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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Advertising-dependent, though. News is not going to work right until the readers pay a significant chunk of the revenue. Purely because the incentives are all wrong for the advertising model - optimising the revenue means doing journalism badly (clickbait, articles designed to inspire emotional reactions instead of inform, partisanship, tribalism, etc).

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I tend to agree. In Norway the paid subscription model is proving to be more sustainable than the advertisement model. This seems to be the case in other niche markets as well. The subscription model doesn't require many subscribers to outweight the advertisment model. I wrote a linkedin article on the subject a year ago https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thousandth-subscribers-outwei...

I had such high hopes for that wikinews thing. I'd gladly pay for unbiased reporting. Maybe all the recent political fiascos (in many nations) will start making people more receptive to the idea.

How do we define "unbiased" here? We can't separate the observations and reporting of it from the humans involved in those.

I am not being rhetorical. It is a genuine question which I am highly interested in.

Even though I don't believe in the existence of completely unbiased news but I do believe that there is a scale here on which we could rank news for bias(or some other more appropriate term). I just don't know what the mechanism for that would be?

We do know of some obvious sources of bias that would be good place to start. Like separating financial incentives from reporting. But that is not the only major source of bias.

I personally liked Glenn Greenwald's approach with the Biden story he published on Substack. He clearly had strong opinions, but he provided references for his assertions that his readers can look into for themselves. The more that we can "hyperlink" journalism to sources, the less an individual writer's bias matters, I think.

By stark contrast, Bloomberg's controversial piece on alleged Chinese spy hardware had no named sources and no references for readers to follow up on, and furthermore companies Bloomberg alleged to have been compromised all reported the allegations were false. The piece even featured an artist's idea of what the hardware might look like, not an image of an actual device, and the only way to know it was an artist's rendition was to read the fine print under the picture.

I'm not sure there's any way to know the truth, but the article should not have been published, in my opinion, without some way for readers to dig further into the available facts independently of Bloomberg's reporting.

When I did my MBA, I was supposed to read a lot of articles on the subject and then form my opinion from them. That was too much work, so I just searched for articles that supported my existing opinion. A lot easier. I never failed to find supporting evidence for my opinion. I originally supposed that this meant I had correct opinions. I've since learned that actually this means there are supporting articles for almost any opinion on a subject.

Having sources doesn't eliminate bias.

Completely agree with all of this.

My point is that sources allow follow-up. Even if, in the extreme case, the sources are garbage, that's still useful information. Bias is to be expected from journalists but disinformation is not, and disinformation thrives when it's divorced from sources/context.

Smarter Every Day did an episode in which a journalist explained how to look for sources when something (in her example, a climate change meme) seems potentially dubious, which highlights an example where the source is actually great and the bias is one we'd normally find positive, but the way the information is recontextualized is misleading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUiYglgGbos

Take it a step further: In journalism, the single largest bias on display at any publication -- from the New York Times down to some hyperlocal startup -- isn't in the content; it's in what they choose not to cover.

Lack of coverage can form opinions just as strongly as coverage can.

> I personally liked Glenn Greenwald's approach with the Biden story he published on Substack.

FWIW, as a former fan of Greenwald, his editor came out looking like a far better journalist than he did in that exchange.

> The more that we can "hyperlink" journalism to sources, the less an individual writer's bias matters, I think.

The correlation between the quality of research/argumentation and the amount of hyperlinks in the text is essentially zero, and some of the worst partisan hacks of all political stripes are prolific generators of footnotes and links.

Greenwald provides no more evidence for the actual claims about Biden's computer than Bloomberg did for the Chinese spy story. He does of course provide a lot more hyperlinks to circumstantial stuff, a lot of angry links to mainstream media not taking the story seriously (which is his main focus) and more sympathetic links to reportage by the likes of the Daily Caller, but the Chinese spy story's credibility certainly wouldn't have been boosted if Bloomberg's house style involved angrily linking to everyone who said they didn't think there was any truth to it and accusing them of mounting a coverup operation, or by links to support the circumstantial case everyone already knows (yes, China can and does mount surveillance operations; yes, Supermicro manufactures in China).

If anything, I'd say the opposite is often the case: aggressive hyperlinking is often a way to encourage people to overlook the obvious bias and thinness of a story is by appealing to the "if it's got lots of hyperlinks it must be complete, accurate and important" strand of faith in stuff that's written down. Ann Coulter and Michael Moore don't fill their books with footnotes because they want their readers to look beyond their biases....

Unbiased was probably a poor choice of words, there's always biases of some sort. As you said motivations, financial in particular, are the main problem.

I guess there's also an onus on us readers to do some of our own fact checking. I'm busy though!

That's exactly my concern as well. Too busy or unmotivated to do fact checking every single time. So much so that I have stopped looking at most(political and others) news altogether as I feel I am doing disservice by studying multiple sources and fact checking. It just gets too tiring. Now on most political conversations I just excuse myself by saying even though I should care and me choosing to not care is only possible due to my privileged position in society, I choose to use my privilege for the sake of my mental peace.

Few people really want unleavened news: it's boring. You can certainly get it, and you can even pay for it if you really need it (Bloomberg terminals!). This is doubly so for local news.

I think we need to distinguish what specifically we're against, and that's hyper-partisanship. Working backwards from how a story might affect a party or candidate. Cherry-picking details to assemble a case where giving even a slightly fuller picture would present the opposite.

But fundamentally for news to be interesting it really does have to convey a story, to engage the reader's sense of drama somehow.

That's exactly what good journalism does. It informs and entertains, while providing a balanced view of the subject and covering all the salient points. It's very difficult to do right, hence the reason that journalists used to be respected and there are awards for it.

Personally, I prefer my journalism without entertainment.

Subscribe to the feed of AP or Reuters.

They don't carry most local news. I live in a town of about 7,000. We had a "labor of love" local paper for a while but haven't for a long time so Facebook or Next Door is pretty much my only source of information about what's happening in town. But it's not hard to do the math and see why it's really hard economically.

How much would it cost to produce a weekly newsletter/newspaper for the town with a sustainable income for one or two people? Maybe $100K/year? Now you're talking about every town resident paying over $10/year--and most won't. Can maybe knock that down with some advertising--of course, now someone has to sell ads too and we have very few businesses in town.

$10/year as a subscription to an online service, probably not. Especially when it's a paywall. But 25c for a copy of an actual paper newspaper once a week? Sure, a lot of people will. Businesses will buy 5 copies to put in their reception area.

It's weird how the online vs print business models change (source: I ran a newspaper for a while).

In my town, I doubt you'd sell all that many. There aren't many significant business--and what there is are essentially a spillover from the adjacent small city in one part of town. We did have a small paper for a time that was quite good but the publisher got ill and it shut down. And to the degree there are other chain local papers in the area, our small rural town is essentially ignored.

Yeah, the economics for hyper-local is still not great. I do wonder what the minimum population that could support a newspaper is. That might make an interesting spreadsheet model someday.

Population is one variable. There's also some sort of concentration/community factor. e.g. there are college papers (although that works mostly because there's a lot of free labor). But I could imagine a coherent urban neighborhood working better for hyper-local than a spread-out largely residential small rural town.

I agree, but I think it's the other way around. The urban neighbourhoods I've lived in are all very much a part of the city rather than actual communities themselves. Whereas the rural village I grew up in, that was an actual community. Though not much news ("headline: Bessie the cow escapes her field again" ;)

25c won't even remotely cover the cost of distribution alone, and I doubt that post-Corona many businesses will have a need for reception areas any more.

That doesn't make any sense logically - wouldn't there still be pressure to form emotional relationships and tribalism if even if they are still paid? They seem more likely to leave or complain if it goes outside their desired bubble. It has the same logical flaw of the vapid cliche "If you're not paying you're the product." - No you can still be the product even when you are paying. Paying more is never a guarantee of value - worse yet it has been found doing so sets a sunk cost fallacy to justify the quality of what was spent.

Cost may set a ceiling in terms of "paying $20 for a rocket" only getting you some fireworks or a model one at most but there is no guarantee that throwing $20M blindly won't end with you getting the same model rocket with a coat of paint and the seller moving to a Caribbean Island.

If you have steady subscription revenue then you don't really care that much about how many times each story is read. It's more about how to appeal to a readership. Yes, this can be partisan, absolutely. But only if the target market is that partisan readership. There is also a valid non-partisan market that is worth going for. So not all media will be partisan, there will be a spread across the spectrum, with some attempting to be strictly neutral

Advertising-driven journalism must get an emotional response in the title to be read, and every click matters. More extreme positions invoke a greater emotional response[0]. There's no room for non-partisan, sensible, balanced coverage because no-one clicks on it when the other option is an article designed to provoke fear or anger. So ad-driven journalism has to go to the extremes to maintain revenue. Hence we see the middle ground becoming a media wasteland, while the extremes get crowded.

[0] political campaigns have the same thing: get people angry or afraid and they'll vote. Middle-ground, balanced, logical positions don't get people angry or afraid, so they don't vote. Extreme positions on issues actually work better than "sensible" positions.

Interesting. I just realized that I do subscribe to the local independent business news journal (it's about $90/yr). What is interesting is that it contains little in the way of click-bait and "made ya look" content compared to the local newspaper and TV station sites. They do cover "real" non-business news, and when they do cover the same news as the other local news outlets, the quality of coverage is better (and feels less editorialized). Still no cure for reader comments, though.

> Advertising-dependent, though. News is not going to work right until the readers pay a significant chunk of the revenue.

That caught my eye too. Your second sentence is why I put a good chunk of change into https://thecorrespondent.com/, and now send them $5/month. I'd be willing to chip in a couple of bucks per month for ad-free local news, otherwise I'm not interested.

Yes, exactly.

But then go the next step and realize that there are already quality news sources for those who are interested and willing to pay.

That is news to me - no pun intended. I have long found many periodicals comparable to subpar compared to random websites.

Ha. :)

I'm thinking of things like specialist newsletters for niches, e.g. SemiAccurate:

> Professional membership allows instant access to the entire site and all content. It includes immediate access to all news, analysis, and summaries of the news. It also includes access to all regularly published analysis, all news, white papers, and related materials. Pricing is $1,000 for a year’s worth of access. We do not offer refunds for cancellation or termination.

https://semiaccurate.com/subscribe/

Eh?

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