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L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

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Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#361

Post by GnarfGnarf »

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet?

I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription.

I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment.

New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA Times $98 The Guardian £119 Washington Post ~$80

I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers.

A news combiner or aggregator would charge me for every article I select. At the end of the month, he charges my account credit card for the sum of all the articles.

He gathers up the money that all readers have paid for reading NYT articles, and remits it.

The newspapers don't have to manage micro-payments, journalism is saved, everyone is happy.

Blendle looks like they are trying to do this, but they've been in Beta since 2016.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#362

Post by acd10j »

dredmorbius wrote: post #348
ghaff wrote: post #7

We've already been seeing this to some degree with harder and harder paywalls--which mostly don't work besides lucrative niche and global brands. But I suspect we're increasingly headed towards a case where quality content is only available to those willing and able to pay for it.

Or information is treated as a public good and publicly supported through taxes and an independent entity. https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-media...

Then it would be indirectly controlled by Government in power,In effect WORSE than current state.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#363

Post by jahaja »

malandrew wrote: post #177
jacobolus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other countries haven't locked down hard and aren't seeing a big spread Let’s be precise. Some other countries haven’t locked down hard and aren’t seeing a big spread yet . You mentioned Sweden. Here was Time a few days ago: > A head doctor at a major hospital in Sweden says the current approach will “probably end in a historical massacre.” He says healthcare workers at his hospital who have tested positive for the…

On a per capita basis sweden isn't really more worse off than many other countries that have shutdown. It's about middle of the pack. Personal responsibility lets us have our cake and eat it too. http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

It's very hard to compare the US with Sweden. In Sweden people are able to stay at home without losing much income due to a strong welfare state - which has also been made event stronger due to the virus. In the I assume that a lot of people would be economically forced to disregard "personal responsibility".

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#364

Post by ceilingcorner »

kitotik wrote: post #355
ceilingcorner wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't what the death statistics are showing, whatsoever. Unless your barista's sister, football team's goalie, etc. are all over 70 years old, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be dead. Your scenario is fear-mongering, plain and simple.

The deaths in NY,LA,CA, and MI include many,many people under 70. Also, you’ve responded several times without answering my question: How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?

Yes, many people under 70 have died. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, all of which are tragedies. People also die from a variety of other diseases, accidents, and other things on a regular basis in numbers that dwarf the coronavirus. Yet, we don't shut down society over it.

> How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?

This kind of snarky comment is precisely the problem. I'm not "willing to put up my friends" for experiment, because this isn't some zero sum game with simple answers. As I have said a dozen times now: it is a complicated situation and this "but people are dying, so we have to be as draconian as possible" take is extremely shortsighted.

There are millions of people that will now have serious problems because of the total shutdown. Here's a number for you:

> 45,000 – or one in five – suicides a year worldwide to unemployment, with a further 5,000 deaths caused by the economic crisis.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/the-link-between-unem...

45,000 people a year kill themselves because of unemployment. And that's just after 2008. We are apparently headed for a far worse crisis.

Have you considered the possibility that completely shutting down everything for months on end will result in more chaos and death than the virus itself? Even worse, this is entirely unpredictable?

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#365

Post by ericmay »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #361

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA T…

> Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet?

Isn't that what products like Apple News are?

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#366

Post by ceilingcorner »

mattmanser wrote: post #353
ceilingcorner wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't what the death statistics are showing, whatsoever. Unless your barista's sister, football team's goalie, etc. are all over 70 years old, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be dead. Your scenario is fear-mongering, plain and simple.

The Barista's sister would fall into the thousands (or even 10,000s) of 2nd connections you have, in which there will almost certainly be young deaths. The goalie might have had health complications. I personally know at least 2 people with diabetes, 2 with asthma, plus one post-cancer. Maybe I'm a little older than you, but many of us would know a young-ish person that would die (a quarter maybe if the 0.2% chance o…

Are the chances of these people dying from COVID greater than other risks we take every single day, yet don't shut down society and curtail freedoms over?

That is really the only question that matters.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#367

Post by tguedes »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #361

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA T…

The issue is you're looking at the value from journalism wrong. If you were to actually pay the cost of producing 1 article, it would be significantly more than you would be willing to pay to read it.

What you are paying for when you pay for journalism is not the value you perceive from reading the individual articles, but of supporting the entire organization's on-going production of journalism. You are a patron more than a customer.

Pick the one you want to subscribe to and stick with it. I would recommend subscribing to your local newspaper if you're only going to pick one.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#368

Post by JumpCrisscross »

easytiger wrote: post #344
mehrdadn wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day, if a doctor is prescribing medication against clinical guidelines, surely the doctor is at fault? Even if you assume that's the case, there's no reason a doctor being at fault would mean nobody else can be at fault.

Well there would have to be some wrongdoing to be proven.

> there would have to be some wrongdoing to be proven

Are you claiming the extensive evidence brought in numerous cases across the country against Purdue and the Sackler family, accepted in many cases by juries and judges, has not done that?

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#369

Post by ceilingcorner »

gwd wrote: post #352
ceilingcorner wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't that what you just did here? No, because I'm not drowning out the discussion, simply pushing back on the usage of hyperbole for pushing an opinion. > The last stats I had were that 5% of people who catch it will die without a ventilator, Your stats are way off and I suggest doing better research. They also don't factor in the idea that the virus is far more widespread than initially thought, and that thes…

> Your stats are way off and I suggest doing better research. I've been reading [1] daily more or less since early February, as well as lots of things posted here. I'm certainly no professional, but I think I'm reasonably well-informed for a layperson. If you think there's something I've missed, I think you'd do much better to actually point me to a resource you think is better. I realize that "number reported" is an…

Do you have a link for this 500,000 tests per day? Every article I am reading says they only started ramping up testing in the past few weeks.

> And the total number of swab tests done by 4 April was well over 1.3 million.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52234061

The population of Germany is 83 million. I find it hard to believe that they've tested more than 5 million or so people in 10 days.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#370

Post by pgrote »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #361

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA T…

>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers.

A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. lol Renewals are a pain if they try to shift you to the vanilla rates; no one has email support and it requires a call.

Anyway, I currently subscribe to NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Las Vegas Review Journal and The Guardian US Edition. I would subscribe to the NY Post if they allowed it. Former WSJ subscriber, but they do not offer long time subscriber discounts. Bloomberg is too expensive.

My main complaint is only a few allow yearly subscriptions.

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