Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook
Newspapers allowed Google and Facebook to drag them to their territory of online ad-monetized business models in which they have no way of competing (because of tech discrepancy).<p>This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money.<p>It is a sad state, but hardly it is fair to blame someone else for it.<p>Own it up, create credible news products, and monetize it like news were monetized for hundreds of years - you pay to read it.<p>The lawsuit admits that what we call "news" is really entertainment with the goal of producing content, not to inform the public, but to maximize CPM. Fox News already made it official [1]. Now you have to explain it to your viewers/readers too and make life less stressful for everyone.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1454288815049240586" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1454288815049240586</a><p>Edit:<p>I get a lot of value from my local newspaper. It is monetized with (local) ads but they are unobtrusive and non-invasive. The content matters because there is a limit to how much it can fit in an edition.<p>I can simply skip the pages with ads if I do not want to read them.<p>And sometimes the ads are the only thing I am interested in, when I am looking for something specific or want to see what is new. That is the beauty of it.<p>Now compare that to the horror story that is the online news. Content is created by the droves. Ads are everywhere, obtrusive and invasive to user experience, not to mention all the tracking and mining of user data. I never purposefully check the online ads. It is a lose-lose-lose situation for the business, the advertiser and for the user. The only reason it exists is because it is 'free', coming with two caveats. One obvious - we get what we pay for. The other not as obvious - we are what we read.<p>"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." ― Ralph Waldo Emerson