I never understood the logic behind this legislation. When the news sites derive revenue from visits, and Meta and Google drive visits, accusing your revenue drivers of stealing content is such a...
I never understood the logic behind this legislation. When the news sites derive revenue from visits, and Meta and Google drive visits, accusing your revenue drivers of stealing content is such a weird take. I would understand it if they were hoovering up content to display online on their own platform without liking the user to the source, but that's not what is going on.
I don't believe for a second that advertising/pageviews can sustain news as a Fourth Estate that provides any source of correction/independent control of the three branches of government. That's a...
Exemplary
When the news sites derive revenue from visits
I don't believe for a second that advertising/pageviews can sustain news as a Fourth Estate that provides any source of correction/independent control of the three branches of government.
That's a dangerous misconception to hold. News has to rely on subscriptions or donations to gain the sorts of revenue needed to produce actual journalism to uncover misdeeds and hold those with power (of various kinds) accountable to society.
You're entirely right that the whole deal is that the social media sites "hoover up" news content in such a way that people don't visit the news sites. Users feel like they read the news, but only see individual pictures, headlines and comment sections off-platform where no-one has read the article.
Meta has consistently over the last couple of years systematically decreased the reach of link posts because link posts lead to users stopping to infinite-scroll and go elsewhere online.
Any site that's relied on free posts on the social media giants for their online circulation has not had a sustainable business model. All serious players have recognized this as traffic driven to their sites from groups with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers has plummeted. Without them having any control over the unilateral algorithm changes of the platforms.
Increasingly, news sites have had to pay large sums of money for sponsored posts on social media platforms to just get eyeballs on their news content in these places. Of course these ad-run giants like google, meta etc. don't want to push users to atttention-using, ad-running competitors.
Canadian news losing 58% of online engagement from the low, low volume post-link squeezing from the big platforms is losing half of a small amount of traffic compared to the traffic these sites were delivering a couple years ago.
The giant platforms want this to look like a failure so they won't have to pay for the content to have people waste their time on their platforms. This is a global battle.
The giant platforms are extremely scared that other countries will regulate them, demand payment from them or demand they don't have addictive algorithms that hurt society, radicalize and ruin the societies they leech off of.
The giant platforms want to paint this law as a huge failure, while the reality is that it's performing as expected. It shows clearly that these companies would rather exclude quality content from view than pay for it. They've shown their social irresponsibility in ways other countries take note of as they regulate this area.
News is struggling.
That's because people don't want to consume traditionally formatted news. They don't want to pay for news. They don't want to spend their time consuming news over doing other things. They don't trust news organizations to perform Fourth Estate functions. They don't trust news to report independently and fairly.
All these issues are compounded by the global tech giants, but they're still there without these global tech giants out-competing news.
We as societies need to decide if we want news-based societies that lead to informed citizens or not. That's up to us individually, and us as societies collectively in terms of regulation.
The giant tech companies are hoovering up all content, our time, our resources, the intellectual property of others. We need to regulate them in reasonable ways so they pay for all the things they take.
Emphasis mine. I never made that claim. And I do understand that news, especially local news outlets, are struggling. But they are struggling everywhere; it's not unique to Canada. At the same...
I don't believe for a second that advertising/pageviews can sustain news as a Fourth Estate that provides any source of correction/independent control of the three branches of government.
That's a dangerous misconception to hold. News has to rely on subscriptions or donations to gain the sorts of revenue needed to produce actual journalism to uncover misdeeds and hold those with power (of various kinds) accountable to society.
Emphasis mine. I never made that claim. And I do understand that news, especially local news outlets, are struggling. But they are struggling everywhere; it's not unique to Canada. At the same time large national outlets like the NYT have record subscribers. But they aren't investigating your local city council, unless something has gone very wrong.
But this law doesn't address or fix any of the problems you mention. As we see here, Meta just pulled out. That doesn't help inform people, it doesn't support local journalism, and critically it is the absolutely predictable outcome of this legislation. Further, the linking was probably driving revenue for many of the news sites. Maybe not enough, but rather than stabilize and shore up the newsroom finances, this law seems to have hastened their financial following out.
That's because people don't want to consume traditionally formatted news. They don't want to pay for news. They don't want to spend their time consuming news over doing other things. They don't trust news organizations to perform Fourth Estate functions. They don't trust news to report independently and fairly.
That's because real news makes people uncomfortable because it doesn't just reaffirm their every little opinion; it challenges them. And that is a problem that should be solved by regulating the use of engagement algorithms, not whatever this law is.
The giant tech companies are hoovering up all content, our time, our resources, the intellectual property of others. We need to regulate them in reasonable ways so they pay for all the things they take.
Yes, they are, but wasn't the data in meta being linked by the users? Or posted by the news outlets themselves to generate traffic? I e., not Meta actively harvesting it? And Google was just indexing it. I get that LLM training has led to lots of unethical hoovering of data, but this law doesn't fix that either.
All this law seems to be is a performative piece of legislation that accelerated the harm it was meant to stop. It doesn't regulate algorithmic engagement maximizing, it doesn't bring in real money for journalism, it doesn't educate Canadian citizens. So what's the logic here, other than puffery for the politicians?
One of the best points in favour of this law being bad longterm policy is that it sets journalism up to rely on these platforms and in turn, means that we need a small handful of large...
One of the best points in favour of this law being bad longterm policy is that it sets journalism up to rely on these platforms and in turn, means that we need a small handful of large American/exploitative tech companies to continue on with business as usual. It's rotten to the core.
I think it's vastly better for society that Meta just pulls out rather than pay even i tiny share of revenue to those that create the content they monetize on their platforms. That's what'll push...
I think it's vastly better for society that Meta just pulls out rather than pay even i tiny share of revenue to those that create the content they monetize on their platforms.
That's what'll push sufficient regulation on global tech giants with time.
All arguments concerning Meta/Facebook driving traffic/revenue from before around 2022 are irrelevant today because unpaid link submissions gain so much less exposure on the platform than they used to. They simply do not drive enough traffic to be anything other than potentially a branding-measure to remind people your news outlet exists. We're talking reductions in referral traffic on the order of 90-95% for most news sites from Facebook post-covid. It's a gigantic, game-changing change.
I don't view it as a minus that people don't get headlines on social media and think that means they're informed. To me, that does more harm than good.
I think having this law is especially much better for local news than the larger players.
That's primarily because I don't expect every local outlet with few employees to be aware that their links now gain a tiny fraction of views from Meta-platforms that they did a couple years ago due to algorithm changes. I don't expect or think it's reasonable to assume they have social media experts paying close attention to platform changes, especially because most aren't ever announced.
The giant tech companies are hoovering up all content, our time, our resources, the intellectual property of others. We need to regulate them in reasonable ways so they pay for all the things they take.
Yes, they are, but wasn't the data in meta being linked by the users?
Precisely. That is exactly what the law wanted outlets to get at least some compensation for: users linking the content of news outlets, with their photos on social media platforms without the outlets getting compensation for this.
You're entirely right: It doesn't regulate algorithms. It doesn't bring large money in for journalism. It doesn't educate Canadian citizens.
It only aimed to give a tiny amount of revenue to news outlets, way less than would be a market price. Even that was too much for several of the giants, even after they'd decimated link exposure for news their sites. The giants have clearly, unambiguously shown they cannot be trusted. They won't do the right thing, and every country in the world needs to go way, way further than this when they regulate.
It also ensures small news who weren't paying attention don't waste their time/resources propping up the tech giants without anything in return, and that users aren't scrolling past headlines in their feeds and leave feeling informed on news. IF they can even sort out serious news sites from clickbait junk or just text written on pictures that could be mistaken for news.
I don't believe for a second that advertising/pageviews can sustain news as a Fourth Estate that provides any source of correction/independent control of the three branches of government.
That's a dangerous misconception to hold. News has to rely on subscriptions or donations to gain the sorts of revenue needed to produce actual journalism to uncover misdeeds and hold those with power (of various kinds) accountable to society.
Emphasis mine. I never made that claim
Sorry, I didn't mean to claim you did. Anyone who holds that view would be drawing the wrong conclusions from analyzing how news works because of fundamentally flawed outlooks on where the substantial chunks of income for news come from.
And it failed, because now rather than Canadian users posting links that lead to click through traffic, they just poat screenshots. This is absolutely an ostrich take. Users are still getting...
Precisely. That is exactly what the law wanted outlets to get at least some compensation for: users linking the content of news outlets, with their photos on social media platforms without the outlets getting compensation for this.
And it failed, because now rather than Canadian users posting links that lead to click through traffic, they just poat screenshots.
I don't view it as a minus that people don't get headlines on social media and think that means they're informed. To me, that does more harm than good.
This is absolutely an ostrich take. Users are still getting their news from Meta, they just are getting less from actual news sources, even if it was just the headline or the blurb. Now they get a screenshot, maybe, but more likely they just get it from an emerging cohort of influencers who curate the news themselves: Gift link - Instagram’s Uneasy Rise as a News Site which can lead to new sources of bias and distortion.
It seems pretty clear that this law failed for predictable reasons: the government created a financial incentive for a company to block a type of content that makes up a small percent of what brings in users. Failing to recognize that and pursue actual meaningful regulation that can't be so easily sidestepped might actually accomplish something, but would be hard work and would likely anger many of their voters. But performative legislation with obvious perverse incentives aren't the answer.
The value of Netflix used to be that you could replace all your tv channels and movie needs with a single service. Now no-one believes that's the case and you have to shop around different...
The value of Netflix used to be that you could replace all your tv channels and movie needs with a single service. Now no-one believes that's the case and you have to shop around different streaming services. No-one sane views Netflix as a one-stop-shop for entertainment needs.
For many years, Facebook was a one-stop-shop for scrolling on the internet for many people, just the same way Netflix aimed to be my only bubble for entertainment. Tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit all attempt to do the exact same thing.
Making it more and more obvious you have to go outside a platforms universe/app (like none of your local/regional news being there) means people will actually go to a different website. They notice this universe is actually just a tiny and insular microcosm.
"We" as a society want users to go visit news websites/Apps directly whenever they want news. Just like we as a society want people not to smoke or inhale asbestos, or waste away drugged out of their minds, for the sake of society. We want people to get news from quality sources and to be able to separate those sources from the influencers, or random teenagers who put text on images.
This law does way less harm than good. It's a step in the right direction.
Especially towards having more and more people (and also lawmakers) realize how heavily we need to legislate the monopoly-seeking moocher-giant online-service corporations. And that these efforts need to be international when we're dealing with companies that have more power than most countries.
I think this is just a point of disagreement. I don't think the law does any of that from what I have gathered. It hasn't caused Canadians to leave Meta properties. All it has caused is less...
I think this is just a point of disagreement. I don't think the law does any of that from what I have gathered. It hasn't caused Canadians to leave Meta properties. All it has caused is less actual news and less convenient link backs to actual news to be on those properties. I'm not sure what this is a baby step towards, either.
Making it more and more obvious you have to go outside a platforms universe/app (like none of your local/regional news being there) means people will actually go to a different website. They notice this universe is actually just a tiny and insular microcosm.
I wish this was true, but my experience tells me otherwise. People won't leave their social media drug of choice because they can't back link to real journalism. Most people don't even understand the basics of journalistic reporting guidelines, and why a breaking story on NYT doesn't make subjective claims the way their belief reinforcing sites like TPM does. They will just stop linking the Canadian news sites and instead link someone's blog or Instagram post about the same subject, hot takes included.
Social media sites are built to reinforce use through dolling out those little dopamine hits. They are engineered like casino games. The way to get people to spend less time on them is to do something like (brainstorming here) introduce a legal definition for digital addiction algorithms and regulate them aggressively.
But even if we take at face value that the law is "a step in the right direction" if it shutters and strains the finances of the news rooms before that next step is taken, then what good does it do for educating Canadians on local issues with real news? It's not like this was touted as phase one of three of a legislative package to handle the situation. It was a one off that is killing their own news outlets. It just isn't good legislation. No one sat down and game theory'd this from all the different perspectives.
Nowhere was this more clearly true than when I took the plunge and actually paid the $300 annual subscription for Blacklocks Reporter. Many Canadians have never even heard of it because you'll...
I don't believe for a second that advertising/pageviews can sustain news as a Fourth Estate that provides any source of correction/independent control of the three branches of government.
That's a dangerous misconception to hold. News has to rely on subscriptions or donations to gain the sorts of revenue needed to produce actual journalism to uncover misdeeds and hold those with power (of various kinds) accountable to society.
Nowhere was this more clearly true than when I took the plunge and actually paid the $300 annual subscription for Blacklocks Reporter. Many Canadians have never even heard of it because you'll rarely find their articles showing up on. Google search. That feels very deliberate.
Blacklocks is the ONLY fully independent credentialled member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and as such has access to great deal of direct info from the hill. Unlike all the other press they take NO money from the gov and it shows. Every morning they send out four or five articles and by any other outlet they would be considered inside scoops. But it's just what Blacklocks does.
The disturbing part is that almost every day they report some kind of malfeasance or spending waste or outright lying at committee meetings and very rarely does any of it ever make it to the big national outlets, especially the things that go on at committee level.
I have never been so starkly aware of how little of our typical national reporting has anything to do with holding the gov to account. Most of it is just the distribution network for press conferences and gov written briefs.
Our national media are NOT doing their jobs and I'm sure it has a lot to do with relying on gov subsidies to keep operating. Who's going to bite the hand that feeds it? Only Blacklocks has that freedom.
They link the user to the source but also offer summaries that render the link irrelevant
I would understand it if they were hoovering up content to display online on their own platform without liking the user to the source, but that's not what is going on.
They link the user to the source but also offer summaries that render the link irrelevant
Is it a facebook-generated summary? OpenGraph embeds allow publishers to set a “description” for the links that is generally used when it’s embedded (like on Twitter, Discord, etc). So if the...
Is it a facebook-generated summary? OpenGraph embeds allow publishers to set a “description” for the links that is generally used when it’s embedded (like on Twitter, Discord, etc). So if the summary is from OpenGraph and discouraging users from reading the content, that’s the publisher’s fault.
Without seeing the summaries it's hard to say. Was it like a tl;dr summary bot, or just the first X characters of the linked content? I've never read a google result and felt it had enough content...
Without seeing the summaries it's hard to say. Was it like a tl;dr summary bot, or just the first X characters of the linked content? I've never read a google result and felt it had enough content that I didn't need to click through.
And so Canada passed a law that encouraged screenshots and killed links. A one paragraph summary doesn't replace the article. That summary is often intended to draw people in like clickbait.
And so Canada passed a law that encouraged screenshots and killed links. A one paragraph summary doesn't replace the article. That summary is often intended to draw people in like clickbait.
This article is playing really fast and loose with the numbers. But they don't back that up with any evidence from the organizations. They look at the fact that fewer posts are made by news...
This article is playing really fast and loose with the numbers.
One year after Meta’s news ban, engagements with local Canadian news outlets fell by over five million (58 percent) between the social media sites Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, according to research published last week. National Canadian news engagement declined by 24 percent.
But they don't back that up with any evidence from the organizations. They look at the fact that fewer posts are made by news outlets on Meta (who banned that behavior), and use that as the "proof" that the ban is a failure. The single linked article that talks about the challenges faced by a small free paper includes the quote:
Fiddler-Potter said the proliferation of entertainment and promotional content on social media is also blurring the lines between journalism based in truth and other online media, and a lack of Canadian journalism on Facebook and Instagram is making it worse.
She said the federal government needs to seriously think about not allowing social media platforms that block news content to operate in Canada.
Only Facebook and Instagram are Meta-owned websites, why are they included in that comparison? Even the study the article refers to only talks about the "failure" of news organizations in social media-centric terms: "Since August 9, 2023, Canadian news outlets have seen a steep decline in online engagement, severely affecting their ability to connect with and grow their readership, source ad revenue, and inform the Canadian population."
Far more significant (in my opinion) is the section that shows that Meta users have just done a workaround and moved to posting screenshots of news articles to do an end-run around Meta's block.
Rather than a massive surge in misinformed discussion
and sensationalist videos, we found a decent (but
smaller) volume of news content. In particular, however,
the sharing of screenshots of news articles has exploded.
As shown in Figure 3, the volume of screenshots of
Canadian news articles tripled in the four months
immediately following the ban, generating such a large
amount of engagement that, although there are fewer
posts containing screenshots than there were posts with
news links prior to the ban, engagement with news
screenshots matched the previous engagement
generated by news links.³
Given that the overall social media interaction with news has shown little change (Fig 3 from linked document), the major question on my mind is the degree to which people who were merely incidental news readers on Meta were significant sources of economic support for these news outlets. None of any of this talks about the economic impact in dollars and cents. If Google's $100 million per year is greater than what news outlets were deriving from links on Meta, they'll still come out ahead. And this article doesn't actually talk about that. Yes, online engagement will be down if links from Meta are banned. What does that actually mean for the organizations?
But it is proof that it is a failure. There were two outcomes possible: success: Google and Meta start paying money to news organizations and news consumption continues as normal failure: they...
But it is proof that it is a failure. There were two outcomes possible:
success: Google and Meta start paying money to news organizations and news consumption continues as normal
failure: they don’t
Well, Meta didn’t pay, and news organizations are suffering. The desired outcome was not achieved. You could maybe argue it’s a half success because Google blinked.
For something to be a failure it's helpful if you define what counts as failure before you look at the results. News organizations were suffering before. The fact that this policy didn't...
For something to be a failure it's helpful if you define what counts as failure before you look at the results. News organizations were suffering before. The fact that this policy didn't singlehandedly change multiple decades of decline of local news organizations doesn't mean that the policy is a failure. Do you have any data to show that the loss of revenues from the absence of direct news links on Meta exceeds the $100 million a year the Google is paying? If not, what's your basis for saying that the policy has failed?
I mean Even if somehow the $100m makes up the advertising revenue loss, this is an unmitigated disaster in terms of informing Canadians and the long term future of news media in Canada.
I mean
Local Canadian News Loses 58% of Online Engagement, Thanks to the Online News Act
Even if somehow the $100m makes up the advertising revenue loss, this is an unmitigated disaster in terms of informing Canadians and the long term future of news media in Canada.
The article shows no proof of that 58% claim to start with, much less make an attempt to sort out how much is due to Meta's link ban vs. all the other factors that are driving down news site...
The article shows no proof of that 58% claim to start with, much less make an attempt to sort out how much is due to Meta's link ban vs. all the other factors that are driving down news site traffic. Also:
As shown in Figure 3, the volume of screenshots of
Canadian news articles tripled in the four months
immediately following the ban, generating such a large
amount of engagement that, although there are fewer
posts containing screenshots than there were posts with
news links prior to the ban, engagement with news
screenshots matched the previous engagement
generated by news links.³
As I laid out in my comment and as shown by the report that I linked that was the basis for this news article, "engagement" is specifically defined in this case as the number of clickthroughs to...
As I laid out in my comment and as shown by the report that I linked that was the basis for this news article, "engagement" is specifically defined in this case as the number of clickthroughs to news websites. Actual discussion of the news was functionally unchanged, with Meta users changing to discussing screenshots of news articles at the same rate as they previously discussed linked articles.
It's definitely a concern for people who would have clicked through to the website, but you're a great example of how someone can engage with the news without reading the links, or even beyond the headline.
And that's my point, users discussing a screenshot is a much shallower experience than clicking through to the actual article with its full media, links to context, and other articles. These users...
And that's my point, users discussing a screenshot is a much shallower experience than clicking through to the actual article with its full media, links to context, and other articles. These users are staying within Meta's platform and not being exposed to all the rest of the content that the news organizations would normally be providing to them which means they are less informed, and even more trapped within the filter bubble of what their like-minded friends are sharing with them.
but you're a great example of how someone can engage with the news without reading the links, or even beyond the headline.
So many people just skim the news without actually engaging with the details of what's said, let alone going any deeper. And you clearly think of that as a moral failing, or you wouldn't be...
So many people just skim the news without actually engaging with the details of what's said, let alone going any deeper. And you clearly think of that as a moral failing, or you wouldn't be offended by my statement. Yet a significant portion of Meta users did not even recognize that the ban had gone into effect. That's a deeper problem than any news outlet can solve, and not something that keeping or removing this tax would change.
why should they pay websites for *linking to the, and thus giving the site more views?” that’s ridiculous and i’m absolutely on meta’s side here. “pay me for sending me more traffic” is the worst...
why should they pay websites for *linking to the, and thus giving the site more views?” that’s ridiculous and i’m absolutely on meta’s side here. “pay me for sending me more traffic” is the worst kind of rent seeking i’ve heard yet, it’s laughable in fact. want local news? go find it where it is. meta is not a good place for that to begin with, and articles like this are just more rent seeker whining. and my degree is journalism, so you’d think i might be gulled by the rent seekers. im not.
I can't help but think of the ecological model of a parasite killing its host. Google at least recognized it needs content to distribute via Search. Meta only needs ad eyeballs that it can get...
I can't help but think of the ecological model of a parasite killing its host. Google at least recognized it needs content to distribute via Search. Meta only needs ad eyeballs that it can get from endlessly circulating gossip, rumor, and entertainment.
It's just a dumb law. They should've increased taxes and subsidies if that was the real goal. The more complicated a policy is, the more likely it is to have unintended effects.
It's just a dumb law. They should've increased taxes and subsidies if that was the real goal. The more complicated a policy is, the more likely it is to have unintended effects.
The loss of engagement has meant approximately 11 million fewer views per day for all Canadian news outlets.
...
In 2023 alone, at least 36 local news outlets shut down across Canada, some even citing the Meta news ban as a main reason for their demise. Since 2008, a total of 516 local Canadian radio, print, TV, and online news outlets have closed.
"The ban has had the most severe impact on local news organisations in Canada. Many lack the resources to build an audience from the ground up on any other platform or are already struggling to stay afloat, so the overall visibility of local news in Canada has decreased and will likely only continue to go down. The worst part is that the majority of Canadians haven't even noticed this is happening."
Yeah, I'm not even Canadian and I encountered Canadian creators I follow discussing how bad an idea this was before it passed because they knew exactly this would happen. This was incredibly...
Yeah, I'm not even Canadian and I encountered Canadian creators I follow discussing how bad an idea this was before it passed because they knew exactly this would happen. This was incredibly predictable.
Warning: Long crotchety older person rant ahead, only loosely associated with the topic post. Before the Internet, legacy media depended on advertising for as much as 80% of their revenue, with...
Warning: Long crotchety older person rant ahead, only loosely associated with the topic post.
Before the Internet, legacy media depended on advertising for as much as 80% of their revenue, with classified ads making up about 40%. Craigslist, EBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online marketplaces killed classified ad revenue. The low cost of online publication versus printing and delivery expenses, sunk costs for real estate, unionized labor, and systematic newsgathering made traditional print news unsustainable. Local radio and television broadcast news media are still surviving on ads, yet the competition from entertainment and self-selected online news is causing generational decline.
It's unsurprising that the thin trickle of referrals and ad revenue shares from Google and social media isn't enough to sustain traditional media. The sites that maintain paywalls and additional revenue streams from cooking and games subscriptions are hanging on, but no one here or elsewhere wants to pay full subscription price to see the occasional well-researched and written topical article.
A recent Pew study suggests that local news about politics and government fails to meet the needs of its audience, more so for younger readers. Anecdotally, I've found that most people in my community are getting their local news via friends' texts or Facebook contacts. The local newspaper costs $30 USD/month to access online only, for half a dozen weekly stories.
We really, really need a viable micropayment model for online media that fully divorces news journalism from advertising and owner-dependence. The engagement-entrapping social media sites do not have "journalism" in their remit, just eyeballs on ads regardless of content quality. $50+/year Substacks for popular authors are a gateway to thinly sourced opinion pieces that contribute to ideological polarization for the well-off. Formerly community newspapers have been bought up by millionaires and billionaires. In the U.S., even "public" media have been captured by corporate contributors - government financing only provides about 15% of revenue, individual donors 30%.
We want quality news, we need to figure out how to pay for it. A previous micropayment model has failed, but part of the problem was having to negotiate with each individual source. I'd like to see news sources agree to a national or international syndication system that allows for uniform payments per article view or a sliding scale of locality, with sharing options. Of course, this could result in yet another private gatekeeping and revenue harvesting oligopoly, like Spotify and Pandora. The slow, agonizing death of quality public information isn't tolerable for democracy or modern civilization to function.
I agree, but the issue is money is power. When (an entity) gives (another entity) money, the first has power over the second. Always. And if not now, if somehow the folks there now are kind and...
I agree, but the issue is money is power. When (an entity) gives (another entity) money, the first has power over the second. Always. And if not now, if somehow the folks there now are kind and honest and genteel and without agenda .... sooner or later they change out.
Someone gets promoted, or leaves. Someone buys the entity, new folks are installed. And the same goes for the people giving the money, as well as those receiving it. Maybe they all start out with good intentions, wanting to be good faith stewards ... but sooner or later that changes because people are people and people will change eventually.
It could be government, but government is people. Same for Big Corps who sell stuff; the new ad manager, or their boss, or their boss's boss, and so on. Someone with an agenda shows up, and wants thumbs on the scale.
"Do you really need to run that scathing expose of our industry's bad practices? Do you really want us to pull our funding?" Or "Do you really need to keep investigating the council meetings and how the votes are breaking down? What if we were to reexamine your funding, maybe get aggressive about some of the greyer language in your 'neutrality' and 'fair' directives in your charter?"
The truth is most people just don't see news as something worth paying for. And that attitude is fixed from an early age. Kids since before my time have always considered news reading to be an old fuddy-duddy thing to be doing. Dad/Granddad sitting down with the paper. Then it was Dad/Granddad sitting down for the nightly news on TV. Then it was Dad/Granddad sitting down with phone/tablet to scan across "the news".
Meanwhile, "the kids" are off doing cool stuff. Which isn't news. They don't care about the local anything, the national anything ... they only care about social media scandals. Which they don't usually need news for; "content creators" and "influencers" are happy to jump all over the juicy scandal and point fingers at sticky targets to be punished by the social mob. Serve those targets up on an easily digestible platter for the mob to chow down on.
That's what draws "the kids" and they maintain those habits as they grow up to be the age of their dads and granddads and so on.
Ideally, the news entity everyone says they wants would be some sort of self-funded foundation. Some rich whoever/whatever donates a very sizable annuity that pays for the annual operations of "the news source" so they can cover reporters and administrative costs to gather, edit, prep, and publish "news". In everyone's head, the people controlling and managing this mythical entity are good faith stewards, honest and forthright, whose only intention and goal is to deliver genuine direct news to the community.
But we're back to money. Who's going to just give money away, to basically every city (at least every major city) in a country? And if they do, now you have these self funded entities (local news sources) sitting around out there. Someone's going to start angling, maneuvering, to get control. All that money, they could redirect it, use it, take it, keep it.
Get yourself appointed senior director of a well funded "local" source like the NYT or WAPo and start enjoying regular expense travel and all that, plus you get to redirect the focus of coverage to what you consider important and away from what you don't. Someone rich starts buying them up, breaking them apart to get at the core funds. Money, greed, urges people to embrace that greed, to wallow happily in it, and soon enough we're all watching something that was valuable being torn down to feed that need for greed.
News is pretty much gone. It used to exist because most places (in America) had some level of societal engagement. Some of those people had built up "institutions" that did "the news". Local papers mostly, then later local radio, then local tv. We mostly skipped the local internet step though.
Your locality would do "the news" there as a springboard to draw in advertising and subscription revenue. Sure some of them did have those Hollywood starry eyed ideals of "helping the people stay informed" and "being good citizens in our engaged community", but even they still needed those revenue sources. Would tread very carefully in the event of anything they wanted to do that might upset (stop the money) those revenue sources.
Now we have a very "modern" society, everywhere. Everyone's squeezed to the limit in time and especially money, and few care about anything that doesn't directly affect their personal bottom line. Meaning, gets them more money and more time for their lives. Wealth has swooped in, buying news at all levels, and either slashed it down to an inexpensive repeater source for the national feeds, or turned it to a propaganda outlet to push their own personal preferences (hello Sinclair and Fox).
The news we want isn't coming back unless people pony up. And I'll be real honest; it's hard to know who to trust. For every one person who has good faith intentions, who genuinely and honestly wants to do Great Good for society, there are nine hundred and ninety-nine others struggling to knock that idealist out of the way so their hand is who gets your money as they thrust it out.
So what's the answer? There isn't one. At least, not an easy all-in-one solution like everyone always wants no matter the problem. People hate complexity, and especially disagreement; so when they hear "messy" and "complicated" that's just one more reason for them to willingly disengage and give up.
We're more or less stuck with these monolithic national and international "sources" that might have a bit of information from the relevant national governments, vetted and approved by those government sources of course. Then we have "big" outlets that have agendas, sometimes openly and sometimes not, who intend to always shape what they distribute to support those agendas. An ever shifting handful of nobodies who pop up here and there to try to be a true "Fourth Estate" only to run out of money or get crushed (or bought) by a big player.
And word-of-mouth, which is mostly just people relinking links they themselves were linked to by someone else.
What a marvelous modern age we live in. Information everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
Thank you for the amplification. My thought was that if there's always going to be a money exchange for journalism, break it into as many small streams as possible so that the balance of control...
Thank you for the amplification. My thought was that if there's always going to be a money exchange for journalism, break it into as many small streams as possible so that the balance of control is determined by reader/viewer/listener interest. I'll admit the trouble with this model in small communities - there aren't enough committed consumers to keep even one journalist from starving without intervention from motivated advertisers. There's room for independent foundations or state/federally-subsidized multiparty consortia. We can decry the current situation all we want, but people are creative and I'm not ready to concede there are no workable solutions.
I never understood the logic behind this legislation. When the news sites derive revenue from visits, and Meta and Google drive visits, accusing your revenue drivers of stealing content is such a weird take. I would understand it if they were hoovering up content to display online on their own platform without liking the user to the source, but that's not what is going on.
I don't believe for a second that advertising/pageviews can sustain news as a Fourth Estate that provides any source of correction/independent control of the three branches of government.
That's a dangerous misconception to hold. News has to rely on subscriptions or donations to gain the sorts of revenue needed to produce actual journalism to uncover misdeeds and hold those with power (of various kinds) accountable to society.
You're entirely right that the whole deal is that the social media sites "hoover up" news content in such a way that people don't visit the news sites. Users feel like they read the news, but only see individual pictures, headlines and comment sections off-platform where no-one has read the article.
Meta has consistently over the last couple of years systematically decreased the reach of link posts because link posts lead to users stopping to infinite-scroll and go elsewhere online.
Any site that's relied on free posts on the social media giants for their online circulation has not had a sustainable business model. All serious players have recognized this as traffic driven to their sites from groups with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers has plummeted. Without them having any control over the unilateral algorithm changes of the platforms.
Increasingly, news sites have had to pay large sums of money for sponsored posts on social media platforms to just get eyeballs on their news content in these places. Of course these ad-run giants like google, meta etc. don't want to push users to atttention-using, ad-running competitors.
Canadian news losing 58% of online engagement from the low, low volume post-link squeezing from the big platforms is losing half of a small amount of traffic compared to the traffic these sites were delivering a couple years ago.
The giant platforms want this to look like a failure so they won't have to pay for the content to have people waste their time on their platforms. This is a global battle.
The giant platforms are extremely scared that other countries will regulate them, demand payment from them or demand they don't have addictive algorithms that hurt society, radicalize and ruin the societies they leech off of.
The giant platforms want to paint this law as a huge failure, while the reality is that it's performing as expected. It shows clearly that these companies would rather exclude quality content from view than pay for it. They've shown their social irresponsibility in ways other countries take note of as they regulate this area.
News is struggling.
That's because people don't want to consume traditionally formatted news. They don't want to pay for news. They don't want to spend their time consuming news over doing other things. They don't trust news organizations to perform Fourth Estate functions. They don't trust news to report independently and fairly.
All these issues are compounded by the global tech giants, but they're still there without these global tech giants out-competing news.
We as societies need to decide if we want news-based societies that lead to informed citizens or not. That's up to us individually, and us as societies collectively in terms of regulation.
The giant tech companies are hoovering up all content, our time, our resources, the intellectual property of others. We need to regulate them in reasonable ways so they pay for all the things they take.
Emphasis mine. I never made that claim. And I do understand that news, especially local news outlets, are struggling. But they are struggling everywhere; it's not unique to Canada. At the same time large national outlets like the NYT have record subscribers. But they aren't investigating your local city council, unless something has gone very wrong.
But this law doesn't address or fix any of the problems you mention. As we see here, Meta just pulled out. That doesn't help inform people, it doesn't support local journalism, and critically it is the absolutely predictable outcome of this legislation. Further, the linking was probably driving revenue for many of the news sites. Maybe not enough, but rather than stabilize and shore up the newsroom finances, this law seems to have hastened their financial following out.
That's because real news makes people uncomfortable because it doesn't just reaffirm their every little opinion; it challenges them. And that is a problem that should be solved by regulating the use of engagement algorithms, not whatever this law is.
Yes, they are, but wasn't the data in meta being linked by the users? Or posted by the news outlets themselves to generate traffic? I e., not Meta actively harvesting it? And Google was just indexing it. I get that LLM training has led to lots of unethical hoovering of data, but this law doesn't fix that either.
All this law seems to be is a performative piece of legislation that accelerated the harm it was meant to stop. It doesn't regulate algorithmic engagement maximizing, it doesn't bring in real money for journalism, it doesn't educate Canadian citizens. So what's the logic here, other than puffery for the politicians?
One of the best points in favour of this law being bad longterm policy is that it sets journalism up to rely on these platforms and in turn, means that we need a small handful of large American/exploitative tech companies to continue on with business as usual. It's rotten to the core.
I think it's vastly better for society that Meta just pulls out rather than pay even i tiny share of revenue to those that create the content they monetize on their platforms.
That's what'll push sufficient regulation on global tech giants with time.
All arguments concerning Meta/Facebook driving traffic/revenue from before around 2022 are irrelevant today because unpaid link submissions gain so much less exposure on the platform than they used to. They simply do not drive enough traffic to be anything other than potentially a branding-measure to remind people your news outlet exists. We're talking reductions in referral traffic on the order of 90-95% for most news sites from Facebook post-covid. It's a gigantic, game-changing change.
I don't view it as a minus that people don't get headlines on social media and think that means they're informed. To me, that does more harm than good.
I think having this law is especially much better for local news than the larger players.
That's primarily because I don't expect every local outlet with few employees to be aware that their links now gain a tiny fraction of views from Meta-platforms that they did a couple years ago due to algorithm changes. I don't expect or think it's reasonable to assume they have social media experts paying close attention to platform changes, especially because most aren't ever announced.
Precisely. That is exactly what the law wanted outlets to get at least some compensation for: users linking the content of news outlets, with their photos on social media platforms without the outlets getting compensation for this.
You're entirely right: It doesn't regulate algorithms. It doesn't bring large money in for journalism. It doesn't educate Canadian citizens.
It only aimed to give a tiny amount of revenue to news outlets, way less than would be a market price. Even that was too much for several of the giants, even after they'd decimated link exposure for news their sites. The giants have clearly, unambiguously shown they cannot be trusted. They won't do the right thing, and every country in the world needs to go way, way further than this when they regulate.
It also ensures small news who weren't paying attention don't waste their time/resources propping up the tech giants without anything in return, and that users aren't scrolling past headlines in their feeds and leave feeling informed on news. IF they can even sort out serious news sites from clickbait junk or just text written on pictures that could be mistaken for news.
Sorry, I didn't mean to claim you did. Anyone who holds that view would be drawing the wrong conclusions from analyzing how news works because of fundamentally flawed outlooks on where the substantial chunks of income for news come from.
And it failed, because now rather than Canadian users posting links that lead to click through traffic, they just poat screenshots.
This is absolutely an ostrich take. Users are still getting their news from Meta, they just are getting less from actual news sources, even if it was just the headline or the blurb. Now they get a screenshot, maybe, but more likely they just get it from an emerging cohort of influencers who curate the news themselves: Gift link - Instagram’s Uneasy Rise as a News Site which can lead to new sources of bias and distortion.
It seems pretty clear that this law failed for predictable reasons: the government created a financial incentive for a company to block a type of content that makes up a small percent of what brings in users. Failing to recognize that and pursue actual meaningful regulation that can't be so easily sidestepped might actually accomplish something, but would be hard work and would likely anger many of their voters. But performative legislation with obvious perverse incentives aren't the answer.
The value of Netflix used to be that you could replace all your tv channels and movie needs with a single service. Now no-one believes that's the case and you have to shop around different streaming services. No-one sane views Netflix as a one-stop-shop for entertainment needs.
For many years, Facebook was a one-stop-shop for scrolling on the internet for many people, just the same way Netflix aimed to be my only bubble for entertainment. Tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit all attempt to do the exact same thing.
Making it more and more obvious you have to go outside a platforms universe/app (like none of your local/regional news being there) means people will actually go to a different website. They notice this universe is actually just a tiny and insular microcosm.
"We" as a society want users to go visit news websites/Apps directly whenever they want news. Just like we as a society want people not to smoke or inhale asbestos, or waste away drugged out of their minds, for the sake of society. We want people to get news from quality sources and to be able to separate those sources from the influencers, or random teenagers who put text on images.
This law does way less harm than good. It's a step in the right direction.
Especially towards having more and more people (and also lawmakers) realize how heavily we need to legislate the monopoly-seeking moocher-giant online-service corporations. And that these efforts need to be international when we're dealing with companies that have more power than most countries.
I think this is just a point of disagreement. I don't think the law does any of that from what I have gathered. It hasn't caused Canadians to leave Meta properties. All it has caused is less actual news and less convenient link backs to actual news to be on those properties. I'm not sure what this is a baby step towards, either.
I wish this was true, but my experience tells me otherwise. People won't leave their social media drug of choice because they can't back link to real journalism. Most people don't even understand the basics of journalistic reporting guidelines, and why a breaking story on NYT doesn't make subjective claims the way their belief reinforcing sites like TPM does. They will just stop linking the Canadian news sites and instead link someone's blog or Instagram post about the same subject, hot takes included.
Social media sites are built to reinforce use through dolling out those little dopamine hits. They are engineered like casino games. The way to get people to spend less time on them is to do something like (brainstorming here) introduce a legal definition for digital addiction algorithms and regulate them aggressively.
But even if we take at face value that the law is "a step in the right direction" if it shutters and strains the finances of the news rooms before that next step is taken, then what good does it do for educating Canadians on local issues with real news? It's not like this was touted as phase one of three of a legislative package to handle the situation. It was a one off that is killing their own news outlets. It just isn't good legislation. No one sat down and game theory'd this from all the different perspectives.
Nowhere was this more clearly true than when I took the plunge and actually paid the $300 annual subscription for Blacklocks Reporter. Many Canadians have never even heard of it because you'll rarely find their articles showing up on. Google search. That feels very deliberate.
Blacklocks is the ONLY fully independent credentialled member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and as such has access to great deal of direct info from the hill. Unlike all the other press they take NO money from the gov and it shows. Every morning they send out four or five articles and by any other outlet they would be considered inside scoops. But it's just what Blacklocks does.
The disturbing part is that almost every day they report some kind of malfeasance or spending waste or outright lying at committee meetings and very rarely does any of it ever make it to the big national outlets, especially the things that go on at committee level.
I have never been so starkly aware of how little of our typical national reporting has anything to do with holding the gov to account. Most of it is just the distribution network for press conferences and gov written briefs.
Our national media are NOT doing their jobs and I'm sure it has a lot to do with relying on gov subsidies to keep operating. Who's going to bite the hand that feeds it? Only Blacklocks has that freedom.
They link the user to the source but also offer summaries that render the link irrelevant
Is it a facebook-generated summary? OpenGraph embeds allow publishers to set a “description” for the links that is generally used when it’s embedded (like on Twitter, Discord, etc). So if the summary is from OpenGraph and discouraging users from reading the content, that’s the publisher’s fault.
Without seeing the summaries it's hard to say. Was it like a tl;dr summary bot, or just the first X characters of the linked content? I've never read a google result and felt it had enough content that I didn't need to click through.
And so Canada passed a law that encouraged screenshots and killed links. A one paragraph summary doesn't replace the article. That summary is often intended to draw people in like clickbait.
That’s rather similar to what we do on Tildes?
This article is playing really fast and loose with the numbers.
But they don't back that up with any evidence from the organizations. They look at the fact that fewer posts are made by news outlets on Meta (who banned that behavior), and use that as the "proof" that the ban is a failure. The single linked article that talks about the challenges faced by a small free paper includes the quote:
Only Facebook and Instagram are Meta-owned websites, why are they included in that comparison? Even the study the article refers to only talks about the "failure" of news organizations in social media-centric terms: "Since August 9, 2023, Canadian news outlets have seen a steep decline in online engagement, severely affecting their ability to connect with and grow their readership, source ad revenue, and inform the Canadian population."
Far more significant (in my opinion) is the section that shows that Meta users have just done a workaround and moved to posting screenshots of news articles to do an end-run around Meta's block.
Given that the overall social media interaction with news has shown little change (Fig 3 from linked document), the major question on my mind is the degree to which people who were merely incidental news readers on Meta were significant sources of economic support for these news outlets. None of any of this talks about the economic impact in dollars and cents. If Google's $100 million per year is greater than what news outlets were deriving from links on Meta, they'll still come out ahead. And this article doesn't actually talk about that. Yes, online engagement will be down if links from Meta are banned. What does that actually mean for the organizations?
But it is proof that it is a failure. There were two outcomes possible:
Well, Meta didn’t pay, and news organizations are suffering. The desired outcome was not achieved. You could maybe argue it’s a half success because Google blinked.
For something to be a failure it's helpful if you define what counts as failure before you look at the results. News organizations were suffering before. The fact that this policy didn't singlehandedly change multiple decades of decline of local news organizations doesn't mean that the policy is a failure. Do you have any data to show that the loss of revenues from the absence of direct news links on Meta exceeds the $100 million a year the Google is paying? If not, what's your basis for saying that the policy has failed?
I mean
Even if somehow the $100m makes up the advertising revenue loss, this is an unmitigated disaster in terms of informing Canadians and the long term future of news media in Canada.
The article shows no proof of that 58% claim to start with, much less make an attempt to sort out how much is due to Meta's link ban vs. all the other factors that are driving down news site traffic. Also:
As I laid out in my comment and as shown by the report that I linked that was the basis for this news article, "engagement" is specifically defined in this case as the number of clickthroughs to news websites. Actual discussion of the news was functionally unchanged, with Meta users changing to discussing screenshots of news articles at the same rate as they previously discussed linked articles.
It's definitely a concern for people who would have clicked through to the website, but you're a great example of how someone can engage with the news without reading the links, or even beyond the headline.
And that's my point, users discussing a screenshot is a much shallower experience than clicking through to the actual article with its full media, links to context, and other articles. These users are staying within Meta's platform and not being exposed to all the rest of the content that the news organizations would normally be providing to them which means they are less informed, and even more trapped within the filter bubble of what their like-minded friends are sharing with them.
Kind of an offensive comment, really.
So many people just skim the news without actually engaging with the details of what's said, let alone going any deeper. And you clearly think of that as a moral failing, or you wouldn't be offended by my statement. Yet a significant portion of Meta users did not even recognize that the ban had gone into effect. That's a deeper problem than any news outlet can solve, and not something that keeping or removing this tax would change.
why should they pay websites for *linking to the, and thus giving the site more views?” that’s ridiculous and i’m absolutely on meta’s side here. “pay me for sending me more traffic” is the worst kind of rent seeking i’ve heard yet, it’s laughable in fact. want local news? go find it where it is. meta is not a good place for that to begin with, and articles like this are just more rent seeker whining. and my degree is journalism, so you’d think i might be gulled by the rent seekers. im not.
I can't help but think of the ecological model of a parasite killing its host. Google at least recognized it needs content to distribute via Search. Meta only needs ad eyeballs that it can get from endlessly circulating gossip, rumor, and entertainment.
It's just a dumb law. They should've increased taxes and subsidies if that was the real goal. The more complicated a policy is, the more likely it is to have unintended effects.
Previous discussion: https://tildes.net/~news/190h/understanding_bill_c_18_canadas_online_news_act
I seem to recall people predicting this exact outcome a year or two ago.
Yeah, I'm not even Canadian and I encountered Canadian creators I follow discussing how bad an idea this was before it passed because they knew exactly this would happen. This was incredibly predictable.
Warning: Long crotchety older person rant ahead, only loosely associated with the topic post.
Before the Internet, legacy media depended on advertising for as much as 80% of their revenue, with classified ads making up about 40%. Craigslist, EBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online marketplaces killed classified ad revenue. The low cost of online publication versus printing and delivery expenses, sunk costs for real estate, unionized labor, and systematic newsgathering made traditional print news unsustainable. Local radio and television broadcast news media are still surviving on ads, yet the competition from entertainment and self-selected online news is causing generational decline.
It's unsurprising that the thin trickle of referrals and ad revenue shares from Google and social media isn't enough to sustain traditional media. The sites that maintain paywalls and additional revenue streams from cooking and games subscriptions are hanging on, but no one here or elsewhere wants to pay full subscription price to see the occasional well-researched and written topical article.
A recent Pew study suggests that local news about politics and government fails to meet the needs of its audience, more so for younger readers. Anecdotally, I've found that most people in my community are getting their local news via friends' texts or Facebook contacts. The local newspaper costs $30 USD/month to access online only, for half a dozen weekly stories.
We really, really need a viable micropayment model for online media that fully divorces news journalism from advertising and owner-dependence. The engagement-entrapping social media sites do not have "journalism" in their remit, just eyeballs on ads regardless of content quality. $50+/year Substacks for popular authors are a gateway to thinly sourced opinion pieces that contribute to ideological polarization for the well-off. Formerly community newspapers have been bought up by millionaires and billionaires. In the U.S., even "public" media have been captured by corporate contributors - government financing only provides about 15% of revenue, individual donors 30%.
We want quality news, we need to figure out how to pay for it. A previous micropayment model has failed, but part of the problem was having to negotiate with each individual source. I'd like to see news sources agree to a national or international syndication system that allows for uniform payments per article view or a sliding scale of locality, with sharing options. Of course, this could result in yet another private gatekeeping and revenue harvesting oligopoly, like Spotify and Pandora. The slow, agonizing death of quality public information isn't tolerable for democracy or modern civilization to function.
I agree, but the issue is money is power. When (an entity) gives (another entity) money, the first has power over the second. Always. And if not now, if somehow the folks there now are kind and honest and genteel and without agenda .... sooner or later they change out.
Someone gets promoted, or leaves. Someone buys the entity, new folks are installed. And the same goes for the people giving the money, as well as those receiving it. Maybe they all start out with good intentions, wanting to be good faith stewards ... but sooner or later that changes because people are people and people will change eventually.
It could be government, but government is people. Same for Big Corps who sell stuff; the new ad manager, or their boss, or their boss's boss, and so on. Someone with an agenda shows up, and wants thumbs on the scale.
"Do you really need to run that scathing expose of our industry's bad practices? Do you really want us to pull our funding?" Or "Do you really need to keep investigating the council meetings and how the votes are breaking down? What if we were to reexamine your funding, maybe get aggressive about some of the greyer language in your 'neutrality' and 'fair' directives in your charter?"
The truth is most people just don't see news as something worth paying for. And that attitude is fixed from an early age. Kids since before my time have always considered news reading to be an old fuddy-duddy thing to be doing. Dad/Granddad sitting down with the paper. Then it was Dad/Granddad sitting down for the nightly news on TV. Then it was Dad/Granddad sitting down with phone/tablet to scan across "the news".
Meanwhile, "the kids" are off doing cool stuff. Which isn't news. They don't care about the local anything, the national anything ... they only care about social media scandals. Which they don't usually need news for; "content creators" and "influencers" are happy to jump all over the juicy scandal and point fingers at sticky targets to be punished by the social mob. Serve those targets up on an easily digestible platter for the mob to chow down on.
That's what draws "the kids" and they maintain those habits as they grow up to be the age of their dads and granddads and so on.
Ideally, the news entity everyone says they wants would be some sort of self-funded foundation. Some rich whoever/whatever donates a very sizable annuity that pays for the annual operations of "the news source" so they can cover reporters and administrative costs to gather, edit, prep, and publish "news". In everyone's head, the people controlling and managing this mythical entity are good faith stewards, honest and forthright, whose only intention and goal is to deliver genuine direct news to the community.
But we're back to money. Who's going to just give money away, to basically every city (at least every major city) in a country? And if they do, now you have these self funded entities (local news sources) sitting around out there. Someone's going to start angling, maneuvering, to get control. All that money, they could redirect it, use it, take it, keep it.
Get yourself appointed senior director of a well funded "local" source like the NYT or WAPo and start enjoying regular expense travel and all that, plus you get to redirect the focus of coverage to what you consider important and away from what you don't. Someone rich starts buying them up, breaking them apart to get at the core funds. Money, greed, urges people to embrace that greed, to wallow happily in it, and soon enough we're all watching something that was valuable being torn down to feed that need for greed.
News is pretty much gone. It used to exist because most places (in America) had some level of societal engagement. Some of those people had built up "institutions" that did "the news". Local papers mostly, then later local radio, then local tv. We mostly skipped the local internet step though.
Your locality would do "the news" there as a springboard to draw in advertising and subscription revenue. Sure some of them did have those Hollywood starry eyed ideals of "helping the people stay informed" and "being good citizens in our engaged community", but even they still needed those revenue sources. Would tread very carefully in the event of anything they wanted to do that might upset (stop the money) those revenue sources.
Now we have a very "modern" society, everywhere. Everyone's squeezed to the limit in time and especially money, and few care about anything that doesn't directly affect their personal bottom line. Meaning, gets them more money and more time for their lives. Wealth has swooped in, buying news at all levels, and either slashed it down to an inexpensive repeater source for the national feeds, or turned it to a propaganda outlet to push their own personal preferences (hello Sinclair and Fox).
The news we want isn't coming back unless people pony up. And I'll be real honest; it's hard to know who to trust. For every one person who has good faith intentions, who genuinely and honestly wants to do Great Good for society, there are nine hundred and ninety-nine others struggling to knock that idealist out of the way so their hand is who gets your money as they thrust it out.
So what's the answer? There isn't one. At least, not an easy all-in-one solution like everyone always wants no matter the problem. People hate complexity, and especially disagreement; so when they hear "messy" and "complicated" that's just one more reason for them to willingly disengage and give up.
We're more or less stuck with these monolithic national and international "sources" that might have a bit of information from the relevant national governments, vetted and approved by those government sources of course. Then we have "big" outlets that have agendas, sometimes openly and sometimes not, who intend to always shape what they distribute to support those agendas. An ever shifting handful of nobodies who pop up here and there to try to be a true "Fourth Estate" only to run out of money or get crushed (or bought) by a big player.
And word-of-mouth, which is mostly just people relinking links they themselves were linked to by someone else.
What a marvelous modern age we live in. Information everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
Thank you for the amplification. My thought was that if there's always going to be a money exchange for journalism, break it into as many small streams as possible so that the balance of control is determined by reader/viewer/listener interest. I'll admit the trouble with this model in small communities - there aren't enough committed consumers to keep even one journalist from starving without intervention from motivated advertisers. There's room for independent foundations or state/federally-subsidized multiparty consortia. We can decry the current situation all we want, but people are creative and I'm not ready to concede there are no workable solutions.