Dear news publications - if you aren't willing to accept an independent record of what you published, I can't accept your news. It's a critical piece of the framework that keeps you honest. I don't care if you allow AI scraping either way, but you have to facilitate archival of your content - independently, not under your own control.
How is the publisher supposed to fund their operations let along make a profit. How about a 1 year lock on the archive pages. There are many ways of keeping that record but not taking views undermining the business model
> How is the publisher supposed to fund their operations let along make a profit.
There used to be plenty newspapers sponsored by wealthy industrialists; the latter would cover the former's gaps between the costs and the sales, the former would regularly push the latter's political agenda.
The "objective journalism" is really quite a late invention IIRC, about the times of WW2.
"To give the news impartially, without fear or favor." — Adolph Ochs, 1858-1935
Objectivity is the default state of honest storytelling. If I ask what happened ? and somebody only tells the parts that suit an agenda, they have not informed me. The partisan press exists, because someone has a motive to deviate from the natural expectation of fair story telling and story recounting.
> Objectivity is the default state of honest storytelling. If I ask what happened ? and somebody only tells the parts that suit an agenda, they have not informed me.
Already at the level of what stories are covered you have made choices about what's important or not.
Your newspaper not covering your neighbors lawsuit against the city against some issue because they find it to be "not important" is already a viewpoint-based choice
A newspaper presenting both sides on an issue (already simplifying on the "there are two sides to an issue" thing) is one thing. Do you also have to present expert commentary that says that one side is actually just entirely in bad faith? Do you write a story and then conclude "actually this doesn't matter" when that is the case?
There are plenty of descriptions that some people would describe as fair story telling and others would describe as a hit piece. Probably for any article on any controversial topic written in good faith you are likely able to find some people who would claim it's not.
I think it's important to acknowledge that even good faith journalism is filled with subjectivity. That doesn't mean one gives up, you just have to take into account the position of the people presenting information and roll with that.
You make it sound like bias is completely relative and undecidable. But there is a clear line journalists can cross - if they're intentionally misleading their reader, that's bias. It's qualitatively different from neglecting to cover a story or not finding a suitable expert or whatever. It's intentional deception because they want the readers to have wrong knowledge. And they do it all the time.
It's a great question, but they didn't seem to have a problem with this before AI, so I have to assume that the presence of a free available copy wasn't really impacting their revenue.
If an independent press is critical to open societies, perhaps some sort of citizen directed funding is needed to maintain independence from both capital and government?
Maybe it would be better if these news operations had to find better ways to sustain themselves than the current paradigms. Also, the internet archive is not the only archive, and there will be more. This ins't something they can really stop.
There's no kind way to interpret "They're pushing agendas, and not hiding it; rather, flaunting it." that isn't deeply hateful of news orgs a whole. Additionally this talk is almost always followed by "I therefore just allow myself to passively hear news through others (which have no biases)" or "I only get my news from hitlers-strongest-soldiers.com" or similar "unbiased" news sources (or maybe just "youtube"/"tiktok"). Deeply conspiratorial thinking and anti-intellectual to think literally everyone is out to get you. I don't think I'm smarter than everyone (which is why I rely on other people to give me the news), but I am at least smarter than this person.
Persinally i think people harp on news bias too much.
I think the real problem is that they often dont put events in context, which leads people to misunderstand them. They report the what not the why, but most events don't just happen one day, they are shaped by years or even decades of historical context. If you just understand the literal event without the background context, i dont think you are really informed.
What I'm talking about is that the news tries to tell you what to think. You can read headlines on Google News about the same story, and see the bias of the publication in the headline pretty often.
Instead of reporting just the facts, they include opinions, inflammatory language, etc.
Reuters writes in a relatively neutral tone, as an example. Fox News doesn't, and CNN doesn't, as examples of the opposite.
If you don't notice, I doubt you're reading the news. It's part of the offering. Fox does it on purpose, not accidentally.
Newspapers in my country always were blogs before the internet existed. Its why they are still around and doing quite well- they don't just bring news.
I consider almost all news to be entertainment unless I need its perspective to make a decision (which is almost never). It is a lot safer to remain uninformed on a subject as it settles than to constantly attempt to be informed.
Information bias is unfortunately one of the sicknesses of our age, and it is one of the cultural ills that flows from tech outward. Information is only pertinent in its capacity to inform action, otherwise it is noise. To adapt a Beck-ism: You aren't gonna need it.
I'm not sure what microfilm has got to do with this. Plenty of national libraries have extensive digital collections of various artifacts - books and even websites. Check out the National Library of Australia as an example: https://www.library.gov.au/discover/what-we-collect/archived...
As a news publisher (RedBankGreen.com) I’ll tell you that pretty much nobody is in it for the money anymore, at least at the local level.
It’s passion and love of the community, despite the many struggles and drawbacks.
AI bots scrape our content and that drastically reduces the number of people who make it to our site.
That impacts our ability to bring on subscribers and especially advertisers - Google and Meta own local advertising and AI kills the relatively tiny audience we have.
I dread the day that it happens in realtime - hear sirens? Ask AI who already scraped us.
Absolutely don't, and I've argued since day 1 that by refusing to try to contract for training before they just ripped it, each and every one of them should be saddled with so much legal liability as to not exist. The capitalist overlords however, will grasp at anything that promises them of being free of dealing with labor...so... Here we are.
I think the question of is a business allowed to have something free only for humans (presumably with advertising) does not have a clear best answer - politicians can decide.
News has a business model: do actual journalism. I don't see much reason to fund the people who are giving me the same story as everyone else who received the same press release, with no additional details: I might as well subscribe to the press releases.
I have seen zero evidence that independent archives “keep news media honest”. In fact, I have on several occasions noticed news media directly contradicting their own stance from just a few years prior, with no mention of the previously published account at all. This is true even for highly respected newspapers of record.
I can indeed find clear records of that in the archives. But what do I do with them? How do I use that evidence to hold news media to account? This is meaningless moral posturing.
Contact the journalist of the new article with the contradicting article? Letters to the editor? Submit an opinion article?
I've contacted multiple journalists over the years about errors in their articles and I've generally found them responsive and thankful.
Sometimes it's not even their fault. One time a journalist told me the incorrect information was unknowingly added by an editor.
I get that it's popular on HN and the internet to bash news media, and that there are a lot of legitimate issues with the media, but my personal experience is that journalists do actually want to do a good job and respond accordingly when you engage them (in a non-antagonistic manner).
The incidents I’m referring to aren’t “errors” though.
If a major article claims that certain groups don’t exist, while the same newspaper published a detailed report about those exact groups and how dangerous they are just two years earlier, it’s not because the journalist wasn’t able to do a 10-second Google search where their own paper’s article would have been among the top results.
> But what do I do with them? How do I use that evidence to hold news media to account?
Contact their rivals with the story, have them write a hit piece. "Other newspaper is telling porkies: here's the proof!" is an excellent story: not one I'd expect a journalist to have time to discover, but certainly one I'd expect them to be able to follow up on, once they've received a tip.
That’s not how publishing works. News outlets (especially those of roughly similar political leaning) very rarely call out each other’s misconduct. In fact, they often seem to operate as a quasi-conglomerate rather than competitors.
If they're not doing real journalism, why are you paying any attention to them? There are hundreds of small journalism groups who will call each other out just as easily as collaborate, who care primarily for truth and secondarily for putting food on the table (and therefore rarely have anything to call out). Many of their journalists have quit (or been fired from) the big news organisations, or would have been snapped up 50 years ago but are presently unhireable.
For the record, I'm talking about actual journalism groups, not Substack blogs. Here's one (largely US-centric) list, a ≈dozen links long: https://hcommons.social/@zeblarson/115488066909889058. You almost certainly have local journalists who need your support, which obviously I cannot list here.
The second thing that came to mind was paywall evasion. Any time a news article behind a paywall gets posted here, someone in the comments has the archive link ready to go, because of course they do.
The incentives for online news are really wacky just to begin with. A coin at the convenience store for the whole dang paper used to be the simplest thing in the world.
> Limit internet archive for articles that are less than a week old.
I mean this as a side note rather than a counterargument (because people learn to take screenshots, and because what can you do about particularly bad faith news orgs?): Immediate archival can capture silent changes (and misleadingly announced changes). A headline might change to better fit the article body. An editor's note might admit a mistakenly attributed quote.
Or a news org might pull a Fox News [1][2] by rewriting both the headline and article body to cover up a mistake that unravels the original article's reason for existing: The original headline was "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown". The headline was changed to "AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral". An editor's note was added [3][4]: "This article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that. This has been corrected." I think Fox News deleted the article.
I don't see the connection to adding the delay. I think the suggestion was to have a snapshot at time of publication but wait a week to make it public.
