Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 127 posts

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#71

Post by _7hzo »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #54
rectang wrote: post #27

Although it's regrettable that Reuters' content will be harder to access, it's a positive trend for the news ecosystem to generate increasing revenue through a subscription-based business model rather than selling ads. The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.

Most of HN crowd I'm sure can spend a few extra bucks per month to get quality news. What about not so lucky people, though?

Let's be honest, most of the HN crowd probably has a paywall blocker extension. That, or they just turn their cookies off and the website can't keep track of how many articles they have left. Not so lucky people can probably do the same.

In my mind, a subscription model for these websites is essentially a donation model.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#72

Post by nojito »

beervirus wrote: post #45
nojito wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting. NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple The fact of the mat…

> The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.

No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight.

https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion

Just like every other high quality news source.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#73

Post by tyingq »

leephillips wrote: post #67
baby-yoda wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could not agree with this more and this has gone on far too long. why does google allow this? as you say it is 100% cloaking to have the entire article indexed but not present it in the subsequent page. Sure, publishers feel they need paywalls for revenue purposes; have at it. That should not absolve them from the "rules" everyone else has to follow. Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or…

If they are cloaking, can we get around the paywall by using the Google crawler user agent string?

That is one of many workarounds the various paywall-buster browser extensions use. Either setting to the Google crawler user-agent, or the Google AdBot agent. I would guess you would need to not send cookies also. They could also be clever and check that your IP/Netblock is a Google owned one.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#74

Post by mc32 »

fakedang wrote: post #59
mc32 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If subs-only model improves reporting and rids the pubs of propagandizing, I’m all for it. The price we pay now for free news is too high -click bait, us vs them, persistent shallow dives into inane subjects is taking its toll.

Do you think the average man is going to rely on a news provider like Reuters after this change? My father reads a lot of third party news but actually fact checks on Reuters. A lot of friends and colleagues skip third party news and read directly from Reuters, because it is free. With this change, I doubt a great many of them will continue with Reuters as a source, and would rather stop at a third-party localized ne…

I don’t know.

People used to pay for newspaper subs before. In real terms, this price is relatively cheap. Gathering facts requires time, money and able reporters.

I know people got spoiled for a while with free news. It’s time to go back to reality and pay for good news reporters.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#75

Post by beervirus »

nojito wrote: post #72
beervirus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.

No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight. https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion Just like every other high quality news source.

That doesn't refute what I said at all. Yes, they have an opinion section. They also inject a lot of opinion into articles that are nominally straight news.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#77

Post by FqOD4xih7Uq6m9Z »

nojito wrote: post #41
zpeti wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage. (and Fox is just as bad, but its not an online publication for the sake of my point)

>Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting. NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple The fact of the mat…

Yeah, Fox never had one of their Pulitzer prize winning journalists writing literal propaganda handed to them by the Soviet Union to cover up the Holodomor.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#78

Post by CSSer »

mindcrime wrote: post #50
tyingq wrote: post #22

"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage" Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc. Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.

Yeah, somebody really needs to solve the micropayments problem for real. I have no problem paying for content, but there is no way in hell I'm paying $35 a month for a Reuters subscription just to read one or two articles a month. And same for NYT, WSJ, yadda, yadda, yadda. I mean... if we all paid for monthly subscriptions for every news site we read a couple of articles a month from, we'd be paying $600 / month jus…

Why not just offer a preview (headline and first paragraph) and pay a small fee per article; maybe something like a quarter? They could also include an unlimited tier for avid readers. A decade ago this model would probably be a non-starter because it would require the inconvenience of maintaining an account everywhere and going through an awkward checkout flow for every transaction. SSO payment providers make this a lot easier now. Anecdotally, Apple Pay is a joy to use, for example.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#79

Post by clairity »

zpeti wrote: post #33
rectang wrote: post #27

Although it's regrettable that Reuters' content will be harder to access, it's a positive trend for the news ecosystem to generate increasing revenue through a subscription-based business model rather than selling ads. The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.

In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage. (and Fox is just as bad, but its not an online publication for the sake of my point)

the same with npr, a crumbling sheen of objectivity thinly veiling increasingly blatant partisanship.

there is value in curation, as demonstrated by subscriptions (or 'donations'), but these outlets have lost sight of that value in the quest to ever-more-desperately shape public opinion while retaining relevance. they've slid down the slippery slope from objective(-ish) curation to the coercive variety and have no one but themselves--principally their wealthy owners/directors/executives but also the rank & file--to blame.

i'd love to pay for objective(-ish) curation, and ideally slower, more considered reporting but that latter bit may be more than is practically possible right now. the paradox of choice makes it really hard to curate your own news feed as substack invites you to do. just like a portfolio of stocks, you won't get great returns on a (likely) highly correlated group of individual newsletters. and without a plethora of them (like 60+), you'd likely fail to garner enough breadth to even have a chance of avoiding false correlation, much like how the nyt and npr (and fox) fail via partisanship bias.

Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

#80

Post by jawns »

aero-glide2 wrote: post #6
bombcar wrote: post #2

"Reuters.com will remain free for a preview period, but will require users to register after five stories. It is not immediately clear when it will begin charging." Reuters reporting about Reuters in the third person is amusing. "We asked ourselves when we would begin charging but we didn't know."

A tangent, but I love that the wikipedia article on Humans is in 3rd Person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human Reads like some alien civilization documenting us.

"Conservation status: Least Concern."
Post reply on HN