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Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

It's disheartening to learn that advertisement apparently isn't even profitable (enough) for a platform that doesn't even pay for its content.

Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.

There's obviously no shortage of hate for "mainstream media" right now, so probably many people can't await the demise of that industry. I'm just wondering which blogger we'll send to cover Ebola in Guinea-Bissau and which twitterer will file & finance 14 FOIA lawsuits[0]. But maybe democracy works just as well without people digging into "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documents".

[0]: http://www.charliesavage.com/?page_id=303

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>Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.

Even at the Washington Post (profitable now), what drove growth was their opinion pieces (which they're doubling down on). And opinion pieces, while having their own merit, is rarely journalism. It makes me sad.

I guess the argument is that journalism is, in many ways, a commodity. Journalism, when defined as the reporting of precise core facts (X happened in Y, Z people were hurt), is available all over the internet.

In order to provide value, newspapers need to provide exclusive value-add, which in many cases includes opinion pieces. Opinion pieces allow experts in the area to link many different news items together to provide a more holistic view of the news item.

Anyone can tell me that 5 Coalition soldiers were killed by an IED, but it takes an opinion piece by an expert in counter insurgency tactics to provide context about how that might represent a shift in tactics/approach by a group.

Even at that, I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is competing away value adds for mass market journalism. News will continue to get disintermediated.

For news firms seeking survival or sustainable operations, you'll see your "value add" opinion pieces consume more of the content with less actual news. This is WaPo's strategy [0].

[0] http://digiday.com/publishers/washington-post-grew-digital-s...

I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is competing away value adds for mass market journalism.

I think there's some truth to this. I think there's also a need for accreditation or other validation/reputation services, not to serve as a gatekeeper, but to assist in helping people determine which sources are likely worthwhile to listen to. If the vetting needs to be done for each person on a per-author basis, that can be overwhelming, not dissimilar to the paradox of choice.

In some ways this may end up looking similar to existing publishers, though with a little less tight-coupling between author and publisher. It's pretty clear there are large changes underway.

I don't think these difficulties of Medium can be generalized to the wider industry. The CEO/founder Evan Williams is a billionaire who set out to create a good publishing platform for everyday Joes and Sues with little to no focus on monetization (as far as I can tell). Other text content based sites are more willing to sacrifice UX for higher ad revenue.

They would be profitable if they reduced the employee count 10x. Which should be doable, it's just a blog platform.

Automattic has over 500 employees, yet they are also "Just a blog platform"

Though I believe they are actually profitable.

Automattic has other services that compliment Wordpress.

Money goes where it's treated the nicest. So where is it going now?

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