<story><title>I Have Resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/i-have-resigned-from-the-google-amp-advisory-committee/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&amp;gt; In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise.&lt;p&gt;Investigative journalism is 1 or 2% of the budget of most media companies. Saying that running a media company is expensive because of investigative journalism is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.</text></item><item><author>nr2x</author><text>I think what the &amp;quot;legacy&amp;quot; news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting.  I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think &amp;quot;the media&amp;quot; is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive &amp;quot;an agenda&amp;quot;.  In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise.  Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees.&lt;p&gt;Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc.  Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, &amp;quot;information wants to be free&amp;quot;.  I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive.  So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).</text></item><item><author>notjustanymike</author><text>Years ago I worked as a frontend dev for Newsweek &amp;amp; The Daily Beast and saw the other side of this. It boiled down to money, brand, advertising and engagement.&lt;p&gt;Wrapping the content in an iframe allowed the host to monetize our content by decorating it with ads. This would dillute the CTR on our ads, resulting in less money. Big sites enter into contracts with major brands for full page advertisements, which could include contractual requirements that theirs is the only ad on the page. Serving and decorating a site would create headaches for us to explain why their ads weren&amp;#x27;t alone.&lt;p&gt;The iframe also reduced engagement as reader would only read the embedded article and move on. An actual visitor of the site had a far higher likelihood to navigate to other pages. Higher engagement resulted in more money and some brand loyalty. This also dramatically hurt sharing as the browser URL wasn&amp;#x27;t ours, but the hosts (which I also hate about AMP).&lt;p&gt;Your site messed with a lot of the ways their business generated revenue, in an industry that was already struggling to adapt to &amp;quot;the internet&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>zupreme</author><text>Years ago I made a news aggregator site which involved dynamically digesting rss feeds and then generating an iframe display of the target story alongside related stories from other sites.&lt;p&gt;The site caught on in certain circles and pageviews skyrocketed within a few months. I was not the only person pursuing this strategy at the time.&lt;p&gt;Before a year had gone by, almost all the major news sites had updated their pages with JavaScript intended to either block iframing altogether, or to “break out” of the iframe, redirecting the viewer to their actual page. We even got a few nasty letters and emails about it with terms like “litigation” casually thrown in.&lt;p&gt;The project became untenable because of this and I shut it down.&lt;p&gt;Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing - but on a much larger scale....</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rndgermandude</author><text>Sadly this. A lot of the &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; media companies saw the &amp;quot;success&amp;quot; of free online content, be it digital-only-ad-based publishers, be it social media, and started to mimic that, and in the process not only desperately pivoted into a market that in fact isn&amp;#x27;t as successful as they thought but also burnt a lot of their reputation in the process.&lt;p&gt;Right now it seems back to paid models for a lot, but I wonder if it&amp;#x27;s too late now with all the damaged reputation and the shift in consumer expectation (that they help create) that news and journalism should be free. I&amp;#x27;d guess for a lot of those newspapers and magazines it will be too late, while a few will survive the onslaught and be able to concentrate the willing-to-pay consumers.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Have Resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/i-have-resigned-from-the-google-amp-advisory-committee/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&amp;gt; In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise.&lt;p&gt;Investigative journalism is 1 or 2% of the budget of most media companies. Saying that running a media company is expensive because of investigative journalism is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.</text></item><item><author>nr2x</author><text>I think what the &amp;quot;legacy&amp;quot; news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting.  I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think &amp;quot;the media&amp;quot; is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive &amp;quot;an agenda&amp;quot;.  In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise.  Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees.&lt;p&gt;Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc.  Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, &amp;quot;information wants to be free&amp;quot;.  I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive.  So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).</text></item><item><author>notjustanymike</author><text>Years ago I worked as a frontend dev for Newsweek &amp;amp; The Daily Beast and saw the other side of this. It boiled down to money, brand, advertising and engagement.&lt;p&gt;Wrapping the content in an iframe allowed the host to monetize our content by decorating it with ads. This would dillute the CTR on our ads, resulting in less money. Big sites enter into contracts with major brands for full page advertisements, which could include contractual requirements that theirs is the only ad on the page. Serving and decorating a site would create headaches for us to explain why their ads weren&amp;#x27;t alone.&lt;p&gt;The iframe also reduced engagement as reader would only read the embedded article and move on. An actual visitor of the site had a far higher likelihood to navigate to other pages. Higher engagement resulted in more money and some brand loyalty. This also dramatically hurt sharing as the browser URL wasn&amp;#x27;t ours, but the hosts (which I also hate about AMP).&lt;p&gt;Your site messed with a lot of the ways their business generated revenue, in an industry that was already struggling to adapt to &amp;quot;the internet&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>zupreme</author><text>Years ago I made a news aggregator site which involved dynamically digesting rss feeds and then generating an iframe display of the target story alongside related stories from other sites.&lt;p&gt;The site caught on in certain circles and pageviews skyrocketed within a few months. I was not the only person pursuing this strategy at the time.&lt;p&gt;Before a year had gone by, almost all the major news sites had updated their pages with JavaScript intended to either block iframing altogether, or to “break out” of the iframe, redirecting the viewer to their actual page. We even got a few nasty letters and emails about it with terms like “litigation” casually thrown in.&lt;p&gt;The project became untenable because of this and I shut it down.&lt;p&gt;Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing - but on a much larger scale....</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whatshisface</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A more apt analogy would be that it was like saying Google was expensive to run because of theoretical CS basic research.</text></comment>