confirmed and then obliterated from existence all for tax write offs, I’m kinda soured on Streaming these days.
Hopefully the WGA and SAG strikes are successful and result in streaming improving again, back to how it felt during the mid 2010s.
Please tell me you aren’t getting your news from Disney. But seriously, a halfway decent local paper is probably more worth your attention than the latest attention grabbing headline at the NYT. Good choice.
No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today’s ads, because they’re literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn’t have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I’m reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.
Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn’t our fault for being pushed so far that we’re fed up with it.
There’re some wack lowly made phones sold in countries without good standards that do this.
A friend’s phone shows ad in every app, from google stock apps to whatapp and even fucking phone/call app. Around 30 pixels of ad blocked at the bottom of the screen whenever mobile data is on.
I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.
Some sites (Fandom Wikis) are unbearable with ads. Sure, you could pay to remove them, but only because it’s so infuriating to navigate the content when it has multiple ads—some that follow you—INSIDE the content of the articles.
Autoplaying videos, side banners, and scrolling ads are the worst and actively make me want to avoid the sites unless adblock is on.
When I had more income I paid for the NYT, but tbh they’ve made enough questionable editorial decisions lately that I’ve decided it wasn’t worth it. The Guardian isn’t paywalled at least.
A little bird told me you’re in cognizance of the way to finance online journalism without depending on ads and subscriptions of readers. That’s a good news. Care to share how?
There’s nothing wrong with advertising in of itself, society has lived with advertisements for goods and services for a long time. Unless you’re unreasonably susceptible to suggestion you should be able to safely navigate them. Some sites take the mick with how they present them but they have to make money somehow.
There is something wrong with advertising in and of itself. Imagine a sphere of all information available to humans, and inside that sphere there’s a corruption of information that’s deceitful, self-promoting for its originators, in excess of what people actually need to know about specific companies or products, and based on manipulation techniques and de-facto brainwashing. This twists decision-making for the entire society.
The only defense is that it’s a “necessary evil” because of the perverse economic structures in our society.
And P.S., the fact something’s been around for a long time is not an ethical defense, and people “unreasonably susceptible to suggestion” (i.e. influenced by ads) are a staggering % of the popularity, probably a majority.
Everyone hates ads but no one wants to pay for it lol
Journalism should be accessible to everyone. Not many people can afford 30 different subscriptions for every individual news outlet because they’re all pay to read. Remember newspapers? Anyone could buy one on the cheap, now these fuckers have moved to a subscription service that’s even more expensive than the average newspaper used to be.
Well there are 3 alternatives.
Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.
All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D
Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.
If I have to pay for it:
If there is a free one with ads:
Wanna regulate? Well. Then. Let’s regulate.
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There are tons of countries that already have national and local publicly-funded news networks. Is your solution to move every currently private network to a public-funded model?
Cause to me that sounds like it sounds very expensive, and more importantly, very dangerous to give governments such extreme levels of control over information.
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The same issue applies to government-run news too. You see it with the BBC as a government owned and funded institution. It’s domestic UK news is pro-Monarchy, pro-Tory, and this is because of how it’s set up.
Private news media, when there’s a lot of it, tends to be less biased in the end because they’re trying to compete with each other, meaning they can’t go too far in one overt political slant. When one person controls more and has a wider reach, that dynamic becomes less important as they gain greater control over where journalists go and what events they cover.
I support public news media, but community-owned papers would avoid the monopolistic issue of either corporate consolidation or a government funded alternative.
I think the best solution would be to just have the best of both worlds, wouldn’t it? We could attempt to create a balanced environment of specially funded public media and nuanced private news companies.
Removing the need for existing newspapers to rely on advertising to keep costs low enough for the consumer to be able to purchase an issue would go very far.
The problem has always been that the academic or “platonic” ideal of journalism as this “objective, 4th estate” that “speaks truth to power” has always been at odds with the costs of doing business. In fact, the first newspapers were owned by Political Parties and wore their affiliations on their sleeves. Switching to advertiser-supported models enabled more independence from political parties in the 1800s.
What’s also true is that most local newspapers (heck, papers in general) are at least on paper, objective in the sense that their journalists are free to pursue and write the stories they want using their professional judgment.
You can avoid the risk of tax-funded journalism by making it so that even though they’re government subsidized they’re still independent. There are multiple potential ways to evaluate which journalistic entities qualify for government funding, all with pros and cons, but it could work.
Here in Finland we have YLE, and it has news, movies/shows, documentaries, radio/podcasts etc. It is funded with tax money, and I consider the two biggest pros to be that news and more are easily accessible for free to anyone and that since YLE isn’t trying to profit from journalism, there are no clickbait headlines. Though, the worst flaw is that goverment-funded journalism is prone to propaganda, and once you control the media, you control the whole country, so people need to be very careful.
Yea that’s precisely it. Publicly-funded media definitely can be the best option, but there’s always risks it can fall into pure propaganda some day
You can always have it be publicly funded but managed by a non profit designated by the government, and make it organized in such a way that if a politician or government institution had a problem with some reporting, there’s nothing they can do.
The same concerns about editorial independence and human fallacy apply in the private sector top. There has always been pressure between the editorial, marketing, and journalist parts of newspapers.
The problem with this is that a government could simply decide to cut the funds for public media if there are views contrary to the executive branch and thereby establish a degree of control. An approach to mitigating this attack vector would be to do it like Germany does, collecting a special fee independently of the taxes that goes directly to the news organisations. This means that the parliament cannot control or withhold the funding of the public media unless there were a major legislation change, which would have to be the will of the majority of the population.
I think you’re missing a potential 4th one, though I’m not 100% convinced as to its feasibility, but a Universal Basic Income and greater societal wealth redistribution raises the bottom so much that everyone can easily afford 30 news subscriptions.
Though personally I think more arms length public funding is the better option since the incentives of capitalism often don’t align with the incentives of high quality journalism.
I love the idea of UBI. But I can’t help but worry I’m wrong.
My love for UBI assumes that idle hands will make themselves useful in productive, please or at least non-destructive ways.
I’m not clear I can justify that
I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I would be useful in productive ways. I went through a period of every nerds’ dream of staying home and playing video games all the time and it drove me nuts. Yeah, it was nice for a little while, but not having the money to go anywhere or do anything made me look forward to working again. If I’d have had money, I would not have been home very much.
I did that too; it was during Covid :)
I think/acted similar to you… which is why I think we might all be common minding.
That said, people that aren’t motivated to do good things are most likely motivated to do nothing… so it might not be a big deal if they don’t show up for a job.
TLDR: fewer workers at Burger King probably would t make service worse
Eh, the actual problem is that most people are shite.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
Very few people honestly want to do nothing. Even the image of the unemployed pot smoker who watched cartoons all day, maybe that person would find fulfillment in art? Or maybe they’re passionate about something important in their community.
There’s still an incentive to work and make more money to better your living situation and contribute productively back to society, but you wouldn’t be as beholden to it.
Another way to think about it was that in the 50s a single worker could make enough to support a family, whereas these days both parents have to work full time. Providing UBI would be a more equitable way of reducing the reliance on work and increase individual families’ health and well being by providing the baseline financial assistance that would allow one parent to take time off work (or both parents to reduce time at work) to better support their family, community, and social structure.
It’s not quite that simple with PBS or NPR, but that’s the basic idea. Open public funding with no political or corporate control sounds like the safest bet. It’s as viable as people deciding to support it.
Not sure why you’d think “publicly funded” would seem like the “optimal” option. Same thing structurally as “state-run media”, just friendlier phrasing. If we had direct democracy or something, that might be fine, but the fact that it has to run through politicians and bureaucrats with their own interests/agendas, that completely changes the picture. If you have that federally funded in the U.S., that basically just tucks under the executive branch like almost everything else, meaning it’s just managed by the President, with basically only a paper tiger of regulations preventing interference in place.
In Germany, the independence of publicly funded media is guaranteed by the payment of a special fee that is collected independently of the normal taxes, and is distributed directly among the public media institutions. No parliament has to approve any funding, the only attack vector would be to change the legislation behind this financing but that would require a parliamentary majority and would therefore have to be the will of the people.
That’s better than “all media is run by the Fuhrer” I suppose, but probably still preferable for people to have the choice of which to support.
This is because the Internet killed journalism’s revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn’t get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it’s just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.
One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don’t.
I work for a plant that prints local papers. They are an invaluable source of local news, and you are correct, the internet is slowly killing them. It’s a real loss for civic engagement. People really need to pay attention to what’s happening locally. National stories are sexier, but we actually have much more control over what happens in our own neighborhoods and towns.
But what keeps a local newspaper from creating an online service over which the papers can be bought, maybe even for a lower price because manufacturing costs are no longer extant?
They are all trying. I’m honestly not sure yet whether it will work. I hope so.
In a word the answer is cost, or economic viability. Local papers can’t operate for free, even strictly online. It costs money to hire and maintain a functional staff of college-educated reporters and editors who are willing to live and work in small towns and rural communities.
Without classified ads/advertising, a physical subscription base and real newsstand sales, where is the money supposed to come from?
The answer is that it’s not there at all, and that’s why local news has basically died over the course of the last two decades.
If you can think of a new workable revenue model for local news, by all means please do tell. The entire nation is screaming for a solution, though many of us may not know it.
Because classified ads used to pay for the paper.
Heck, ‘The Advertiser’ used to be a popular name for newspapers.
You would sometimes pick up a newspaper specifically for the ads. You might be looking for a job or a car and that was a good starting place.
Back before VCRs were a thing, movies like ‘Deep Throat’ were only available in theaters. The local theaters ran ads for XXX movies on the same pages as the general stuff.
Newspapers used to be full of ads and were also subscription based. You could buy a one off from a paper for relatively cheap, but their primary income was ads and subscribers.
This seems like a common theme. There are just so many things to subscribe to: Netflix, Spotify, New York Times, Amazon, Audible, individual app store applications, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, NPR+, Disney+, etc. Just keeping track of it all is complicated. And all content producers want to maintain the subscription framework, too, passing the costs on to us. This is a little off topic, but it still bugs me that Netflix became a content producer. I think it would have been a cleaner/cheaper arrangement if they’d remained a subscription service only.
I do pay for my local paper, cable, spotify, disney+, Netflix…
Only so much blood in this here stone.
With so many shows getting canceled, or even un-confirmed and then obliterated from existence all for tax write offs, I’m kinda soured on Streaming these days.
Hopefully the WGA and SAG strikes are successful and result in streaming improving again, back to how it felt during the mid 2010s.
Please tell me you aren’t getting your news from Disney. But seriously, a halfway decent local paper is probably more worth your attention than the latest attention grabbing headline at the NYT. Good choice.
My local paper has actual investigative journalists and a city desk, I’m happy to fund them.
No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today’s ads, because they’re literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn’t have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I’m reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.
Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn’t our fault for being pushed so far that we’re fed up with it.
Unskipable ads when I’m browsing my files on my phone, how fucking obnoxious can you possibly make them?
Where did u experience this lol, Ive never heard of that
There’re some wack lowly made phones sold in countries without good standards that do this.
A friend’s phone shows ad in every app, from google stock apps to whatapp and even fucking phone/call app. Around 30 pixels of ad blocked at the bottom of the screen whenever mobile data is on.
Xiaomi, that was the worst update ever
It’s a xiaomi, phone is great but the software bloat is horrible
What phone or service is this? Not in the states right?
Maybe install a different file browser, here’s one I think is nice
Yeah that’s what I ended up doing, but that never should have happen in the first place
I agree, needing to watch ads to view your own, local, personal files is insane
It’s like you don’t own anything anymore, using what you bought is a privilege
I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.
Idk, 15 years ago I was watching cable and 1/3 of my time was spent subjected to ads on a paid service. I think I prefer them now lol
We’re talking internet here, bub. Cable ads are definitely BS, though.
Some sites (Fandom Wikis) are unbearable with ads. Sure, you could pay to remove them, but only because it’s so infuriating to navigate the content when it has multiple ads—some that follow you—INSIDE the content of the articles.
Autoplaying videos, side banners, and scrolling ads are the worst and actively make me want to avoid the sites unless adblock is on.
Firefox has an autoplay block setting, and I’ve never had it fail me.
That’s why I use an inverted ad-block list. I see ads unless they get intrusive or unreasonable, and then I enable blocking on the site.
You can get NY times for just $4 a month. I personally think it’s worth it.
When I had more income I paid for the NYT, but tbh they’ve made enough questionable editorial decisions lately that I’ve decided it wasn’t worth it. The Guardian isn’t paywalled at least.
I’m perfectly willing to pay what I pay for the actual news paper for the subscription. The subscription turns out to be about 10x.
If you are defending ADS (of all things) you are definitely part of the problem.
I’m defending the right for people to make a profit from their labour 🤷♂️ even if ads aren’t my preference either
A little bird told me you’re in cognizance of the way to finance online journalism without depending on ads and subscriptions of readers. That’s a good news. Care to share how?
If you can’t do it without ads then it shouldn’t be done.
Fuck.
People are brainwashed.
This is a very naive take.
Nice to see you revealing your naivety. That’s what I’ve intended to do in the first place.
There’s nothing wrong with advertising in of itself, society has lived with advertisements for goods and services for a long time. Unless you’re unreasonably susceptible to suggestion you should be able to safely navigate them. Some sites take the mick with how they present them but they have to make money somehow.
There is something wrong with advertising in and of itself. Imagine a sphere of all information available to humans, and inside that sphere there’s a corruption of information that’s deceitful, self-promoting for its originators, in excess of what people actually need to know about specific companies or products, and based on manipulation techniques and de-facto brainwashing. This twists decision-making for the entire society.
The only defense is that it’s a “necessary evil” because of the perverse economic structures in our society.
And P.S., the fact something’s been around for a long time is not an ethical defense, and people “unreasonably susceptible to suggestion” (i.e. influenced by ads) are a staggering % of the popularity, probably a majority.