Hacker News Reader

Comment by holograham | Hacker News Reader

news corporations are just a proxy for what the public wants to know about. The news consumers (aka the market) dictate the type of news publishers report. Obviously we currently put a higher premium on covering apple launches and political conventions. If people did not want that, they wouldn't pay attention to those news outlets and subsequently those news outlets would either go under or change their coverage trends.

View on HN

This is a preposterously naive understanding of how the news business works. Customers dictate what gets produced--no question--but so do a variety of other market factors. Namely, what is cheap and easy to produce for publishers. In the case of Apple news, these factors create a wicked cycle. Users click on shiny gadget stories and the news doubles down on such content because it's a lot easier and a hell of a lot cheaper to send a reporter to Cupertino than it is to send them to Baghdad.

ALL news can be made to be interesting and exciting. The problem is that the pay-per-pageview model heavily incentivizes blogs to grab low hanging fruit instead of doing the real (and often expensive) work of making the important news readable.

I disagree somewhat. It is true that certain news can be prohibitively expensive and/or completely barred by the country or another country however for the most part news that people care about enough to purchase and read will be obtained by a news publisher of some sort. We have already seen different business models develop to deliver news that would have been too costly to hire a team of dedicated reporters (e.g. Huffington Post). The fundamental rule of a free market should make news outlets proxy's for the consumers interests. This site in particular hosts numerous ideas where the current offerings do not match the consumers needs (sometimes due to market inefficiencies, sometimes due to new tech, sometimes due to new business paradigms that circumvent current legal/political impediments, etc). If the news industry is delivering news that is a hybrid of what the public wants and what is cheapest to report then inevitably there will be a business model that will spring up to deliver a better solution that optimizes for what people want and delivers it in a cost effective way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com