Another key component of today’s reality is what was originally called “collaborative filtering,” which was invented at the MIT Media Lab in the late 90s. My company was a sponsor of the Media Lab, which meant that I went to Cambridge twice a year from 1995-2001 for sponsor meetings where we saw demos of all the stuff they were working on, plus lectures, talks and meetings with industry luminaries. In 1996 (or 95, I forget which year) one of those people was Jeff Bezos. The memorable quote from his talk was, “we’re going to obsess about our customers and make our competitors obsess about us.” Pretty accurate, even today.
At that same meeting, one of the groups at the Media Lab demonstrated the first iterations of collaborative filtering. The idea was simply “if you like these things and someone else also likes them, then other things they like could be of interest to you and vice-versa.” Bezos saw immediately the possibilities of this and Amazon was the first large scale practitioner of what is now a huge core component of today’s commercial internet.
This is relevant to the free-with-ads model. One need only look at Facebook with a critical eye to see how this has taken on a life of its own. Their newsfeed is largely built on top of this concept. And in that form, it is key to driving people into the “filter bubbles” that are now widely studied by sociologists because they as seen as heavy contributors to our increasingly polarized societies. This is nowhere close to the good intentions of the Media Lab people who came up with the idea.
Given the massive size and scope of the ad-based 'Net economy, I don’t think there is any way to curtail or possibly even slow down this momentum. Regulation can help, but even with the huge fines the EU imposed on Google, it has no meaningful effect on their bottom line. The ethos of these companies, like Google and Facebook, can I believe be fairly characterized as “better to ask forgiveness than permission.” And so they do frequently say in public how they got this or that “wrong” and then carry on their merry way.
And it has to be said that huge numbers of people, quite possibly a majority of users, are fine with this arrangement. or if they dislike something about it, they keep using the services.
So I think realistically the key to this is working to increase public awareness and if there is to be regulation, it should be in the area of, “do you know what you are trading off when you use these services and can you control it?”
There are a few newish nonprofits in the USA trying to function as a viable news service. This link lists 11 of them. Mainly they engage in more investigative pieces.
News is a tough business and it has always needed support from other aspects of its producer. newspapers relied on classified, horoscopes, columnists, sports and all kind of other items to support their core newsroom. Classified being the main one. For example, in the last year that I ran sfgate.com in 2001, the newspapers I worked for (there were 2 bound by what they called a “joint operating agreement” which in itself was designed to slow down the revenue drain that was already happening in the 60s) grossed 139 million dollars from classified advertising. The building had almost an entire floor of people who just took phone calls all day long for the ads.
Today they don’t even have a meaningful classified section at all. 139 million bucks is a ton of money to simply lose altogether!
In TV news, many don’t know this, but in the early days, TV stations didn’t want to carry news at all because it was not profitable to do it. But the federal government forced them as a condition of using the public airwaves. Even today I don’t think TV news is particularly profitable. For all the attention it receives from other news outlets that talk about such things, only about 5% of the TV-watching population watches TV news on a regular basis (my estimate based on reading a number of sites talking about the subject).
People get news from the internet, especially in younger demographics, but one can get into the weeds pretty quickly as you try to define what “news” even is. In this world of clicking to see things, it is now common for headlines to be more sensational and misleading as to the actual content of the story. AKA “clickbait.” Seems like newsy blogs are especially this way, but then so are a lot of other more mainstream sites. This leads to other bad habits like 'burying the lede" intentionally so you have to scroll down to find out the true nugget of the story.
So, yeah, open source not-for-profit news I believe is essential to a free society. But how to get there…?
This is a good example of a small, focused news site, Climate Home News, that says it is open source, but is not nonprofit. They have sponsors and also accept donations through Patreon. They have a section called Sponsored Content where their sponsors post their own news. They are a responsible operation and a good example of where at least some of news is hopefully going. But only if they can keep the lights on…
Maybe it starts with re-assessing the use value (and dangers) of constant “news”:
For being able to understand and influence (!) current affairs, awareness of every detail is not necessary at all and takes away the time one could spend on actual understanding: reading long-form articles, books about history, philosophy, sociology and so on. And books on actually influencing things … dangerous link ahead:
So my vision for an open source “news” economy would rather be that: a library of this in-depth content for active citizens. It would then recommend some of its content as suitable for each major event in society. Funding via Patreon (or better, its open source alternative LiberaPay) could be possible, but I’m not sure. It’s not something that too many people are really enthusiastic about so that they would spend money on it. But I might be wrong, and it would certainly be an important contribution to society.
And a lot of valuable material is already out there and just waits to be collected and presented properly in a digital library of open source works. That would probably be my starting point. For reference, doing just that but for a different topic took me around 50-60 hours for 509 e-books (so far).
Breaking news is definitely overrated and often is a real attention hook. I admit I look at it too often, but really it is in the probably vain hope that Trump will be on his way out of our lives.
I read the New Yorker, which I find to be a stellar source of in-depth story and analysis. The Atlantic is the same. The New Yorker is unique in that it gets more revenue from circulation than advertisers. Loyal readership that wants the in-depth stuff by the best writers. I recommend it to anyone who wants the long view. Good website too - no need for paper if you don’t want it. So that is what the top of the heap looks like where the best writers get paid well. Because that’s the thing - and a big reason why most newspapers dropped their investigative desks long ago - it’s very expensive to produce. Takes time and there are a lot of dead ends going after the story.
Breaking news with splashy headlines get the clicks. And even in newspapers, as one of my pals with decades in the news business says, “every newspaper story gets something wrong.” That has been my experience in the maybe dozen newspaper stories I have been featured in. But quick deadlines and no money for fact checking means a lot of inaccuracies. And bloggers or tiny operations often don’t even have copy editors or proofreaders.
I’m excited about the enthusiasm out there for a modern journalism that really serves the people. And I know a few in my locale who are dooing it local and small scale, but trying to do good journalism on a shoestring. But as the saying goes, don’t mistake a clear vision for a short path. News is one tough business. Tight margins and fiercely competitive.
Nadia just offered this link to Codastory. It’s a high-end news nonprofit with significant writers and donor partners. Plus they take donations directly. Impressive group.
How they got there is noteworthy: it looks like they and The Financial Times are the only newspapers who get most of their revenue now from digital. And they do it without a paywall.
This is a good New Yorker story called “The Urgent Quest for Slower, better News.” It has this salient quote, “As it turns out, there is a way to puncture this illusion of knowledge. It involves forcing people to explain in detail what would happen if their views on a specific public-policy issue were put into practice. It’s when we try to provide a “causal explanation,” Sloman and Ferbach write, that we realize how ignorant we are. That realization, in turn, leads us to become less extreme in our views. This insight has an obvious implication for media: depth matters. Journalism that engages with complexity, examines the implications of proposed policies, and offers the public rigorous analysis can lead to a more informed—and less polarized—citizenry. And yet, if Schudson is right, then only a small portion of readers will have the time, inclination, and disposition to become so ideally informed. Far more people will be monitorial, rather than informed, citizens—and, thanks to social media and high-volume news operations, they will be easily alarmed and distracted. Adding yet more stories to this maelstrom may make a certain economic sense for media organizations, but it won’t necessarily make us any better informed. It might only further fragment our knowledge.”
I do agree with subscription agrument to some degree, but it’d be great if there was a system that would not just have money be thing giving you access to things (as not everyone has money globally, and this obviously will exclude people from certain opportunities/knowledge)
great discussion and great topic: the never-ending question of how to fund news in an ethical way ;). And yes, I work with codastory.com! Thanks for the kind compliments! But we’re still trying to figure it out, as most of the news organizations are - at every journo conference there’s several panels on “how to not be paid by ads” ;).
A great initiative, in my opinion is https://civil.co/ - read here why it’s CEO Vivian Schiller (the former head of National Public Radio and of news and journalism partnerships at Twitter) tries to innovate journalism by re-examining the quality of public information and raise public trust in evidence-based reporting through blockchain: https://blog.joincivil.com/why-im-joining-civil-ca474d8b7440 (it’s still a bit unclear to me how civil works exactly, but…). She’ll be talking at ZEG Tbilisi Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi June 20-22 (there are still tickets if you want an excuse to visit Tbilisi )
Other great examples of not relying on any ad-related income in journalism are the Dutch The Correspondent https://thecorrespondent.com/ (tho they did F# up after fundraising in the US and not basing themselves there, but that’s a different story), and the Slovakian Dennik N https://dennikn.sk/: y by using a complex analytical and automated system, they target their readers to become members. They built this system by themselves, and it’s open-sourced. The cheapest membership is a one-month membership deal. The software helps them to target the right readers: analytics tell them that someone reading it on an iphone is 5 times more likely to buy a 3 month membership deal than someone on android - so they show a different deal to those than to android users. How it works: their long form reads are behind a paywall, but not fully. Readers can read several paragraphs, more than with others, before they hit the paywall. All members can get a shareable link and share the articles they want on social, giving their friends a one-time free pass to read the full story. They also publish one paragraph news stories without a paywall, often linked directly to other news sources. And they have a paper version, which they see as advertisement for their online platform.
Also, worth mentioning is the Polish Outriders, for which I also write. https://outride.rs/en/
Dennik functions a lot like a few other new sites I have seen. I think it is a good way to go: give people enough substance that informs them enough to know if they want to go further, and then takes the payment, plus the one-time viewing when you share the link. I hope that succeeds. And it can only succeed if the quality behind the wall is worthy. So headline, opening paragraph and whole story have to be aligned.
they actually work together on back end stuff with The Correspondent, but difference is that The Correspondent has nothing behind a paywall.
Dennik N has been running for 5 years, and are finally making more than spending, which allowed them to open a branch in the Czech Republic as well. OH: and they DONT cover sports, which I think is pretty cool (tho, who am I…)
As I mentioned above, I am generally against pay walls, as I think information should be freely available to all. But, I do think for a Local newspaper in a local language, if the fee is affordable even for those with minimum wage, this could be an interesting model.
It’s not the model we’re interested in with Coda Story. We started out with a fundraiser a few years ago, and are now funded by members, donations, and international donor organizations. But we’re trying to figure out how we can rely more on non-pay wall membership, and that’s quite “a puzzle”.
There are a few organizations looking into how to increase engagement in journalism, and they are worth checking out (because an engaged member, will support you - either through donations or word of mouth):
The Membership Puzzle - founded by NYU professor Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 program and De Corresponden, funded by Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Luminate.
For the library I built, it did not take longer. It was quick because a lot of the value of tech content can be judged from the book’s context (publication date and topic combination, the organization publishing it etc.). And since there is not that much open source / free content around about these topics, it was often about taking the first substantial work that covers a topic, with the option of replacing it later when something better comes around.
In the case of content on politics, sociology etc. it needs some more checking to weed out badly politically biased stuff, but also the library could probably be smaller.
A big step forward is moving social presence from commercial platforms that harvest data (in order to target ads) to platforms (personal domains, decentralized and p2p social networks) that users control. The ad economy feeds on the firehose of personal data. Take that away, and business models built on microtargeting become less practical.
Ultimately a producer (journalist, publisher or whatever) has to get paid or they will make a living some other way. When the product is substantial journalism in matters of serious public interest, so much of it comes without pay that the pull to get it “free” is overwhelming. Plus, subscribing individually to different news sites (and again, could be some other field besides journalism) you get into a lot of password and payment management. That is itself a daunting set of hoops. In many cases it is the difference between participation. This is true for me - ‘oh no, another password to manage, another site holding my credit info.’ Micropayment solutions have been tried in the past and have not worked. But maybe they are not easy enough. Maybe if it was as easy as dropping a coin into a slot so to speak, it might be viable. There has to be some kind of conscious bartering. Money or something else.
Perhaps there’s an important distinction between two different advertising economies on the Internet:
The system where ads provide revenue that supports content (like journalism) that consumers used to pay for directly
The system where ads generate revenue by being interpolated amongst things like photos you share with your friends and family - This is content that people generate without an expectation that they will make revenue from it, but in fact the platforms are generating a great deal of revenue.
We need an alternative model for case 1 so that content like journalism continues to be produced for the public benefit. Case 2 could (and perhaps should) be replaced by a system that doesn’t have revenue generation/profit maximization as an objective.
)