Publishing Is Back to the Future
A shallow, one-sided take on what happened to the news business. I mean, here&#x27;s a guy who quotes himself (!) saying,<p>&quot;I’d go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet&quot;<p>As his example of this, he appears to the New York Times as his exemplar of a company that&#x27;s been relatively successful online.  Relative to newspapers that have basically failed that is. Comparted to Breitbart, Fox News, and other non-fact based journalism, relatively, well, less successful.<p>Google is in a sense an aggregator but according to algorithms that it&#x27;s careful to keep secret. Its main financial goal in doing this is to maximize ad revenue it can extract from the feed, and Google is more successful in that regard than any of the sources of the news it aggregates. Leaving other concerns aside, this does drain ever more revenue out of the business of creating news, since advertisers now choose between buying ads from the aggegator or ads from the source, and no, Google&#x27;s work hasn&#x27;t doubled marketing budgets of advertisers.<p>Facebook controls what people see -- it doesn&#x27;t aggregate, it segregates. You see what Facebook has determined you want to see, and usually they&#x27;re right (It would be much better for us as a community if they were wrong much more often and showed everyone things they don&#x27;t want to see.) Facebook financial goal in choosing what to put in user feeds is maximizing ad revenue for Facebook.  This has further drained ad revenue away from sources of content.<p>The piece claims, hey, the internet was making it harder on news sources before the ascendency of Facebook and Google, though as late as the 1990&#x27;s newspapers were still a very profitable business.  Yeah, Craig&#x27;s List grabbed a huge share of the classified ad business which traditionally was a major part of newspaper revenue, and newspapers stupidly failed to mount any significant effort to get that revenue back.  But Google and Facebook have vastly more effective methods of siphoning off revenue as they&#x27;ve dominated market share and therefore become indispensable for all news outlets.<p>It not only starves news sources of revenue but favors sources that tell people what they want to hear in a way that excites the audience.  In other words, the current sorry state of our political world.