Hard News: Obscuring the News
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nzlemming, in reply to
Danyl over at the DimPost is looking for an aggregator,
As I commented there, he's actually looking for a curator, rather than an aggregator. Very different things.
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Has no one read Alain de Botton? http://alaindebotton.com/news-users-manual/
It's pretty well covered off in The News how bad reporting, as seen in The Herald, is for society. And also why reporting is performed in this way.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Paywalls for quality, sure.
Yup.
But the key point is the news service has to demonstrate quality first. You can't spew drivel onto your webpage and then promise "oh if you pay you'll get real news".
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Josie McNaught, in reply to
Doesn't this rejection by Not the onion mean that nzherald.co.nz is breaching some of the basic codes by which journalism stands or falls? Stealing content is just a simple way of saying plagiarism - isn't it??? (But easier to spell and the digital 'kids' don't have to google it to find out the meaning)
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BP M,
Media companies have to stop promoting access to eyeballs. Who wants to buy eyeballs anymore? There is too much fraud. I can buy 1000's of eyeballs from some Russian robot for $100. Media is loosing, I don't think anyone really knows who is consuming the content. Relative to Facebook and Google they have no idea who their audience is. Sadly, I don't think the media really want to know, if they did know they would have to face the fact that, these days, it's audience is incredibly diverse. The diversity is expensive to cater for, so rather than solve it, better to ignore it, burry the head and sell click bait cats and international junk content. Often buying the international junk content comes with 1000's of fraudulent clicks from Russia anyway. How would an exec upstairs at NZME even know. Just looks like a bunch of clicks to them right. They can spew this up on some unsuspecting brand owner and ask them to buy it. Too easy...buy cheap content that comes with clicks, everyone gets to go home at 5. Meanwhile.... the entire country becomes munter stupid on a diet of crap that some weird digital fraud engine convinces low tech execs that the population likes to look at.
The decision makers are looking at a faulty gauge that tells them they are doing ok. They ignore the good stories and great jouralists because their broken gauge tells them to. The gauge is 20 years old, its ancient and it's based on some really broken assumptions.
Ask any big sophisticated international media buyer...
Media has become like the used car sales man, flogging an old beast with a shiny paint job but has done too many k's and has a worn out gear box.
This sux for all you awesome journalists trying to encourage some kind of rigour and excellence in your field. I feel for you guys and wish you could raise 100 million and start again.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
he now subscribes to Washington Post online
try your local library for Press Reader or similar
- free access to a world of papers
( Washington Post included, at least in Chchch)
http://www.pressreader.com.ezproxy.christchurchcitylibraries.com/ -
izogi, in reply to
the NYT now gets more revenue from subscriptions than from advertising. While those subscriptions are still mostly print, this strikes me as yet more evidence that the paywalls are a-coming generally.
I'm not too surprised that the NYT is able to attract such a good subscription base, especially with its national and global appeal. Could we expect the same success from smaller and more localised newspapers?
Something I'd like to see in the internet age, personally, is some kind of consolidated subscription for content which lots of newspapers and other publishers can publish to. Modern media comes from all over the place. I don't really want to have to buy subscriptions to 50 publications, or pay a high price to download single article from each of them, just to cover all the times I stumble across interesting or worthwhile references, but I might happily pay a capped annual subscription for all of them at once.
Are there already any systems out there which let publishers draw from a consolidated subscription according to whether the subscribers read their stuff? (Possibly not too dissimilar to what works in many public transport systems with combined ticketing and multiple operators.)
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
I don't think that /r/nottheonion is the global news adjudicator, somehow.
I'd be quite sure that the Herald's legal department keeps them on the straight and narrow with copyright. All newspapers syndicate their content and have done for over a hundred years, in addition to newswires (Reuters, AP, etc) who produce content purely for syndication (and other purposes). In addition, there is no copyright in facts, so providing the words are my own, I can take facts from any media source and publish them.
The literary/academic concept of plagiarism doesn't really exist in news reporting and never has done. Before the internet, print newsdesks would seek out the first copies of rival papers when they went on sale (usually around 1am in England) and copy any 'scoops' in their later editions ready for commuters on their way into work.
Of course, excessive use of repurposed content with no original input makes for a dull and uninteresting publication, which is the problem here.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
In the same time-frame people are talking about for the Herald, I’ve noticed a change in Stuff’s “related stories” links, at the bottom of the page. They’re not related, they’re the worst kind of Women’s Weekly diets, junk science and body-shaming crap. I used to go there every morning for news. Now I just do the quiz and leave.
I don’t know about Stuff, but the Herald uses Outbrain, a “content distribution network” (but in a totally different sense to Akamai et al) which aims to drive traffic to publishers who have paid to have their story teasers placed on the websites of other publishers. It allegedly uses “behavioural targeting” to choose which stories it shows, but the external links are generally risible clickbait. The whole industry is basically dodgy.
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
As does the Guardian. Must pay them ££ to do so, because it sure damages their brand.
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And what happens when the Fairfax-NZME merger takes place? One giant paywall, I expect ... and yet, they've annoying people with rubbish. Not a smart business move.
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Fairfax in Australia, at least, sees an end to 7 day a week printing.
I'd suggest that a pre-requisite for a paywall isn't just content of quality, but content that enough people require for their work in order to finance its creation (and no usable free competitor). The FT and Wall St Journal have this (mostly to service the finance sector). Probably the New York Times, Washington Post and Economist also. I don't think any other publications in the English language do.
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I think this belongs here:
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I'm pretty sure that the mould is a miraculous representation of the newly canonised St. Theresa. Have a closer look at the screen shot.
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Here is a clue – all of these newspaper sites are using “Outbrain” plugin for International paid advertising links. Those stories provided by Outbrain” are all very similar, moronic, meaningless, hyped up crap – form around the globe. All newspapers are now following that same model, dumbed down sensationalist BS. Outbrain is actually an Israeli owned company. And oddly enough, a very large amount of the International media are controlled by Israeli businessmen – Howard Marks would be one good example – an Israeli/ American billionaire who controls Media Works via his Oaktree Investment Fund. The agenda is very clear, and global, buy up and control the media and dumb it down. And no doubt make sure the reporting on the illegal wars and genocide in the Middle East is not being covered, not least the ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
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Emma Hart, in reply to
It allegedly uses “behavioural targeting” to choose which stories it shows
It better bloody not be.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
Outbrain is actually an Israeli owned company. And oddly enough, a very large amount of the International media are controlled by Israeli businessmen – Howard Marks would be one good example – an Israeli/ American billionaire who controls Media Works via his Oaktree Investment Fund. The agenda is very clear, and global, buy up and control the media and dumb it down. And no doubt make sure the reporting on the illegal wars and genocide in the Middle East is not being covered, not least the ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
As always, it's the Jews' fault.
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Earlier, from James Hawthorne: (in whale oil comments)
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Can't these news outlets that simply repackage news at least dig a little deeper? Take for example a seemingly innocuous story of vehicle clamping that I came across on thespinoff.co.nz earlier today. It had previously been covered by Story and stuff.co.nz in a manner that I probably wouldn't have even hovered over, let alone clicked on. But by investigating further, David Farrier makes this into an enticing and captivating read! My breath remains abated until the next part of the tale.
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As a member of the Hibiscus Coast Facebook page I did comment at the time that the story was probably published by the Herald as a distraction piece, one of many that appear in MSM that lead readers to believe that they are in the pocket of Government.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Ask any big sophisticated international media buyer...
That was brilliant, and echoes the argument I was making almost 20 years ago to government agencies about their web stats. Nobody knew what they were looking at, so the bigger the raw numbers, the better. No-one (except most of the web geeks) seemed to understand that "sticky" wasn't a good thing for a government site, because it meant the user couldn't find what they were looking for. Of course, government is a different kettle of web fish, but they're reading the same books.
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Martin Brown, in reply to
To be fair, I think NZME has a commercial arrangement with ODT and the 'byline' was not actually that - just a reporter's email for further info. The story was also attributed to the NZ herald.
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I wonder if the increase in Daily Mail and news.com.au content is related to the Olympics? Remember NZME didn't send any reporters in protest, and subsequently the majority of their Olympics coverage was from those two sources. I noticed how many there was around this time. Maybe they did exceptionally well and so they kept the contract going?
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Non-journalism non-media non-RNZ normally non-interested in public-reporting acquaintances have reported the same for a while. It’s been my pleasure to point them to RNZ News. Unprompted (but supported) by me older family (70-95) have been relying on Al Jazeera for international news for 5+ years. Were it not for Swideswipe or Fourlegsgood I probably wouldn’t visit their respective hosts [much*]. * Necessity sometimes requires...
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Matthew Hooton, in reply to
Not to mention that if I wanted to read Daily Mail online, I could go straight to the source easily enough.
I spend a good two to three minutes a day reading the Daily Mail, mainly to enjoy their latest pisstake about Corbyn. It is the best of its genre. But I expect something different from the Herald. And what I have learned is that what the Herald takes from the Mail can be days old. It's really pathetic that the Herald has been reduced to re-running out of date Mail copy.
Overall, I think I agree 100% with everything in Russell's post. It really is appalling.
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