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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

Whoever is paying for the newspaper owns the content. The readers aren't paying, the editors aren't paying, but the advertisers are. If any free or heavily ad-subsidised paper publishes negative content about one of their advertising partners, guess what happens? The contract gets pulled and a major revenue stream disappears, so if you're an editor of a free paper, you don't do that.

There is very little integrity in a free paper, it's basically a propaganda leaflet handed out by large organizations to influence your behaviour, with a few crosswords in the back.

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> There is very little integrity in a free paper, it's basically a propaganda leaflet handed out by large organizations to influence your behaviour, with a few crosswords in the back.

Bit of an over-simplification, I think. The Evening Standard was paid-for until a few years ago. It's now ad-funded. That doesn't _necessarily_ mean that the advertisers influence the editorial line: there are plenty of publications that get the majority of their income from advertising yet remain editorially independent (I edited one for six years).

The ES has historically been very editorially independent (generally not with an editorial line I like tbh, but that's by the by) and yet remained profitable. Now it's crossing the line towards ad-controlled. That's their decision, but I don't believe it was inevitable.

(That said, I think I'd prefer puff pieces about Google to the relentless crap about some guy called Nicky Haslam that the ES has historically run...)

>Whoever is paying for the newspaper owns the content.

This is also true of TV news. Last century, my cousin produced local tv news. They did a consumer report "lease or buy your next car" and the conclusion "buy". This did not sit will with the advertisers and my cousin was called into meetings.

Also this year the art non-profit I work for submitted a story to a free paper and it was published. It was more of a "here is an event thats happening", piece but still gives me a little pause.

> Also this year the art non-profit I work for submitted a story to a free paper and it was published

Isn't that just a press release? When I was taught about press releases the idea was to make them as simple as possible for the person at the newspaper to cut and paste.

kind of a press release but there most press releases I've seem come with a comment on the bottom that it is a press release with contact info of the press person.

I know the person went back and forth with the paper's editor about how to improve the story. In some ways we were just providing free content.

The contract gets pulled and a major revenue stream disappears...

Does it? The advertiser isn't the basis of the revenue stream - the ad space is. That space can be sold to someone else. The revenue will be lower, especially if the newspaper is struggling to find advertisers, but not necessarily by very much. If the advertiser has negotiated favourable rates for bulk purchasing then losing them could actually lead to selling that space for more money to a range of smaller advertisers if the supply of advertisers is greater than the newspaper can serve.

In some cases giving up editorial control to advertisers will drive some readers away, which contracts circulation and consequently lowers ad prices, leading to a similar reduction in revenue.

I don't think the economics of advertising, especially in print media, are very obvious. There's a lot of different forces that need to be kept in balance in order to maximise revenue. It isn't a simple case of keeping the advertisers happy to make the most money.

Yes, it is a bit more complex than that. But it's pretty clear that readers don't know who has editorial control, so they won't get driven away if that changes. It's also surprising how few advertisers there are in each paper, if you're maximising your profit you need only a few big accounts to fund the paper, diversifying to a bunch of smaller clients is going to be difficult and costly.

To maximise revenue you want clients to compete for your ad space (in some cases, just to be in there instead of their competitors). Editorial control just goes out of the window, so long as the baseline quality is high enough to keep people reading, you're good.

complex yes but flipside is, if you alienate an advertiser your ad space is less valuable to others. if you are very friendly to the viewpoint of your advertisers, space worth more. its a dance tho

So, what does this tell us about HN’s policies and moderation activities?

Do they actually moderate stuff which is negative about YC? I don't think I've ever seen it.

What does happen, in my opinion, is that negative comments get down voted into oblivion, which kind of makes sense.

The objective aspect is that they generally make for low quality conversations and the subjective aspect is that you're complaining about people's livelihood (the age old: "you can not rely on a person understanding something if their salary depends on them not understanding it").

> Do they actually moderate stuff which is negative about YC? I don't think I've ever seen it.

> What does happen, in my opinion, is that negative comments get down voted into oblivion, which kind of makes sense.

"Downvoted into oblivion" would be precisely how I'd quietly moderate stuff I didn't want showing up on the site. Not saying it's happening, but "I don't think I've ever seen it" would be precisely the intended result.

Nothing? I’ve seen negative news about YC funded companies on the front page many times, and I think I’ve seen some articles that were being critical of YC somehow too. So I don’t think they abuse their powers for censoring negative news.

Besides, HN is not the product, nor is it primarily meant to market the YC backed companies I think. HN is a forum for the startup community and its primary function for YC I think is to be a channel to attract people to YC.

> Besides, HN is not the product, nor is it primarily meant to market the YC backed companies I think. HN is a forum for the startup community and its primary function for YC I think is to be a channel to attract people to YC.

Exactly -- provable, heavy-handed suppression of criticism by the moderators would undermine this goal. Instead, the community itself exerts a drag on direct criticism of YC and its companies by giving it less attention than other material. (With some notable exceptions.) And that's fine -- I can and do find such material on other fora which have their own biases.

HN is run by YC so is obviously going to be biased. But that's ok because you know that it's presenting a biased viewpoint and can balance it appropriately. Free newspapers masquerade as a balanced source and it's not always obvious who they're owned by and why they're free.

We all know HN runs the occasional job ad and promotional piece, but I find it acceptable given the educated target audience. Personally, I also like "Show HN" where a startup CEO/tech lead gets flak, but also has the chance to expose his product.

A more imminent concern is that, given the increased news frequency in the last one or two years, many stories don't make it to the home page, and don't get the coverage they deserve. Also, HN is somewhat prone to ring voting, and I guess this is almost impossible to get under control, though it's not too bad IMHO.

Both of these issues could be seen as inviting growth hacking or worse: the first one to shadow negative publicity (a trick as old as the soccer world championship); the second one, obviously, by making public reception appear in favour of something, when in reality it's everything but.

Ok there's one issue I'm having with HN: too many pieces about machine learning/big data, and stories being predictably offtopic'd by functional programming nerds (but it's par for the course on HN, ycombinator and all).

They’re obviously going work in favor of y-combinator. Did anyone ever doubt that?

You should look in to "The No Agenda Show". You'll like it- news and media deconstruction that is entirely listener supported. 0 ads for EXACTLY the reason your stating.

"Listener supported" has similar issues, though. You're just avoiding content your listeners will object to rather than your advertisers.

If NPR suddenly started doing ranty right-wing commentary they'd be in the same financial difficulties as they'd be from losing a bunch of major advertisers/sponsors.

(Edited to add a side note: For a show called "No Agenda", "Curry theorizes that the Haiti earthquake was done on purpose by an earthquake machine so that Bill Clinton can build hotels on the northern shores of Haiti" sounds a bit agenda-y... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Agenda)

Even if you pay, how do you know the people running the paper aren't double dipping.

You don't, but at least you know they might not be.

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