> No doubt there are other ways, but partisanship seems to be the optimal way at least in today's social media landscape.

Yes, of course, but the statement I'm responding to was claiming that the economics of ad-based publishing drives agenda-driven "news". I'm saying that this doesn't fit the evidence, as agenda-driven reporting is if anything more consistent with a subscription-based system. The fact that it's agenda-driven instead of broadly sensationalist has roughly nothing to do (at least first-order) with the Internet and everything to do with consumer demand. To put it another way, in a hypothetical parallel universe where ad-funded news was banned, you would still see the turn towards agenda-driven reporting, as it's reflective of much broader trends in journalism and independent of ads-funding.

> The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.

Yes, I agree, but my point is that this is an _exogenous_ factor. Competition from an ads-funded Internet had nothing to do with driving newspapers towards partisanship; an exogenous shift in consumer demand did. I brought this example up not as a description of the world as it is but as a contradiction in your hypothesis. My claim is that consumer demand for partisanship is driving partisan news. Whether it's funded by ads or subscriptions is irrelevant.

> there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low

I know it's trite to say that correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's very relevant in this case. The postwar decades of relatively high journalistic standards were a historical anomaly. Yellow journalism existed in the past, well before online advertising, and the strategy that got people to buy newspapers was broad-based sensationalism, not the construction of elaborate filter bubbles.

I get that it's cheap to dismiss correlation without elaborating, but the causal hypothesis (ads -> partisan news) both has data pts contradicting it[1] and a more-plausible alternative mechanism, or at least the sketch of one[2].

> Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.

Ha, we differ pretty strongly on this factual question. Though perhaps this is my fault for being a little glib: when I say people aren't interested in being informed, I am very much (perhaps centrally!) including the modern information junkie, the core of the NYT (or Fox, or CNN, or MSNBC, or WaPo) subscriber/viewer base. They would probably claim they like being informed, but my point is that watching infotainment opinion shows and reading whatever the fuck the NYT calls what they do these days is a grotesque mockery of "informing oneself". There are undoubtedly hyper-literate, intelligent news consumers out there that have every subscription and use them all sparingly, but these are a vanishingly small minority; my claim is that anyone who thinks that a single-source news subscription is likely to make you understand the world better instead of understanding it worse is not "informed" by any useful definition.

All of the educated, affluent coastals that make up my entire social group use their NYT subscriptions and John Oliver viewings as nothing more than keeping up with the latest approved narrative[3]. For them, the value of their subscription is the feeling of religious harmony and comfortable, predictable single-mindedness it delivers. Broad-based (non-partisan) sensationalism is much less compatible with subscriptions than it is ads-funded articles.

[1] a broader rise in partisanship that is not plausibly driven entirely by journalism, the fact that the NYT et al has gotten substantially _more_ partisan as they've become increasingly subscription-based, etc.

[2] Ads funding and the decline in journalistic quality were both coincident with the earth-shaking, epochal rise of the Internet. Ads funding doesn't need to be causing this decline in order for them to co-occur, because they both arise from complex changes in the way information is distributed and epistemology is carried out. To use a contrived example, the correlation claim here is like saying "literacy expansion causes urban slums, just witness the correlation across the late 19th-century Western world" and ignoring that industrialization is the shared upstream node in the causal graph.

[3] The pandemic was an incredibly stark example, since for the first time they had significant skin in the game of being informed. No surprises there: everyone did exactly what you'd expect them to do, switching multiple times from "X is a terrible anti-science Trumpist conspiracy theory that people shouldn't even be allowed to think about!!!!" to "X is the science how dare you not believe it" on a _dime_ as soon as their news orgs of choice told them to.