Quote of the Day
News is expensive to produce
As new commentary channels emerge the “fact basis” for the commentary becomes an afterthought
Newsrooms (not just MSM) begin laying off staff as they can’t monetize fact finding
The pool of information to comment on is drying up
Tim Pool @Timcast
Posted on X, July 29, 2025
That is an interesting observation. I had not thought of that before. That does help explain some things.
I am reminded of “yellow journalism.” Very profitable. Factual deficient.
It’s not so much that “fact finding” has become an afterthought. For those outlets, they can’t do it. They’ve been in the narrative journalism business for so long that not only can they themselves not do it, they don’t know anyone that does or can, either. They don’t know that they should do it. Newspapers, TV, radio media had decades of setting themselves up with a business model of “if the public knows it, it’s because we told them”, and their audience is the “if we know it, it’s because they told us” set.
Ten years ago, the average age of their ‘news’ audience was 60. Now it’s 68. Check their commercials: it’s for medication, erectile disfunction, reverse mortgages, cruises, vacation packages… old people stuff.
As Larry Correia notes, the bottom line of everyone’s business plan is “get paid”. Most businesses have a core product, and then propaganda (marketing, advertising, all forms of getting the public to know what you want them to know) is a supporting role. And that supporting role is very easy when the facts are objectively on your side, you just have to let people know they exist. A convenient fact for a propogandist to have to communicate is “Our product/service will make your life better, for less money/effort/time than you can do yourself.”
What do you do when your product is entirely propaganda? First, find and retain an audience that wants to receive your propaganda. Flattery and praise for their wisdom, virtue and morality is reliable for that purpose. Ideally, find someone that will directly pay you to tell your audience what your customer wants your audience to know (regardless of the truth of the matter, of course). Secondarily, or more likely primarily, accompany your original propaganda with other propaganda that your audience is receptive to, such as solutions for occasional irregularity and other marketing. Your audience is your product; sell it for all it is worth. At no part in this process is “fact finding” truly necessary, especially not facts that contradict the notion that your audience is wise, virtuous, intelligent and moral.
Such as shame that a lot of Gen X, most of Gen Y and almost entirely Gen Z and later left or never joined the audience for scheduled continuously streamed programming. VCRs then DVRs turned broadcast content into time-shifted content separate from getting stuff on your own terms from Blockbuster, and then Netflix, Hulu and the rest just skipped all the middle steps and went straight to ‘consume at convenience’ entertainment. There’s very little opportunity to bolt on a “Your kitchen may be trying to kill you; story at 11” teaser.
I don’t see how “fact finding” is any more expensive than “making sh!t up in a plausible, believable way”. Keeping track of The Narrative[TM] and the trail of falsities — and making all new “reporting” consistent with them — is much more difficult than just reporting facts and truth, so in theory it should command a higher price tag.
Novelists typically earn more than historians.
I think the problem is that hard facts are boring and don’t generate eyeballs to sell to advertisers. The Narrative is high in emotional content, and people get their daily fix from it.
I would think by this time they could have had AI read everything they ever wrote and just have an AI response on all channels?
I mean how many people do you need to give “the prep was probably white” message?
That was lame enough even I could write communist talking points as good as they do.
No reason to go broke over this crap. I would be more than happy to moonlight on my SSR.
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The notion of “monetizing” a newsroom betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the finances of newspapers. My first job out of college (DEC, 1978) was on-site software repair for newspapers, where I normally worked with the “composing room”. Those are the people that turns the bits of content into finished pages, delivered to the press room.
One of them taught me that your subscription or news stand payment pays for the paper — as in, the blank off-white stuff that the ink goes on to. Everything else: the ink, the delivery, all the employee wages, supplies, power, mortgage, is paid for by advertising. And, interestingly enough, the majority of that is classified ads, not “display” ads.
Because of this, news is basically what fits in between the ads to make the paper more attractive, typically about 1/3rd of the total. (I think it had to be a minimum of 1/3rd in order to qualify for USPS newspaper rate, at least back then.) On any given day, the first question is “how much advertising space do we have” and from that the newsroom knows how much news fits on that day.
In other words, news is just another form of overhead, existing only to make more people subscribe. And while some people don’t mind having opinion everywhere, a lot of them like their news to be actual news and not preaching. I subscribed to the WSJ for 45 years precisely because they clearly kept opinions segregated to the opinion pages — though in the last couple of years there has been a clearly visible leftward shift on the formerly very much neutral news pages.
Tons more money to be had reporting gossip as “news”. Always been that way.
John Solomon, Sharyl Atkisson, some other former MSM journos are still able to buy groceries.
So “monetizing fact-finding” to me doesn’t capture what’s happening, or supposed to happen, here.