[1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Hopefully the addition of a paywall does not skew things.
why does google allow this? as you say it is 100% cloaking to have the entire article indexed but not present it in the subsequent page.
Sure, publishers feel they need paywalls for revenue purposes; have at it. That should not absolve them from the "rules" everyone else has to follow.
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected. [0]
[0] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
The news articles are free for a few days. After that, access to older articles require premium subscription. This generates eyeballs and ads revenue for the site especially for hot news.
They also generate the premium quarterly industrial reports which are very informative and marketing, product folks of certain industrial love to pay for them.https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion
Just like every other high quality news source.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50637200
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participat...
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
NY Times has been in operation for 170 years and has made a few mistakes. There is just no comparison. They are best news source in the country bar none.
It's perfectly possible to provide facts in a highly opinionated way. The world we live in is a messy smear of mostly-contradictory evidence [1], so media can influence perceptions enormously by being selective in its reporting of that evidence.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAy7jujW4AAHhuu?format=png&name=...
People are drowning in accounts (well over 100/person in a 2015 survey[1]) and subscription services. Offerings are fragmented amongst these, and control battles lead to withdrawal of or blocking of materials during inter-corporate wars.
OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts.
A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough at the level of the ISP provider.
Aggregation, not disintegrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues.
Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit.
Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the "why should I pay for information I don't use" objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don't access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive.
(Yes, events of the past decade temper my enthusiasm for that belief somewhat, though information rather than propaganda still seems likely a net positive.)
The concept could be trialed on a regional basis, rather than globally. It should offer any willing publication within a set of quality and bias tiers (there are third-party rating services, such as Ad Fontes Media, amongst others, which might serve as arbiters). A bidding process in which given tiers are compensated at specific rates, subject to competitive alternatives, should help address the "who gets paid and how much" question --- high-bias low-accuracy clickbait is a cheap-to-produce product, but would also be compensated at a low rate.
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Notes:
1. Dashlane came up with this number in 2015, archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dash... Experian cites a similar number, without source, in a 2019 identity fraud report https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identi... A NordPass study finds > 100 passwords/person on average https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords HN readers report upwards of 700 accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 Data quality here are poor, but the general scope is clearly large. Whether its increasing on an annual basis or if 100 accounts/person represents a metastable plateau is unclear.
Both sides indeed. They report on news of national importance, such as a playground scuffle:
A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim...
Once it turns out the story was a hoax, they do their journalistic duty and remove any reference to race from the title:
Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim...
I wonder if they would have reported on it at all if victim and perpetrator were reversed, or featured race so prominently. But if they were reversed, the story would not be important to the national conversation, would it?
> The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back at themselves in more articulate form. Nobody actually pays for news, unless your livelihood depends on it, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will still flourish, but nothing vaguely resembling news will otherwise remain in a subscription-driven world.
Source: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elite...
Top five or so stories of the day with a few lines of detail so you can understand what happened and why it's important, focusing on the actual events, not the narratives around them.