Traditionally, newspapers had three sources of revenue: sales, subscriptions, and advertising (including personal and classified). Sales went down or stopped altogether. Subscriptions work for...
Traditionally, newspapers had three sources of revenue: sales, subscriptions, and advertising (including personal and classified). Sales went down or stopped altogether. Subscriptions work for some (like the NYT) but don't bring nearly as much revenue as before. Personal and classified advertising is much better served by social networks, dating apps, and websites like eBay. There's only one sure source of revenue left: regular, annoying, traditional advertisinga much more aggressive and invasive form of advertising. And that's one reason why newspaper websites suck. Most of them still have a large overhead with old-fashioned things like full-time employees.
The other reason, and this is highly anecdotal, I admit (my parents are both journalists...), is that newsprint leadership is not particularly knowledgeable when it comes to web development. And, when the client is adamant in its wrong premises, no amount of dev money will make something good. Just an example: this is the most popular newspaper in my state (excluding tabloids). It sells 44'000 copies a day. And the website is shit.
I mostly agree, however: There's nothing regular or traditional about present-day online advertising. The traditional newspaper ads were all passive: targeted at certain demographics who were...
I mostly agree, however:
regular, annoying, traditional advertising
There's nothing regular or traditional about present-day online advertising. The traditional newspaper ads were all passive: targeted at certain demographics who were likely to read certain sections of a print newspaper.
Present-day online advertising is done through embedded third-party ad networks which hyper-target ads based on tracking and personal information bought from data brokers; While you're reading the news, news media are reading you.
Their lack of resources to build websites makes it more likely that they depend on trojan-horse-like apps that provide a service that doubles as a tracker. For example AddThis which provides sharing functionality, or Facebook and Disqus, which provide comment sections.
The worst part is that you could self-host Wordpress and get a better, more maintainable site (or pay someone to host it for you and not have to worry about upgrading it) and you could "redesign"...
Their lack of resources to build websites makes it more likely that they depend on trojan-horse-like apps that provide a service that doubles as a tracker
The worst part is that you could self-host Wordpress and get a better, more maintainable site (or pay someone to host it for you and not have to worry about upgrading it) and you could "redesign" it fairly cheaply by just buying a new theme and tweaking it a bit for font, colors, ad placement, etc. The biggest hurdle is moving content over.
I still see news sites that use Flash to stream videos (not just live streams, but prerecorded content, too). Just use YouTube, or if you want to look a bit fancier, Vimeo. There's so much room for improvement, and it's probably easier to use and less expensive than whatever godawful stack my local newspaper runs on.
Well YouTube embeds are trackers as well, but I get your point. Vimeo tracks too, but it not being part of Google makes it less of a problem. I'd gladly visit a clean site with Vimeo embeds.
Well YouTube embeds are trackers as well, but I get your point. Vimeo tracks too, but it not being part of Google makes it less of a problem. I'd gladly visit a clean site with Vimeo embeds.
You can set a dnt parameter on Vimeo embeds to tell it not to track the playback data, and it's supposed to do it automatically if the viewer's browser has Do Not Track enabled. Hard to say for...
You can set a dnt parameter on Vimeo embeds to tell it not to track the playback data, and it's supposed to do it automatically if the viewer's browser has Do Not Track enabled. Hard to say for sure what it actually does, but at least it's something.
From this page (search for "dnt", no way to link to it directly):
We track all playback sessions to identify bugs and monitor performance in our player. Setting this parameter to true will block the player from tracking any playback session data. (Will have the same effect as enabling a Do Not Track header in your browser)
They have a shitty biz model and didn’t proper adapt to the times
This is not entirely their fault. It's a complicated problem with a decades-long history.
In the early days, news media were still figuring out what their online presence should look like. Paying online wasn't an easy or safe thing to do, so few people dared do it. At some point, ad networks jumped in to fill the void and helped provide online media with some form of income.
Unfortunately, the ad-supported business model trained the public into believing that news should be free. Print subscriptions went down because the news cycle sped up thanks to the internet and the online presence both fed this and provided a more up-to-date alternative to the print paper.
FFWD to now, and the great advertising duopoly owns both the means through which online media derive income and the means through which people find and read their content; Search engines, social platforms, Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles.
Google and Facebook are pocketing the money that used to go to media. The media only get a small percentage while still doing the majority of the work: producing the content. They now have less money but have to produce even more content than before, and around the clock instead of once a day.
The situation puts an even greater emphasis on ad impressions and clicks. Clickbait headlines, fluff, and a prevalence of news agency content over own reporting is a direct result. There's an incentive to generate a lot of traffic and page loads over in-depth, long-form, high-quality, self-produced, expensive content.
We have a role to play. Unless we as readers start to break out of this 'news should be free' mentality and start valuing journalism enough to pay for it with money, it's going to become even shittier than you think it is.
This seems to be a fairly common topic of discussion here and across the web lately. On a slightly unrelated note: I really like the design of this website - I've gotten so accustomed to news...
This seems to be a fairly common topic of discussion here and across the web lately.
On a slightly unrelated note: I really like the design of this website - I've gotten so accustomed to news websites being covered in garbage that a website focusing on just the writing and nothing else feels strange. This is also always a nice sight from uMatrix :). Only thing I'm not a huge fan of is the footer covering part of the article, but again, it's fairly subtle and infinitely better than some websites (looking at you Medium).
Interesting. I don't encounter most of these problems with my preferred news website. Admittedly, I'm a paid subscriber, so maybe that eliminates a lot of the gratuitous advertisements. But the...
The torments of these sites are well known: clunky navigation, slow page-loading times, browser-freezing autoplaying videos, a siege of annoying pop-up ads, and especially those grids of bottom-of-the-page “related content” ads hawking belly fat cures and fake headlines (what’s known as Internet chum).
Interesting. I don't encounter most of these problems with my preferred news website. Admittedly, I'm a paid subscriber, so maybe that eliminates a lot of the gratuitous advertisements. But the only item on this list I encounter is the auto-playing videos, and that's more of a minor annoyance than a full-blown problem.
However, I still prefer reading a PDF copy of the printed newspaper to the online version, for a few reasons:
I read the newspaper on the train. To reduce my mobile data costs, I download the PDF to a tablet on my home wi-fi. That way I'm not trying to read a live website on my mobile data connection.
I have noticed that the website presents different articles than the PDF version. Some articles I find in the "printed" version don't even appear on the front page of the website! The website is driven by creating click-through traffic just as much as by delivering all the news.
I like the random discovery aspect of turning a newspaper page and not knowing what stories will appear. On the website, everything gets too categorised, and you only end up reading articles about certain topics. I like to encounter a breadth of news topics.
I share these preferences, so I very much like this site https://guardian.gyford.com. It takes content from The Guardian, and attempts to present it in the same order as which those articles...
I share these preferences, so I very much like this site https://guardian.gyford.com. It takes content from The Guardian, and attempts to present it in the same order as which those articles appear in the paper.
I’m a subscriber to The Guardian, but still find this a much better way of reading the news to the extent that I have written my own version which downloads all the content making it usable offline, but it’s too flaky to share...
It’s interesting to see how many papers allow their content to be published through Apple News, which has a much better reading experience, and no adverts, so it’s unclear to me what they’re getting out of that relationship, except perhaps the fabled “exposure”.
Traditionally, newspapers had three sources of revenue: sales, subscriptions, and advertising (including personal and classified). Sales went down or stopped altogether. Subscriptions work for some (like the NYT) but don't bring nearly as much revenue as before. Personal and classified advertising is much better served by social networks, dating apps, and websites like eBay. There's only one sure source of revenue left:
regular, annoying, traditional advertisinga much more aggressive and invasive form of advertising. And that's one reason why newspaper websites suck. Most of them still have a large overhead with old-fashioned things like full-time employees.The other reason, and this is highly anecdotal, I admit (my parents are both journalists...), is that newsprint leadership is not particularly knowledgeable when it comes to web development. And, when the client is adamant in its wrong premises, no amount of dev money will make something good. Just an example: this is the most popular newspaper in my state (excluding tabloids). It sells 44'000 copies a day. And the website is shit.
edit: changed to reflect /u/ourari's correction.
I mostly agree, however:
There's nothing regular or traditional about present-day online advertising. The traditional newspaper ads were all passive: targeted at certain demographics who were likely to read certain sections of a print newspaper.
Present-day online advertising is done through embedded third-party ad networks which hyper-target ads based on tracking and personal information bought from data brokers; While you're reading the news, news media are reading you.
Their lack of resources to build websites makes it more likely that they depend on trojan-horse-like apps that provide a service that doubles as a tracker. For example AddThis which provides sharing functionality, or Facebook and Disqus, which provide comment sections.
The worst part is that you could self-host Wordpress and get a better, more maintainable site (or pay someone to host it for you and not have to worry about upgrading it) and you could "redesign" it fairly cheaply by just buying a new theme and tweaking it a bit for font, colors, ad placement, etc. The biggest hurdle is moving content over.
I still see news sites that use Flash to stream videos (not just live streams, but prerecorded content, too). Just use YouTube, or if you want to look a bit fancier, Vimeo. There's so much room for improvement, and it's probably easier to use and less expensive than whatever godawful stack my local newspaper runs on.
Well YouTube embeds are trackers as well, but I get your point. Vimeo tracks too, but it not being part of Google makes it less of a problem. I'd gladly visit a clean site with Vimeo embeds.
You can set a
dntparameter on Vimeo embeds to tell it not to track the playback data, and it's supposed to do it automatically if the viewer's browser has Do Not Track enabled. Hard to say for sure what it actually does, but at least it's something.From this page (search for "dnt", no way to link to it directly):
Good to know, thank you!
You're very well informed and entirely right. Thanks for the correction ;)
Thank you. You're not fumbling around in the dark either :)
Yes:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-05/local-news-is-dying-and-it-s-taking-small-town-america-with-it
And no:
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/small-town-american-newspapers-are-surprisingly-resilient
Edit:
This is not entirely their fault. It's a complicated problem with a decades-long history.
In the early days, news media were still figuring out what their online presence should look like. Paying online wasn't an easy or safe thing to do, so few people dared do it. At some point, ad networks jumped in to fill the void and helped provide online media with some form of income.
Unfortunately, the ad-supported business model trained the public into believing that news should be free. Print subscriptions went down because the news cycle sped up thanks to the internet and the online presence both fed this and provided a more up-to-date alternative to the print paper.
FFWD to now, and the great advertising duopoly owns both the means through which online media derive income and the means through which people find and read their content; Search engines, social platforms, Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles.
Google and Facebook are pocketing the money that used to go to media. The media only get a small percentage while still doing the majority of the work: producing the content. They now have less money but have to produce even more content than before, and around the clock instead of once a day.
The situation puts an even greater emphasis on ad impressions and clicks. Clickbait headlines, fluff, and a prevalence of news agency content over own reporting is a direct result. There's an incentive to generate a lot of traffic and page loads over in-depth, long-form, high-quality, self-produced, expensive content.
We have a role to play. Unless we as readers start to break out of this 'news should be free' mentality and start valuing journalism enough to pay for it with money, it's going to become even shittier than you think it is.
This seems to be a fairly common topic of discussion here and across the web lately.
On a slightly unrelated note: I really like the design of this website - I've gotten so accustomed to news websites being covered in garbage that a website focusing on just the writing and nothing else feels strange. This is also always a nice sight from uMatrix :). Only thing I'm not a huge fan of is the footer covering part of the article, but again, it's fairly subtle and infinitely better than some websites (looking at you Medium).
Interesting. I don't encounter most of these problems with my preferred news website. Admittedly, I'm a paid subscriber, so maybe that eliminates a lot of the gratuitous advertisements. But the only item on this list I encounter is the auto-playing videos, and that's more of a minor annoyance than a full-blown problem.
However, I still prefer reading a PDF copy of the printed newspaper to the online version, for a few reasons:
I read the newspaper on the train. To reduce my mobile data costs, I download the PDF to a tablet on my home wi-fi. That way I'm not trying to read a live website on my mobile data connection.
I have noticed that the website presents different articles than the PDF version. Some articles I find in the "printed" version don't even appear on the front page of the website! The website is driven by creating click-through traffic just as much as by delivering all the news.
I like the random discovery aspect of turning a newspaper page and not knowing what stories will appear. On the website, everything gets too categorised, and you only end up reading articles about certain topics. I like to encounter a breadth of news topics.
I share these preferences, so I very much like this site https://guardian.gyford.com. It takes content from The Guardian, and attempts to present it in the same order as which those articles appear in the paper.
I’m a subscriber to The Guardian, but still find this a much better way of reading the news to the extent that I have written my own version which downloads all the content making it usable offline, but it’s too flaky to share...
It’s interesting to see how many papers allow their content to be published through Apple News, which has a much better reading experience, and no adverts, so it’s unclear to me what they’re getting out of that relationship, except perhaps the fabled “exposure”.