Comment by dopylitty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dopylitty | Hacker News Reader

On the Media is a great program about media and the making of news. They had a very interesting episode a while back about the economics of local news as well as how critical it is to the health of our society[1].

Once you stop paying people to sit in board meetings and town council sessions and listen for interesting stories you suddenly see a lot more corruption. It would be great if people could focus less on national/international news and more on what's going on locally. Local news helps tremendously by reporting on, contextualizing, and digging into all the local government/business/other activities that most people don't have time to focus on.

For my part I've found a few (verified) local outlets run by local citizen that I subscribe to and I think it would be good if more people did the same.

I would not deal with the organizations in the article though as by admitting they are "for profit" they have already made their values and incentives clear. If they are siphoning off a large portion of their proceeds to go into the owners' pockets there is no way they can produce a quality product. This is not unique to the news industry.

1. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/local-news...

While I agree that hyper-local news is absolutely vital to discovering and highlighting corruption and ineffectiveness (my local city board screwed up on a grant for transportation, because one of our elected officials is incompetent and lazy. A complete lack of local news ensured he could sweep it under the rug, to the detriment of the elderly and rural poor around me), I don't understand your last paragraph.

How is being for profit inherently against being fair and honest? If they are up-front with their funding sources (like how NPR makes clear whether they have donors who are involved in any story they report at the start of the story), then what is the harm? Bias would be clear, at that point.

By stating they are for-profit, they state what their incentives are. Does that mean they will be unfair or dishonest? Not necessarily. But it does mean that their incentive is not providing fair and honest coverage, but getting as many eyeballs on ads (or subscriptions) as possible. In the news "industry", this has repeatedly been shown to lead to:

  * yellow journalism (what click-bait was called before there were clicks)

  * content driven by their owners' and advertisers' best interests rather than the best interests of the public at large

  * content geared toward the views of the majority at the expense of the rest of the public.

OTM is amazing. The programme had a long-running feature, "Present and Future Business Models for Monetizing the Newspaper Industry" (here's the "new jingle" announcement ... from ten years ago: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/132848-hot...)

This Google search seems to find many of the segments:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=3v2rX-ixKMXQtQaSg4u4C...

> by admitting they are "for profit" they have already made their values and incentives clear.

For profit operations produce most good things in this world.

Their incentives are usually to produce as good a product for their customers as possible, since that generates the most profit.

I wonder if the incentive actually is to "produce as good a product for their customers as possible," or if it's to find the optimal place on the "price to produce" vs. sale price*popularity curve.

I would also posit that in spite of the fact that, while perhaps "For profit operations produce most good things in this world" (for some very specific definition of "good"), news media is in fact a niche where not-for-profit organizations do have a history of being superior to for-profit counterparts (e.g. BBC, NPR, AP, etc)

I'll concede that the news business is a special case in the internet era.

What's "good" is determined by customers. Of course, for news that is often that which confirms our beliefs.

I was mostly annoyed with the "for profit ventures are inherently bad" message. I think it's a profound and fundamental misunderstanding of the world.

It is the second and it is a good thing one is for availability and the second is for making desired products and implies at least novelty to keep the willing to pay high.

Just focusing on quality pure would result in a comically overluxury white elephant of a product as optimizing it would result in more and more cost and overwroughtness.

> For profit operations produce most good things in this world.

Mothers produce most good things in this world.

> Their incentives are usually to produce as good a product for their customers as possible, since that generates the most profit.

Their incentive is to produce as cheap a product for their customers as profitable.

Some businesses compete on quality, but it's not universal.

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