Thursday 13 June 2019

When the News is the News

The Reuters Institute went out and asked a bunch of questions, and eventually came to this shocking result.....over the past couple of years, in general.....people don't want to pay for online news.  They aren't subscribing for services or newspapers, or 'special content'.

Naturally, you'd then ask....if you have some news group (TV, internet, or whatever) which doesn't get much revenue collected except for 'click-bait' or some special billionaire throwing money into the pit....how would you survive?  The answer?  You won't survive.

There is this problem brewing and you could feel it almost twenty years ago....too many groups pretending to be news organizations, and the news just doesn't have content or value. 

It's like asking the question about sports and sports-related news.  Can you dig eighty-eight different stories (of value) out of the Atlanta Braves for the month of May, from sixteen different news sources?  Answer?  No.  So you end up with five stories over some rookie which all basically say the same thing.  Or you get three interviews with the Manager which seem to be all the same content.  If you went back to 1975, there might have been a day-to-day assessment of games, but you might have only seen a total of five stories over an entire month on the Braves.

The same thing is happening with the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, the NCAA football crowd, and various sports.

If you go looking for Nancy Pelosi stories for May, there's probably a total of ninety stories out there, and maybe four have some general value.  The rest are.....'Nancy said' stories. 

Have we come to the end of the news being worth reading or listening to?  Not quiet yet, but I'd suggest various news groups are financially coming to a point where the big-money is gone, and million-dollar deals are going to happen at a lesser pace in the future for journalists.  People are going to start going back to landscaping work, painting their fence posts, fishing, and hobby-time. 

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