<story><title>How does one appear in the Google News carousel?</title><url>https://char.gd/blog/2019/google-news-is-broken</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jondubois</author><text>This is scary because it translates to not just centralization of news sources but also centralization of power and wealth in general. Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations.&lt;p&gt;I think I prefer to live in a world with fake news than one where the elites curate everything we learn.&lt;p&gt;The world has always had conmen, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen and fake news; in small quantities, they are essential to make sure that people keep questioning everything.&lt;p&gt;Fake news is like a vaccine which protects us against a zombie apocalypse. Most news cannot be scientifically proven to be true; so it doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense that we should all believe it just because it&amp;#x27;s popular. Popular news sources are more likely to be true but they are also a lot more dangerous if they&amp;#x27;re not. Given enough time, these big news sources will be corrupted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Fake news &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; the zombie apocalypse. It&amp;#x27;s cheaper to produce than real news, and so there&amp;#x27;s likely to be much more of it drowning out the real news. It&amp;#x27;s also useful to corrupt people&amp;#x27;s belief in the possibility of getting accurate news. The public retreat to partisan news sources if there is no source in the middle that can be trusted. The quality of decision-making goes down and it becomes easier for real corruption to flourish once &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; is accused of corruption by fake news.</text></comment>
<story><title>How does one appear in the Google News carousel?</title><url>https://char.gd/blog/2019/google-news-is-broken</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jondubois</author><text>This is scary because it translates to not just centralization of news sources but also centralization of power and wealth in general. Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations.&lt;p&gt;I think I prefer to live in a world with fake news than one where the elites curate everything we learn.&lt;p&gt;The world has always had conmen, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen and fake news; in small quantities, they are essential to make sure that people keep questioning everything.&lt;p&gt;Fake news is like a vaccine which protects us against a zombie apocalypse. Most news cannot be scientifically proven to be true; so it doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense that we should all believe it just because it&amp;#x27;s popular. Popular news sources are more likely to be true but they are also a lot more dangerous if they&amp;#x27;re not. Given enough time, these big news sources will be corrupted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adventured</author><text>&amp;gt; Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations.&lt;p&gt;That depends on the publisher. Subscription revenue is now 2&amp;#x2F;3 of the NY Times business as one major example. There are few larger news publishers in the US than the NY Times. As recently as 2005, 2&amp;#x2F;3 of their revenue came from advertising. That ratio has inverted. The NYT subscribers are on average 30x to 40x more lucrative than the ad-only readers.&lt;p&gt;The Wall Street Journal has been able to accomplish a similar, gradual build-out of their online subscription business. The Washington Post is pursuing the same model and will likely reach a similar balance on revenue over time.&lt;p&gt;A good subscription business will always beat a good ad business, unless you&amp;#x27;re Google or Facebook (in which case their hyperscale enables them to monetize drastically more users than they could with subscriptions).&lt;p&gt;No coincidence the NY Times has rebuilt their business and their stock is approaching ~15 year highs. Meanwhile, ad businesses like BuzzFeed are in collapse mode (BuzzFeed&amp;#x27;s ad-based ARPU is less than 1% of what the NY Times derives from its subscribers).</text></comment>