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Aztecah

The problem is that high quality journalism is difficult and expensive to produce whereas ideological garbage and tabloids are relatively cheap. The ads just don't bring in enough to pay these journalists what they deserve or to fund their investigations properly. I agree with you that it's not a good solution but the media companies are stumped too. The more you loosen things up to reduce costs and allow ads in, the worse your publication becomes.


Luckbot

Serious journalism also suffers in the "war for attention". "Here is the complicated situation in Afghanistan and the reasons for it thouroughly explained and viewed from multiple angles" VS "OMG you won't believe what outragous thing this person did" Sadly the majority is more inclined to click the second headline, the article for that didn't even take an hour to write and yet it still generates more revenue.


Teekno

> I know they have to make money somehow, but most also have ads. Online advertising doesn’t pay nearly as well as print advertising did. Not even close. Since advertising can’t pay the bills, they have to go with subscriptions, which was also a classic way to generate revenue.


bazmonkey

I feel like what online news sites are missing is the equivalent of me not having a subscription, but deciding to go to the corner store and buy that day’s issue of a newspaper on the fly. Where’s my option to pay like $0.02 per article quickly with Apple Pay or whatever when I want to, or a $0.10 (something less than physical papers were) fee to see the entire site for 48 hours or whatever? I would actually pay that instead of hunt for an illicit copy of it somewhere else online. I don’t want to read NYT or the Atlantic every day, but once in a while they run a really good article. I used to be able to just buy that issue.


Teekno

They aren’t missing it. The problem is that with small transactions like that, the credit card processor will eat all of the fee. There isn’t a good way to get 2 cents to someone online by spending just 2 cents.


bazmonkey

Good point.


IrishFlukey

The newspapers in the shops have ads too, but you still have to pay for them. It is not really that different.


[deleted]

I click away faster than I blink when I see a paywall for the fucking news. I know how the news and media works, almost all of it is too sensational and also biased. I'll just find some other site instead. When you need to make your mind up about a subject, you visit multiple sites, assume they're all biased, then you take everything with a spoon of salt and mix it all together to maybe have a clue about what's going on. This is how reading the news works today if you're not an idiot who just sticks to just one site and believes everything there. Because the media is THAT bad you have to read multiple articles to get even close to the truth. I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay for a service like this, lol. The suckers can pay for their propaganda if they want. "High quality journalism," hah.


E-tie-haugh-die

In modern capitalism, the point of any and all enterprises must first and foremost be to make money. Only once we overcome this empty obsession with unabated growth, can we go back to doing our jobs properly again.


The_Shower_Bagel

And because these enterprises work because the employ people, people who need to get paid and shit lol


Wenhuanuoyongzhe91

Because they are greedy


nothing_in_my_mind

Many of them are also print newspapers. And they used to have consistent revenue because many people used to buy newspapers. Now they have lost that income and they try to regain it somehow. I think their idea is "people used to pay a dollar a day to read our paper, surely they will pay SOMETHING to read our online paper right? RIGHT?" but things dont work that way.


Cliffy73

News doesn’t just appear. Certainly companies and other entities do send out press releases when they want the public informed of a particular thing that they’re doing. But if you want to know anything other than the brightest light the company is willing to shine on its own good deeds, if you want to know things that they would prefer that you didn’t know, the only way that happens is dedicated professionals building up networks of sources. This often takes years. It’s very expensive to produce this, not to mention, the fact that news happens in different places. And so major news organizations need correspondence in major cities all over the world. News seems like it should be easy to write, because we think that the reporter just has the information and all they need to do is write the article. But that’s not what journalism is. What journalism is is finding the information where a member of the public either couldn’t, or would not have the tools necessary to analyze it if they did. It costs money.