Job losses, declining circulations and local newspaper closures could mean spread of misinformation in pivotal election year
As the election battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden begins, there are growing fears around the health of the US news media which has been struck by job losses, declining circulations, the closure or crippling of well-known brands and rise of new threats such as fake or AI-generated information on social media.
Evidence of this state of crisis abounds. Last year, more than 21,400 media jobs were lost, the highest since 2020, when 16,060 cuts were recorded when print was still in the process of being succeeded by digital news distribution. Major names including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Vice have taken serious hits, alongside scores of smaller brands and the total collapse of newcomers such as the Messenger.
“We’ve settled into the final act of the election season, and it’s promising to be the harbinger of all kinds of problems because of the nature of the candidates,” says Robert Thompson at Syracuse University. At the same time, he says, “the very industry that should be girding up for this is in a total state of crisis”.
Readership and income from digital production has been falling overall, and industry downsizing in 2024 appears to be accelerating. Meanwhile, social media is uncoupling as a referral service to news organizations, which hits both readership size and revenue generation. Meta has dropped its news tab from Facebook, Google is more unpredictable, and X has de-prioritized posts that contain outside referrals.
Readers are fleeing to mediums in which fresh dangers lurk, even when accounting for the partisan nature of some US news sites. The share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023, yet such sites are subject to the threat of viral misinformation – whether deliberately sown or spread organically.
They read, but only if posted on archive links with client side ad blockers to make sure the papers don’t make a cent.
Yeah how dare people care more about their unmolested reading experience and not being loaded up with spyware more than if the paper is making money off the spyware?
I thought it was ridiculous when I actually had an online subscription for my local (Gannett owned) paper for a short time and the page was still absolutely riddled with ads. It’s like what’s the fucking point if I could still read these stories for free?
Now they just lock shit behind a “this article is for subscribers only” and I just look elsewhere. Since this has occurred, a couple truly local papers have sprouted up from the ashes.
The primary use of ad blockers isn’t to ensure the websites don’t make money but to protect the end user from unwanted effects of intrusive advertising. If we’re expected to be concerned with their loss of revenue they should be as concerned about ads masquerading as OS prompts, scams feigning legitimacy, false medical or financial claims, malware and miners being injected etc. If they won’t accept responsibility or accountability for the material they are serving and effectively endorsing then it’s only prudent for the users to protect themselves.
And if they want to attract subscribers instead of relying on advertising income then they should also avoid racing to the bottom by (solely) relying on LLM generated “articles” and misleading clickbait tactics. If they have to rely on tricking their prospective customers then they aren’t peddling something actually worthwhile and aren’t owed a reward for doing so.
Who is the “they” in this. Google destroyed local news papers. All these smaller players can afford to do is open their sites up to google exchanges. It’s a viscous cycle where the leaner your journalist team gets, the more you need click bait pages to drive ad views on those exchanges. I don’t know what the solution to this looks like to raise journalistic standards and ensure they are funded, but I think that whatever it looks like will require readers to pay subscriptions and/or tolerate ads in their news.
“They” (the local newspapers) don’t have to make that Faustian bargain but choose to because it’s easier or more lucrative to. They could take meaningful steps to address and communicate to their readers that they care about the accuracy and informative aspects of their reporting as well as the safety and respect of their electronic systems used to access it.
Wikipedia doesn’t have flashing boner pill pop-ups and their pages aren’t filled with intentionally misleading information – I strongly suspect their donations would fall off a cliff if that started to change. It’s not a great comparison since the scale and business structures are different from local newspapers but other entities like PBS also show that people will donate for good/honest content.
Ad blockers just wrongly get painted with this brush as being horribly destructive to the poor companies that have no choice but to be evil when they were a logical consequence to the boundaries of acceptability being constantly pushed. We had <marquee> and <blink> text, static banners -> animated banners, auto-playing sound/video, iFrames -> pop-ups -> recursive pop-ups -> mouse click & window resize disable scripts -> overlays -> unskippable full-page video -> multiple unskippable videos -> LLM/AI generated bogus content. And tons of other variations I’m not remembering at the moment. Ad blockers also (mostly) don’t work properly when the ads are being served from the same source as the content; the newspapers could host the ads themselves and vouch for their safety and propriety.
The ad blockers are there to make it readable, otherwise you get advertisements for drop shippers and sweatshop clothing taking up half the page
Then use ads that don’t make reading the article a miserable, tedious experience and stop vacuuming up tracking data. Maybe readers would trust the website then, though many of those bridges have been burned to cinders already.
The value of ad space includes things like viewability, interactivity, attribution. You can’t make ads harder to see and easier to skip without lowering the value of the ads and what the site takes in. It’s hard line to balance between maximizing value for your ad space and user experience.
No. There is no rational defense of ads taking up more and more of the space around us. Companies do not concede to reasonable limits with their ads, so why should we? They take whatever part of our lives that they can, and they only ever take more of it wherever allowed. We are not irrational for taking whatever steps we can to limit and remove those intrusions from our lives.
The defense is free content. There’s operating costs for running papers. And they usually aren’t there to make a profit. So the combined income of subs and ad revenue need to cover the operational cost. If the content is free, then there’s going to be lots of ads. But even in print news, there were a lot of ads. Some full page ads. Fun front page stories that continued on Section C page 5 which forced you to flip through more ads to find it. User experience needs to be cleaned in digital to not drive users away because of the ads, but they will necessarily have to be there if folks aren’t paying for subscriptions.
“Free” content isn’t a defense in any way. It’s not free - we’re paying with our divided attention and, in more and more cases, our personal information. And they demand more and more of it while we get less. That is not acceptable. And ads being embedded in our lives for decades and centuries doesn’t justify anything, either.
They have pushed far beyond anything resembling acceptable. If it crashes and burns because people are tired of it, that’s their fault, not ours.