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Comment by Knulp | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a fair point but I agree the comparaison is wrong originally because here one of the main issue is that people are not willing to pay for information anymore.

Thing is also that houses that have crumbled have crumbled and there's nothing left. You can't quantify what happened so easily. Articles stay online. Actually that's something that might be good to think about : for a magazine or a journal that decided to make things better and do more responsable journalism, should they delete the content that doesnt fit that bill anymore ? Kind of like the YouTube Kurzgesagt channel when they were confronted with a few of their faults and decided to eradicate the content that was problematic ? It's pretty radical but it sends a message. Not sure how that would be doable economically though.

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I don't believe that people are not willing to pay for information, but they might not be willing to pay as much for the information they are presented. If there's a lot of falsehood, propaganda and celeb-news to fill in the blanks between the ads, why should any reasonable person be willing to pay? They aren't the customer, they are the product being sold to advertisers, PR agencies and anybody who wants to influence public opinion.

Would they be willing to pay? That probably depends on the audience. Some certainly would. Others use news as entertainment, they probably won't, because there are better forms of entertainment commercially available.

Regarding corrections: I don't like deleting stuff outright, but afaik you can't change the video on YouTube, so that's a harder problem. For their own site, a company could (and should) still leave them online, but clearly mark them as retracted (and say why they retracted it; and possibly set noindex on them so search engines drop them from the results). This would achieve transparency and keep unknowing readers safe. Doing secret edits that change the meaning of sentences is the worst that can happen.

Does that mean all traditionnel outlets are just bound to... Die? Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so. In the meantime they have to maintain the flow of content, content, content so ads will continue supporting them in the meantime. If you add to that most of them are still paper magazines which are going down in sales and require it's own workforce...

Someone made a point in another discussion that traditional news outlets are no longer trustworthy and would have to rebuild somewhere else to get a new sort of trust. Maybe that's the way...

> Because they could do websites with only quality journalism but they dont have enough people subscribing to do so.

Chicken and egg? Virtually nobody has paying customers before they start and create their product. Especially for the large media conglomerates, I don't believe it would be a venture where they'd have to risk their company. For individual journalists or small groups that might be different. I don't know how successful the crowdfunded experiments of the last few years were.

I do believe that it's hard to transition from the current form to an alternative system by making lots of small changes over a long time. On the other hand: there's a chance to build trust with each new generation. It's much easier to start with a clean slate than win back those you've lost, I suppose.

True. And they for sure took the wrong direction to build a new trust so it will probably take quite a while.

There's been a big the wave of new medias but not many survived more than a few month or a year. Not sure about crowdfunding. I'll look it up actually, that would be interesting to compare.

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