A whole class of site is on the chopping block as ad revenue and clicks dry up. For actual journalism worth paying for increasingly paywalls are popping up to compensate for these factors.
Us: "Here Google, I've done your bidding to earn higher placement in your search engine"
Google: "Thanks for all the data, idiot. Now we'll show it on our site and claim it as ours"
Our organic traffic is WAY down despite nonstop kowtowing to their demands.
I don't understand this viewpoint at all. I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it. A whole lot of people seem to be hallucinating this past moment in history when news was strictly factual information, delivered with no editorializing, from people who had no opinions or ideas, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. Walter Cronkite would frequently editorialize about events he was reporting. All the major historical men and women of news would, that's... the point, you're not just tuning in to know what happened today, you're tuning in to experience those events through the eyes of someone you've at least got some vague trust relationship with.
And I categorically reject any notion that it's better to get a summary via AI. I can clock articles written with heavy AI use and I dislike their monotone and... well, inhuman writing style. Frequently, especially as of late, current events need the touch of an empathetic human with their own ideas.
If you require your news filtered through a bias-remover, IMO you just lack media literacy. I can read something from someone I disagree with on basically everything and still get the facts out of it. Frankly: skill issue.
I miss suck.com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com
Suck.com Net.Moguls Internet Mogul Trading Cards:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...
Rick Adams, Front:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115113im_/http://www.suc...
Rick Adams, Back:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143444im_/http://www.suc...
And the hard hitting funny-because-its-true parody from fuckedcompany.com.
Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.
(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)
Classic Dot-Com Era Fucked Company Brock Pierce DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) Documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41Ttr73TqU
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
>I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT creepy MAGA Bannon Epstein good buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s
Brock Pierce's Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Went Deeper Than Anyone Knew:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/brock-pierces-relationsh...
Fucked Company:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
>Sorry.
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164342/https://wayback.a...
Then they went from sorta fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...
To fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210219012551/https://www.polit...
https://www.salon.com/1998/10/30/feature1_6/
Very, very different from what you'd expect from Salon in the later years.
I archived it, because the OP didn't really make it clear if salon.com is going offline or not: https://archive.is/PesDo
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.
Guess that didn't work out. I enjoyed reading their creative journalism before they went all the way in on dogmatic politics.
So yes, people lack media literacy. Billions of people currently online are experiencing their first generation of exposure to the what the world of news and other media has to offer in any real sense. Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.
It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.
That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).
Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.
Then a customer like me who is literally at the checkout trying to give them money isn't allowed to.
And they're selling digital goods - pixels are free, a non-paying customer doesn't cost them anything!
vr46•53m ago
Animats•37m ago
That why Salon is disappearing. I used to read it, and I thought it disappeared around the time Brill's Content and The Standard went under.
I haven't seen Salon in a Google search result in years.