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Thursday, December 10, 2020

YouText

Paging through the news this morning, I came across an article about Bari Weiss on ZeroHedge where I found this:
Weiss notably quit the Times - leaving behind a scorching resignation letter denouncing the paper as nothing more than an echo chamber of 'woke' activists masquerading as journalists who believe dissent has no place on the platform.

The New York Times used to be the standard by which all others were judged. Now it seems to have become the highly partisan mouthpiece of the Democratic party. I was sure it was because it was sold and new owner had their own political views and so the transformation was driven from the top down.

A little reading and a little arithmetic (of 2 + 2 variety) tells me something else.

Let's start with Bari Weiss and her 'scorching resignation letter'. From the introductory paragraph:

I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.

She then goes on paint a picture of her experience there and it's not pretty. 

But it makes you wonder who is driving the culture there, so I look at who is in charge and I find 

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger was in charge (and still is). He is the A. G. that Bari addressed her letter to. From the Wikipedia article about him we have this line:

Sulzberger has been the principal architect of the news outlet's digital transformation and has led its efforts to become a subscriber-first business.

A subscriber-first business? What the heck is that? Is that even a real thing? Um, yes, no, maybe so. Many products are sold on a subscription basis, newspapers, magazines, music, movies, and business software to name a few. It is a well established model and for some products can be very successful.

I suspect that a subscriber-first business more carefully tailors their product to their customer base. The transformation of the newspaper business from print to digital has been devastating. The New York Times, like all newspapers, was desperate for revenue, so they started pushing digital subscriptions, and somewhere along in there is where the problem started. They got the idea of catering to their customers, which led to finding out what the customers wanted, and what their customers wanted were articles promoting the Democrats and vilifying the Republicans.

What we need is a subscription service like YouTube Premium except it would be for written words instead of video. Anyone would be able to post something. At the end of the month YouText would add up the number of views of all the posted articles and divy up the revenue proportionally. Whether anyone would be able to make a living off of this would depend on how many current news services could be induced to sign on with this new service, and how many subscriptions you could sell. 

More importantly the subscriptions would pay for the hosting fees. Blogger is free and that makes me a little nervous. What it they decide to abandon it, or start charging?


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