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In the context of the article, they're talking about the fact that news outlets aren't getting enough ad revenue to sustain themselves, and people don't really buy classifieds in papers anymore.
I feel like ads got worse over time to the point that one can barely fathom visiting a news media site without an adblocker.
This could be a good thing in that it could potentially help democratize journalism, taking it out of the hands of billionaires. Conversely, it could make harmful conspiracy theories more widespread.
Most likely, it would be a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
Also, why the hell is this downvoted? Am I missing something?
Even with an ad blocker, news sites are so full of garbage that you need to scroll past or close.
I have that about:config setting in Firefox that makes videos only play if you manually click them. Many news sites refuse to display the video at all with this setting.
Another thing they do that makes them unusable for me and anyone else with impaired vision is they aggressively disable the "force pinch to zoom" accessibility setting that browsers have. ABC News does this, for example. I actually did file an ADA report about this, but it was rejected, even though it's a clear violation of the federal ADA guidelines. Worthless corporations protected by worthless government agencies that only exist to protect the rich.
To make a long story short, I have no qualms about not giving these sites my money. Let them burn.
I did not down-vote this OP or any comment here, but since you asked, here are some thoughts that might help.
Or even with one. Giant half-page banners pop up at you - from the top, from the bottom, from either side, from the middle (LOOK OUT, IT'S BEHIND YOU!!!:-P).
And don't even get me started on the unskippable videos, even when you go to GREAT lengths to make your browser not auto-play things by default. Okay so in fairness, I may have later turned it off b/c I wanted youtube videos to auto-advance:-P. If I really wanted to read a bunch of news articles, I would set up a browser dedicated solely to doing so. CONSENT SHOULD MATTER, but "news" sources are hands-down the worst offenders for me whenever I visit them on the internet. Fuck, even piracy websites don't have the sheer blatant offensiveness of news media sites.:-(
And it still does all that even for gift articles! i.e. even if you pay money, you still have to swat away the ads for "would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?", "what about this partner's newsletter though?", "oh and what about this other partner's newsletter?". They're just fuckin terrible:-(.
Separately, I think Lemmy.World trends towards a younger audience, and let's be honest here: this article while it may be entirely well-meaning, isn't "news", being about 10 years if not multiple decades behind the times. Combined, what that means is that for one, many people today know of literally no other world than the one that we are now in - during their entire adult and even teen lives this is simply the way that it's "always been". And two, "news" isn't dying - a large fraction of it died at least a decade ago - and what is "dying" now is the bloated remains of their corpses.
It's hard to feel sympathy then, yes, when the sites that ignore everyone else's consent, now also says that they want moar moonay from the whole affair. I mean, their owners are already billionaires and trillionaires - e.g. the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who bought them all out - but now, somehow it's OUR faults that they are dying, b/c what... we don't watch enough ads?! That has more than the tiniest sense of an abusive person vibes - "look what you made me do!"
I could go on and on... and so okay, I will, at least for one more: I learn more from watching just ONE video, from the likes of John Olivier, or Kurzgesagt, or Crash Course, or some source like that, than I can get from a 12-hour documentary on a traditional television channel such as baby boomers watch (those seem geared more for entertainment, and spread their non-information out very slowly along with music in the background, seemingly more to facilitate people sitting down to watch them than to actually inform anyone of anything). True, there are always exceptions - here's one (damn, I was going to give you a link to an 8-hour documentary from 11 years in the past, that has been free most of that time, except now it is marked "subscription only" on Plex, unless you watch it on YouTube - hence arguably making my point all the more strongly?) - but in general the trend has been that real sources of information have already moved away from those billionaire-bought enterprises that are now trying to blame us, the audience, for not watching them enough, rather than LISTENING to what people WANT. TLDR for this part: news media did not go away, it just changed its format - case in point: Jon Stewart.