LastWeekTonight
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2016–2017
19:23 · 15M views · Aug 8, 2016
A Last Week Tonight segment on the decline of the newspaper industry and what it means for journalism, including local reporting. It uses John Oliver's comedic commentary and references the film Spotlight.
HN cites it in discussions of news economics and repackaged reporting, though some commenters say they distrust Oliver as a source.
5 comments from Hacker News
tangential to this is the fact that a lot of 'news' is repackaging an original source for each platform John Oliver had a great segment on this: this video
I started my career as a Tribune employee (eventually working for a Tribune/Gannett joint venture). It was right after Sam Zell bought them. I recall him bringing in a million dollars in cash and placing on the floor of basement where our offices were as a sort of challenge to come up with some great idea and he'd fund it with that cash. I was young, impressionable, drunk and stupid, so, it was kind of exciting to see. Being from Chicago, I wish they'd do well, but every time I hear about them it usually just ends with me shaking my head at how silly whatever they're doing sounds. Tronc itself recently got the John Oliver treatment in this video .
That's a very interesting thing to try to quantify. I would say they had _more_ integrity, but risks always existed. Reuters used to have a corporate structure that would prevent it from capture, and even that didn't guarantee impartiality. Multiple revenue streams (sales, classifieds) would make them less beholden to advertisers. Of course they would still have to write material that sold! I don't like to use John Oliver as a source, but there's some decent content in this: this video
> there is no problem first off and malware is not how you would solve this fantasy of a "problem". If you think consuming content online without paying anything for it isn't a problem, you're wrong and it's not even debatable [1]. I'm not saying this is a good solution. I'm just pointing out it's not a "fantasy" of a problem. 1. this video
John Oliver's recent show on "Journalism" included references to the Spotlight movie: this video