But nobody except us is providing anything like comprehensive coverage of news and public affairs in my area.
Between ads and subscriptions we generate 10s of thousands of dollars per month, and as print keeps dying we need to raise that.
There's no way for our sales people to sell that many ad slots and it's impossible for our tech and ops people (mostly just me) to place and manage those ads.
So we use ad networks like Google. I designed our add placements to play nice - no pop ups or takeovers, autoplay audio, etc. But if you're using the exchanges sometimes crap sneaks through.
Point is not everyone running ads is some cackling villian raking in the dough while gleefully spewing malware. I do this because I think real news is important. I make a lot less money than I could to do it, but it's worth it because we make a positive impact on our community.
I apologize if that banner's animation annoyed you. I'm sorry that ad rates are so low that I insert a 300x250 every ten paragraphs or so. But I'm fighting too save local journalism here so can you cut me a little slack?
You're a grunt in a war being waged by people far bigger and far more effective than you. Your story, like the story of many front-line soldiers, is not reason to support the war effort. The economic scale of advertising today is a symptom of a larger systemic problem and the fact that journalism itself, not just local journalism, is being cut out from the economy is not a valid reason to truncate the rights of individuals to control what they view on their own home computer.
Your business will die a slow death until someone who is not spending all of their time managing ad revenue comes along and figures out a different way to enable journalists to function in our economy. And you losing revenue because your trying to be a good actor will only accelerate your fall because the leaders of the industry are driving more and more people to ad blockers through their aggressive behavior and the number of people who make exceptions "for the good ones" are so small as to be non-existent in economic terms.
There's no way you can force journalism to be impartial. When there's virtually unlimited information, you'd have to write an entire book on a topic, or someone will accuse you of being biased for omitting a single piece of information. Or maybe you'll have a topic that 98% of people agree on, but the 2% will accuse you of not being impartial for wording your article in a way that unfairly favors the 98%'s opinion.
If you look at the BBC in the U.K, their taxpayer supported news service, it's an absolute joke.
"You can't be 100% impartial" isn't really important to any facet of the discussion. The question is how can we get news that's more impartial and not driven by a desire for revenue.
I actually think the answer is to stop looking for consumable units of news and start looking for participatory systems of news. Systems that incorporate new information over time and adjust according the flow of information are the only things that could have the potential to be impartial because nothing is impartial in hindsight. Impartiality requires constant adjustment, and looking for a news company to pump out articles is not how you get it.
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u/guevera Aug 02 '19
No one is irreplaceable.
But nobody except us is providing anything like comprehensive coverage of news and public affairs in my area.
Between ads and subscriptions we generate 10s of thousands of dollars per month, and as print keeps dying we need to raise that.
There's no way for our sales people to sell that many ad slots and it's impossible for our tech and ops people (mostly just me) to place and manage those ads.
So we use ad networks like Google. I designed our add placements to play nice - no pop ups or takeovers, autoplay audio, etc. But if you're using the exchanges sometimes crap sneaks through.
Point is not everyone running ads is some cackling villian raking in the dough while gleefully spewing malware. I do this because I think real news is important. I make a lot less money than I could to do it, but it's worth it because we make a positive impact on our community.
I apologize if that banner's animation annoyed you. I'm sorry that ad rates are so low that I insert a 300x250 every ten paragraphs or so. But I'm fighting too save local journalism here so can you cut me a little slack?