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9 votes
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The news is bad in Hungary: "Viktor Orban didn’t like what the press was reporting, so he took it over."
11 votes -
'Journalism while brown': Why Sunny Dhillon quit The Globe and Mail
6 votes -
The National Enquirer’s plot to assassinate Ted Cruz’s US candidacy
11 votes -
Amazon pulls ads from Bloomberg, and Apple did not invite Bloomberg to its Oct. 30 event—both allegedly over China hacking story
18 votes -
I feel like one of the biggest digital losses of the last five years was the rise and fall of independent news networks
There was a brief (an oh-so-brief) period in youtube history where all types of non-corporate content thrived. I'm referring, if memory serves, to the timespan from around 2011 - late 2014. This...
There was a brief (an oh-so-brief) period in youtube history where all types of non-corporate content thrived. I'm referring, if memory serves, to the timespan from around 2011 - late 2014.
This was after youtube initially got big, but before Google decided that it wanted to step in and maintain the cultural status quo rather than redefine it. Ad revenue paid creators fairly-ish in most cases, and the talk of the town was machinima assfucking it's segment of poor souls that signed into it, rather than youtube pulling the same moves universally as it did a few years later.
(Suffice to say I have no love for the platform).
It's important to note that at this time, Youtube was a bit like a small-scale television enterprise, before it dreamed of deliberately becoming one. Youtube had everything from animations to product reviews, news to reality programming to VFX extravaganzas.
One of the most incredibly important innovations of the time, and one that's been all-but-lost, was the birth (and subsequent heat-death) of youtube news channels.
These channels mirrored cable news, but without the influence of corporate sponsors getting in the way, and without the ravenous need to appease political parties and harebrained cable tv viewers. They were biased - good god were some of them biased - and they weren't perfect, but they were set up in such a way that, had youtube not fucked it up (sigh...) they might've someday dethroned CNN, MSNBC and Fox.
With the next election coming up and shaping up to be a small-scale repeat of 2018s (you're kidding yourself if we're every going to go any other direction than further down at this point - after all, it works!) it's important to remember that there was, for a beautiful gleaming moment, a chance for not a corporation, but a community, to rise up and redefine the way people received news in a way that hadn't been seen since the conception of the newspaper.
Instead, youtube squandered it. Real events and engaging content don't generate views. People can't sit and watch hours of current events like they do for whatever-the-hell youtube trends nowadays (list videos and toy openings, I guess?), and why would they? If you get on youtube to watch today's news, you're not going to stick around for yesterday's. So youtube's 'algorythm', a word I've come to absolutely detest, doesn't favor them just like it doesn't favor basically anything else that once made youtube great.
The icing on the cake: rather than embrace even a tertiary aspect of the community, they went for the safe option and the ad revenue. No Phillip Defranco for you, we'll show you Jimmy Kimmel. No TYT, we'll fill trending with clips of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The only real survivor of the era was infowars.
Here's to you, youtube news. Dead and gone, but not forgotten.
9 votes -
Two more bombs found, addressed to Cory Booker and CNN in the US
23 votes -
Not real news: The Associated Press reports on this week's most shared fake news
19 votes -
Apple CEO Tim Cook is calling for Bloomberg to retract its Chinese spy chip story
13 votes -
Six red carnations and one severed ram’s head: Deadly threats sent to Russian independent newspaper
6 votes -
How Facebook’s Chaotic Push Into Video Cost Hundreds of Journalists Their Jobs
11 votes -
One man’s (very polite) fight against media Islamophobia
5 votes -
Stop press: has a journalist revolt at Forbes Russia saved the magazine’s independence?
7 votes -
Photos: What Hurricane Michael’s destruction looks like on the ground
6 votes -
Why you should be skeptical of the latest nutrition headlines
11 votes -
Turkey: Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi was killed by ‘murder’ team
4 votes -
Financial News presenters Kai Risdal And Molly Wood are currently doing an AMA
4 votes -
The NY Times has an option in their store to pick out favorite recipes that have been posted on the site (and in the paper) and print them in a cookbook
5 votes -
Photos from the deadly earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia
8 votes -
As Comcast takes control of Sky, Murdoch could yet bounce back. Mogul’s influence on worldwide news is unlikely to be weakened by latest defeat
5 votes -
Australia's Labor party laughing as Coalition kowtows to Rupert Murdoch
4 votes -
UN chief urges Myanmar government to free Reuters journalists
6 votes -
We now know more about the apparent poisoning of the Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov
11 votes -
Five important stories that were lost in last week’s news dump
8 votes -
Internet taxes are sweeping sub-Saharan Africa — and silencing citizens
9 votes -
The aftermath of Hurricane Florence
14 votes -
Media Manipulation, Strategic Amplification, and Responsible Journalism | danah boyd at the Online News Association conference
11 votes -
Facebook punishes liberal news site after fact check by right-wing site
10 votes -
Remembering The Onion’s 9/11 issue: ‘Everyone thought this would be our last issue in print’
16 votes -
Why are newspaper websites so horrible?
23 votes -
BBC admits ‘we get climate change coverage wrong too often’
18 votes -
Elon Musk and the meaning of ‘off the record’
14 votes -
The entire island of Hokkaido in Japan is without power after a 6.7 magnitude earthquake
17 votes -
I am part of the resistance inside the New York Times opinion desk
11 votes -
China officially bans ABC website, claims internet is 'fully open'
9 votes -
A study on the online "filter bubble" found that liberals and conservatives were actually recommended similar stories on Google News, representing a fairly homogeneous set of mainstream news sources
8 votes -
Suspected Iranian influence operation leverages network of inauthentic news sites and social media targeting audiences in US, UK, Latin America, Middle East
12 votes -
Tajikistan releases whistleblower but leaves conviction in place
6 votes -
Whale hunt in Faroe Islands turns sea red with blood
10 votes -
What it's like being the editor of a newspaper in Eve Online
14 votes -
Fox News violates Poland's holocaust law with reference to "Polish death camp"
14 votes -
The Correspondant - A different business model for organizations producing journalism.
I just watched an interesting This Week in Startups interview with the CEO of a nascent but successful new "news" organization from the Netherlands called De Correspondent. They are launching a...
I just watched an interesting This Week in Startups interview with the CEO of a nascent but successful new "news" organization from the Netherlands called De Correspondent. They are launching a new US-based company called The Correspondent, which has some high profile supporters. This list includes Nate Silver, William Julius Wilson, Rosanne Cash, and some others.
Their business model allows them to attract high-quality journalists by optimizing for journalistic integrity and independence. They have around 60,000 members paying around $70 per year in the Netherlands. They do no advertising business and are a for-profit corp with a dividend cap of 5% to make themselves unattractive to VC-type investors. The CEO claims they "ignore the news," meaning that they try to avoid the sound-bite quips that can be very distracting. They do not report on individual's scandals, instead focusing on systemic issues.
Journalists are required to share their stories with the members as they are developing. Stories are not guarded secrets while in development unlike traditional news organizations. This allows members to contribute to the stories via a form of curated crowdsourcing. For example, they reached out to members when doing a story on Shell, and found a few members who had access to the company which led to discovery of Shell's own internal Inconvenient Truth type video which was made in 1991.
The CEO also mentioned that he always includes a developer or designer in story discussions so that the latest investigation and presentation tools can be used on a story from day one.
Please take a look at the links and let me know what you think of this model, and its chances in the US market. I am pretty excited for anyone trying anything new in this space. What do you think? Would you pay for something like this?
Edit: I'm not sure if there is a better ~group for this topic, please move it if there is. Also, formatting, phrasing, and clarity.
Here is a direct link to the CEO's Medium account with more information.
15 votes -
The million-dollar brownstone that no one owned
3 votes -
Fascist activists have spent the last year trying to win over police
17 votes -
Hundreds of US newspapers run editorials rebuking Trump for attacks on media
16 votes -
Shenzhen Tech Girl Naomi Wu: My experience with Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine
41 votes -
A Boston newspaper is proposing a coordinated editorial response from publications across the U.S. to President Donald Trump’s frequent attacks on the news media.
8 votes -
"Why objective journalism is a misleading and dangerous illusion"
20 votes -
Manhole covers: A window into a city’s soul – in pictures
4 votes -
The Most Powerful Publishers in the World Don’t Give a Damn
21 votes