[HN Gopher] USA Today is getting a paywall. Who's the audience f...
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USA Today is getting a paywall. Who's the audience for it?
Author : x14km2d
Score : 97 points
Date : 2021-07-11 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.niemanlab.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.niemanlab.org)
| t0mmyb0y wrote:
| "USA Today's digital subscription offering seems likely, in its
| current form at least, to fall between those two stools."
|
| Yeah, the 2 stools nobody flushed yet.
| bjourne wrote:
| It seems like more right-leaning sites have it easier to remain
| funded by advertisements while the more left-leaning sites, which
| I believe includes USA Today, more often than not have to go for
| subscriptions. And since most people are cheapskates and not
| willing to pay for news, left-wing voices are heard by fewer and
| fewer.
| abz10 wrote:
| One of the ironies in banning right wing voices from popular
| platforms is that you teach their audiences that they have to
| more proactive in supporting their content.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| USA Today is left-wing? I thought it was a free reading rag for
| traveling businessmen at the hotel breakfast buffet.
| bjourne wrote:
| Almost everything is right-wing in the US. The left-wing of
| the right-wing may be a more appropriate description of USA
| Today.
| will4274 wrote:
| > Almost everything is right-wing in the US.
|
| Compared to what?
|
| Compared to a dozen or so of the most liberal countries in
| the world, all of which are located in Europe - fair
| enough.
|
| Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia and
| Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing,
| including the republican party and USA today.
|
| Compared to virtually any government anywhere prior to
| 1800? Again, almost everything in America is left wing,
| including the republican party and USA today.
| bjourne wrote:
| > Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia
| and Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing,
| including the republican party and USA today.
|
| That is just not true. For example, Rwanda, Burkina Faso,
| Iran, and Sri Lanka has universal health care - the
| United States does not.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Is it still written at a grade school reading level? It was
| kind of like news for dummies but a step above watching it on
| TV.
| slumdev wrote:
| It's like the WSJ, except for people who don't like big
| words.
| rc_mob wrote:
| USA today favors those with money and power. It does not
| accurately tell stories from the point of view of the poor.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| I think it's fascinating how many people want:
|
| - Current, high quality news sources
|
| - For free
|
| - With no ads
|
| Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see
| enough value to want to consume it.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Also don't want anyone else to pay for it, or link to it, or
| talk about it.
| tyingq wrote:
| I'd just be happy if Google didn't index paid content, and if
| sites like HN wouldn't link to it. Posting links to paid sites
| is, to me, silly, because chances are that link is effectively
| dead to the person that follows it.
|
| The odds of a random reader (whether from Google SERPS or HN or
| similar) having a subscription are very low. I don't personally
| know anyone that has a subscription to the top 10 paid sites,
| and there's quite a few more than 10.
|
| Google used to call the practice "cloaking", and would de-index
| you if you presented content to its crawler that didn't match
| what it provided to a visitor.
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think there is a huge opportunity for innovation in search
| functionality that gives users control over the types of
| content they see. Imagine being able to toggle on and off
| paid sites, news results, or other types of results. It could
| be like Google Scholar or Google patents but for other
| interests: blogs, companies, adult content, ect
| [deleted]
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I would pay for a search engine that never showed me
| results from a set of domains that I could select. There
| are so many mainstream media sites that I would never read
| but they bury the interesting content.
|
| I.e. "never show me NYT, Amazon, Pinterest, or any site
| that is a scrape of StackOverflow or Wikipedia"
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Perhaps cynically, I wonder if search engine incentives
| have moved from helping users find the what they want as
| fast as possible while serving adds along the way to
| maximizing the number of modified searches to serve more
| adds
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| On second thought, I wonder if there are browser
| extensions to append these modifiers to Google search
| sj4nz wrote:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncf
| bmi... is one that I have found useful.
| tyingq wrote:
| I imagine Google will eventually have to go there. If more
| publications move to paywalls, and the search results are
| almost all paywalled, surely Google would have to do
| something?
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Just because you don't subscribe to the time doesn't mean
| other people don't and therefore shouldn't get to talk about
| some of their incredible investigations, or discuss a crazy
| business story in the journal. You and your friends are not
| the only consumers in the world.
| tyingq wrote:
| I suppose that works if you and all your friends have an
| identical list of subscriptions.
|
| It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is
| or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't
| possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly
| as a discussion.
| tzs wrote:
| > It only works on HN because we use things like
| archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it
| weren't possible to work around it, it would die off
| pretty quickly as a discussion.
|
| Some of the most interesting and informative things I've
| read on HN were comments on articles I did not read. I
| almost always read the comments before reading the
| article, and a significant fraction of the time I don't
| even try to read the article after seeing the comments.
| slezyr wrote:
| > You and your friends are not the only consumers in the
| world.
|
| I can use this argument against you.
|
| Not sure why would users around the world pay for US
| newspapers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Not sure why would users around the world pay for US
| newspapers_
|
| They do because it's relevant to them.
| tzs wrote:
| When I'm searching on Google it is because I am looking for
| information on some topic. Sometimes it is just idle
| curiosity, but sometimes it is because I have some actual
| need for the information to solve some real problem where the
| information will save me time or money.
|
| I don't see how it would help me if Google failed to show me
| information relevant to my problem just because it is paid
| information.
| nine_k wrote:
| FTFY: with no _obnoxious_ ads.
|
| Also, if there were an easy way to pay for just the article,
| say, 10C/, most people won't mind. But wherever it exists, it's
| not easy, and generally the big players are not interested in
| implementing it, even if it were technically trivial (it's
| not), because they prefer a smaller but captive audience which
| pays more ( _and_ watches ads).
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but
| see enough value to want to consume it.
|
| There's nothing fascinating about that. I'd love to drive a
| very expensive car too, but I don't want to (can't!) pay for
| it. This is basically just the law of demand.
| omega3 wrote:
| The problem right now is that outside of select few
| publications you're expected to pay for a low quality content.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You're missing the other case.
|
| Free content is provided not for informational value but for
| propaganda purposes.
|
| https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-
| corruption-... (HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978)
|
| And paid-up services _still_ include ads. (Which have higher
| advertiser value simply because the audience is known _and_
| sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| I actually agree.
|
| But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and
| not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's
| low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
| Zababa wrote:
| To be fair they usually invest some time, energy and/or
| money into making sure that you want to read it. I don't
| want to pay for most news, but often I'm baited by an
| appealing headline. I'm not above being baited and fear of
| missing out, and they are exploiting this.
|
| If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of
| it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food
| I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor
| over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up
| visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I
| can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the
| situation.
| shusaku wrote:
| Or you pay but you still are bombarded by tracking.
| tsian2 wrote:
| I think more people might part with their cash if they could
| fund the topics/proposals they were interested in. Something
| more like Gofundme and Twitch where people feel like they're
| directly paying for something to happen.
| snegu wrote:
| That's really the idea behind Substack. You can subscribe
| to the journalists who investigate the issues you are
| interested in.
| rc_mob wrote:
| USA today is not quality
| burlesona wrote:
| There was a moment in the 90s where a lot of good news media
| met the criteria you list. I think that anchored us on
| unrealistic cultural expectations.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| I'm not so sure that golden age ever really existed. It was
| the height of the mass media, and because of this objectivity
| and the consensus were interchangeable, and no one was held
| much to account for their inability to comport with reality.
|
| The internet gave the layman all the tools they needed to do
| their own followup on what they were told, and to access new
| perspectives about it. That's when cracks started appearing.
| nhffdhnb wrote:
| Yes, well, what exists is a lot of trash for free and a few
| publications that charge way more than the value they actually
| offer and in some cases partake in the sleaziest tactics to
| keep you paying once you signed up.
|
| If Reason can send out a physical magazine for $20/yr some of
| these other news outlets can figure out how to trim some fat
| and offer a competitive rate.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Reason_ is propaganda and is subsidised as such.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| We manage to do this in the UK - it's subsidised by TV watchers
| but if you don't do that you don't need to pay a penny.
| teeray wrote:
| It's not "with no ads," really. It's become that because ads
| are so intrusive now. Static ads, stitched into the page at the
| edge, with zero tracking would be acceptable by many. Those
| kind of ads have been around in print newspapers for decades.
| Ad blocking is in response to poor user experience in the same
| way that piracy was in response to the poor experience of
| physically buying a CD that had just one track you wanted.
| eugeniub wrote:
| Sure, but if there was such a thing as adblock for the
| physical world, able to get rid of freeway billboards, USA
| Today's "hybrid babies" front page
| (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/usatoday-hybrid-babies-
| ad-...), etc, it would be extremely popular.
| city41 wrote:
| I think the physical limitations of paper ended up causing a
| finite supply of ad space, allowing price of ads to settle.
| On the internet, there's basically infinite ad space. You can
| just make your readers keep scrolling, or chop the article
| into an arbitrary number of pages. With so much potential ad
| space, someone will budge a little and allow a few more ads
| to get a bit more revenue, and after everyone does that it
| snowballs into what we have today.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I suspect a lot of it comes from the inversion of the ad
| marketplace.
|
| In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre
| of the ad universe. You'd call up your local paper to put
| in an ad, and they'd have control over presentation and
| pricing, and keep all the revenue. Standards were upheld,
| and the papers did well.
|
| Now, they're farming out boxes on heir page to middlemen
| networks. They have little or no control over what ends up
| there, and they're getting a fraction of the revenue.
| What's worse, their content, being wide in scope and often
| full of brand-unfriendly news, isn't hugely friendly to
| algorithmic targeting paths. The only way to try to stay
| above water is to run more and more aggressively obnoxious
| ads.
| handrous wrote:
| I have similar feelings about kanban boards and other team-
| task-trackers. Physical forms are better, because it gets
| very hard to deal with them when they're too full or
| overflowing.
| loosetypes wrote:
| I'm increasingly convinced the endgame here is advertisers
| hiding content within the ads themselves via steganography.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I agree, the "with no ads" really paints consumers as only
| being cheap and ignorant. It is almost victim blaming.
|
| "Intrusive" doesn't being to describe the modern ad tracking
| infrastructure, data collection (and attendant leak
| vulnerabilities), and exploitation.
|
| The pop up ad, autoplay video/audio, and epilepsy-triggering
| flash ads are just the beginning of the predatory nature of
| this that has been deeply entrenched as the biggest companies
| that effectively make up the modern consumer web rely on this
| for their massive revenues.
|
| It is orwellian in every sense of the word, not just
| dangerous for individuals in a data privacy and identity
| theft perspective, and dangerous at the civilization/society
| level in that it is a direct threat to a free, liberal, and
| democratic world.
|
| Advertising was already a dangerous psychological influence
| back in the era of print ads. Now that we are essentially
| entering the first cybernetic era with our online personas
| and screen time, it is directly manipulating personality,
| mental stability, opinion, and belief.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| I think calling yourself the victim here is ridiculous.
| It's a product. You can accept their deal, or not. There's
| no victims here.
|
| You know how you avoid all those ads? You avoid their site.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Well, there is the 3rd option...
|
| Steal their content and publish it elsewhere, such as in
| posts on Reddit or HN.
|
| Trying to paint anything black or white will just lead to
| a model that doesn't represent reality and what people
| are going to do.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Agreed, and sorry, I wasn't trying to do that. However,
| in that scenario, I'd claim the news site is the actual
| victim.
| chucksmash wrote:
| Good lord.
|
| It's nonsensical to equate being shown an ad (even in this
| third party tracking day and age) with victimhood.
|
| Histrionics aren't the answer.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I'm saying accusing consumers of complaining about being
| "shown" ads as cheap and unreasonable is blaming the
| victim.
|
| It's not "showing" an ad. It's a popup ad, with a
| tracking cookie, with a stored identity and list of urls
| tracked over years, tied and shared to a dozen databases,
| probably shared with governments (willingly or
| otherwise).
|
| I get a huge percentage of people on HN work for FAANG
| and are a part of this meat grinder, so go ahead and
| downvote. But blaming a consumer for not wanting to be
| tracked and characterizing it as them being cheap is
| shifting blame to the consumer. Which is victim blaming.
| weare138 wrote:
| I agree. I use an ad-blocker for privacy and because many
| news sites are almost unreadable without them now. Instead of
| addressing the core issues with online advertising the
| industry just doubled down and made ads more intrusive and
| distracting to the point it's literally driving away
| consumers. If people can't read the content on your site
| without having to jump through hoops or feel the privacy
| trade-off isn't worth it, they're just not going to use your
| site anymore.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| And that is exactly what should happen. But I don't see
| people stopping going to these sites. They simply find ways
| around whatever monetization the paper is trying (archive,
| ad block, etc...).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Those are certainly better, but I would still block them,
| because they are ultimately still ads that interfere with my
| focus.
|
| So how do I expect the content creators to make money? I
| assume there are some people who are watching their ads.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Maybe where I personally land is that someone who produces
| content has the right to sell it however they like. The deal
| we can all make is that you can pay the price for the product
| and consumer it, or not.
|
| In the digital age, there are a lot of people who decide that
| we get to price the content however we want. We decide that
| because they are trying to use terrible ads to make money,
| that we can just go around that and take their content for
| free.
|
| That doesn't fly real well with physical products (This loaf
| of bread is priced at $1, but I only want to pay $0.50, so
| I'll just give them $0.50 and take it), but seems to be
| accepted with products that have infinite free
| reproducibility.
| technothrasher wrote:
| The analogy is more like they are out on the public road
| giving away free loaves of bread along with ad flyers. I
| take the bread and refuse the flyer.
|
| They can put themselves behind a fence, without letting
| anybody in who doesn't take their flyer. That's fine, I'll
| just skip their bread. They can charge for their bread.
| That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. No hard feelings
| on my end, it's all fair. But what they cannot reasonably
| do is give away free bread and then complain that I won't
| take their ad flyers.
| Angostura wrote:
| Aren't you going to get rather hungry?
| bialpio wrote:
| Not if there's another stall handing out slightly
| different bread but without the flyer. There's a lot of
| content available for free, depending on your goal
| there's always something descent to read.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Is that really what you want? News being locked behind
| increasingly strict locks?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Buy a print newspaper then.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I don't mind ads. I mind being tracked as I browse the web and
| this being called "advertising".
|
| Static images as ads would work, wouldn't be blocked by ad
| blockers, and would be effective as ads.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| I want to support a lot of different journalists and publishers
| but giving 100 journalists $0.5/month each on patreon is
| impractical and cumbersome. Just like subscribing to a dozen
| high quality publications would run more per month than my car
| payment.
| mindslight wrote:
| Why not? That's close to how things were 20 years ago. When you
| searched any topic, there would usually be a quality hit within
| the first page of results of someone with vast technical
| experience writing up their knowledge as a hobby, as plain text
| or basic HTML. You needed the skill to discern whether the
| person knew what the hell they were talking about and what was
| their own bias, but after that you had access to a pretty great
| stream of information.
|
| The influx of money-incentivized noise swamped that out, and
| now we're left with a continuum from aggregator sites (eg
| stackoverflow, forums, etc) to just straight up webspam. I'm
| not saying there is an easy way to get back to where we were,
| but there is a standard to compare to where all of those
| qualities existed together.
|
| In the present, why would I believe that a news site which
| demands payment would be any higher quality than the ones who
| do not? The basic business dynamic is to market to gain a sale,
| and then deliver the minimal cost product that doesn't violate
| the expectations.
|
| Ultimately it goes back to the fragmenting of authority. You
| used to be able to trust the NYT or whatever because it was all
| you knew, everyone else trusted them, and therefore there was
| little reason to break that lock step, even when they did end
| up misleading you. But with the modern plethora of voices,
| there are more opinions to choose from and we can easily see
| when "authorities" ended up misleading us. If you want quality
| news sources, this lack of authoritativeness/trustworthiness is
| the genie you need to put back in the bottle, not simply
| funding.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think paper newspaper ads are great. Hell I used to buy
| papers at the newsstand in my building or gas station _for_
| ads.
|
| The problem with my local Hearst paper's online presence is
| that there are literally hundreds of irrelevant ads, pop-up
| videos, 40+ trackers, tabloola or something similar and other
| junk.
|
| That stuff doesn't go away when you pay.
|
| I'm no expert on the metrics here, but since the economics of
| the online ad market are so awful, and the ads are mostly shit,
| I don't understand why the paper can't sell ads online like
| they do in print.
| TX0098812 wrote:
| It's mostly about entertainment.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| To me it's a similar dynamic to the treatment of open source
| developers. Journalism and open source software are (now)
| crucial products for the operation of a functioning society but
| the biggest consumers have no desire to pay for it.
| everfree wrote:
| I read about 2 articles per month from each of 5 news sites.
| Each site wants me to pay a $10/mo subscription. I'm not paying
| $50/mo for 10 articles. They need to figure out a way to fix
| their pricing model as a group.
| heisenbit wrote:
| I'm willing to pay but I'm not so happy about funding editorial
| and brand value over and above their fair share compared with
| reporting. I resent getting locked into a bundle that I have
| little control about and that despite funding it I will be sold
| as a product to advertisers (or messages brought to you by a
| strong but silent editorial hand).
| tengbretson wrote:
| Well now USA today delivers on 0/3 of those.
| axaxs wrote:
| I never minded ads, until ads started being abusive. Malware,
| screen takeovers, redirects, etc.
|
| If they'd fix the ad problem this could work. I'm surprised ad
| supported sites haven't demanded better.
| blooalien wrote:
| Exactly! Not only ad supported sites, but _advertisers
| themselves_ should be speaking out and fighting back against
| the _abusive_ advertisers that created a _need_ for
| adblockers in the first place, too! _They_ did _massive_ harm
| to their own industry. Instead of helping to _fix_ the
| problem and calling out those who _caused_ it, the war is
| turned against the very consumers they 're trying to reach
| with their advertising.
| fullshark wrote:
| Most people say they want this, but they really just want
| headlines, and occasional in depth reporting on some long tail
| interest of theirs. Social media / message boards serve this
| and have taken over for a reason.
| pier25 wrote:
| IMO the problem is really committing to a single news source.
|
| I'd happily pay for news. I just don't want to pay to, say, the
| NYT just to read a couple of pieces a week. (Ignoring the NYT
| shady unsubscribe practices)
|
| The solution seems to be either micropayments or some form of
| paid news aggregation.
|
| I pay for a Coil[1] subscription which solves micropayments,
| unfortunately very few sites have implemented it (and no major
| news sites AFAIK).
|
| [1] https://coil.com/
| slipperlobster wrote:
| > Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices
|
| I signed up for a student-priced NYT subscription a while
| back and realized I didn't really use it. I trudged through
| their cancellation information and got on their chat. The
| representative threw everything at me why I shouldn't cancel
| and they offered me a discounted rate of _exactly what I was
| paying currently._ So silly.
| pier25 wrote:
| If you're outside the US they require you to make a phone
| call to cancel, it's ridiculous.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I mean people can wish for anything. I can wish for a billion
| dollars.
|
| I don't hear anybody actually _expecting_ free news with no
| ads. Everyone knows journalists need to be paid a salary. So
| that feels like a strawman to me.
|
| But the idea that content isn't worth paying for is more that
| it's not worth paying for any _single_ news source. I see links
| to news articles I read from 20+ sources a day. If somebody
| builds a Spotify for news where you pay $10 /mo. and can access
| 99.9% of news articles including NYT, WaPo, etc., I think a ton
| of people (most, even?) would have no problem paying for it at
| all. But I sure as hell can't pay $10/mo. across 20 different
| sites, and that _still_ covers less than half the sources
| people regularly link to.
| tyre wrote:
| I don't think news sites can survive on the tiny slice of
| revenue. Musicians make most of their money on live events,
| so while the content creator is taking a hit compared to more
| lucrative CD sales, they are still using Spotify as marketing
| for the real product.
|
| Journalism doesn't have the same revenue stream to fall back
| on.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Newspapers in the US collectively had $19.9B yearly revenue
| in 2020 [1]. ($8.8B advertising + $11.1B circulation.)
|
| With a population of 331M, that's $5.01 per person per
| month, or half the population paying $10/mo.
|
| Now obviously you're not going to get half the people in
| the country to pay, but if you call it $20/mo/household,
| and compare it to the average $100-150/mo/household people
| pay for cable TV, I'd news _absolutely_ could survive on
| numbers like this. It 's not "tiny" at all -- it's
| ballpark.
|
| [1] https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Information is a public good, in the economic sense that it's
| nonrivalrous, nonexcludable, and has low _marginal_ (not fixed)
| costs of production.
|
| In practice, every long-term viable media support model has
| attached a _public good_ model for distribution to some _rents-
| generating_ activity. Those inlcude patronage, church tithes
| (or other contributeions), political organisations, member
| /donor contributions, and of course advertising.
|
| Or taxes.
|
| The problem with each funding mechanism is that it is _at the
| least_ distortionary to the interests of the funder or that
| funder 's controlling body. In the case of advertising, the
| issues are well known, with a remarkably insightful account
| coming from the dawn of the modern mass-media and mass-
| advertising age, Hamilton Holt's _Commercialism and Journalism_
| (1909), a short, highly readable, insightful, and information-
| packed quick read (it 's based on an address given at UC
| Berkely by the author, himself a magazine publisher). Online at
| the Internet Archive:
|
| https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
|
| Advertising's distortions are its drive to sensationalism
| (which increases the audience) and an antipathy for publishing
| anything which might offend the paymasters --- advertisers
| themselves. Holt quotes John Swinton (anonymously):
|
| _There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I
| am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am
| connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed
| in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my
| occupation, like Othello 's, would be gone. The business of a
| New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright,
| to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to
| sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the
| tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time,
| our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property
| of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes._
|
| Philanthropic support leads to donor-influence along largely
| similar lines (the Tiny Sparks podcast frequently addresses
| such distortions in the non-profit world:
| https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/)
|
| Other options are that propagandists run media services for
| their own benefit or interest (RT, Sputnik, Newscorp, OANN,
| Sinclair), or that "news" simply panders to the minimum viable
| user, at the lowest possible cost, choking out all but a tiny
| minority of high-quality services, themselves only affordable
| to a few.
|
| The free market utterly fails information goods, due to the
| mechanics of the market itself.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I would personally pay for good, unbiased journalism.
|
| Good luck finding that.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| This is exactly the issue. I don't trust any of these
| organizations alone with my information diet. I can't afford
| to subscribe to them all, but I don't want to favor one over
| the other. I've opted out and used page archives, which are
| better because I don't have to worry as much about unlisted
| shadow edits to content post-publication.
| rc_mob wrote:
| I've found vox news to be ... mediocre. just about everything
| else is junk. thank god for certain subreddits that do a good
| job of aggregating news
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Exactly. Seems most of these big media conglomerates are
| leaning left. And a minority right. And then we look to what
| as the zero-influence news source? Not sure it can even be a
| corporation or organization because that's inherently
| controlled by some person or persons who have left or right
| bias. If only there were social news networks.... Oh wait. ;)
|
| I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
| blooalien wrote:
| > I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
|
| Thanks! You just gave me my new favorite news source.
| rc_mob wrote:
| Plz try not to see the world as left/right. The lenses of
| honest/dishonest and smart/stupid are a much better way to
| look at the media.
| watwut wrote:
| What are you talking about? Right wing media space is large
| and powerful. Fox alone is massive anf then you have huge
| amount of talk radio, podcasts, journals and so on.
| tyre wrote:
| "Left" and "right" is horribly reductive. I don't know a
| single person who agrees with everything thrown into those
| simplistic buckets.
|
| Take even the Supreme Court. Multiple "right" judges voted
| to uphold the ACA and abortion restrictions; things that
| would certainly be top on the list of "left vs. right".
|
| Pay attention to the specific issues.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I agree with you but I wouldn't have used the supreme
| court as an example. The justices are supposed to decide
| whether a law is constitutional, not whether they agree
| with it--at least in theory, and they try to keep up some
| semblance of appearances.
|
| A lot of the ACA arguments the court heard were
| incredibly stupid. And they _still_ have struck down
| parts of the law.
| Spivak wrote:
| In principle I agree with this but you have to have a
| certain baseline level of privilege yo even get the
| choice of choosing D/R in the US. If you're a minority or
| marginalized group [1] you're basically stuck huddling
| around the Democrats regardless of how you think of their
| broader views. I'm a super liberal person so it works out
| for me accidentally but I have libertarian friends who
| would for sure vote Republican if it wasn't for baseline
| existence issues like BLM or gay marriage.
|
| Like all actual policy discussions happen within parties
| because of this. It's easier to get the Democrats to be a
| little more conservative than get Republicans to support
| trans healthcare.
|
| [1] in the colloquial usage don't @ me with X is 49% of
| the population
| numpad0 wrote:
| Every pieces of information is always biased unless its
| Shannon entropy is zero. Your FM radio tuned to nothing is
| basically it.
|
| You're welcome. Here's my cryptocurrency address:[just
| kidding]
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Sure, but I would like journalism that at least tries.
|
| On All Things Considered on NPR a couple of weeks ago one
| of the hosts was interviewing someone about perceived media
| bias, and she seemed flabbergasted that people thought they
| had a bias. It seems to me they (and other organizations)
| might be in such a bubble they don't even realize it
| anymore.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| You still get ads with NYT, Economist, WSJ, WaPo after getting
| a paid premium subscription, especially in their mobile apps.
| I've had to install Pi Hole to get rid of them until they
| figure out how to encrypt them like Instagram.
| hedora wrote:
| I suspect "with no tracking" is more important than "with no
| ads" for most people.
|
| People happily tolerated ads in print media for at least a
| century. The pivot from display ads to surveillance capitalism
| is what I hear most (non-tech) people complain about.
|
| Also, per-user targeted ads undermine the value of premium ad
| real estate, letting middlemen (like Google) eat the content
| producers' lunch, all while providing minimal value to web
| sites and consumers.
|
| (Yes, they subsidize their "free" services with the revenue
| they extracted from the publishing industry, but that's just
| predatory pricing, with the goal of precluding consumer-
| friendly computing stacks.)
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I think even the tracking is not an issue for most people.
| It's just the intrusive nature of the ads. If I'm reading a
| news story I do not want to have to dismiss a popup/overlay
| every 30 seconds, have a video suddenly start playing, have a
| lot of blinking, flashing, and movement in my peripheral
| vision, have my back button hijacked to show me ads when I
| try to leave the site, etc. If there were static ads in the
| margins and a clean readable column of content in the center
| and no other foolishness I would tolerate that.
| syshum wrote:
| I believe this is a direct by product of "rage news", where a
| newspaper used headlines to illicit an anger response in order
| to get more views / clicks
|
| No one wants to pay a business that angers them all the time,
| if walmart pissed every customer off in every visit they would
| go bankrupt
|
| Rage Bait has been a mainstay in "journalism" of late in part
| to the Ad revenue nature of the business, however in doing so
| they pissed off most of the customers that they now want to pay
| for their product.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Like everything else in the US, these major newspapers merging in
| our lifetime seems inevitable. I just cannot believe how dirt
| cheap the subscriptions are, and yet, I'm not going to subscribe
| to a single one of them because their content is too varied in
| quality, let alone a handful.
|
| It seems like it would be impossible to start a news business off
| the ground today without a powerful investor, which means the
| publication would have some intentional bias.
| errantmind wrote:
| The entire centralized model is dying and shifting towards
| individual journalists with a personal brand and a degree of
| perceived authenticity. We are still in the early stages but I
| find it likely these big brands will fade away one funeral at a
| time.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| If yellow jounalism pays so much that Microsoft shoves it down
| every users throats in the name of being "current" and "updated"
|
| Why do we have these paywalls then?
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| I doubt it's feasible, but I've always been hoping for some
| payment service that would allow me to pay by the article across
| all news sites.
|
| My problem with paywalls is I don't want to buy a full NYTimes
| subscription just to finish reading one article.
|
| I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10
| to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on
| Wall Street Journal.
| realityking wrote:
| Laterpay (https://www2.laterpay.net/) has or used to have a
| service do allow publishers to sell individual articles.
| Interestingly, you'd only pay after you had consumed 5EUR worth
| of content which was a nice on-ramp. Spiegel here in Germany
| used to use. Unfortunately it didn't meet their revenue
| expectations and they went to a subscription.
| Aaronmacaron wrote:
| This looks like a good idea on the surface but there is one
| factor which is easy to forget but still very important. If you
| have a subscription with a news site instead of paying for
| articles individually you might not read articles you would
| have read otherwise. I often find myself enjoying articles much
| more than I would have anticipated just considering the title.
| If a per-article business model will become the norm the
| clickbait-problem will undoubtedly get worse. Deeper and less
| catchy articles will fade from media outlets which hurts the
| industry as a whole.
|
| That's one of the benefits of streaming services in the music
| industry. Nowadays it's much easier to discover artists which
| deviate from the mainstream because you don't have to spend any
| extra money to discover a new artist. I think this is healthy
| for the music scene and I suspect the same is true for
| journalism.
|
| Also if you have a subscription you are probably going to read
| more articles than if you would have to purchase every article
| individually even if it's less expensive to do so. People
| reading less is hardly a desireable goal.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| But with a music subscription like Spotify, you've got the
| whole catalog to browse at $10/mth. If I want a 90% complete
| catalog of journalism, what is that $200/mth across them all?
| _delirium wrote:
| Apple News+ is trying to build that, one subscription for
| $10/month. This is the current list of who they include:
| https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/
|
| It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what
| you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like
| the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami
| Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some
| news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic.
| It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though,
| who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining
| their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified
| in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
| eddyg wrote:
| Came here to say Apple News+ has been quite excellent.
|
| If you get to a paywalled WSJ article on the web, you can
| often use the "share" icon to "Open in Apple News" and
| read it just fine.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| That list of Apple's partner publications does reflect a
| bias though. For example the news/politics section
| contains more lean-left and left biased sources from All
| Sides (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-
| ratings) than it does lean-right and right-biased
| sources. I am guessing a number of right-biased sources
| either aren't welcome on Apple's platform or don't feel
| comfortable partnering with them. Given that Apple's own
| content policies implement a progressive bias (for
| example on trans issues), and since they have a long
| history of censorship
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple), I am
| not sure how people can trust such a service to fairly
| represent all views or provide a diversity of viewpoints.
|
| And this is the exact problem with this sort of bundle -
| it centralizes something that is better handled in a
| decentralized way, and the platform owner then gains
| power that they can abuse. The GP comment mentioned
| Spotify, and they suffer from the same issue. They
| entered the podcast market, acquired Joe Rogan's show as
| an exclusive, and then immediately proceeded to censor
| vast swaths of content based on their employees'
| ideological biases
| (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-
| spotif...).
| baggy_trough wrote:
| The content menu is decent. Unfortunately the UI for
| Apple News+ is bad enough to make the service a no-go.
| rchaud wrote:
| With Apple doing the bundling, the content will only be
| available in the Apple News app, which is Mac and iOS
| only.
|
| Even worse, the Mac app does not let you print or even
| select text. It's taking web content and making it as un-
| web like as it can. I can't even share the article to
| Pocket!
|
| I subscribe to the NYT and Globe & Mail. I print articles
| I want to read to PDF (or save as a SingleHTML file) and
| have them auto-synced to my tablet. This gives me a
| permanent copy of the article that supports annotation.
|
| I'm never going to go the bundling route.
| xeromal wrote:
| I was part of a google program that did just that. In fact,
| they tried it twice but I don't even remember the name. You
| loaded an account with some cash and it would deduct
| micropayments from various news sites. I loved it but they
| killed it pretty quickly.
|
| Edit: Found the name. https://contributor.google.com
| Flockster wrote:
| I think this was the idea of flattr. A little different, you
| set a fixed amount per month and this was splitt across the
| articles/media you consumed. It was quite popular in the german
| podcasting scene, where you then "paid" per show you listened.
| alyandon wrote:
| I wouldn't mind paying for a "day pass" to online news sites
| for a nominal price as long as I continue to have access to
| that day's content just as if I had paid for the print version.
|
| That might be more manageable given the current reality of
| payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article
| basis.
| dunnevens wrote:
| Amazon will sell you the current issue of a newspaper or
| magazine in Kindle format. You can get today's New York Times
| for a dollar. Not as nice as a day pass to the site, but it's
| one option.
|
| Kindle books can be updated with the publisher's changes.
| Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would
| be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful
| as a day pass.
| alyandon wrote:
| Thanks - I wasn't even aware that was an option.
| biddit wrote:
| This is the model that helped the music industry come out of
| the Napster era.
|
| $1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an
| attractive proposition relative to file sharing.
| rchaud wrote:
| $1 songs are about as dead today as $2.99 ringtones.
|
| I'd argue we never moved past the Napster era. Spotify was
| freemium at birth, it was Napster with a subscription option.
| Nobody is paying piecemeal for audio or video these days.
|
| Over the past decade the Internet became mobile-centric
| rather than desktop-centric. A generation of users grew up
| connecting entertainment with phones and tablets, rater than
| computers. Mobile devices are opaque and locked down in ways
| computers never were, but they're also much easier to use.
|
| So it's not a surprise that someone today might look at you
| pityingly if you show them how to get something from a
| torrent or p2p client. They'll pull up the Youtube/Spotify
| link in a couple of seconds, and for them, it's the exact
| same thing.
| nightski wrote:
| Meh I'd imagine this would just lead to even more clickbait to
| try and get you to pay the $0.10 for an article that actually
| isn't worth the time to read it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then
| $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something
| on Wall Street Journal_
|
| Investigative journalism is expensive. So out the door,
| articles would need to be differentially priced to avoid
| adverse selection. That's a new friction the newspaper would
| need to incur to provide this pricing. Add to that the cost of
| cannibalizing subscriptions and the volatility of non-recurring
| revenue and it's a deal only newspapers who _couldn 't_
| otherwise get subscriptions would take.
| mtts wrote:
| A company called Blendle tried this in the Netherlands. It
| didn't work. Turns out you do _not_ want to have to think after
| every headline and teaser whether you want to pay to read the
| full article.
| rchaud wrote:
| Makes perfect sense. I remember going to an amusement park or
| fair with my family and being given a small amount of money
| or tokens to spend. I'd enjoy myself, but I would be thinking
| about how to stretch out the tokens I had to maximize my
| experience.
|
| Few will have the patience for that when you're an adult. And
| especially when we're talking about pennies per article, for
| potentially a lot of articles.
| notatoad wrote:
| The beauty of blendle was that you _didn 't_ have to think
| after every headline whether to pay to read the full article.
| They prominently had a refund option at the end of every
| article, so you could decide after you read the article
| whether it was worth the money or not.
|
| What killed blendle was the lack of newspapers willing to
| sign on, and the lack of integration for the few newspapers
| that actually did - if I was presented with a micropayment
| option instead of a $10/no paywall when I clicked a link to
| an article on Twitter, Facebook, or hacker news, it might
| work. But blendle payment was only an option if you found the
| article through the blendle website, and their website
| sucked.
| phreeza wrote:
| Even with the refund it caused mental load I didn't like.
| mtts wrote:
| Why would a newspaper send money to Blendle for a someone
| clicking a link directly to their own site?
| detaro wrote:
| to make money from the transaction?
| xGrill wrote:
| Lots of comments here are talking about lowering paywall site
| search results since you can not view them, however, I would
| actually consider raising them. Free content in journalism has a
| race to the bottom mentality when it comes to content quality.
| Free content often is incredibly bias or does not actually do any
| research. This gets you a lot of "fake news" that can spread like
| wildfire.
|
| Having papers that are more reputable by having a sustainable
| business model that allows them to produce better quality
| content, to me would be worth it over fake news sites.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| I pay for USA Today, NYT, WSJ, the Houston Chronicle, 2 local
| community web-only newsletters, and a smattering of
| newsmagazines.
|
| In my strange way of thinking it's just another form of civic
| duty.
| shusaku wrote:
| > instead, it was bulk purchases by hotels and other places with
| lobbies that fueled the business.
|
| When I was a kid I actually would read the newspaper every
| morning, though mostly I was just looking at box scores. I do
| distinctly remember getting USA Today when we went on vacation.
|
| If you'll forgive my ramble, one other thing I remember now was
| my parents always complaining about the quality of the newspaper.
| We moved around a lot, and they really missed things like the New
| York Times, which I suppose was too expensive to get so far from
| New York. When I was a kid, I couldn't understand why one news
| paper would be better than another, I think I thought it was the
| quality of the writing. But we're my parents really complaining
| about the political slant of Midwestern papers? Did people care
| about that in the 90s? The lack of investigative journalism? I'll
| have to ask them next time I call.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It would be an impossible coincidence if all newspapers were of
| the same quality, however you define quality. USA Today and the
| NY Times are news for different purposes:
|
| I think USA Today is (or was, last I read it, ~5-10 years ago)
| underrated. They did some important investigative reporting and
| good journalism, and while they can lack depth in their short,
| digestible format (which is their intention, per distant
| memory), they also can be more succinct, which is a good thing.
| I thought the lack of depth was a real limitation, but I
| thought they also suffered from projecting themselves as a
| simple, easy (my words, maybe imperfect) source of information:
| People looking for the best information don't associate it with
| simple and easy.
|
| The NY Times addresses serious topics in much greater breadth,
| depth, and sophistication, and their investigative reporting is
| unparalleled (and taken for granted - if you step back and look
| at the stories they've broken, and think of what the world
| would look like without those stories, it's astounding).
| Certainly it has its flaws, including IMHO sometimes long-
| windedness - rarely do I wish an article was longer!
|
| You mentioned the NY Times but it has peers, IMHO, in the
| Financial Times and, to a degree, the Washington Post.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The Sunday NY Times of the 90s was like a science project. The
| thing was about 4 inches thick.
|
| No other paper was like that.
| hedora wrote:
| The 90s was the beginning of the collapse of journalism in the
| US. Media ownership laws were relaxed, and some of the bigger
| players were acquired, leading to layoffs of "redundant"
| journalists, and their replacement with partisan shills.
|
| Soon craigslist popped up and destroyed the market for
| classified ads (which used to be the primary source of revenue
| for local papers). Free internet news didn't help either.
|
| Since then, more and more ownership rules and things like the
| equal time doctrine (if you let one politician on the air, you
| need to let their opponent on as well) were eliminated.
| will4274 wrote:
| Equal time never applied to newspapers, and the broadcasters
| began relabeling their news content as entertainment
| ("infotainment") so the rule did not apply all the way back
| during Reagan.
| perardi wrote:
| The New York Times: the paper of record. Oh, oh no, I can hear
| the screams of "bias" already, but: from either the right or the
| left, you can't really argue that if a story is in the Times, it
| becomes _A Story_. Their investigations, their opinion pieces,
| they lead the national conversation, for better or for worse, and
| people pay for that.
|
| The Washington Post: the paper of the seat of the power. Similar
| to the times, it's...sigh...thought leadership. Big political
| stories break in the Post, and people pay for that.
|
| The Wall Street Journal: the paper of Wall Street. It's business
| news. It's valuable. People pay for it. People have been paying
| for it for a looooong time, too--they've had a paywall for quite
| a while, and a not particularly porous one.
|
| USA Today: the paper of...uh...the door mat at the Hampton Inn I
| stayed in because that AirBnB ended up being terrible? I have no
| idea who would pay for USA Today. It isn't the national voice on
| politics or business. They do have some solid reporters, but what
| differentiates them from either the Post or The Times? Why would
| I pay for USA Today _above and beyond_ any of these other papers?
| analog31 wrote:
| Noam Chomsky described the NYT and WP as "establishment"
| newspapers, representing the left and right leaning sides of
| the establishment.
|
| WSJ is fine for business news if you don't look at the
| editorial page, which has been the case for decades.
|
| USA Today was "TV that you can wrap fish in."
| will4274 wrote:
| Honestly, I like Chomsky a lot, but I think this quote
| reveals more about Chomsky than about newspapers. Or, he was
| describing a very different WP from the one that exists
| today.
| analog31 wrote:
| It was a fairly old book, so your point is well taken.
| Also, the boundary between left and right has shifted
| throughout the years.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| While I agree with your analysis I also reminded myself of USA
| Today's launch and how the conventional wisdom was no one would
| be interested in such a newspaper. Fox (the TV network) was met
| with similar disbelief.
|
| Yeah, USA Today and a paywall doesn't make sense, but USA Today
| doesn't make sense so who knows? I guess we'll find out soon
| enough.
| errantmind wrote:
| I see the news meta shifting towards individual journalists with
| a personal brand, like some of those on Substack.
|
| I don't think there is anything to be done to save these larger
| newspaper organizations. I used to consume them but their
| signal/noise ratio is now so low I wouldn't read them even if
| they were free. The sacrifices in integrity and quality to
| satisfy low attention span, lowest common denominator readers
| signed their death warrant. No longer journalists, they
| transformed into ideologically reinforcing entertainment.
| aml702 wrote:
| LOL. Imagine paying for USA Today.
| clubdorothe wrote:
| Which journal do you think worth paying for?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Mediapart, Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Monde, Le Canard Enchaine,
| Canard PC and tons of other.
| t-writescode wrote:
| The standard $20/mo asking rate of most papers after their
| trial "$1 per month for 3 months!!1" period?
|
| None of them.
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I think the major newspapers need to get together and start
| offering umbrella subscription packages. Preferably via something
| like Scroll, which worked in any web browser via a simple cookie.
|
| Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month
| per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two
| subscriptions. Since the incremental cost of online distribution
| is nearly zero, this means that the news outlets are leaving
| money on the table.
|
| Make everyone's first subscription cost $10, then provide access
| to additional papers for 50C/ each. Or use some other type of
| sliding scale--I'm sure there are numbers that would make sense.
|
| The alternatives are either that a major tech company comes along
| and does it for them (as Apple is attempting), or that all the
| papers ultimately merge into 2-3 huge outlets. I don't like
| either of those outcomes.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Normal rate for WSJ is around $40 per month. The starter rate
| is $20. If you try to cancel, they will renew at the starter
| rate.
| donkeyd wrote:
| They're also leaving international money on the table. I would
| never get a paper version of a US newspaper, but now with
| digital papers, I would love to read some articles from US
| papers. I just don't want to have to pick a single one,
| especially because many of them are local.
| CalRobert wrote:
| NYTimes has very cheap subscriptions internationally. At
| least for me, it's EUR2 a month. Doesn't include cooking
| though.
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| NYT and WSJ are probably fine with that, as if you are going to
| spend money on a subscription, it is probably one of those.
|
| So why share any revenue with the smaller papers?
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It's probably _one_ of those major papers (I 'd include a few
| others like The Washington Post) but which one?
|
| There is precedent for the major papers working together in
| markets where it makes sense to do so, see the International
| Herald Tribune.
| ghaff wrote:
| The Economist is another for a more international English-
| speaking audience. FT for European finance. Maybe a more
| cultural magazine like The New Yorker. But 2-3 is probably
| the limit for the _vast_ number of people.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| In a revenue sharing scheme, they would be able to command a
| larger share than the others. With enough people subscribed,
| it could possibly give them more revenue than the status quo.
| watwut wrote:
| Wouldnt it be anti competitive? The good thing about capitalism
| is supposed to be competition of products and prices. The
| cartel/monopoly thing destroys that.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per
| month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one
| or two subscriptions.
|
| But if you are the NYT or WSJ, you believe, reasonably, that
| one of those subscriptions will be for you.
|
| I agree generally. Aren't micropayments supposed to solve this
| problem?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| WSJ and NyTimes are papers that many people might read both
| of, they both provide different high end perspectives. USA
| Today is more like...I'm not really sure why anyone read it.
| Maybe if they wanted a very drab ultra-produced version of
| the news that uses more modern fonts, which is sort of the
| market they were going for on their introduction in the 80s.
| I don't see much overlap between the high quality New York
| papers and USA Today.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I'm usually reading the 'high quality' publications, but
| USA Today in the past (I haven't read it in years) had
| coverage the others lacked. They were (are?) a serious
| paper. They are also more succinct, which isn't a bad thing
| - many NYT articles could be shorter.
| ghaff wrote:
| It may have been SNL that described USA Today as the paper
| for people for whom the evening network news was too
| complicated to understand.
|
| As the sibling notes, a _lot_ of USA Today 's were left
| outside hotel rooms at one point when that was common in an
| era where the WSJ was very oriented towards finance types
| and was deliberately stodgy. (There was also the
| International Herald Tribune internationally which was at
| least at one point, a joint effort of the Post and the
| Times.)
|
| But, yeah, an American political junkie might get the Post
| and the Times today. I'm not sure why someone would pay for
| USA Today. It completely generic in digital form.
| jhbadger wrote:
| That SNL dig was obviously an exaggeration, but I
| remember when USA Today was being launched and they
| themselves compared themselves to TV news in printed form
| and that being a good thing.
| ghaff wrote:
| USA Today was clearly a very graphical and not too taxing
| paper often for business travelers who didn't want to
| deal with the _very_ serious, and at least somewhat NY
| /DC local, NYT and Post--or whatever the local newspaper
| was.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I recall that years ago, USA Today was sort of intended to
| be a "generic national newspaper". It made sense for places
| like 'delivery to hotel rooms' where the audience wanted a
| general national/global news product, but didn't need the
| 50% of the paper that was local school board meetings and
| classified ads.
|
| With that principle, I always figured that the endgame of
| the Gannet company would be to make their local papers USA
| Today with a small local supplement folded in.
|
| Maybe the same applies online-- you'll buy usatoday.com for
| national news, and also subscribe to a local rag. Over
| time, the local papers may scale back the
| national/global/wire service stuff.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Interestingly, at least for a while (and maybe still in
| some papers) Gannet used to do the opposite -- they would
| tuck in a condensed version of "USA Today" into the local
| papers they owned.
| numpad0 wrote:
| While I agree that $10 umbrella subscription make metric tons
| of sense even if it was not the only way online newspapers
| could work, I don't see competition in it. A whole industry
| without competitions is generally not a good thing......
| graftak wrote:
| The fee could be (partially) be distributed amongst publisher
| based on conversion like articles read, and time spent on
| that. In theory this would still provide an incentive to
| compete on quality, similar to music streaming services.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| They must take into account the loyal subscribers who are
| already paying the current fees. Introducing lower prices can
| mess up with this income stream.
|
| It's not easy to differentiate the product enough to collect
| maximum money from the both groups.
|
| But I do agree with your thinking. For me it would be almost
| enough if I could get access to just those articles posted on
| HN for $10/month (across many newspapers and with no risk of
| falling to some subscription trap).
| ghaff wrote:
| At which point someone will create another site that provides
| links to all the major articles (or every article) on all the
| major sites and how could they not have the same deal?
| Pandabob wrote:
| I'd gladly pay for 5-6 digital news subscriptions for $10 per
| month each. What's harder to justify for me are the multiple
| 30-40$ per month subscriptions for sites like FT, Bloomberg and
| the Information.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc have to realize that at $10 per
| month per paper, almost no one is going to pay for more than a
| single subscription_
|
| Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely,
| and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a
| population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market
| that has ad-supported filler.
| billytetrud wrote:
| That's a really shitty outcome tho. Look at how toxicly
| inaccessible academic papers are. Universities pay exorbitant
| prices for their students and faculty, and no normal person
| could every afford it.
|
| What we need is a system of pay-per-view+quality news that
| uses a rating system to determine how much people pay for the
| article. Imagine a pay scale where users pay x/log(2+x/1000)
| cents to the service per month (where x is number of articles
| read, or some similar metric), and the authors/publishers of
| those articles split that money based on how highly the user
| rated each article. This would mean that someone reading 10
| articles a month would pay 30 cents/mo, someone reading 10
| articles a day would pay $9/mo, and someone reading 100
| articles a day would pay $40/mo. At the same time, it would
| mean that users have an incentive to rate articles fairly,
| since they're charged regardless of their ratings, but better
| quality articles would get rated higher and get paid out more
| per view, incentivizing publishers to put out higher quality
| content and disincentivizing click bait.
|
| Ad supported content leads to click bait and emotional
| manipulation. We are living in the news dystopia and only
| finding a way to get rid of ad supported content will save
| us.
|
| This happened in the 20s too btw. Those "extra extra read all
| about it" boys selling newspapers by the headline caused a
| decrease in news quality too. Subscription news came along
| and saved us then. Unfortunately, there are too many
| different news sources to be supported by subscription
| services without massively fragmenting what people can read
| (just like video streaming services have massively fragmented
| what people can watch).
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I don't think you can charge per article. It makes opening
| a new article too high-stakes; people don't want to think
| about spending money each time they click on something,
| even if the amount they're spending is super small.
|
| I'm also concerned that your ratings system would
| perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which
| authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe,
| as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see
| this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on
| social media.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Just like no one wants to think about spending money each
| time they turn on a light in their house or take a
| shower? Yes, it'll be a barrier for people for a week,
| and then they'll forget about it like everything else we
| pay for individually.
|
| > your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-
| piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their
| readers currently believe
|
| The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality
| news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate
| towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will
| it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for
| people who are actually looking to escape their biases,
| because those people could rate articles more highly if
| they actually convince them to change their views, or at
| least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-
| infuriating way.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| >" Just like no one wants to think about spending money
| each time they turn on a light in their house or take a
| shower?"
|
| No, in the same way that Netflix is different from
| renting movies on Amazon Prime. It's SVOD vs TVOD vs
| something like youtube without a subscription that is
| AVOD. There's a reason that Spotify is hugely popular
| while it's a lot less common to buy an album on iTunes.
| It's the reason AYCE KBBQ and buffets are popular. Even
| if pay-per-use ends up cheaper, flat-rate subscriptions
| are easier for people to see value in, and they can
| consume without concern of overages.
| billytetrud wrote:
| > There's a reason that Spotify is hugely popular while
| it's a lot less common to buy an album on iTunes. It's
| the reason AYCE KBBQ and buffets are popular.
|
| Yes, but the reason is not the subscription model. People
| like variety. The subscription model actually prevents
| good variety in a network. Read my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804511 . You bring
| up Spotify, but music is a fundamentally different
| product than news or videos.
|
| > flat-rate subscriptions are easier for people to see
| value in
|
| What you're saying is that people are getting duped into
| paying higher prices for lower quality content. While you
| might be right, this isn't a point in favor of the
| subscription model.
|
| > they can consume without concern of overages
|
| There is no reason a service can't help a user track
| their consumption and let the user configure a warning if
| they're hitting the configured limit. The subscription
| service is a very inflexible way of ensuring people stay
| within their budget.
|
| The real problem is that pay-per-view content is
| massively overpriced. Of course people opt for
| subscription services when for the price of 3 pay-per-
| view movies, they can watch 30 movies on a subscription
| service. If pay-per-view content were priced
| commensurately with subscription services, it would
| change the game.
| ghaff wrote:
| Micropayment startups have come and gone. I agree with
| you that pay-as-you-go has been normed with electricity,
| water, and probably even gas for cars. But maybe it's
| because people feel they need to do those things for some
| definitions of need. Whereas media, even newspapers, is
| more in the class of entertainment. Even music, which was
| trending towards digital purchases for a while has
| largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.
| billytetrud wrote:
| > Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of
| entertainment
|
| But why would pay-as-you-go be bad for the class of
| entertainment? The vast majority of entertainment options
| out in the world are pay as you go (live shows, movie
| theaters, vacations, restraunts, etc etc).
|
| > Even music, which was trending towards digital
| purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can
| eat subscriptions.
|
| Music has been an interesting outlier here because people
| are increasingly listening to music playlists and not
| hand-picking their own music. Hand-picking music is time
| consuming and a pain sometimes, so why not let the
| algorithms decide what to listen to? By contrast, people
| still hand-pick news articles, TV shows, movies, and
| things like that - and they'll likely continue to do that
| because they're activities that generally require
| engagment - whereas music is generally listened to in the
| background while doing something else.
|
| The movement towards the subscription model has primarily
| been about improving things for businesses, not for
| customers. The rhetoric is "customers don't want to think
| about paying", but we can clearly see countless
| counterexamples in the world. Businesses, however, like
| the subscription model because it makes it easier for
| them to predict their revenue and it puts up a (small)
| barrier in place for customers to stop paying them.
|
| However, while the subscription model is great for single
| items (eg high-end software) where the subscription is
| basically just a way to pay-as-you-go automatically, the
| subscription model is actually a pretty bad payment model
| for networks of content when you think about what it
| incentivizes. The user pays a fixed price for unlimited
| content. This incentivizes the user to consume as much as
| they can. A user who use the service 100 times more than
| another user both pay the same price. This means it
| necessarily excludes users who don't consume a lot, and
| raises the price for people who consume a below average
| amount. There is a deadweight economic loss there.
|
| In addition it provides no net incentive for the
| subscription provider to increase the options available
| in the system or the quality of those options. In fact,
| there is an incentive to release low-quality content as
| filler so that their high-consuming users don't run out
| of content (which they do anyway). Take a video streaming
| service for example. If they increase the number of
| options available to customers, they don't earn any more
| money but each item available in the system gets watched
| less, which means owners of the content would would to be
| part of that subscription network less and less as the
| content grows. Either that or they charge customers more
| as the library grows - which customers wouldn't pay for
| since most people wouldn't actually consume more just
| because the library's bigger.
|
| What results is that video subscription services have
| necessarily fragmented and will stay fragmented for as
| long as people keep drooling over the subscription model.
| People are locked into one or two networks of content
| which are primarily all they watch. They don't have
| access to other content without paying significantly more
| or making a burdensome leap of ending service with one
| network and beginning with another (which loses them
| access to content they had there).
|
| News is even worse, where individual newspapers have
| their own siloed subscription services. That's great if
| you read most of the content on there, but its terrible
| if you just want to read an article someone sends you
| ever once in a while. There's some more aggrigated news
| services that have come out recently, but these will also
| have the fragmentation issues that video streaming has
| because of the subscription model.
| ghaff wrote:
| The entertainment people pay for a-la-carte is relatively
| high-end though. It's $5 to $10 to $100+ . People are
| fine with making that a conscious decision. Not so much
| with a $.05 for an article. I'm not justifying this
| pattern. Just observing that it seems to be the case (as
| have others).
|
| As for video services, lots of people argued against the
| $100/month bundle as augmented by the $5/each Blockbuster
| payment. I actually prefer the current fragmented
| services plus a la carte even if it's annoying sometimes.
| Certainly saves me money.
|
| ADDED: >In addition it provides no net incentive for the
| subscription provider to increase the options available
| in the system or the quality of those options.
|
| Not sure I understand that. While there's certainly
| inertia, if your subscription isn't providing me with
| value, I cancel it. (Some companies make it difficult to
| do so but that's a separate issue.)
| billytetrud wrote:
| > Certainly saves me money.
|
| I think a lot of people believe its saving them money,
| but in reality its actually costing more and at the same
| time lower quality than it would be with a correctly-
| priced pay-per-view model. You can't compare to
| blockbuster because that system was old and there have
| been many things that can bring the cost down these days.
|
| > if your subscription isn't providing me with value, I
| cancel it
|
| Yes, that's why streaming video services have some
| quality content, and its why they price them so cheaply -
| so its worth it despite the fact that most of the content
| is low quality and lacks a variety of quality content. If
| they increased the options available, they'd have to
| charge more money than its worth to cover the costs of
| that extra content. If they increased the general
| quality, same thing. There is a limit to how large these
| subscription content networks can get before it must
| fragment.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| There's a lot less decision-making involved in turning on
| a light, or running the faucet--it always does the exact
| same thing. It's hard to know in advance if an article
| will be worth reading.
|
| People have also had an entire century to become inured
| to utility pricing.
|
| A better comparison might be data-limited cell phone
| plans. Even though spectrum and network capacity are
| legitimately scarce resources (especially in the early
| days), basically all of the carriers have been forced to
| offer some kind of quasi-unlimited data plan, where you
| might be throttled but you won't be charged overages, or
| you won't be charged on specific streaming services.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Thus the ratings system
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Yes, that works super well on Youtube, doesn't it? ;)
| billytetrud wrote:
| You're comparing apples to orangutans. Like, sure I get
| you're joking. But your joke implies that you think that
| youtube upvotes are at all comparable to what I'm
| suggesting. Its not.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Why is it different? One reason I used Youtube is that
| they started out with a five star rating system, and
| moved to the current one because it worked better. Users
| only ever rate things either five stars or one star, when
| given the choice.
|
| The only exception I know if is Goodreads, where people
| seem to put a great deal of effort into their ratings
| (which I find super interesting). You might argue this is
| a better analog because the audience would have more
| overlap with newspaper readers, but people aren't going
| to put as much thought into a short article versus a long
| novel.
| billytetrud wrote:
| > Why is it different?
|
| Because youtube videos aren't rewarded based on votes.
| People generally want creators to be rewarded for their
| work when its good, and they'll almost certainly put more
| effort into rating if they know that's how those creators
| get rewarded.
|
| Also, you seem to think that youtube's voting system has
| failed somehow. In what way do you think its failed? You
| do know that youtube doesn't recommend things to people
| based on upvotes, right? Views are what youtube cares
| about, not votes. Votes are mostly just for show on
| youtube.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| High quality public news is also still available. BBC, In
| Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering (DW),
| NPR in the US I believe, in reality you don't need to pay
| for news at all if you're an ordinary citizen who just
| wants to stay on top of what's going on. If you're some
| kind of think tank employee and read four hours of news per
| day surely you can afford it.
|
| Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > High quality public news is also still available. BBC,
| In Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering
| (DW), NPR in the US I believe ...
|
| In the US, there simply isn't enough quality news
| available for free, and many essential stories and
| reporting are behind paywalls (especially the NYT and
| Wash Post).
| billytetrud wrote:
| > Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.
|
| Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being
| informed by low quality "journalism" that is really just
| entertainment in disguise. By paying 0 bucks we need to
| spend more time reading things to be well informed, or
| we'll just accept being less informed by news that's more
| entertainment than journalism.
|
| > High quality public news is also still available
|
| Sure, but increasingly you need to pay for it or you need
| to be good at finding it. Not everyone has the skills to
| sus out good journalism, and almost nobody can avoid
| their time being wasted by garbage articles and click
| bait. This is the price we're paying.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| https://apnews.com/
|
| uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network
| does pretty well at cutting out most ads.
|
| Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash
| content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying
| is not always the solution. We must demand better
| journalism, even though everything seems to be trending
| toward entertainment and sensationalism.
| billytetrud wrote:
| > uBlock or AdGuard
|
| Sure, adblock is nice, but its kind of irrelevant to the
| discussion. The fact that you block ads doesn't change
| the fact that most news is paid for by ads (that people
| who don't have adblock get). In fact, adblock probably
| reduces the quality of news even further, because the
| people who don't have adblock are probably less smart on
| average than the people who do use adblock - and thus the
| articles who cater to that group more earn more money.
|
| > paying is not always the solution
|
| You're creating a straw man here. Did I say that "paying
| is the solution"? No I didn't, I said ad-funded news has
| lead to the trashy news dystopia we live in today. The
| reason is not because of ads per se - its because these
| pages get paid on a per click basis. If you click, they
| get paid, even if the article ends up sucking. This
| incentivizes massive amounts of low quality click bait.
| If there were such a thing as an advertisement mechanism
| where low-quality content wouldn't get paid, that would
| solve the problem without paying.
|
| > We must demand better journalism
|
| Sorry, but you don't just get better things because you
| demand it. We live in a world where the only way to
| actually make your own tiny individual impact on
| journalism quality is to purchase subscriptions to
| quality news sources and to avoid clicking on anything
| online. Ever. If you're still going to click on things
| online, you're not demanding better journalism in a way
| that will make an impact. And how many people do you
| expect to do that? Very few. I doubt you'll do it
| yourself, even tho you care about getting better
| journalism.
|
| What we need are better tools that allow people to only
| give money (ad revenue or otherwise) to publishers of
| quality journalism.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I edited my post while you were replying--I do know some
| individuals who have a _couple_ of subscriptions, but not
| more than that unless it 's for professional reasons.
| Businesses are a different story, and they should be charged
| accordingly.
| Cyclone_ wrote:
| Agreed, the only people I know of that subscribe to
| multiple publications do it for professional reasons. I
| only subscribe to WSJ and it's more pricey than others but
| worth it. I get all the major stories.
| tyre wrote:
| I subscribe to the NYT, New Yorker, London Review of Books,
| New York Review of Books, and the Atlantic.
|
| I don't know how people think they'll survive with a tenth
| of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of
| people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue?
|
| So then what? Publications look for alternative means of
| supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content
| towards clickbaiting.
|
| Maybe it's fine not trying to be for _everyone_ when not
| everyone values them.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I think you're a major outlier, and that newspapers would
| get well above three times the number of subscribers.
| Magazines are a little different since they're more
| focused, i.e. The New York Review of Books is not a
| substitute for PCMag.
|
| But it's also possible I'm wrong--I certainly have no
| background on this industry. For example, someone on the
| TWiT podcast said the reason there's no effective
| "Netflix for Books" is because the industry is highly
| dependent on a very small number of "whales" who will buy
| five books per week.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even for most people who are regular readers, however
| defined, a la carte book purchases over the course of a
| year don't add up to a huge number. Reading most books
| takes a bigger time committment than most other media.
| And many who are voracious readers, among others, use
| libraries. I read at least a middling bit and I'm fine to
| pay $150/year or whatever and own my books (or "own" in
| the case of Kindle).
| deadalus wrote:
| I HATE clicking on a Google link and discovering that it's
| paywalled.
|
| I don't care about the newspapers "survival" problem, I
| personally do not derive any benefits from them. I just want my
| Google/DDG results clean and actually be able to read them. If a
| link is paywalled, it should be ranked way lower. Google cache
| trick doesn't work all the time.
| newsyyswen wrote:
| One issue is that the newspapers believe that they are
| providing a service by allowing search engines to link to their
| page.
|
| From the perspective of the search engine (and us readers), it
| feels like a bait-and-switch to present the full article to a
| crawler robot in exchange for a better search ranking, only to
| hide it and demand payment from a human.
|
| But over in Australia, old media organizations have
| successfully lobbied for a "link tax" which allows them to
| demand payment from search providers who link to them. We've
| still got a long way to go before we reach a consensus on the
| independence of search platforms and the idea that human
| viewers should be served the same content as web spiders.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Google actively encourages hard paywalling in lieu of other
| ways of gating media (like incognito detection) .
| https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-ini...
|
| Also strange that some people would care more about a clean
| search result than the survival of media being consumed.
| kin wrote:
| If we want quality content then these news sources need to be
| incentivized somehow.
|
| When it comes to SEO, the content is all there but the paywalls
| are usually client side so it's harder for crawlers to dock
| down paywalls.
|
| Overall I agree that paywalls are annoying. But I do want
| quality publications to survive else we are going to be stuck
| with content like USA Today
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Do you deposit your paychecks in the bank or do you send them
| back to your employer ?
| platz wrote:
| Pay up.
| syshum wrote:
| They need to make the price reasonable, and $9.99 month for a
| single paper is not reasonable IMO.
|
| For $9.99 I month I can access to a library of thousands of
| hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands
| of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands
| of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass)
|
| Sorry but the USA Today is not as valuable as these
| services... maybe $2.99 but more likely something like $9.99
| a YEAR at most $1.99 a mo would be a price point I would
| consider.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Those are interesting comparisons.
|
| None of your comparisons get you actual, recent news. Do
| you see this all as simply entertainment?
| syshum wrote:
| In many ways yes. News competes for the same time and
| budget as entertainment. These are both activities that
| people spend their disposable time / income on. They are
| not Food, Shelter, etc. Nor will someone refuse to go to
| their kids ball game because they need to read the USA
| Today..
|
| No news like a movie or a tv show is something to pass
| the time when you have nothing else to do.
|
| Also keep in mind Trust in news is at a all time low, in
| part because the news themselves treat it as
| entertainment by sensationalizing everything, "if if
| bleeds it leads" and other High Drama "news"
| ameister14 wrote:
| I'm willing to support honest, well done journalism and
| thoughtful editorial for $5 bucks a month and expect about
| 4 articles for that.
| memling wrote:
| > For $9.99 I month I cant access to a library of thousands
| of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) ,
| thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) ,
| or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass)
|
| Do you think it'd be worth it if you had archival access to
| the paper? It'd be interesting to be able to read NYT from
| its inception in 1851, for example. I know there are some
| papers that have done digital archiving, but I wonder if a
| research pass would be a way to generate revenue, too...
| syshum wrote:
| It could be, Only if it was a full, complete, uncensored,
| unedited archive. Which is highly unlikely.
|
| Another valuable feature would be to have access to a git
| style record of all edits... which no newspaper would
| ever do either
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| It's like walmart throwing some expired food after you
| for free.
|
| It could be good for some use cases, but not for the
| primary one which is getting fresh food for consumption.
| memling wrote:
| hence the research pass. I could actually see that as
| valuable for a subset of people if it were searchable. I
| find the historical value of news generally higher than
| the current value but of course that's not why people
| read the paper. I might be inclined to subscribe to the
| times if I could read contemporaneous perspectives of
| historical periods I'm interested in. as it is, I
| sometimes feel like Chesterton, who snarkily opined he
| would be impressed if the news could get the past right,
| to say nothing of their guesses about the future.
|
| even so I think there's a need for deeply reported
| careful work...and that takes money. archives might work.
| I also like the git diff idea in a sibling comment.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| It might be interesting to read the newspapers for
| september 10 2001 or read the stories for the days before
| a big event, but other than that? It has very little
| value.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I built a search engine based on Bing's API. One of the core
| features is ranking paywalled sites lower, making their text
| grey (eg Hacker news), and putting a moneybag char in the link.
|
| My reasoning is the same as yours - there's nothing wrong with
| Paywalls, but they're no good in search results, since chances
| are, a given user doesn't have an account with an arbitrary
| paywalled site that shows up in search.
| xoa wrote:
| > _I personally do not derive any benefits from them_
|
| > _I want to be able to read them_
|
| Uh? Being able to read is deriving a benefit. I don't disagree
| that the current situation is a complete mess, and that subs
| everywhere is ridiculous. It's perfectly possible to imagine
| technical/business solutions that would match reasonable
| budget/month for news to what people read and valued. And it's
| also easy to see real collective action problems, incentive
| issues and so on that might make that impossible. All tied
| together with advertising, privacy, public education issues and
| so on as well.
|
| But claiming you derive no benefit from newspapers at all would
| be a stretch even if you didn't want to read them, but claiming
| you don't while one sentence later saying you _do_ want to read
| them? That doesn 't seem quite reasonable.
| deadalus wrote:
| >I personally do not derive any benefits from them
|
| Any article is plastered all over the internet in hundreds of
| websites. Same topic, different headline.
|
| >I want to be able to read them
|
| I want to be able to read ANY of those "free non-paywalled"
| articles instead of the one that's paywalled. I have no
| loyalty to NYT, USA Today or The Blaze.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| So you want the news, and you don't want anyone to earn any
| money from spending the time to produce that news?
| deadalus wrote:
| I will prefer reading the same news from a website that
| does not paywall content. Websites pay-walling content is
| not the issue here. The issue is Google ranking paywalled
| sites higher even though the same content is available
| elsewhere for free. Those non pay-walled websites must
| also survive.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _issue is Google ranking paywalled sites higher even
| though the same content is available elsewhere for free_
|
| It's almost like it's not the same content. Something
| breaking on the _Times_ and then being summarized
| elsewhere are not interchangeable, which is why Google
| ranks its results as it does.
| deadalus wrote:
| I agree that if something breaks on the Times, it should
| be ranked higher. But 99% of the time, the news didn't
| break on Times or some other paywalled site. Still,
| Google will rank it higher - and I have to waste my time
| : opening it, closing it because its paywalled, open the
| next result and hope that it's not paywalled.
| dejj wrote:
| HTTP status 402, Payment Required may be the one for you
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
| astura wrote:
| I could have sworn that USA Today already had a paywall, but
| looks like it's just the local papers owned by it's parent
| company (which largely have the same page layout as USA Today)
| are the ones with the paywall. Seems obvious that they'd extend
| that to their national publication.
| EGreg wrote:
| Journalism had to adapt to the Internet. We talk about paywalls
| for online content in our whitepaper about how we plan to
| decentralize the Web economy and help monetize journalism and
| open source through micropayments instead:
| https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Paywalls
|
| The original Xanadu project had the concept of micropayments, but
| until now the only way to really achieve it was using lotteries
| (I think it was Ron Rivest in the 90s who suggested this?)
|
| The question is, how to monetize open source or journalism -
| online content that can be easily copied. Any sort of effective
| payment system requires a network effect. People could forj the
| system but they'd have to start from scratch, as no one would
| accept their payments.
|
| Imagine if every app and plugin on wordpress could have its own
| currency to earn money as people use it on various sites, and
| still continue to be open source. Imagine if social networks like
| Facebook were the ones paying for their users to read it,
| settling balances once in a while. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp
| fought for something like this in Australia and won.
|
| Would welcome feedback and thoughts. Why the massive amount of
| silent downvotes?
| gnicholas wrote:
| I didn't downvote, but I'm guessing others are doing so because
| this looks like self-promotion. You can mention a personal
| project on HN, but it's best to do so only at the end of an
| otherwise interesting comment, so it's clear you're not just
| shilling.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Micropayments have an absolutely unblemished three decade
| history of perfectly and precisely failing to work.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia.
| ..
| EGreg wrote:
| Thanks for that link! Very useful substantive analysis
|
| How does it apply in our case, by the way? In our case we
| take the payment decisions out of the hands of users and
| into the hands of community administrators.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Media payment systems work best with a clear
| transactional boundary and gatekeeper. Bundling models
| are vastly more successful than unbundling ones.
|
| In a tax-supported scheme, the tax collector serves that
| role. In a ticketbox, it's the literal gate or door
| itself. For advertising-supported media, it's the
| publisher or broadcaster, gatekeeping in a three-way
| branch between advertisers, creators/talent, and audience
| (similarly, cable providers). In donor-based
| broadcasting, the broadcaster intermediates between
| individual donors and content producers.
|
| As an alternative to a governmental progressive-tax-based
| system, a natural gateway exists at the ISP level, for
| which a _sufficiently effective_ gating, revenue-
| collection, and content-payment system might work. I 'd
| outlined that about three months ago here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033
|
| There are access-based royalty systems such as ASCAP /
| Harry Fox, though my sense is that for more substantial
| text-based content (similarly: data-backed reporting,
| deep analysis, and probably a fair bit of serial media of
| the video or podcast variety), linking payment to
| _publishers_ or _studios_ , who can support a staff of
| creators (writers, artists, actors, directors, support
| personnel) would be preferred to the music/broadcast
| model.
|
| Your problem is you're trying to dam a flat plain. You
| need to find a suitable dam site, and it's probably the
| ISPs. On the other hand, they're going to need systems
| for that service: content negotiation, payment
| collection, royalties or subscription payments, etc.
|
| The distinction my model has from a traditional
| micropayments or subscription model is that the provision
| level is universal. A service subscriber pays in a flat
| fee, they get an all-you-can-eat plan. The payment
| differentiation is between the aggregator and the
| creating studio (somewhat similar to current cable
| subscriptions).
|
| Note that total OECD content spend is roughly
| $100/capita. Advertising runs many times that, at ~%$600
| billion for the 1 billion inhabitants of the OECD, about
| $600/capita. "Free online content" costs the average
| household of 4 over $2,400 a year.
| gotorazor wrote:
| Did anyone here commenting actually read a copy of USA Today on
| paper before? The Nieman Lab article is not about paywalls per
| se, but paywalls in USA Today. People forget that pre-internet,
| USA Today was basically a news aggregator that just happened to
| print other people's stories on newspaper form. Their business
| model was to bulk sell these papers to chain hotels. Most of
| their readers had never paid for a copy of USA Today.
|
| So, if few reader in its heyday paid direct for it, and Gannet
| hasn't really changed the structure or content of USA Today in
| the last 25 years, what makes them think that readers will pay
| directly for it now in the internet age?
| mapgrep wrote:
| > People forget that pre-internet, USA Today was basically a
| news aggregator that just happened to print other people's
| stories on newspaper form.
|
| This part you're wrong about, USA Today has always had its own
| reporters, a fair number of them, although it's probably true
| they ran plenty of wire service stories as well, and may have
| run stories from other papers run by the parent company
| (Gannett).
|
| It's true about the hotels and as far as I know few people ever
| bought direct subscriptions.
| tyingq wrote:
| >Did anyone here commenting actually read a copy of USA Today
| on paper before?
|
| Yes, though because it was provided by a hotel for free. I
| can't imagine paying for one.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Oh, you paid for it.
|
| A major _USA Today_ revenue model has been passive
| consumption through hotel distribution. To the tune of $82
| million /year. (Total revenues are estimated at $3.4 billion
| for the privately-held company.[1])
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/08/02/how-
| us...
|
| (This _Forbes_ article is in fact linked in the _Nielsen_
| piece anchoring this thread.)
|
| Edit: Hotel revenue contribution downgraded from "a
| principle" to "a major" w/ information from Owler.com.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. https://www.owler.com/company/usatoday
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, the article says there's basically a 50% chance you
| paid for it explicitly on your room bill. Which shocks me,
| I always look at my bill in detail (out of curiosity) and
| I've never seen that in my life. Is this specific to
| certain types or brands of hotels, that I somehow
| rarely/never stay in?
|
| For the other half... now it's got me wondering what hotels
| pay USA Today on average per newspaper? I'd always assumed
| it was free or at least nearly free, just an ad delivery
| mechanism. But now you've got me curious.
| tyingq wrote:
| >the article says there's basically a 50% chance you paid
| for it explicitly on your room bill
|
| I'd like to think I'd have noticed that, at least once.
| That's a pretty shitty tactic.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Hilton affiliates used to have an opt-out model where you
| get a refund ranging from $0.50-$2.50 depending on the
| property or franchisee.
| walkedaway wrote:
| I don't think the data backs your claim. Sure, maybe in the
| 2000s after the internet began to dent its model it became a
| hotel paper, but in its heyday (the 80s and 90s) it was very
| popular option from newsstands (I'm old enough to remember
| dropping 50 cents for a copy).
|
| Back in the day, it was common for people to grab their
| favorite local paper and a USA Today. USA Today was great at
| national coverage of sports which apparently drove newspaper
| sales.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Today#History
| throwitaway1235 wrote:
| A few weeks ago the Reuters Institute published a study that
| claimed 29% of Americans "trust media".
|
| My question based off of that, are 29% of Americans funding
| paywalled media?
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hmm, interesting article. It _does_ kind of pointless for this
| newspaper.
| Trias11 wrote:
| The moment I see a paywall or even a flavor of heavy popup
| nonsense presenting some obstacles to content - I move on. Same
| with ad-infested sites. I have low tolerance to crap.
|
| The more people will do that - the quicker this annoying business
| model die. Unless your content will help me to make money
| (courses, tutorials, specific investment analysis) I aint'
| spending a penny on you.
|
| In a controversial note - I'd totally pay monthly subscription to
| some pirating service that extracts content from behind paywall,
| strip pages from ads and provide access. This will be valuable
| service.
| realityking wrote:
| Why would you prefer to pay pirates instead of the original
| creator?
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