[HN Gopher] Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 15 points
Date : 2024-08-14 19:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (diaspora.glasswings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (diaspora.glasswings.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Despite a great deal of jawboning and gnashing of teeth about the
| state of news media and possible remedies there are a number of
| dimensions of the problem and potential opportunities I rarely
| see discussed.
|
| I'd add to my 2022 comments the following:
|
| - When the NY Times hardened its paywall notably in TK-year,
| front-page appearances on Hacker News _fell to a quarter_ of
| their previous trend. There was no policy change at HN, just
| voting behaviour on submissions.
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (Own data based
| on a 2023 scrape of all HN front-page activity.)
|
| - Broadcast / programmed television seems to be undergoing a
| similar transition as occurred to newspapers in the past decade.
| See: "Traditional TV is Dying" <https://www.theguardian.com/film/
| article/2024/aug/08/traditi...>.
|
| - My "short reading list" is available via archive:
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi...>
| (The subreddit it was posted to is now private protesting
| Reddit's enshittification.)
|
| - Most _successful_ media have had either government support
| (e.g., the BBC, Deutschlandfunk) _or_ a strong multi-tier
| financing model.
|
| Of the last, the _Economist_ suggests a commercial basis being
| roughly by thirds subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke
| research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Public
| broadcasting in the US (NPR, PBS) benefit by member support,
| commercial underwriting (now little different from ads), and some
| government support (mostly to local stations). Traditionally
| within the US commercial publication revenue was based on banner
| ads, classifieds, legal notices (effectively an obligate support
| of newspapers by law imposed on private citizens and firms),
| subscriptions, and news-stand sales.
|
| Currently, the ISP as _at least a major payment gateway_ seems a
| highly underutilised opportunity. What translates to an Internet
| age is clearly still being worked out, though at the cost of many
| established institutions, large and small, failing entirely.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And I've remembered one other additional insight I'd meant to
| include above: _I 'd far prefer if more news entities operated
| like Wikipedia_.
|
| I'd first noticed this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
| and tsunami, which was a huge, complex, long-evolving story
| covering a huge area. Trying to get _useful_ information from
| news media was ... maddening. Even _good_ sources were at best
| useful for 1) initial reports and 2) a long dribble of
| additional developments, but after the first day or so
| _reading, listening, or watching_ news items gave very little
| clear overview of the story.
|
| There've been many, many, many such cases since. The Oroville
| Dam crisis (a notable press exception was Brad Plumer, then at
| _Vox_ , whose single-author reportage largely equaled
| Wikipedia). Covid-19. Various major court cases.
|
| Most recently, after hitting several outlets (BBC, CBC, NPR, NY
| Times, Guardian) over the outbreak of riots in the UK, and
| trying to relate the news and answer questions to an older
| relative, I remembered my Wikipedia trick and turned to their
| coverage. _The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gave
| all the relevant context far more clearly than any of five or
| so mainstream media sources I 'd turned to._
|
| Moreover, the Wikipedia article had on the order of 175
| footnotes and references, _linked_ in the article but
| _separated_ from the text, as footnotes are, meaning that one
| could _read the text as a narrative_ and _NOT_ be constantly
| interrupted by attributions as one so often is in current
| reporting. _Yes_ , it's useful to have sources cited, but
| _doing so as part of the narrative_ is itself, in my
| experience, mind-numbing in its own way.
|
| And if you're not happy with the Wikipedia coverage, there's
| the article's "Talk" page, which discusses issues and conflicts
| amongst editors, _at length_. At the time I 'd checked, the
| article ran about 18 screens (on my A4 e-ink tablet), only half
| of which were the actual article, the remainder being
| references and other Wikipedia "furniture". The Talk page ran
| _38 screens_ , which is to say, twice the length of the article
| and four times the length of the actual text, such that
| virtually all major conflicts and concerns were voiced there.
| And of course there's edit history so the reader can see what's
| changed, when, and by whom.
|
| I'd _really_ like to see media organisations adopt a Wikipedia-
| like format for long, complex, and evolving stories such that
| it 's easy to turn to such a page and get _the best, concise,
| current_ state of understanding, again with sources and
| discussion if wanted.
|
| Most media organisations, even those which are now fully
| digital, seem still to embrace the notion of a static printed
| product, and haven't fully embraced the capabilities of digital
| production, dissemination, change-control, and disclosure. It's
| ... disappointing.
|
| But we _do_ have Wikipedia, and I 'd strongly suggest using it.
|
| (A more permissive edit capability on HN, and for that matter,
| Diaspora*, would also be nifty. Perhaps an earned privilege,
| probably with strong penalties for abuse, as in "you lose
| privs". But SRSLY...)
| 57FkMytWjyFu wrote:
| When I realized how many news stories were paid placements, I
| refused to be billed to read them.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm aware that some people find the news _as it exists_ largely
| useless. I 'm going to suggest that _this is in fact a symptom of
| the larger problem I 'm referencing_.
|
| And that news _can_ be useful, even _vital_ at times. And
| performs a critical role in a democratic polity. One which is
| increasingly not being performed, most especially at the local
| and regional level.
|
| And that the proposals I'm making in TFA might be worth
| discussion in that light.
|
| Thanks.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers),
| but since online, people seem to expect free.
|
| Plus I think over the decades, broadcast news morphed into a form
| of entertainment. And seems well over half the news I have access
| to is about Sports, Hollywood and who is having sex, which I do
| not care about.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Use to be very common for people to pay for news
| (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free.
|
| I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my
| streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325
| a year for whatever it is that they're selling? Even setting
| aside concerns about the quality of the product, news
| subscriptions are priced way too high given the amount of
| competition for those dollars. Then they'll monitor everything
| you do and sell your information to the highest bidder. Then
| when you realize it's not worth it, they'll put you through
| hell and back to cancel.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Local News Papers were a lot cheaper, plus you got news that
| no one else was reporting.
|
| In most cases the news was balanced back then. Go to a
| Library and see for yourself by viewing archives.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Oh, I'm old enough to remember the days when we were all
| subscribing to the local newspaper. I'm still thinking
| about subscribing to our local paper, but last time I
| checked it was just too expensive, taking into account that
| all the news I need will get to me by social media, TV,
| email, or text message.
| svachalek wrote:
| You used to be able to have them put real ink on real paper and
| deliver multiple pounds of it to your doorstep for less than
| they want to charge for the bits now. It's like in the 90s
| banks wanted you to pay extra to use the ATM. It saved them
| from having the office open and hiring tellers but they wanted
| to charge you for the "convenience" of using the machine.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| Sure, none of the people involved in that had healthcare.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Those newspapers made most of their money through ads. Most of
| what people paid was their attention, not their money.
| input_sh wrote:
| One crucial difference is that you could walk up to a newsstand
| and buy an issue whenever you felt like it.
|
| Online, there's very other options that don't include a
| perpetual agreement.
| xp84 wrote:
| This is so true. I'd anonymously pump 50 cents into those
| paywalls on a daily basis if that were a way to gain access
| to an article, but the only online option any newspaper or
| magazine I know of provides is an auto-renewing subscription
| of $5-10 a month, with the deal being a bit better if you go
| annual. Problem is, there are like 6,000 newspapers and
| magazines in the country whose articles I might stumble upon
| and like to read. No, I'm not subscribing to the Akron Times,
| the San Diego Tribune, and the Boston Herald just because
| someone linked me an article from each today.
| KerryJones wrote:
| The most obvious reason seems to be missing?
|
| Because it's split up. You no longer pay "for the news", you pay
| a specific company for their take.
|
| Do you want leftist? Rightist? Something central? You want
| multiple opinions, will you pay multiple subscriptions?
|
| Happily pay $10/mo for a selection of specifics news items.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| See "The closest I've come to a solution" in TFA.
|
| Thoughts?
| svachalek wrote:
| I don't know how you find agreement on what our taxes have to
| pay for, given how polarized it all is now. I'd much rather a
| system where my browser anonymously pays a nickel or
| something to read what I want.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| We've had three decades of micropayments proposals, none
| have worked.[1] _Traditionally_ , publishers have strongly
| trended toward _aggregated_ rather than _disaggregated_
| payment models: you pay for _a full issue_ of a publication
| at the newsstand, you pay for a _year-long subscription_ of
| a print publication. Or these days of online publications
| and streaming services, should you choose to do so.
|
| Superbundling (e.g., a single fee providing universal
| access), a universal content tax, and/or a fee assessed by
| ISPs (if at all possible indexed to typical household
| wealth within an area) strike me as far more tractable
| options.
|
| Among the elements of a tax-based system is that there are
| in fact multiple taxing jurisdictions, and access might be
| spread amongst them, and through multiple mechanisms.
| Public libraries already exhibit some of this, with funding
| being provided at the local (city/county), state, and
| federal levels, as well as other aggregations such as
| regional library coalitions, _academic institutions and
| districts_ (particularly community and state postsecondary
| institutions), and others.[2] There 's also the option of
| _indirect_ support, which is what mechanisms such as
| mandatory legal notices entailed: a jurisdiction could
| require public posting of various sorts (fictitious names,
| legal settlements and actions, etc.) which effectively
| require private parties to pay for the upkeep of a
| newspaper. Similarly, discount "book rate" postage was a
| distribution subsidy offered to publishers of not only
| books but newspapers and magazines within the U.S. That's
| less an issue given the Internet, but the _spirit_ of that
| idea might be adopted.
|
| The idea of local papers which can rely on some level of
| multi-jurisdictional tax funding, perhaps some charitable
| or foundational support, advertising, subscriptions,
| obligatory notices, bespoke research, and other funding
| sources would give _multiple independent funding channels_
| which would be difficult to choke off entirely. That seems
| far healthier than the present system.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. My own argument, and numerous citations to both pro and
| con views, is "Repudiation as the micropayments killer
| feature (Not)" <https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004820/
| https://old.reddi...>, based on a six-year-old proposal
| from David Brin which has gone ... precisely nowhere.
|
| 2. Yes, I'm aware of certain issues concerning library
| texts in recent years within the U.S. I'd suggest that the
| fact that those debates are ongoing rather than settled
| _either_ way means that overt control isn 't completely
| straightforward.
| KerryJones wrote:
| Yeah, I think what I'm describing would fall under a thing
| like MoviePass but for NewsPass.
| johnea wrote:
| I agree. I scan about 30 websites for news each day.
|
| Do I need to subscrible to all of them?
|
| Just not practical...
| paradox460 wrote:
| Is grounded still around? Because that's what they offered.
|
| For me I find skipping the daily hystronic news cycle is better
| for my health. Anything of significant enough import would get
| to me via social channels, at which point I can go find enough
| sources about a subject to get a proper nuanced view
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Yes, I see them advertised by a few YouTube content creators
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It doesn't even need to be everything. to be honest I'm not
| really interested in paying for current events from any outlet,
| as I am simply not a news junkie, but if I could get some kinda
| combo deal for the publications that are frequent fliers in
| Sunday Longreads I would go for it.
|
| In the olden days papers would target people like me who only
| occasionally read news with good headlines on the front and a
| low price for that day's print run. Now they are asking for a
| subscription (which is too much to pay for a single article)
| and acting like the archival value add is worth it to me (it
| isnt).
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I am astounded that the conclusion the writer comes to is..
| socialize the news.
|
| Clearly people won't pay for news because it's flawed, the
| product stinks, and the information is biased. So here's a great
| idea, let's steal from everyone via taxes and force them to pay
| for it! Then it will be good somehow.
| autoexecbat wrote:
| Some countries provide government funded news that is of
| reasonable quality, for example abc.net.au/news
| atrus wrote:
| I'll nibble. A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring
| a profit and where that profit comes from. News is required to
| be dramatic and sensationalist because that's what attracts
| attention and gets you those advertising dollar. Certain topics
| are off limits, because of those advertising dollars.
|
| It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to
| organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it
| might solve some.
| gottorf wrote:
| > A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit
| and where that profit comes from.
|
| The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded
| organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks,
| and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather
| there not be an official merger of the government and media
| that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty
| picture of the government.
|
| The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may
| have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as
| the alternative.
| jl6 wrote:
| The BBC has a sorta-kinda-taxpayer-funded model and manages
| to attract criticism from all sides, which is generally
| taken as a compliment to its neutrality.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Um, no. The criticism from the Left is, "it's not Left
| enough."
|
| Show us some stories, oh, the Rotherham grooming scandal,
| for instance, _before_ it became a national story.
|
| Here's one afterward:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-
| yorkshire-61868863
|
| > Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal
| with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town
| for more than 15 years, according to a new report.
|
| "not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I
| thought that was what police were supposed to do.
| somishere wrote:
| Personal biases abound in publicly funded news orgs, just
| as in private. But there are models where editorial
| independence is maintained .. including in Australia and
| the UK.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Not sure I agree. NPR, a nonprofit, has followed Fox News,
| NYT, MSNBC, etc down the biased, slanted drain hole. I
| listened to NPR from my childhood until a few years ago
| before I, sadly, had to call it quits.
| atrus wrote:
| It's a multifacted problem, so you're still going to have
| the attention problem. NPR is primarily user funded, so if
| your news is boring (as non-biased, non-slanted tends to be
| thankfully) you're going to lose out to the
| more..."exciting" sources.
| johnea wrote:
| BBC is pretty good, as well as NPR.
|
| News companies are mostly collapsing. The only viable way to
| keep in private hands might be the Guardian model, of a trust
| established in it's name.
|
| Bozo could certainly afford to do that for the Wash Post,
| instead they're leading the race to the bottom with firings and
| more for-profit articles.
| gottorf wrote:
| I don't know, Uri Berliner's critique of NPR was pretty spot-
| on, at least from n=1 of this former longtime listener. I
| found it increasingly difficult to stomach the lopsided
| coverage that no longer stuck to just the facts, but rather
| what to think and how to feel about them.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Neither of your comparisons is true, as I've detailed
| elsewhere in this thread.
| glial wrote:
| Ideally, governments solve problems that are important but that
| society can't figure out how to solve in other ways. The
| questions for us are then:
|
| - is it important that voting citizens are informed about
| various issues?
|
| - is the market (or some other mechanism) currently meeting
| this need?
| Schiendelman wrote:
| And: - would implementing "news" change the level of
| informedness?
|
| I don't think we can assume it would.
| glial wrote:
| Good call - 'news' as we know it today is optimized for
| engagement, not creating an informed citizenry.
| dinkblam wrote:
| i want to pay for reuters but they won't let me. no option to
| turn off the ads in exchange for payments..
| apercu wrote:
| I mean, the shareholders.... think of them....
| nimbius wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godi_media
|
| This is nothing new and in fact is a feature of having a for-
| profit 24 hour news media industry that thrives on advertising
| revenue and flourishes under emaciated regulation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
|
| the repeal of the fairness doctrine in the United States means
| your television radio and internet news feeds are free to
| outright fabricate stories with impunity. commercial news means
| the product is tailored to the consumer, not congruent with the
| facts.
|
| Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it
| to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure. You
| can still have private news agencies, they just cannot market or
| sell "snake oil" in the service of the dollar. Another
| alternative is turning all news into something akin to NPR, or
| having news "co-ops" that provide the service to their listeners
| for a fee.
| gottorf wrote:
| > turning all news into something akin to NPR
|
| Why do you see NPR as such a positive example of journalism? It
| seems to me that it's been skating on its previous good
| reputation for quite some time now.
| madrox wrote:
| I don't think the OP was pointing to it as a example of
| positivity but an example of a business model (donation
| supported)
| paradox460 wrote:
| Likely because NPR has yet to tread on one of their beliefs
| with biased reporting. It will happen eventually, the rate at
| which it's happening is accelerating, and when they realize
| it happens they'll feel the same outage we all did our first
| time. The umbrage, the "you were supposed to be unbiased" cry
|
| I grew up on NPR. It was always on in the background. On the
| way to and from daycare, in the car on Sunday mornings on the
| way to the uu church, playing out of a small boom box on the
| back porch, or winding up the miles of a long road trip.
| Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Schickelie mix, etc, all
| were the background music to my childhood. When I entered
| adult life, I tried to continue listening, but leading to,
| during, and after the 2016 election, the biases became to
| base, to visible to ignore
| paradox460 wrote:
| Likely because NPR has yet to tread on one of their beliefs
| with biased reporting. It will happen eventually, the rate at
| which it's happening is accelerating, and when they realize
| it happens they'll feel the same outage we all did our first
| time. The umbrage, the "you were supposed to be unbiased" cry
|
| I grew up on NPR. It was always on in the background. On the
| way to and from daycare, in the car on Sunday mornings on the
| way to the uu church, playing out of a small boom box on the
| back porch, or winding up the miles of a long road trip.
| Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Schickelie mix, etc, all
| were the background music to my childhood. When I entered
| adult life, I tried to continue listening, but leading to,
| during, and after the 2016 election, the biases became to
| base, to visible to ignore
| AlbertCory wrote:
| NPR is National Palestinian Radio. I suppose you want a
| reference now? Here you go:
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/npr-editor-reveals-why-sta...
|
| They didn't report the story because it would have helped
| Trump.
|
| Likewise the BBC has been captured by wokeness.
|
| https://deadline.com/2023/12/bbc-denies-feeding-viewers-diet...
|
| "cherry-picking" seems to be their favored accusation. Perhaps
| if they cited their own "cherry-picked" data about stories
| supporting the other side, it might have some resonance.
|
| What you seem to want is a US equivalent of Pravda and
| Izvestia. "Fact checking" just means "checking that no
| conservative-supporting facts have sneaked in."
| AlbertCory wrote:
| let's keep the downvotes busy. Maybe they could try actually
| refuting it:
|
| NPR is National Palestinian Radio. I suppose you want a
| reference now? Here you go: https://www.msn.com/en-
| us/news/us/npr-editor-reveals-why-sta...
|
| They didn't report the story because it would have helped
| Trump.
|
| Likewise the BBC has been captured by wokeness.
|
| https://deadline.com/2023/12/bbc-denies-feeding-viewers-
| diet...
|
| "cherry-picking" seems to be their favored accusation.
| Perhaps if they cited their own "cherry-picked" data about
| stories supporting the other side, it might have some
| resonance.
|
| What you seem to want is a US equivalent of Pravda and
| Izvestia. "Fact checking" just means "checking that no
| conservative-supporting facts have sneaked in."
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| The Hunter Biden laptop story was a giant nothing-burger and
| no one had any real information about it before the election.
| It took time to responsibly analyze the contents are
| accurately report on it, and none of that happened until well
| after the election. Reporting on it at all before the facts
| were available would have _clearly_ been inflammatory for no
| good reason.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| As someone who grew up quite a while ago with the BBC,
| there's some serious delusion going on here about the
| historical and present day nature of that institution.
|
| Whether or not it is true that the BBC has (or has not) been
| "captured by wokeness", the objections to this tend to hinge
| on its reputation for objectivity and dispassion in the past.
|
| But the BBC has never been objective or dispassionate. It has
| been a steadfast supporter of the status quo. If it didn't
| treat socialism and communism with the idiocy that modern day
| Fox News does, it certainly offered them no serious coverage
| outside of a few intellectual "talk shows", even then only as
| a curiosity set against "what we all know is the truth".
|
| The fact that someone might be upset that the BBC or other
| similar organizations choose not to give "full coverage" to
| conservatism should not obscure that the same organizations
| have never provided much to any "radical" cultural or
| political phenomenon.
|
| The cherry-picking was always real, and it is generally only
| Americans who live under the ridiculous idea that there can
| be "objective" journalism. There isn't, and there never has
| been, and there never will be (in the context of broadcast or
| daily media, anyway).
| nomel wrote:
| > Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing
| it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure.
|
| I think it would be very difficult to set rigor (truth?)
| standards. There's a long history of truths that directly
| conflict with the "facts" provided, especially those from
| governments, which could probably not be reported under such
| scrutiny. I'm also curious how lying by omissions, which is the
| biggest problem I perceive, would be handled.
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| The fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast license
| holders, so it would have never affected internet or cable news
| companies.
| timbit42 wrote:
| It's ridiculous how much they want to charge for an article. Some
| won't even sell single articles and want a monthly or annual
| subscription to see everything they produce. I don't want to see
| everything. I'm not your sheeple. I can't afford to buy 5 or 20
| annual subscriptions. I want to read articles from a variety of
| news sources.
|
| I want to pay $20 for 10 articles and be debited for the ones I
| view. If that takes me 3 days or 3 years to view 10 articles,
| that's what I want. They will make more money selling articles at
| a reasonable price than they will selling annual subscriptions
| full of crap people don't want.
| apercu wrote:
| Right? I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75
| and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a
| fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days, though it was
| probably a huge waste of paper and water. Although the industry
| actually provided jobs back then.
|
| If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5
| or 10 times a month. But I guess capitalism says that they
| would rather have 1 person pay $100 a year than 2500 people pay
| fifty cents once a month.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's badly outdated pricing data.
|
| The _daily_ edition of the _New York Times_ now runs $2 at a
| news stand, best I can make out.[1]
|
| Sunday costs $5 in NYC, $6 elsewhere.
|
| Note that the print Sunday edition was (and is) _massively_
| underwritten by advertising, which comprises the bulk of the
| issue, 60--90% by column inch or weight.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. <https://www.travelizta.com/how-much-is-a-copy-of-the-new-
| yor...> isn't a particularly impressive source, but it's the
| best I can find. I cannot find a newsstand price for the
| _Times_ anywhere on the paper 's actual website. Which is
| another gripe I've got generally: for a commercial product,
| pricing data are exceedingly difficult to come by.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Their point remains.
| mhb wrote:
| No it doesn't. He could subscribe to the online NY Times
| and get ALL the articles for every day (including
| Sundays) for less than the cost of printed Sundays alone.
| So what's the missing element? Taking a fun article to
| work on Monday?
| apercu wrote:
| I liked the news better in America before the Fairness Doctrine
| was revoked by an extreme right wing administration.
|
| I also spent a huge chunk of my adulthood in Canada, and I never
| really minded the CBC, until the last ~10 or so years when (like
| most institutions and companies) they have lacked any sort of
| reasonable, competent or rational leadership and now they're
| combining staff layoffs and massive executive bonuses, which is
| the ridiculous reality of the world we live in.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| For what its worth, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this
| because - and full disclosure -- I've been working on a startup
| for news. (More on that below.)
|
| But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a
| few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably _did_ pay for
| news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc.
|
| The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for
| free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that
| the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally
| was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it
| online and advertise against it?
|
| That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising
| market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators.
|
| These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on
| paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great!
| Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit.
|
| There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news
| homepages -- because the links go to articles.
|
| Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just
| imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you
| subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you
| wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was
| inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or
| whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd
| flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It
| didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw
| the same number of ads, and they had value.
|
| Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites
| need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so
| they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize.
| They cannot monetize if you don't click.
|
| If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes
| the story -- you give the user little reason to click through.
| There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors
| start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble
| their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most
| newsworthy.
|
| Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard.
| They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to
| ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the
| shoeleather reporting, they just type.
|
| --
|
| As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth
| (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all
| of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're
| admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let
| users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of
| topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people
| doing the reporting.
| throwadobe wrote:
| It's an interesting problem, but I would say that a single feed
| of the "latest" news isn't really what I want as a reader. I
| already have twitter for that. None of your writers are known
| to me so I'm not going to implicitly trust them more than John
| Doe on Twitter.
|
| I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or
| nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on
| what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for
| different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all
| of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you
| so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding.
| Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized
| content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with...
| but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if
| they want what everyone else is reading
|
| Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!
| madrox wrote:
| I think the author is in the right ballpark, but frames it in a
| way that makes me wonder if they're right for the wrong reason.
|
| News has always been partisan and flawed. The internet just makes
| the flaws more obvious, because no single source gets nearly the
| same control over the narrative as pre-internet. As long as
| someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way about
| things, news will have this problem.
|
| Which is also why no one will pay for it. As long as someone
| stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way, they'll
| happily give you that content for free. How can a subscription
| service compete with that?
|
| The article does cite these reasons, but in a way that makes me
| think they see these as bugs in the system and not endemic to the
| newscycle. When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE
| the product.
| impure wrote:
| I have trouble believing any of these reasons. You don't pay for
| news because you can get it for free elsewhere. You don't have to
| be all high and mighty about it.
|
| This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when
| you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining
| about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want.
| deadfece wrote:
| Allow me to offer my opinion without reading the article:
|
| I can and do pay for news, I just dislike the bait and switch
| with modals/popovers that much. Now that I can no longer block
| domains in my Google search results, I can't remove those
| paywalled sites from relevancy and it's hard to keep track of
| everyone who only lets you read the first paragraph and a half
| before sticking their hand out asking for $10.
|
| ETA: I have now read the article and have no revisions to my
| statements.
| 627467 wrote:
| most news is really just entertainment disguised as life-changing
| information. deep down everyone knows it. so, now it competes
| with all other forms of entertainment
| motohagiography wrote:
| BBC and CBC are already public agencies, as the author suggested
| as a solution. arguably, given who pays them, the party of the
| official opposition should appoint the heads of them both.
|
| imo non-partisanship was the artifact of another time. in another
| life i wrote occasionally for establishment media and met many
| players, and i don't bother with any mainstream news anymore.
| these days i prefer to read the writing on the wall.
| taeric wrote:
| This is ignoring the question of "what is the value of news for
| most people?"
|
| It is clearly of high value for people that can to make informed
| decisions. Unfortunately, most decisions people are making are
| not informed by the news. Such that any attempt to get people to
| pay for it will be difficult.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I think it's because people don't find news through news sites
| anymore. They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and
| then want to read a single article. Then you're prompted with a
| paywall that requires you to _dedicate yourself to a single news
| company (or have multiple companies) and pay them $4 to $40 / mo
| - usually on the cheap-but-then-expensive-in-6-months-when-you-
| forget model)_.
|
| I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate
| subscription that covers all the major players *OR* if I could
| pay per-article from a centralized grab-bag.
|
| I don't want to see an interesting topic and then need to go to
| the NYT to see their take on it. I just want to see an
| interesting topic and read that view of it - maybe read several
| views of it (and happily pay for each one).
| nottorp wrote:
| > They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and then
| want to read a single article.
|
| or HN :)
|
| No, I won't pay a subscription for each random site that gets
| posted on here. I might pay a few cents, if it's a unified
| service as you say, but micropayments are 10 years away every
| year.
| NaOH wrote:
| _> I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate
| subscription that covers all the major players...._
|
| Isn't this what the Apple News+ service offers? I haven't used
| it, but for US $13 per month Apple says it offers content from
| over 400 publications. Of course it necessitates using one of
| the Apple OS platforms, and I've heard both good and bad about
| the overall design and presentation of the content, but it
| seems like this kind of service is akin to what you describe.
|
| I'd think this kind of broad offering would appeal to readers
| more than a single-site subscription. The Apple cost of $13 per
| month sounds much better than, say, the NY Times cost of $25
| every four weeks, but maybe the Apple access to publications is
| limited or has other problematic attributes.
| wrp wrote:
| Local newspapers should not be used as a point of comparison.
| When we subscribed to the city newspaper, it easily paid for
| itself in coupons and awareness of sales. There would also be
| notice of civic affairs that directly affected our lives.
| National and world news was essentially added entertainment.
|
| Before complaining that people aren't willing to pay for online
| news, recall that they didn't pay for national broadcast news
| either.
| flimsypremise wrote:
| Because I don't want to pay monthly for a bunch of content I
| probably won't read. I want to pay a small amount of money, with
| as little friction as possible, for the specific content I want
| to read now.
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