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The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

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Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#41

Post by freddie_mercury »

rawfan wrote: post #22

I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month. Go.

Why do you assume that $20 is enough to support multiple newspapers?

That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business.

On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#42

Post by loriverkutya »

Lies are not free, they are paid by ads and a complete industry is built on keeping this going. The price of the ads are built into the price of the product/service you buy, so we are basically paying for the lies too, it’s just not as obvious as paying to get through the paywall.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#43

Post by freddie_mercury »

HPsquared wrote: post #15

I'd like more microtransactions and would gladly pay a few cents or even a dollar to read a good article. The business model is to bundle everything together, for a long subscription - most want at least a month, perhaps a year, full subscription.

All that would do is massively incentivize clickbait headlines, if they could actually get paid $1 for each person who clicked on it.

Do you really want a world with even more clickbait headlines and articles artificially spread over 20 pages? Because that's what microtransactions would lead to.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#44

Post by MattGaiser »

5etho wrote: post #39
rawfan wrote: post #22

I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month. Go.

and how much you think journalists should earn? 10k/yr?

Newsrooms probably pay for too many things.

You could probably get most opinion for free, lifestyle content for next to nothing, etc. The weekly jobless claims articles could be handled by cheap content mills. A lot of columns like personal finance and restaurants could easily be purchased freelance on the market.

The Huffington Post demonstrated that non-investigative content can be had for free.

So there should probably be far fewer middle skill journalists.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#45

Post by CM30 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #41
rawfan wrote: post #22

I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month. Go.

Why do you assume that $20 is enough to support multiple newspapers? That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business. On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources…

Don't many services that cost far more than journalism to produce charge $20 a month now? Netflix is $13, Disney+ is $7 a month, Xbox Game Pass is $10 a month...

And those movies, TV shows and games cost many millions of dollars to produce. Why is journalism so much more expensive when journalists likely aren't earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and spending millions on investigations?

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#46

Post by Udik »

teraku wrote: post #17
HPsquared wrote: post #15

I'd like more microtransactions and would gladly pay a few cents or even a dollar to read a good article. The business model is to bundle everything together, for a long subscription - most want at least a month, perhaps a year, full subscription.

It doesn't work. Because what if you pay 0.5$ for an article, and then you find out it's not what you expected/badly written/... You basically are not happy and less likely to do it again. If you put payment to the end, then people are less willing to pay, because they already consumed the article. You can't take the information out of the head again if he's not willing to pay. It's a tricky thing

A possibility would be a (global, publication independent) subscription service like this: you pay a fixed amount in each month (say, ten dollars). Then every time you read an article from a website that subscribes to the service, if you liked the article you click on a widget. At the end of the month, the ten dollars are redistributed to the publishers in proportion to your clicks. So payment is voluntary but the total amount per month is already allocated- it's not a matter of deciding whether to pay or not but just how to distribute the money.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#47

Post by roenxi »

lm28469 wrote: post #14
ferros wrote: post #3

I would be willing to pay an amount for better quality news than what can be found for free, however news outlets always seem to lean one way. I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.

> I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction. No one on this planet is 100% unbiased. It doesn't matter if it's free or $100 per article, it's still written by a human being with personal opinions, experiences, prejudices, &c. The easiest way to get close to the "truth", which is subjective in many cases anyways, is to read from many sources and cross check the facts between them.

Although that is true, it would be very easy to be much better at it than most major media sources. There are theoretical limits then there is the limit that those clods actually achieve. It is a rare, rare day when an article manages to quote an entire paragraph of what a politician said, context and all.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#48

Post by hootbootscoot »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #41
rawfan wrote: post #22

I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month. Go.

Why do you assume that $20 is enough to support multiple newspapers? That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business. On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources…

That actually is a great way to bring up how miserably the Netflix model treats content creators.

The $4 billion rich Netflix CEO says that artists should try harder if they don't want to starve (source, this same article we are discussing)

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#49

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

ferros wrote: post #3

I would be willing to pay an amount for better quality news than what can be found for free, however news outlets always seem to lean one way. I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.

What is unbiased? If you were a late 18th century french reporter writing a report about the death of king Louis XVI, would you write "King Louis was murdered", "King Louis was executed", "former king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason", "citizen Louis Capet beheaded on the order of the National Convention" or something else? All of those descriptions can be considered true and yet none are unbiased.
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