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xp84 a day ago

It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.

petilon a day ago | parent [-]

Bloomberg and Economist seem to be doing OK, so it is possible.

xp84 a day ago | parent [-]

I'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth.

That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.

The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.

xp84 15 hours ago | parent [-]

oops, forgot citation:

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers...

and https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families... (Table HH4)