Because its reporters are from the "mainstream media." Often reporters who could not get any further in their old companies, or who were cut from their organizations due to budget cuts.
cancel subscriptions to major media institutions
...and that's why those budgets got cut, and large media organizations became more reliant on advertising money, instead of subscriber money.
News isn't free. It's good that you appreciate strong journalism. But robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work.
Even if your local newspaper is terrible, you should still support it financially so that good people can still try to do good work, and not disappear altogether.
My local paper is bad. But I subscribe, and reading it (actually reading, not looking at a web site) have learned that there are good people there trying to do good work. Between the lines you can see that they are underfunded, and do a lot with very little.
I also subscribe to large, award-winning important journalistic endeavors. "Real news," as it were. But I also know that award-winning journalism doesn't magically appear out of thin air, or straight from journalism schools. Those reporters have to learn their trade at small newspapers, television stations, and radio outlets to work their way up to the big leagues. If we don't support local reporters, there won't be any smart journalists in the future.
"News isn't free. It's good that you appreciate strong journalism. But robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work.
Even if your local newspaper is terrible, you should still support it financially so that good people can still try to do good work, and not disappear altogether."
No. If you pay the same money to Paul who creates better content, you are voting with your wallet. Everyone should do that. Definitely dont stay with sucky provider but give the same money (or more) to someone better, that helps things to develop.
That works for cans of soup, it doesn't work for journalism. This isn't a fight between companies. It's about preserving democracy.
You seem to be under the impression that if enough people subscribed to some very good national publication that it would somehow start covering local school board elections. That simply won't happen.
That's why we need local media. Those local, low-level politicians have to be held accountable, or they end up becoming congressmen and senators, and other high-level officials.
> You seem to be under the impression that if enough people subscribed to some very good national publication that it would somehow start covering local school board elections.
Not implausible; enough US attention drawn to a particular British publication got GuardianUS to happen; why wouldn't enough paying attention to a national publication and the stories it already has about a particular locality from local residents be a signal that would lead that publication to opening up a locally-focussed offshoot in that locality?
Actually, the 20 years I spent in journalism tells me it is completely implausible.
a locally-focussed offshoot in that locality?
Because there are over 15,000 school districts in the United States. Plus another 20,000 municipal governments. Plus another 100,000 other local government organizations.
The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States.
And even if it did, people would demonize it because it was centralized, or at one time published an article they didn't agree with, the way they do with the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place.
I'm old enough to remember that when Capital Cities bought ABC, and General Electric bought NBC, and Westinghouse bought CBS, suddenly those broadcasters were beholden to stockholders and not the public. That was when television journalism started dying.
> Because there are over 15,000 school districts in the United States. Plus another 20,000 municipal governments. Plus another 100,000 other local government organizations.
> The Guardian, or a similar organization, would need a staff the size of Apple or Google to even just scratch the surface of local news in the United States.
So, what? It wouldn't happen all at once or with just one organization, anyway. Maybe the Guardian sees demand from it's subscriber base for an additional product with local coverage in a couple of places, initially, and expands imto that. Maybe someone else does it in other localities.
Now, personally, I don't think there is an adequate market for profitable paid non-ad-supported local news of the type that we are used to thinking of as general need coverage because the people willing to pay are a narrower group with deeper and more focussed needs, but nonprofit quasi-patronage model like the Guardian and some others could work.
> Applying mass market economics to news is what destroyed journalism in the first place.
No, what destroyed the traditional news media is not understanding the value proposition and drastically cutting newsrooms in shortsighted consolidation, a mistake which it hadn't recovered from and was maybe just starting to recognize when new media came along and made it impossible to recover other than by largely becoming the new competition.
What killed journalism is...nothing. There's a lot of rose-colored glasses about the more opaque bias of the time when the media, top-to-bottom was far more uniform in it's bias than it is today, and when the major media were even narrower in their ownership, because people mistook (and mistake Even more in retrospect than contemporary audiences did) the uniformity of vías for neutrality and objectivity, but journalism is no less alive today than at any time in the past. Probably far more.
>I'm old enough to remember that when Capital Cities bought ABC, and General Electric bought NBC, and Westinghouse bought CBS, suddenly those broadcasters were beholden to stockholders and not the public.
Dang. You old. It's like a different world now, that there's no news you can rely on. Oh they'll scream and cry and say "but they don't exert editorial control . . ." (but they fucking do).
> Why Giving Food Stamps to the Rich Is Not a Terrible Idea
> Every child in N.Y.C. public schools was given a $420 benefits card. The well-off should use theirs to support food banks.
> A few weeks ago, I received a text from an 855 area code telling me that I might be eligible for food stamps and to call the number provided to find out. Given that I am sufficiently compensated for what I do, I deleted the message assuming it was a scam (which it turned out to be).
> Soon enough, though, friends living in well-appointed Brooklyn brownstones began reporting, with appropriate astonishment, that they had received debit cards, in the mail, issued by the state for $420 each, which were meant for purchasing food.
No. If you pay the same money to Paul who creates better content [...]
But that manifestly doesn't happen. Nobody wants to pay 20 different local bloggers to cover 20 different local issues, large firms asset strip or crowd out small firms, and if all else fails the truth is denounced as 'fake news'. The market is not a meritocracy.
I find this way too charitable to mainstream media organizations, but I don’t have the right understanding to make an argument against.
My impression is that there’s too much news produced. Journalism makes people feel more depressed, and editorial sections are of the most read and most filled with junk parts of publications. Facebook and Google are complicit in generation of division and fake news, but news media has been complicit toward that end my entire life. Most mainstream publications seem to push a particularly narrow neoliberal mindset and little else.
Local news has been filled with poison and junk since at least the mid 90s from my recall.
This is very hard to find these days, but if you can, try to subscribe to a local newspaper that is not owned by a hedge fund. A friend is a reporter at a smallish hedge fund-run local newspaper in Northern California and has many horrible stories about the slashing of resources and dilution of quality all in the name of maximizing gains for some faraway owners since the hedge fund took over about a decade ago. [1]
Also, try finding an alt-weekly if your city is lucky enough to still have one. [2]
> ...and that's why those budgets got cut, and large media organizations became more reliant on advertising money, instead of subscriber money.
Newspapers had chosen to became online ad-ridden tracker infested (5MB script for 5kB of article) junk quite a while before the entire publishing industry was even willing to admit that, maybe, people didn't like paper as much any more.
Sure there may be some quality journalists funded by this.
But even for the "quality" outlets, you can see that, in quantity the ad money drives clickbait trash articles (pretending to make money for the "quality" articles, but this ultimately has to end up just making money to make more clickbait trash).
News websites are in fact the only mainstream websites I visit, where I feel I need my adblocker to "protect" me, instead of just blocking annoyances. Mainly because it's just so much script compared to content.
I canceled my subscription to my local newspaper because of the number of advertisements and trackers on every page. I would happily pay for a subscription. I expect it to cost more than an option supported by advertising. But they do not want to sell me such an option. The newspapers had decades to figure this out. Serve readers/subscribers or serve advertisers.
Whitney Webb is doing pretty well on her lonesome. So the excuse for establishment press to hide establishment crimes is because we don’t pay for subscriptions.
In case of this specific item, you may want to see if Google still digs up the story of how the chancellor of exchequer flew to DC to stop DoJ. Very interesting story. (And why are the shady banking outfits in the islands of “the Crown”?)
”The involvement of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority in the US government's investigations and enforcement actions relating to HSBC, a British-domiciled institution, appears to have hampered the US government's investigations and influenced Department of Justice's decision not to prosecute HSBC".
That’s from a congressional report. Please pay NYTimes so they will look into this :(
Because its reporters are from the "mainstream media." Often reporters who could not get any further in their old companies, or who were cut from their organizations due to budget cuts.
cancel subscriptions to major media institutions
...and that's why those budgets got cut, and large media organizations became more reliant on advertising money, instead of subscriber money.
News isn't free. It's good that you appreciate strong journalism. But robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work.
Even if your local newspaper is terrible, you should still support it financially so that good people can still try to do good work, and not disappear altogether.
My local paper is bad. But I subscribe, and reading it (actually reading, not looking at a web site) have learned that there are good people there trying to do good work. Between the lines you can see that they are underfunded, and do a lot with very little.
I also subscribe to large, award-winning important journalistic endeavors. "Real news," as it were. But I also know that award-winning journalism doesn't magically appear out of thin air, or straight from journalism schools. Those reporters have to learn their trade at small newspapers, television stations, and radio outlets to work their way up to the big leagues. If we don't support local reporters, there won't be any smart journalists in the future.