Well what do you expect me to do when British newspapers and the BBC are nothing but a steaming pile? I've never seen any good quality journalism worth paying for on TV either.
the guardian's dying
- Thread starter Muffin`
- Start date
Well what do you expect me to do when British newspapers and the BBC are nothing but a steaming pile? I've never seen any good quality journalism worth paying for on TV either.
The ft allows so many articles free per month before you have to pay for it.
It probably won't happen in this instance but you must be able to see that its happened before? (The public paying for a failing private business) so its not totally without precedent.
Care to point out the part which implied the rest of you would be subsidising it?.
I said none state funded.
so not private and not state?
So magical leprechaun gold funded?
well
adverts = paper panders to market that gets most viewer ship for adverts/specific market advertisers want
donations = paper panders to market segment that gets most donations, or company/pressure group that donates the most
Foreign state = paper panders to that states interest
Basically there's no way to get funding externally without it inflicting bias.
Associate
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I think they are being too slow to realise they need to change dramatically to survive. Maybe they do know but are working on it in the background. Just seems a bit like the music industry fighting illegal downloads rather than thinking up a new way of delivering music.
Ultimately the costs of bringing news to the public have greatly reduced. The barriers to entry to the market have also greatly shrunk in very short space of time. There is a huge amount of new competition out there.
I don't think it matters that there is no solution for them at the moment. Maybe that's why they will fail - they need to maintain a traditional method of delivery while other upstarts don't have that and can build an online news distribution network without the current huge costs of news distribution e.g. The Huffington Post. Or other sites which already have a different method of generating revenue can build in news sections as a way of building on their core business.
I totally agree about the advertising stuff btw - i don't think ad-blockers should be allowed.
It depends on how you define private. Are mutual or charity status considered private?
Soldato
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I tried reading the Guardian when I was at university after seeing all the other "well read" and enlightened media students browsing through it, but after reading it a couple of times I saw it was the lefties version of the Daily Mail.
A pile of garbage pandering to their readers ego.
A pile of garbage pandering to their readers ego.
Aha. It'd be a sad day when / if everything goes digital. "daddy, what's a newspaper?".
"What do you mean? You used to actually print off ALL the news??"
I personally think it is a bad point.
I'm not willing to pay that extra to go to newspapers. We already pay for the broadband connection & as far as I'm concerned I use the BBC so I'm already paying for that too.
I have no intention of reading the Guardian, Sun, Daily mail blah blah blah so why should I pay for them?
It's a terrible point.
ISP should subscribe to a news agency or start their own news desks and hire their own reporters.
Newspapers are going to be a thing of the past, like records, unless they change their business model.
A news paper was a way of getting the news to people on mass, well we have other ways of getting now so.......... Tough.
The costs of news-gathering have barely changed. Why do you think that newspapers consist almost entirely of recycled wire stories and press releases, plus opinion pieces? Because actual news gathering is too expensive compared to the money coming in. And the news on the web, designed for the web, is the same, except by much poorer writers. Again: how do you make news pay, when no one wants to pay? It costs money to gather it, and newspapers aren't charities. All you'll be left with are rich people trying to influence opinion on behalf of companies and politicians. Like now, but worse.
Of course the cost of news has reduced nowadays. People see things that happen, take pictures / videos and upload it to the net for free. They no longer need to waste time with contacting news papers or channels when they can just stick their newsworthy stuff on the internet a lot easier.
Man of Honour
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The cost of some news is cheaper now, sure, but as Meridian states the cost of other news gathering has barely changed at all. Maybe you (and millions of other people) don't care about the news where it's in depth and has a detailed analysis but to get someone with expertise and an ability to write interesting/insightful stories about it that are well researched isn't much cheaper now than it ever was - you might get a few people who fit those categories and do it for free but that's a whole lot rarer than finding poor quality stories written by someone who barely knows which way to hold a pen attached to a blurry picture taken on their cameraphone.
While it's true that using professional journalists doesn't always guarantee quality it does at least give a slightly greater level of reassurance that the story has had to pass some form of vetting since media sources (particularly large media sources) are vulnerable to being sued - an anonymous newssite has comparatively little footprint for anyone damaged by the story or defamed to go after.
You're confusing the distribution medium to the content. They are two separate things. The physical distribution medium allowed money to be collected to fund the content. The new digital distribution medium does away with that - so there's far less money available for content.
We can't expect reporting of any quality for free!