I wonder a lot about news websites being chock full of sludge ads. Because I think we assume the process went like this:

• Print/TV news org is doing fine financially in the 90s
• In the late 2000s, print begins to decline and consumers demand online access, which they won't pay for
• News org adds awful ads everywhere to get by
• They begin making their material worse and worse as they learn what kind of pandering gets people to click; It's no longer an option to make good news, because content is less important than being eye catching

But I have always wondered if the reality is far more banal and less human:

• Print/TV news org is doing fine financially in the 90s
• People in charge learn about web ads; decide to make a website solely so they can get extra free money for content they were already making
• This succeeds, so they immediately begin trying to find ways to create bait (content) for less, since the actual product is now the viewers, not the news

This is part of my overarching theory that if something is free, it will be popular simply because there is no opportunity cost, and this is what drives an awful lot of terrible decisions at businesses - they will do anything if it's free, and it doesn't matter if it's a good idea; but if that thing costs any non-negligible amount they won't even consider it.

My favorite example is mail merges - your bank would not send you a physical piece of mail every single week telling you about some minor account feature, It would be absurd, but they'll do it via email because it's quote unquote free.

And if someone had to hand-print every single advertisement, they wouldn't send you credit card offers at all. It's not that they would budget less for those things, or do them at longer intervals, they just wouldn't do them at all if there was any associated cost whatever.

The invention of the mail merge and of mass printing and mass mailing created the business "need" to do these things. They're not intrinsic, obvious practices, and I imagine for every 50,000 emails, they get maybe one curious sniff, and fewer bites. But it's "free", so why not irritate their entire customer base despite the strategy being incredibly ineffective?

This shit was invented opportunistically, and that's why every time a new technology appears, my first thought is "what obnoxious idea will this put in the brains of businessmen that they never would have had otherwise?"

tl;dr: The newspaper business isn't merely sick, it's a murder victim.

To start, here's quantitative data from Pew Research on the decline of the news business.

It's important to note upfront that print didn't just decline because people moved online; it was sent into a death spiral to make more short-term money. Many still-profitable newspapers were purchased by corporate raiders who loaded them up with debt, cut staff, and increased prices, causing subscribers to flee, causing revenue to drop, causing the cycle to repeat. Other newspapers that were treading water weren't given a chance to rebuild. See: Alden Global Capital and Lee Enterprises among others.

Beyond that intentional corporate agenda:

The whole economic model of the web is premised on getting views and selling ads (often ads for yet other websites). You used to buy a dictionary; now you can Google a definition and they make it up on ad revenue. You used to pay newspapers to place classified ads; now Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are free and make it up on other ad revenue. No one's ever figured out a good micropayments technology because ads were easier and credit card fees are prohibitive, so you can't just toss a nickel at each website you want to use.

Social media sites made it especially easy to share news articles from distant lands, but if you live somewhere in West Dakota, it doesn't make sense to buy a whole subscription to the Peoria Picayune just to read one article, so the Picayune has to hope they get a lot of ad revenue when the article about the miracle talking Christmas tree goes viral. However, the same phenomenon has driven more traffic and revenue to newspapers that provide broad national coverage like the Washington Post and New York Times, who are doing pretty good. (Accordingly, many local newspapers have wisely decided to devote more space to their original local coverage and less space to reprinting news from national wire services.)

Another wrinkle: Online ads suddenly seemed more valuable than print ads (or TV, radio, billboards) because you can quantify them. You can measure impressions, clickthroughs, and sales conversions automatically, compared to having to manually ask "How did you hear about our business?". Unfortunately, much of the online ad business is outright fraud, so the numbers don't mean as much as people think they do. Print ads still collapsed in value.

One more piece of social media fuckery: If you ever heard about Facebook's "pivot to video" (prioritizing video content because that's where consumers were supposedly headed), you should know that they made their engagement numbers up. Newsrooms reprioritized staff toward video content but got negligible views. When I saw how many websites were automatically playing videos I didn't want and either ignored or immediately closed, I figured something was fishy there.

And finally, there's no simple excuse for this, but a lot of news websites just have godawful design. Don't worry, the people on the inside know it, too. Some newspapers have had 200 years to figure out the best print layout; the web is a whole different medium, and they have a lot of information to figure out how to organize effectively.

The concrete outcome of all of these factors is that thousands of newspapers have closed and fewer than half as many people work in newsrooms now compared to 2004. There just aren't enough people to do in-depth research, attend school board meetings, etc., but we're just as hungry for Content as ever, so you get more puff pieces and rebranded press releases, junk content that's meant to go viral, and pyramid-scheme chumbox ads at top and bottom. Oh, and complete bullshit factories like Breitbart who feel no obligation toward facts or research in the first place, because all they need is engagement -> ad revenue.

After all of this, the good news is that civic organizations, philanthropists, and concerned citizens are trying to recreate sustainable local journalism, usually on a nonprofit basis. Examples close to my heart: States Newsroom founded the Minnesota Reformer, which provided invaluable coverage during the George Floyd uprising. The Nebraska Journalism Trust founded the Flatwater Free Press, which has been covering unhealthy drinking water caused by agricultural runoff. Both of these news outlets, uncoincidentally, employ a lot of talented people who used to work for their local daily newspapers but were either laid off or felt no choice but to leave. I can assure you that everyone who's left in this business is there because they care deeply about making a positive impact on the world; it sure isn't for the money, easy hours, or lack of stress and abuse.