Hacker News Reader

Comment by sour-taste | Hacker News Reader

This is super interesting, but I think the question everyone wants an answer to is how are the news orgs doing? Are they going out of business or does the ban just not matter to them? Looking at revenue or other metrics would have been the study I'd want to see.

View on HN

They’re going out of business/further consolidating/mass layoff for a lot of reasons but this doesn’t help.

A lot of newsrooms have already done mass layoffs over the years and there isn’t much more to cut other than shutting down.

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-wire-news-releases-pm...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/corus-entertainment-says-ong...

Can sort by date here and see a pile of newspaper closures in 2023: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_newspapers_o...

Metromedia filed for bankruptcy and shut down all papers in August 2023: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/an-atomic-bomb-for-local-news-me...

This is especially having a huge negative impact on some of the smaller newspapers. One example from a recent article - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/one-year-after-news-ban-can...

Yeah. This study is almost entirely about vanity metrics. Like, who cares about the number of social media engagements for news companies? Nobody. They're not worth anything to anyone.

Or how is the proportion of people who don't know that news content is blocked interesting?

Basically, this appears to be a study of data that was easy to get, not of data that could produce any kind of actionable insights for anyone.

In addition to the kind of data you asked for, data on whether use of FB/Instagram went down when the block was put in place would be fascinating.

CBC is publicly funded so they aren't going to go out of business. The smaller outlets maybe, but remains to be seen.

One of the oldest (though smaller) dailies, the Whitehorse Star, folded this past May:

<https://thewalrus.ca/whitehorse-daily-star/>

I mean, they'll probably shut down if Pierre Poilievre assumes power, though.

Not sure why I got downvoted— for context to non-Canadians, a core policy of the Conservatives is to defund the CBC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com