Most media organizations have a small number of in-house journalists on verticals that make sense.

The rest of the content is curated and brought in from content partners and written outside of the news organization.

In practice they function more like a social media feed than traditional newspapers. I’m no fan of CNN, but this isn’t exactly a scandal, media had to adapt to keep up with so much being on social media these days, they all do this.

In response, many of the most used web sites flooded their own sites with transparently fake product reviews full of SEO phrases about “we spent N weeks testing K products to root out the very best” and very little else. The actual reviews would be pretty much copy-pasted from the description provided on the product producer’s site.

And, that’s how Google made itself useless for finding product reviews.

I was under the impression that the generic "news"/"information" on many sites is purchased (or otherwise obtained through some kind of business relationship) from some other organization.

And I just don't get this perspective from the article:

"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"

I guess I can't figure out what the problem is supposed to be here. I don't think there's necessarily a problem with fleshing out a site with generic content. I would guess CNN has an agreement with the content provider on the general character of content, and can surely opt out of things they don't want to be associated with.

FWIW, I opened "CNN underscored money" and at the top of the page it says:

"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN Newsroom. CNN earns a commission from partner links on the site but the reporting here is always independent and objective." (plus there's an "advertiser disclosure" link but I didn't click on it).

I just don't get what the problem is here.

1. You run a content website with a strong domain rating. 2. They approach you with an offer of creating a subsite (your brand + advisor, marketplace, etc) on your domain 3. They write all the content and completely manage the subsite - you have 0 risk (aside from brand risk) 4. You split the affiliate revenues from the subsite 5. The internet is now full of shitty content shilling diet pills and google can't figure it out

I half expect to start seeing new incarnations of things like Prodigy or Compuserve spin up, aiming to provide an Internet-within-Internet type of experience. Without advertising, purely pay-to-play. Sure, a lot of regular people will never pay for such a thing, but I bet there are enough of us that will pay for good quality content (and shielding from crap) that it could be viable. Maybe the 'net gets balkanized and the 'free' part left as a wasteland.

(or maybe I'm just a grumpy old man and I should go get a cup of coffee and quit my bitching)

There weren’t any.

Instead they had little blurbs, online they’d be called “tweets” or “posts” mostly submitted by readers.

That was journalism in a midwestern city in the 1800s.

They are all rags.

The issue is that CNN is using their domain authority to boost this drivel affiliate Money content, and hiding the fact that they are doing it by using layer 7 routing to cloak the site. If CNN used a subdomain, e.g. money.cnn.com, Google could learn that this content should be judged independently from the rest of the site.

This money content isn’t competing fairly. Google is being tricked to think these Money articles should have the same inherent authority as other CNN articles.

Where this impacts the consumer is that the first articles for popular search terms aren’t the best, but instead written by content marketers chasing the highest affiliate. This crowds out legitimate sites (e.g. in depth reviews of the best mortgage lenders) because they can’t hope to rank higher than CNN for the same term.

At the very least, this “path based” cloaking of content authorship should be detectable by Google, but it’s a game of whack a mole, unfortunately.

I think if you had a human curate the best content written for these popular SEO’d search terms, they’d be able to find the diamonds from the rough. That gives some hope that algorithms can improve to rank the most useful content for readers.

It’s also why Reddit is so popular as a source of content in Google.

These sites are officially linked to from the parents (CNN and USA Today in this case), with whom they no doubt have a revenue-sharing agreement. They're very real in all senses of the word. The third party in question (Forbes marketplace) is not trying to fraudulently set up some parallel CNN and USA Today websites without their authorization.

This just confirms it.

I feel the title of the blog entry is maybe a bit “extreme,” but it does show some well-done sleuthing.

Media companies have had to drastically change their business models, lately, and this is just another part of it.

This doesn't mean the stories published are false, or even inaccurate - but there's a big negative space in their media coverage. E.g. if culture war issues are amplified, but there are no stories on industrial policy, infrastructure problems, manufacturing job and supply chain analysis - that's deliberate. No, it's not 'what the public wants', it's what the owners of these media outlets want their readers to be thinking about.

Under regular news reporting journalists have no legal obligation to their readers or the truth. They can say anything they want, essentially. It can be accurate, or not. It can be the truth, or not. It really doesn't matter. You can be lying for personal profit or political effect or any reason you want and it really isn't something you can get sued over. Just have to avoid tripping over defamation laws.

Where as if you are dealing with financial reporting there is legal liability. It is possible to get busted for committing fraud, it is possible to get sued for misleading information.

So keeping these sides of the business completely separated is probably a good way to limit liability.

Seems the real intention here is say that since there are affiliate ads and advertorials on the site, the entire site is somehow "fake news".

That's quite a stretch.

A fake news site would say something like Covid is "just the flu". Or maybe, let's say, endorse lies about an election being rigged.

Or focus on new conspiracy theories. Every. Single. Week.

Neither site does anything like that — No reputable news organization would ever do something that irresponsible, right?

That would be fake news.

Every news site has advertising sections

https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/about

"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN newsroom. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a commission."

Anyway, I’m not surprised. As far as I’m concerned they’re already out of business (just like National Geographic, which currently employs zero staff writers).

Just follow a few high quality independent journalists and also let the open-source algorithm rank content to show you.