"Now each assignment is subjected to a cost-benefit analysis—will the article earn enough traffic to justify the investment?"

Finally. Journalism is getting back to its roots.

The term "fake news" has obviously come to be associated with Donald Trump, but the first person I ever heard use the phrase was Hillary Clinton as she whined about how unfairly she was being treated during the campaign. Trump took her usage, flipped it and ran with it to the point where "fake news" is now a meme/joke.

This stood out in that article: "Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events—and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users’ feeds."

I'm fairly certain the "ideologically pleasing propaganda", i.e. "fake news", being pushed by these tech firms isn't pro-Trump, pro-Republican, or pro-Conservatism.

Also, maybe Boilermaker Rick will begin to understand what a disaster the death of the newspaper actually is.

The term "fake news" has obviously come to be associated with Donald Trump, but the first person I ever heard use the phrase was Hillary Clinton as she whined about how unfairly she was being treated during the campaign. Trump took her usage, flipped it and ran with it to the point where "fake news" is now a meme/joke.

This stood out in that article: "Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events—and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users’ feeds."

I'm fairly certain the "ideologically pleasing propaganda", i.e. "fake news", being pushed by these tech firms isn't pro-Trump, pro-Republican, or pro-Conservatism.

So this is basically a long winded way to say that people need to write about things people want to read?

I'm sure people in the old days who wrote for newspapers never cared that the readers would actually be interested in the story.

So this is basically a long winded way to say that people need to write about things people want to read?

I'm sure people in the old days who wrote for newspapers never cared that the readers would actually be interested in the story.

Leave it to Rick to defend yellow journalism.

I'm pretty sure that term existed before my generation stopped reading newspapers.

I'm not defending it. It's just dumb to think that some time around 2005 that suddenly it became a thing.

Clicks would rain down upon us if only we could get over ourselves and write about the same outrage as everyone else. Everyone else was doing this because it worked. We needed things to work.

He is romanticizing old time journalism a bit but he isn't overhyping the way News is being provided today. More than anything this article is providing information on how News business is a for profit industry. Whether it has always been that or not is beside the point. It's that way now and the internet is shaping the way that News is being facilitated.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

When I wrote for SB Nation -- part of Vox Media -- we were coached on sensationalizing headlines for more clicks. Like the Atlantic article explains, "Tiger Woods Switches to Nike Golf" got far fewer clicks than "Tiger Woods Makes Shocking Choice." You can imagine some of the headlines during his sex scandal, for example.

The primary focus of the news isn't to inform the public any more. It's to get more clicks faster than the guy down the street.

We have access to more news than any time in history and we don't have to wait until the next day to see if that news was deemed worthy.

What about the proliferation of celebrity then and now articles that permeate the internet these days? "What this celebrity looks like today will shock you". Takes you 50-100 clicks to get to the Celebrity in the headline.

Instead of doing a simple then and now it's important for you to be shocked by their appearance.

Which is exactly the problem.

News has been big business my whole life. "RAZORBLADES IN CANDY, tune in at 10 to hear more!"-style news was around all the time when I was a kid.

This is just more whining about the good old days. We have access to more news than any time in history and we don't have to wait until the next day to see if that news was deemed worthy.

That's a good thing. Nothing is stopping you from being more informed than a newspaper reader from previous decades.

Access to News doesn't mean that what you're being provided with is News. A lot of News today is nothing more than filler.

Which is exactly the problem.

A lot of newspapers were ads and filler. I'm not sure that comics, advice columns, and classified sections were "news" either.

To a point, yes. But as the article states (and to which I agree) nearly every major online news source is publishing with a hive-mind. Google's search results algorithm is a major root cause to this. Type in "Donald Trump tweets..." and see how many articles come up with those words in the title.