{"id":205,"date":"2015-01-16T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T20:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/?p=205"},"modified":"2015-01-15T23:57:18","modified_gmt":"2015-01-16T07:57:18","slug":"the-fucking-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/2015\/01\/the-fucking-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The fucking news"},"content":{"rendered":"
I finally finished the last episodes of The Newsroom<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0recently, and it\u00c2\u00a0got me thinking and worrying about the future of journalism. I know a lot of old guard organizations that did great work are dying a slow death into irrelevance, and that’s sad. I see hope in a lot of new organizations popping up doing great journalism in a digital age (Vice and Salon come to mind), but I can’t help but feel like we’re still seeing a net loss. Although new tools make the barrier to getting into doing journalism\u00c2\u00a0a lot smaller, we are losing the quality of journalism that comes from great big organizations with a lot of resources to do great news for us.\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
But man, for an industry that needs all the money it can get, I am amazed at the sheer awfulness of the news products these companies are putting out. The experience is so user-hostile.<\/div>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
    \n
  • I don’t want to have to visit your web site and check the news from there every day; I want to aggregate it.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want to need to use\u00c2\u00a0your mobile app to read the news.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want your article pages to be magazine-like with painstaking layouts and typography. Good writing suits me just fine. If you do want do do those things, keep the design clean.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want my news pages littered with ads. In fact, I don’t want any ads at all.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want articles cluttered with links to other things I “might be interested in,” half of which are actually ads posing as real content,\u00c2\u00a0and many of which have carefully constructed clickbait titles. And i sure as hell don’t want these links inserted into the article content.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want to make comments on your site or participate\u00c2\u00a0in any\u00c2\u00a0sort of community with the other readers, and the only people who seem to aren’t exactly generating positive discourse.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want the articles I’m reading to be paginated. I know how to scroll.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want a toolbar at the bottom with a call to action for me to share that thing\u00c2\u00a0to a bunch of social networks.\u00c2\u00a0If I want to share the article, I know how to copy a link.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want to\u00c2\u00a0pay over $100\/year to support the site. News companies are pricing these as though I get all my news from one source, when I’m reading from dozens of sources in a given week.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want to see user generated content on my news site. There are other sites where I look at user generated content, like Twitter, or Instagram, or Vine, or YouTube, or Facebook, or one of the dozens of other places.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want to read articles that managed somehow to extract four paragraphs of filler from a single tweet. I’d rather just look at the tweet.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want my news site to have a social presence, trying to push things to me to read there.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want my news site to be incentivized to get me to click on their articles.<\/li>\n
  • I don’t want a video at the top of the\u00c2\u00a0articles I’m reading, and I sure as hell don’t want it to auto-play.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    \u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
    I want:<\/div>\n
      \n
    • Well-written articles that are rigorously fact-checked and well contextualized<\/li>\n
    • \n
        \n
      • Bonus points if you happened to capture some photos of the event. If you didn’t, that’s okay, you don’t need to show me a stock photo of something related to it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
      • A full-article RSS feed\u00c2\u00a0that lets me do all my reading from my RSS reader.<\/li>\n
      • A way to\u00c2\u00a0easily pay you a fair price for the above two things, and ensure that you’re beholden to me, and not your parent company, not advertisers, not some bullshit KPIs somebody wants you to hit.\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n
      • the ability to share links to nice clean versions of articles with my friends and followers<\/li>\n
      • The news org to be independent from corporate owners. If I’m paying you, I want you working for me.<\/li>\n
      • For news like this to be available to me at the local, regional, national, and international levels\u00c2\u00a0(and I don’t mind paying separately for each)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
        \u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        In short, I want to read the fucking news.<\/div>\n
        \u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        Sometimes i like to listen to the news, and I think podcasts (which, like Dan Benjamin, I like to just refer to as internet radio)\u00c2\u00a0are the future of audio news updates.\u00c2\u00a0I also like weekly shows like Last Week Tonight<\/em> (which admittedly pushes the limits of being able to call itself a legitimate news show but they’re doing good work). And I’m willing to pay more for podcasts and video formatted news\u00c2\u00a0shows. But\u00c2\u00a0ultimately the core\u00c2\u00a0experience I demand as a news consumer is to read the news.\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        \u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        That’s really all I want. I’m happy to pay something like $50 a year from multiple organizations\u00c2\u00a0for news like this. And this format doesn’t have to be just for news news. I would love to see The Onion<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0offer something like this (especially The Onion;<\/em> their sponsored content is getting obnoxious). Ars Technica Premier offers something very much like this.\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        \u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        Being able to pay $50 a year for news is a privilege, though, and I agree that those who can’t spend that kind of money should still have access to the news. I can’t name a specific model for non-paying users that would be successful. Maybe free users would see tasteful, non-obtrusive banner ads (though I really hate the idea of a reader’s eyeballs being treated as currency), and the free RSS feed would not have full articles.\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        \u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
        Maybe I’m just an old geezer who\u00c2\u00a0is still clinging onto RSS, but it truly is the best tool for those who want to keep up with news from many sources. RSS respects you as a reader. It puts you in\u00c2\u00a0control of what you see. It\u00c2\u00a0doesn’t let you be tracked with cookies. It\u00c2\u00a0is super flexible.\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        I finally finished the last episodes of The Newsroom\u00c2\u00a0recently, and it\u00c2\u00a0got me thinking and worrying about the future of journalism. I know a lot of old guard organizations that did great work are dying a slow death into irrelevance, and that’s sad. I see hope in a lot of new organizations popping up doing great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-rant"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}