Are you sure about this? One of the biggest publishing houses is being sued by the DOJ to stop a merger. Publishing houses have recently started splitting advances into thirds and quarters over 2-3 years. There's an unprecedented quitting of agents, leaving many authors afloat with no rep. Barnes & Noble recently and suddenly changed how they market hardcover childrens literature which will likely sink debut authors.
This was all subjects within the last 2/3 weeks btw.
To my knowledge, coverage of the journalism industry isn't a huge part of the news cycle, certainly not as much as coverage of the software industry is!
Anyway, there's plenty of stuff on HN that isn't about software development: in the top 10 front page articles right now, there's a news story about an Albanian cyberattack, a link to WikiHouse, a warning about a potential privacy breach on virtual meeting software, product announcements for YC Summer 2022, etc.
It's more "stuff that may be of interest to people in the software industry", and I have no trouble imagining how you could fill a link aggregator with "stuff that may be of interest to writers".
It could be that a wave of similar sites will emerge for a bunch of niche topics and it just so happens that hackers were on the internet first. That hypothesis matches the data too.
This is functionally not the case with engineering schools. Are there any experienced CS or CpE majors working as journalists for major mainstream media organizations? There may be, I honestly don’t know, but they are at least rather hard to find.
Hacker news exists and has value in part because what we had before were predominantly press releases and wikis run by often a single person. Writers with very few exceptions didn’t have the depth of practical experience necessary to provide insights and context, while technology needing commentary was rapidly emerging.
A lot of the early would-be peers such as slashdot and ars got absorbed by media companies and now they are not the same. It helps that HN does not have to make money, and from what I have seen is extremely well moderated.
The original point of issue was the claim that industry-specific news pertaining to writers isn't needed. Whether or not computer scientists are writers has nothing to do with the incorrect claim, which I've given examples to portray its incorrectness.
You have given an example of people in a specific subfield wanting to spread awards around, unless you’re referring to something else. I’m not denying the reality of that. That is very different from what we are discussing as well.
You think it will work, I’m skeptical it will work. That’s ok.
I think you are speculating on a place of ignorance about a community you're not a part of and assume you can simply deduce the state of a community anyways, even when your priors are completely wrong.
As I said earlier, I think our definitions are different. Yours is a very broad take on a news site. Mine is more of a direct analog to HN.
You are correct I am not a part of the science fiction writing community. The fact that I am not in no way precludes me from having valid positions on the viability of a community model translation from one community to another based on a more broadly informed macro perspective. It might even be the more accurate perspective as members tend to be biased toward their communities.