[HN Gopher] Forget Spotify for news - let's fix the real problem
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Forget Spotify for news - let's fix the real problem
Author : pnielsen2
Score : 34 points
Date : 2023-07-16 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (baekdal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (baekdal.com)
| morkalork wrote:
| I'd be happy with a Spotify model for news if instead of paying
| out to broad publications, it paid out to authors. There are some
| freelance journalists whose names I can recognize when they pop-
| up occasionally in Vice, CBC, etc. Although Spotify is
| notoriously misery towards independent artists and the whole
| thing would probably collapse under clickbait trash.
| locallost wrote:
| > Why is it that people like Adriene can make this work, and get
| young people to pay this much money when traditional publishers
| struggle to get people to pay anything at all?
|
| Because "Adriene" sells yoga classes, not news. I do agree that a
| lot of the publishers mentioned are screwed because they are no
| longer needed. A yoga magazine needs to figure out what it can
| sell, but if anything it cannot compete in yoga classes, those
| are available in simply a better form online. But this is not
| news.
|
| News is a newsroom reporting on things of interest. This is
| difficult because there are many things to cover and good people
| covering it are expensive. So would Spotify for news work? I
| worked for a relatively large newspaper and tried pitching this
| idea years ago. By pitching I mean I chatted about this with
| people at parties, but whatever. Anyway, the feedback I got was
| that these ideas floated around years ago, bit didn't stick. My
| feeling is that most newspapers are trying to find subscribers
| who will trust the newspaper with their life and use it
| exclusively to get news. There is logic in this, e.g. it's better
| to have 100k subscribers that will be your core audience than to
| have potentially millions of users but you have to fight for them
| and their clicks every day. Long term however I don't think it
| will work. This idea is becoming too foreign for people,
| especially young people.
|
| I did not actually call this Spotify for news, instead I called
| it cable for news. After all mostly you do not pay for every
| single program you get on cable, it's bundled and everyone gets a
| piece. I think this will end up happening one way or the other
| because newspapers are increasingly concentrating and it's only a
| matter of time before someone offers a subscription for all the
| products in their portfolio, if they're not doing it already. To
| this I also feel there is a big technical obstacle in that
| because all of these products run often on different technical
| stacks and integrations that make it often too painful to
| implement.
| usrusr wrote:
| I've been talking about this for some years as well, but mostly
| without that audience of news professionals. I absolutely agree
| with your assessment that people won't be going back to that
| model of getting one subscription to pre-select what they can
| see that was the way in the paper age. Perhaps that could be
| the future if a past in which the decades of ad-funded free
| online news had never happened (I include "let's have an
| attractive web presence to lure people to our paper
| subscription" in ad-funded), but now that we are spoiled by
| having been able to read through the full political spectrum of
| publishers (and from every nation where they also write
| something in English), paying a subscription feels like paying
| to narrow access and that's just not very attractive.
|
| What I imagine as an unlikely best-case model for reader-funded
| news isn't "spotify for news", but a "spotify for news without
| spotify": a step back to the print age where you'd have exactly
| one news subscription (unless you were particularly rich), but
| with what might be called reverse syndication, a profit share
| access scheme where every publisher acts as a spotify for its
| competitors. Provide proof of subscription with publication A
| to get a well-defined level of access at publications B,C and
| D, with a fixed part of the subscription fee divided amongst
| peers. The exact level of access would have to be well-defined
| of course, to prevent abusive strategies, but it could be
| something noticeably below "home subscription" (not ad-free
| perhaps?) but clearly above the free tier.
| jsnell wrote:
| I agree that the author's framing of having random Twitch
| streams be "news" because somebody might learn something they
| didn't is absurd, and the essay relies so heavily on this idea
| that it is basically unsalvageable.
|
| But...
|
| > News is a newsroom reporting on things of interest.
|
| This doesn't feel right either. It's... not quite circular, but
| nearly so. It's basically saying there's a single specific
| historical organizational structure that can produce news, and
| nothing else. Sure, if you want to provide a steady torrent of
| news on a huge variety of subjects, you need that huge edifice
| of journalists, editors, support personel, etc. But why does
| the same organization need to be producing all the news? What
| makes the writings of a single individual on a single subject
| and following reasonable journalistic practices not news?
| jaqalopes wrote:
| The author conflates individual YouTube channels with
| "publishers" which is nonsense. The publisher is YouTube. You
| don't read 10 different "publishers" when you read stories in a
| newspaper by 10 different journalists. Are we also going to say
| that watching, say, 20 TikToks from different creators is
| consuming content from 20 publishers? I sure don't think so. The
| whole idea of the article seems like nonsense to me. "Spotify for
| news" is your web browser or the home screen on your phone that
| has five different news/social media apps. We don't need another
| layer in between.
| evo_9 wrote:
| The legalization of pharmaceutical advertisement in 1997 was the
| start of the corruption of our news. If you pay attention to
| virtually any of the news orgs, such as CNN, or MSNBC, etc,
| you'll see pharma ads and / or sponsorship logos during the
| broadcast. In many cases, the pharma company account for 70% or
| more of their advertising revenue. They can effectively crush any
| story they don't want making the mainstream, while also pushing
| whatever health narrative they desire to drive profits. It's
| truly disgusting.
|
| I've pretty much started watching Glen Greenwald's online
| newscasts, he is one of the few remaining true investigative
| journalists out there.
| gruez wrote:
| I'm unconvinced. There are many developed countries that don't
| allow pharmaceutical advertisements. If your theory was true,
| we'd expect stories that pharma companies want suppressed to
| show up there but not in the US. Can you provide examples of
| this? The best I could come up with is "support for public
| healthcare", but support for public healthcare wasn't something
| that got torpedoed starting in 1997.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > The best I could come up with is "support for public
| healthcare"
|
| ... Wouldn't that be more than enough?
|
| They can easily spend tens of billions on advertising, in
| order to make hundreds of billions. You'd expect them to; if
| they're allowed.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Blendle was an attempt at Spotify for news, and is several years
| old.
|
| It didn't really work out in the end, the low fee shared with
| publishers was not sustainable.
| thazework wrote:
| No need for bundling really. I subscribe to a major American news
| source for $2/month. Their algorithm figured out that's what i'm
| willing to pay and got it right. I assume that for most big
| publishers this could work (possibly through some process of
| price discovery and segmentation to capture those willing to pay
| more).
|
| I also subscribe to a patreon for $3/momth - for small publishers
| this obviously works too (again alongside higher tier plan
| options).
|
| The problem is the middle sized publishers, they likely need
| higher revenue per subscriber to survive.
| romanixromanix wrote:
| Isn't https://go.readly.com/ the Spotify for news? Many magazines
| and newspapers are available.
| resolutebat wrote:
| As the article explains at great length, the idea is doomed
| because its promoters assume news = old media like magazines
| and newspapers, which is simply not the case anymore.
| gruez wrote:
| I skimmed the "Top Titles"[1], and most of the publication
| aren't exactly what comes to my mind when I think of "hard
| hitting journalism".
|
| [1] https://us.readly.com/products/magazines
| jachee wrote:
| > On YouTube, I follow about 120 different YouTube channels...
| regularly, every week. On Twitch, I watch some other channels. In
| my Inbox I get about 25 newsletters per day, and on Feedly, I
| follow about 100 more sources, regularly.
|
| Holy crap. How do you have any time for anything else?
|
| I sub to 3 YouTube channels, never watch twitch, avoid email
| newsletters like the plague, and _still_ don't have time in my
| day to keep up with it all. Especially while I have actual work
| to get done.
|
| Used to rely on Reddit for sip-of-the-firehose news acquisition,
| but they screwed that up. Now it's mostly HN, and even here I
| miss tons of things.
| COGlory wrote:
| This, 100,000x this. There's a piece to this whole puzzle I
| can't figure out exactly, but it has something to do with this.
|
| There's two aspects at play here:
|
| 1) attention economy 2) network radius
|
| I can't quite get them disentangled in my head, but I'm
| confident it goes something like this:
|
| Attention economy is zero sum. Huge network size (i.e. the
| firehose of Youtube _et al_ ) means there's infinite
| competitors. Economically, it's a race to the bottom, every
| competitor is trying to get whatever fraction of your attention
| they can (not to mention monetize it). So they wind up
| competing over smaller and smaller fractions.
|
| There's an additional problem on top of this, which is that you
| can't vet that many people, as the consumer. This amplifies a
| lot of negative things in its own right.
|
| It's like we just weren't built to be exposed to networks this
| large. I think it's OK to not be completely informed on all
| topics, and typically this used to be outsourced to communities
| and specialists within your communities, each of whom you knew
| and trusted in their own domain. But small communities are
| gone, and the current communities are too large for you to get
| to know who to trust. So you need to be an expert on all.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I subscribe to 141 channels on YouTube. However, only a
| fraction of those subscriptions involve channels that actively,
| regularly publish content that I want to watch. Say 10 or so
| per week.
|
| I watch a lot of YouTube; it pretty much fills all my free
| time. But I have plenty of playlists to keep me busy, and I
| pick through recommendations and try "mixes" sometimes. I will
| even watch the "Free with Ads" films they offer, which is a
| hilarious mixed bag of box office bombs and diamonds in the
| rough.
|
| I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium. I don't do Patreon or
| "Join" any channels for a subscription. I don't send "tips" in
| live chat. I endure a lot of ads! But I feel like, if I would
| pay for one channel, I would probably end up paying for 10, and
| that I can't afford.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Every media and entertainment format is catching up to where
| video games were in 2007. Basically discovering Steam.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I think instead of following a particular publication "New York
| Times", "Washington Post", etc., people will start to follow the
| authors. The concept of a brand with mostly invisible
| contributors should probably go away. Then, I do feel that a
| "spotify for news" could probably work. It seems a lot better
| than the current model where (I suspect) 99.9% of potential
| readers do not get past the paywall.
| svantana wrote:
| (2017)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This sells me further on the model, actually.
|
| I would be 100% for paying a monthly fee on Twitch that gets
| sliced up proportionally to how much I watch each channel. While
| it seems to work for them, and clearly lots of people pay to be
| part of a club and get noticed by their streamer, there's no way
| I'm paying $7.50CAD _per channel_. So I end up paying nothing at
| all.
| dmonitor wrote:
| this exists: https://www.twitch.tv/turbo
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Do the streamers get 50% of that $12 like they would a
| subscription?
| andrewf wrote:
| "We built Turbo with this question in mind, and streamers
| continue to earn revenue from ads that Turbo subscribers
| miss. For streamers - revenue you receive from Turbo
| subscribers who watch your channel is reflected in your
| "Ads" revenue estimate in your payout analytics." Source:
| https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/twitch-turbo-
| guide?language...
|
| Disclosure: I work here, but I'm not close enough to the
| Turbo folks to do anything but quote public materials.
| toxicFork wrote:
| This sounds a lot like the Brave browser model. I am unsure how
| well the company is doing, and how well the users who opted in
| to receive BATs are doing, though.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I feel like the missing piece is transparency. Otherwise it's
| like tipping: a lingering skepticism that funny financials
| are happening in the background.
| [deleted]
| okennedy wrote:
| TFA's point is that the model is horrible for creators: a
| revenue sharing model is only viable as long as the number of
| creators being shared is comparatively small. $5, $10, $20 from
| a few hundred or thousand viewers is a decent haul when
| compared to a few fractional pennies per view.
|
| It makes sense that creators focus their efforts on cultivating
| personal relationships with a small, but loyal base. You're not
| their target demographic.
| ghaff wrote:
| People say they will pay for news. The translation is that
| will be dragged kicking and screaming into paying $100 per
| year for all they can eat news rather than the thousands it
| would actually cost.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > the focus seems to be on only the publications from traditional
| publishers, like these...
|
| All of these are entertainment publications. I'm really not too
| concerned with how it's paid for, whether its ads, subscription
| fees, or a Youtuber doing it for free. The news I worry about is
| the eat-your-vegetables sort that is valuable for society, but
| few people actively seek out. Public funding doesn't work well
| because its subject to political whims, ad funding doesn't work
| because it doesn't drive enough volume, and subscriber funding
| doesn't work because not enough people actually want to pay for
| quality reporting that isn't biased towards entertainment.
| Spivak wrote:
| So what are the eat-your-vegetables sorts of news because I
| can't think of a time that news news has been relevant to my
| life -- "staying on top of current events" has only ever
| benefited me making small talk at parties. The stuff that
| matters like local politics, community events and organizing
| rarely happens in the newspaper. Maybe it used to before my
| time but it doesn't seem to anymore. Following my states bill
| tracking platform, local orgs, my local chapter of the ACLU,
| and the social media of local politicians and government
| agencies like the planning commission, and (begrudgingly)
| Facebook events actually surface real life actionable stuff.
| For capital G grass roots stuff Tiktok has been surprisingly
| good since they feed you geographically local content. Have
| been to a few protests that organized on TT.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| As the article points out "spotify for news" model is already
| here, that's Youtube and platforms like Nebula. Revenue is shared
| by the platform with the news creator.
|
| And I get that people don't register many channels as "news", but
| I see it as just semantics. There is no ambiguity about what
| MKBHD is providing in his podcast/weekly Waveform videos, or how
| a lot of channels have a weekly video or corner to lookback at
| what happened during the past days, often straight labeled
| something like "news Thursday".
|
| Of course, just like Spotify, the platforms can't sustain these
| channels. The article points at patreon, but there's another
| source that is completely missing from the picture: sponsors and
| product placements. Those represent a lot more money than the
| platform a and often a lot more that patreons.
|
| Now there might be problems somewhere, but at this point I'd see
| them getting solved along the way as we transition further and
| further from the "news agency" model to smaller "news studio"
| channels.
| kristopolous wrote:
| The real problem is presuming the profit model for news is a good
| idea.
|
| It's going to always tend towards quick-turn around, low-effort
| sensationalism because that's the most profitable configuration.
|
| Speculation, accusation, defamation, and conspiracies will always
| get more eyeballs then careful balanced well researched
| reporting. Lying about something now is cheaper and more
| profitable than sending a reporter out and getting the facts
| tomorrow.
|
| Especially after the rise of the modern citizen journalist where
| the costs of video hardware, production, and distribution are
| near zero. Naturally people doing near zero-cost content
| production quickly flooded the market and Bullshit will always be
| the cheapest content to produce.
|
| There has to be a model where such manipulative lying doesn't pay
| off. We have to somehow separate how we've structured news from
| how we've structured entertainment.
| morkalork wrote:
| It takes time and resources, which cost money. Ads can't pay
| for it well enough. The article rightly points out that
| subscriptions cost way too much relative to the number of
| sources people consume. Everyone left and right screeches about
| government influence if taxes are used to pay for it. What's
| left, wealthy patronage paying for it? People working for free
| (e.g. OSINT twitter)?
| [deleted]
| silvestrov wrote:
| I think that in the old days people read newspapers and
| magazines _because there was no other way to spend time in a
| bus /subway/train/waiting_room_ without engaging with other
| people.
|
| So newspapers were entertainment (and status signals) to a much
| higher degree than journalists wants to admit.
|
| Being informed was only a small part of the job that reading a
| newspaper did.
|
| This is why Facebook could take over such a large amount of ad
| spending while it is still correct that only a very small part
| of time on Facebook is reading "real news".
|
| https://cdn.baekdal.com/_img/2017/spotify4.png
| morkalork wrote:
| I don't remember news papers being a status symbol exactly,
| what I remember is that it was rare for a household to have
| more than one subscription. Multiple magazines, sure, but not
| newspapers. I remember categorizing my friend's parents by
| their choices. "This is a National Post household" or Toronto
| Star, The Globe and Mail.
| 2big2fail_47 wrote:
| the categorizing shows how different newspaper signal a
| certain world view. They can also signal wealth, class and
| a political view. so i think they are very much status
| symbols
| osigurdson wrote:
| What other model do you propose? Government funded news? No
| news at all? Volunteer news?
| kristopolous wrote:
| Think about how higher education and journals work... There's
| lots of criticism of them but if you get, say, a masters in
| chemistry from let's say Columbia, you aren't going to be
| learning about alchemy and orgones. We seem to be able to
| reasonably pull that off as a society.
|
| So I guess look at systems with relatively low bullshit
| information density and try to follow their lead somehow.
|
| We might have to admit that decently produced news is hard,
| time-consuming, and kind of expensive.
|
| As for "who's going to pay for it", I reject the premise.
| Society figures out how to pay for things they value. The
| first step is to create the things of value and get general
| society to respond in kind.
|
| The first part is mostly done. The second part needs the
| work. Most people probably don't know about things like say,
| quanta magazine or whether it's any good or not.
| damnesian wrote:
| >It's going to always tend to quick-turn around, low-effort
| sensationalism because that's the most profitable
| configuration.
|
| Exactly so. Just thinking about to the last time I consciously
| perceived my media offerings were being tailored based on my
| previous behavior, I found the choices abysmal. The algorithm
| is all; but the algorithm sucks. That makes it wholly
| unsuitable for digestion as news.
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