(The Atlantic) How the Economics of Journalism Explains 2016's Information Bubbles
/Jay Hamilton, a stanford professor who studies media business models, sees similarities between some of today's outlets and the partisan press of the 1850's.
“I think there are five incentives that lead information to be created. “Pay me”—that’s the subscription model. “I want to sell your attention to somebody else”—that’s advertising. “I want to change how you think about the world”—that’s nonprofit. “I want your vote”—that’s partisan. And “I just want to talk”—that’s expression. All of those incentives are biased against telling the stories of low-income people. They’re not subscribers, their attention is worth less to advertisers, they vote in lower numbers, and in some cases they’re not linked up to broadband, so you’re not hearing their voices on the internet. And they’re definitely not donors to nonprofits. So there’s a bias against telling stories from their perspective.”
