For above a hundred years, the news media regaled the U.S. public with unprecedented amounts of information for a small fee under the old advertising model that would serve the western world so well. In print media, advertising became more science than art thus stabilizing and increasing profits. Improved color printing technologies also made advertising more effective.
With the advent of television the advertising model proved even more lucrative. Television advertising revenues were much larger, the small fee impractical (the alternative being coin-operated televisions) and unnecessary.
It is probably fair to say that the quality of the product created by the larger players, and a good many of the smaller players, in print and television, was high. Mostly what was lacking was diversity — which is to say “quite a lot” but not to the present point.
Perhaps a decade after its inception, the Internet began to offer quantities of news. The potential revenue was too much to resist and legacy media began expanding into the digital realm. The old advertising model was kept largely intact as the main source of revenue. For another decade still, the strategy was to lower production costs via the remarkable new technologies coming available and to gain audience through the vastly expanded connectivity.
Investment and overheads in order to be able to establish new venues being so tiny compared to historical models, however, “new media” rapidly captured a huge part of the available audience. The price of expertise and journalistic ethics being irreducible, they were, at best, conveniently redefined. If legacy media would follow suit they would have no superior product to offer. Sadly, however, they would be unable to manage sufficient profit without discounting that same expertise and those same ethics.
Search engines not bringing enough traffic to the larger venues, news aggregators, such as Google News, YouTube and Yahoo News, sprang up to attract more eyes. Those news venues with more resources purchased prime listing space and additionally developed their own proprietary apps to capture as much of the audience the aggregators brought to them as possible thus increasing their audience and data share.
To overhead and operating costs, scaled back by going digital, then, were added in stages: 1) IT and consulting costs; 2) placement costs on search engines; 3) SEO costs; 4) subscription costs to aggregators. The aggregators being essential, they take far-and-away the lion's share of the advertising revenue. Burgeoning new media take an ever greater share of what remains.
All of this history has arrived at my morning news. In order to take away more traffic from Google News and YouTube aggregators, Microsoft Network began locking in its own news aggregator to its Edge browser, displaying the aggregator on every New Tab that the user calls up. All comers, large and small, in the news field, were offered the chance to apply for their articles to be listed. Once the population reached optimum, in MSN judgment, the invitation-links landed on a deactivated page.
Meanwhile, the larger venues had, one at a time, begun instituting paywalls — requiring paid subscriptions — in an attempt to turn what was left of expertise, ethics and reputation into revenue. Microsoft Network has been so successful traffic-wise, however, that it has been able to require all its venues to drop their paywalls for links submitted to the MSN aggregator.
So most mornings I am regaled by a large colorful photo from Tagtik News and a headline designed to hint at compelling information. While Tagtik states that it was founded in 2008 so regular a news hound as I has never seen it until the past year. It sees itself as the future of journalism:
It exists not to provide quality journalism, by any traditional measure, but to provide a “unique selling proposition”. It is a pretext for advertising provided in the Dutch, French and English languages.
It is one of the more analytical and disciplined of the many such new media sites. The photo is sourced not from a staff photo-journalist but from several among the myriad “stock” photo and video companies that have sprung up to serve the new media and to monetize their stock by asserting newly developed legal bases to claim copyright for every video and illustration they can manage to print their name on and offer up for sale. There is no more a graphics department than there is a print shop.
The article on the other side of the headline will uniformly be 100-150 words or less. It will be general and generally disappoint the headline and it will be so free of specifics as to avoid check-able facts. It will reference an unlinked (unverifiable) source so general that expertise can only be implied to have been brought in from outside the Tagtik newsroom (such as it is). The “news” will be several days old, as the rule (some new media show contemporary headlines connecting to stories from weeks to decades old without disclaimer). The byline will be unidentifiable — in the English language version, generally initials.
Tagtik, it bears saying, is among the more successful of the new media. If for no other reason than having seen the MSN invitation soon enough to apply before it was closed down.
Also from the Library of Babel:
- Public Health Alert: Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. February 17, 2025. "It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation..."
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
Also from Virtual Grub Street:
Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
A Thousand Years of English Terms. June 2, 2019. ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”. There was no clock to be o’. But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’