HACKER Q&A
📣 raydiatian

Who is paying for Washington Post, Bloomberg, NYT, and why?


This kind of bothers me, but maybe somebody had a better perspective. The above listed news agencies are both (1) frequently cited on HN, annd (2) are all top Google results whenever you look up a news story. You always get two sentences in before paywall pops up. Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, worth $126B. Bloomberg is worth $76B. Reuters is held by Thomson-Reuters, which is chaired by David Thomson, worth $46B. NYT is owned by a trust fund for the fifth generation of AG Sulzberger, which is honestly the least conflict of interest of the lot. Elon now owns the window a lot of people discover these articles with. Why give them all more money?

Furthermore, why is the default HN behavior to link the article, and not the archive.ph version?

  👤 tene80i Accepted Answer ✓
I subscribe to NYT. It’s high quality reportage, including holding power to account. I want such things to continue to exist. I don’t want such things to be entirely reliant on the whims of advertisers and billionaires.
👤 neximo64
Feels a bit unethical to default to the archive links vs paying for content, the news are generally good from those sources too.
👤 yuppie_scum
Bloomberg is obviously very successful in the financial services industry. Look into the Bloomberg terminal and it’s pricing mode.

People use archive because they are too cheap to support the hard working journalists who are out there getting the real news instead of writing listicles and posting them on sub stack.