<story><title>Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook</title><url>https://www.axios.com/1-local-newspapers-lawsuits-facebook-google-3c3dee3a-cce3-49ef-b0a2-7a98c2e15c91.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jccalhoun</author><text>I have long said the problem with paying for news is that it is rarely worth paying for. When I was in grad school there was a program that gave us &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; copies of the NYTimes and USA Today (I&amp;#x27;m sure part of our tuition paid for it but all we had to do was swipe our student id to open the newspaper box). I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>threatofrain</author><text>1. News isn&amp;#x27;t worth paying for when the race-to-the-bottom has already occurred. How do you persuade people to buy things which are basically free and can be viewed even without ads?&lt;p&gt;2. For many events, it&amp;#x27;s not the writing I care about but the &lt;i&gt;information&lt;/i&gt;. IMO Google realizes the difference and bets on information over writing, whereas NYT still wants to sell writing. All publications which are trying to stop Google from scraping their information are basically insisting that their copyrightable storytelling is being ruined by Google&amp;#x27;s information extraction.&lt;p&gt;3. For &lt;i&gt;general&lt;/i&gt; news, I often don&amp;#x27;t know what I want to know. This is where news aggregation is way better than individual outlets, at least most of the time, with exceptions going to specific domains like food or games. If WION gets the exclusive interview, then WION is where I want to go and everyone else is just re-reporting. News aggregation also allows you to take in a sense of inter-rater reliability on a per-story level. But this is all playing into Google&amp;#x27;s strengths.&lt;p&gt;Given this, I don&amp;#x27;t understand people saying this or that outlet sucks; for example, does Buzzfeed News suck? Just the name alone makes it sound like celebrity news gossip. But then once and awhile Buzzfeed News gets an exclusive interview (such as on Palantir matters), and guess what, I want them to show up on my aggregators.</text></comment>
<story><title>Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook</title><url>https://www.axios.com/1-local-newspapers-lawsuits-facebook-google-3c3dee3a-cce3-49ef-b0a2-7a98c2e15c91.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jccalhoun</author><text>I have long said the problem with paying for news is that it is rarely worth paying for. When I was in grad school there was a program that gave us &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; copies of the NYTimes and USA Today (I&amp;#x27;m sure part of our tuition paid for it but all we had to do was swipe our student id to open the newspaper box). I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperducer</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I would get them every day and there were rarely more than one story in them that I would actually read.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the problem wasn&amp;#x27;t the paper.&lt;p&gt;The New York Times&amp;#x27; target audience isn&amp;#x27;t grad students.  I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s all that surprising that you weren&amp;#x27;t all that interested in it.&lt;p&gt;As we get older, we change.  We learn more.  We become interested in more things.  Depending on how long it&amp;#x27;s been since grad school, you may be interested in what&amp;#x27;s in the Times now.&lt;p&gt;I know that I don&amp;#x27;t like the same thing I did back in grad school.  I certainly know that I&amp;#x27;m interested in more things than I was then.&lt;p&gt;When I was in grad school, I couldn&amp;#x27;t stand the taste of tapioca.  Now, I love it.</text></comment>