Comment by Majromax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Majromax | Hacker News Reader

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> There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it.

The imbalance is that as platforms, newspapers cross-subsidize content. Interesting headlines attract readers to the newspaper, but once in hand readers are likely to continue reading the other, less unique articles. (See also why newspapers carry sports scores and comics). An investigative report is by itself a money-loser, but the overall effect on net readership is a win.

Aggregators break newspapers as platforms. Google et al provide extra discoverability for a single article, certainly, but then there's no lock-in to keep readers on the (now) website, reading more and seeing other ads. Headline-and-summary view might even result in zero-click satisfaction, denying the outlet even that first impression.

This might just be a change that the industry must adapt to, in the same way that television and radio news took over the news-breaking role. However, it is more than a trivial threat to the fundamental business model of a news outlet; it's not (just) superficial greed.

Personally I'd be happy to see the ad driven model die. It used to be that people bought newspapers or didn't read them. They still had some ads, granted, but far less intrusive than today's web ads with their colours and animations.

I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we need some sort of intervention here. But I'm very very strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.

I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads. There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.

It used to be that you could get a paper for a quarter out of a machine on the street. That quarter covered printing and delivery. the newspaper had a classified ads section (plus inline ads, plus ad inserts) which actually funded the people who make the newspaper.

Not to mention they often had a rich owner who ran them at a loss if need be to ensure they keep being friendly to him/her when needed.

Because what you paid is far less ( think 10x) than what it takes to run.

Traditional paper-based newspaper is ad-supported too.

> If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.

This is the 'trade journalism' model. Here, good journalism still exists, but the price is more than most people would afford. People buy trade journals when the news is important, with direct financial implications that justify the cost of admission.

General journalism, however, is something close to a public service. It's better in a vague, hand-wavy way to have an educated citizen body that's informed about current affairs, but few individual citizens derive much value from their own knowledge. (This is also why people tend to gravitate towards 'entertaining' news, by some definition. Come for the sports scores, stay for current events.)

In this model, the benefit of news is externalized. I benefit when other people are educated. This is a classic market failure, and it suggests that a reader-pays framework will underprovide news.

The can post a robots.txt file to say not to index.

How do they say "You can index the story in your search engine, but you cannot borrow the text or images of our content for use on your own news site or info panels"?

I think you can do this with

  <meta name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">

Why should one have to do this? The slippery slope of what is ok goes straight from this to copyright laundering via LLMs.

Why shouldn't they? This is basic fair use. Google is giving them an out they don't have to.

Fair Use isn't a thing in Canada.

Google and Meta (or Twitter or anyone else) don't 'borrow' them. Websites explicitly declare what image and snippet they want anyone to use to summarise a link in the metadata on the web page. it's a choice by newspapers to place that image and text below the link.

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