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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

#121
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the fallacy that led to the current broken model. Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month to get that and five other similarly high quality news sources. Does this make it harder to fund journalism? Not at all. The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. So do the five other organizations. And, since…

> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much.

Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no intersection and 100% conversion rate.

The real issue is that traditional media's competitive edge was its infrastructure for content distribution, not the content itself. Sadly, people willing to pay money for high quality journalism seems minority so its budget is. Otherwise, ads-powered yellow journalism cannot be thriving as is. In this landscape, there's simply not much incentive to pursue such aggregated subscription model for media itself. Maybe there can be suitable business models for aggregators like FB or Google, but I don't think this is what you really want.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#122
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.

The absolute worst posts on HN start with "I just want..." and then selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. Anyway, you've described a cable bundle model, not Netflix's model.

> selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want.

if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse.

The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#124
The linked article concludes:

"Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal."

Let's also consider whether lies should be made more expensive. Free costs more than it's worth.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#125
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.

The absolute worst posts on HN start with "I just want..." and then selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. Anyway, you've described a cable bundle model, not Netflix's model.

A customer saying, "My reservation price for the following good is $X." is not selfish. Information is easier to access and so, whether you agree with it, people are willing to pay less for information (including newspapers). We've seen many other "information services" get much cheaper due to this demand. The news media have simply been slow to change.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#128
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.

Hard pass on algorithmic recommenders. I have always wanted human curation, filters, opinion.

More importantly, news is the last place I want to be fed more of what I like.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#129

> You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. Excuse me but why would I want to pay for that ? I don't earn by reading articles online and the news websites are already…

Don't even use Infowars and NYT in the same sentence. The NYT has some notable shortcomings, but Infowars is straight-up propaganda used by its host to shill for questionable food supplements and fake corona-virus cures.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/04/09/infowa...

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#130

The first link in the article is not a "lie". "Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets" has a RT video that shows exactly that, and links to several other confirmed Twitter accounts all stating the same thing. How is that a lie?

Because it doesn’t agree with the narrative that Mr. Robinson is trying to push.
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