The outsized influence of ad money in society is getting worse day by day
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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How do you pay for journalism?
Honestly I'm fine paying a subscription if the content is good. There's one local news source that's free that I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount to view.
Do you pay for journalism?
There’s one local news source that’s free
It probably costs something to produce, and it's probably beholden to whoever pays its wages.
what? I'm really confused by your comment.
When you asked how people pay for journalism I assumed you were asking how journalists can make a website free while still having costs to their business, which is a very valid concern. I was stating that there are definitely jouranlism sources that I'd be happy to pay for if they gave me that option.
Presently I don't pay for journalism frankly because there are no sources that I hold to a high enough standard to say that they deserve some of my money. There are sources out there currently that are free or free with ads that, if they launched into a subscription model, I simply would not pay for because I don't think they have a high enough quality standard. There are some out there which is what I meant by my comment, but they're currently not accepting donations.
It probably costs something to produce, and it’s probably beholden to whoever pays its wages.
Do you think I don't know this? Do you think I was born yesterday?
Presently I don’t pay for journalism
So the answer to, "Do you pay for journalism?" is, "no".
It's great that you have free, ad-supported news that you enjoy. But complaints about "the outsized influence of ad-money" seem pretty hypocritical when you choose not to pay.
(I realize you were not the original commenter complaining about the influence of ad money, but you picked up the ball so I'm responding to you.)
I do. I support/ sub to Unicorn Riot on Patreon. There are a lot more people willing to do so than you might think. It's no different than a NatGeo or newspaper sub. The advantage of subs is that not everyone needs to pay to fund a site, whereas online ads are so little revenue that a site needs everyone to be allowing them, which is never going to happen.
It’s no different than a NatGeo or newspaper sub
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Nat Geo stopped publishing in June and fired all its regular staff. Newspapers have been in consolidation and contraction for decades, with no sign of recovery.
The advantage of subs is that not everyone needs to pay
The disadvantage is that not enough will pay.
Newspapers have been in consolidation and contraction for decades, with no sign of recovery.
If you are talking about printed newspapers, yes of course. If you are talking about Newspapers as in the organizations (NYT, Atlantic, etc), news consumption is actually way up, they have just been struggling to monetize effectively in the digital space, especially since the corporate-backed non-newspaper news media orgs like CNN and Fox don't have to rely on website ads or subs, and can create the expectation of free news content, which directly discourages casual news consumers from paying for it.
The disadvantage is that not enough will pay.
This depends entirely on the size and scope of what is being made. There are tons of news content creators who operate through subscriptions just fine. They're also not outputting print media which were always pre-printed based on demand estimates, never printed-to-order. If you think that there are no news sites funded off of subscriptions that are doing just fine, you are misinformed. They're just not the big names you think of, who have lost their mass-appeal due to having to compete with the aforementioned corporate-backed news media outlets who can afford to undercut them.
Anyone who is trying to ask for a subscription in order for people to read the same news they can get on CNN for free is going to fail hard. The key is reporting on stuff that CNN et al doesn't or won't.
There are plenty of small independent publications and online journalism outlets that survive off donation drives, subscription patrons, and volunteer citizen journalists. There are even totally independent citizen journalists that report on community sources. Unfortunately, honest journalism is something that society currently has a limited carrying capacity for, but that capacity is not zero.
Neither is the capacity high enough to prevent the outsized influence of advertising money, that's my point.
I actually loved Jezebel, because it was maybe the only news site I encountered (as a dude not particularly in the know), that actually talked about women's issues like my wife does.
People got very upset that they were opinionated, but that's the whole point; why would you expect anything else on a site literally named Jezebel?
I wish this discussion happened around Vice. I was subscribed to every platform that had Vice on it and had watched every episode of their news shows as they were scrambling to pivot as HBO Max gave them the hatchet. Yeah, capital decides. At the end of the fucking day, the people with the money decide for us.
I don't even think readers wanted it to exist
It really seems like ad networks specifically targeting these edgier spaces could do very well for some brands.
They do already exist, it's just for a much smaller market so it flies under the radar. Advertisers pull out of YouTube due to strong language and others happily slap their apps on porn sites.
Are you talking about the try not to cum scam games or are there some legitimate ads too?
I mean a lot of ads are scammy but also there are plenty that just point to adjacent adult content services like other sites or toy selling sites etc. Regardless it's a profit for whoever runs the ads.
I'd argue that like half of all ads are scams nowadays (and maybe since the beginning)
I definitely see some of the concerns that they have with this GARM stuff, but I also don't particularly feel like I've seen much under the umbrella of the Gawker media group in general that I'd classify as "high-quality journalism". There are decent articles here and there, but the standard for what qualifies to be published has always struck me as not particularly high.
I get that there's a place for aggressive journalism, sometimes it's exactly what's called for. But Gawker always kind of felt like it was just aggressive for its own sake in order to attract eyeballs. Not to say that they never shed light on anything important, but a lot of the time it seemed like they were tilting at windmills just trying to keep that energy up.
Advertising really doesn't seem like a great long-term solution for journalism's funding, though. Nobody really wants ads, and people are increasingly able to just not interact with them. At the same time, nobody wants a paywall either.
Government funding, maybe? Some big public foundation? We certainly need something to prop journalism up financially or it's just going to keep getting worse.
I think the problem is centralised "big house" journalism. I've only ever really been happy with special interest, independent, moderately-sized publications. I can drop them and move on when they start to show institutionalised bias that I find distasteful (like the AIM hosting Labor lapdogs, which would be fine, if the party wasn't ambivalently ableist and infested with documented Christofascists). There's a certain size of online journal that is actually sustainable given its audience.