Yes they do. But the income from one story doesn't pay the cost to generate all the other stories that the paper produces. According to our local paper that just shut down, their ads couldn't compete with the ads on Google/Facebook.

So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story.

This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective.

Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements.

Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.

Because very few people click through to the article, they just read the headline, summary, and comments on Facebook. Facebook is capturing most of the economic value generated by these articles.

Reminds me of hackernews. I'm doing it now (commenting) without visiting the site because I'm aware of the story.

That happens with everything. People talk about movies without having seen them, discuss what woodworking tools are best with no intent to buy them, and the relative value of random sports cars without ever being able to afford them.

If newspapers would be able to charge people for referencing an article, then why shouldn't Lamborghini be able to charge people who talk about the Aventador?

The difference is that most of the value of a movie doesn't come from the title and a synopsis of the prologue. You need to actually watch most movies through to completion in order to speak about them with any competency.

In journalism, articles are generally written following an "inverted pyramid" pattern. The most critical information is put at the top (the headline, and the first paragraph). As you move further down, the information becomes less and less critical to the overall story. The idea being that most people only want the broad strokes (X candidate won an election, Y submarine went missing in the Atlantic).

It is harmful to the news orgs because people used to have to buy their newspaper or magazine, or see ads on their website or TV channel, in order to get any of this information. Now people get 90% of the relevant information from their social media feed, where Facebook or Reddit or whoever rakes in all the ad revenue.

I'm not endorsing Canada's solution to this problem, but I don't think it is very helpful to pretend this isn't a problem at all. Good journalism is expensive, and the fact that nobody is willing to pay for it is why it seems like a lot of the news that is left is either clickbait or propped up by corporate or political interests. We need some way to continue funding quality independent journalism or it will cease to exist in a sea of clickbait and AI-generated nonsense.

Eh, I’d content that most of the economic value is captured by users reading the articles. The comments and ads are near-zero-sum in the aggregate, if that.