Forget Spotify for news – let's fix the real problem (2017)

the categorizing shows how different newspaper signal a certain world view. They can also signal wealth, class and a political view. so i think they are very much status symbols

This, 100,000x this. There's a piece to this whole puzzle I can't figure out exactly, but it has something to do with this.

There's two aspects at play here:

1) attention economy 2) network radius

I can't quite get them disentangled in my head, but I'm confident it goes something like this:

Attention economy is zero sum. Huge network size (i.e. the firehose of Youtube et al) means there's infinite competitors. Economically, it's a race to the bottom, every competitor is trying to get whatever fraction of your attention they can (not to mention monetize it). So they wind up competing over smaller and smaller fractions.

There's an additional problem on top of this, which is that you can't vet that many people, as the consumer. This amplifies a lot of negative things in its own right.

It's like we just weren't built to be exposed to networks this large. I think it's OK to not be completely informed on all topics, and typically this used to be outsourced to communities and specialists within your communities, each of whom you knew and trusted in their own domain. But small communities are gone, and the current communities are too large for you to get to know who to trust. So you need to be an expert on all.

I subscribe to 141 channels on YouTube. However, only a fraction of those subscriptions involve channels that actively, regularly publish content that I want to watch. Say 10 or so per week.

I watch a lot of YouTube; it pretty much fills all my free time. But I have plenty of playlists to keep me busy, and I pick through recommendations and try "mixes" sometimes. I will even watch the "Free with Ads" films they offer, which is a hilarious mixed bag of box office bombs and diamonds in the rough.

I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium. I don't do Patreon or "Join" any channels for a subscription. I don't send "tips" in live chat. I endure a lot of ads! But I feel like, if I would pay for one channel, I would probably end up paying for 10, and that I can't afford.

As the article points out "spotify for news" model is already here, that's Youtube and platforms like Nebula. Revenue is shared by the platform with the news creator.

And I get that people don't register many channels as "news", but I see it as just semantics. There is no ambiguity about what MKBHD is providing in his podcast/weekly Waveform videos, or how a lot of channels have a weekly video or corner to lookback at what happened during the past days, often straight labeled something like "news Thursday".

Of course, just like Spotify, the platforms can't sustain these channels. The article points at patreon, but there's another source that is completely missing from the picture: sponsors and product placements. Those represent a lot more money than the platform a and often a lot more that patreons.

Now there might be problems somewhere, but at this point I'ď see them getting solved along the way as we transition further and further from the "news agency" model to smaller "news studio" channels.

I've been talking about this for some years as well, but mostly without that audience of news professionals. I absolutely agree with your assessment that people won't be going back to that model of getting one subscription to pre-select what they can see that was the way in the paper age. Perhaps that could be the future if a past in which the decades of ad-funded free online news had never happened (I include "let's have an attractive web presence to lure people to our paper subscription" in ad-funded), but now that we are spoiled by having been able to read through the full political spectrum of publishers (and from every nation where they also write something in English), paying a subscription feels like paying to narrow access and that's just not very attractive.

What I imagine as an unlikely best-case model for reader-funded news isn't "spotify for news", but a "spotify for news without spotify": a step back to the print age where you'd have exactly one news subscription (unless you were particularly rich), but with what might be called reverse syndication, a profit share access scheme where every publisher acts as a spotify for its competitors. Provide proof of subscription with publication A to get a well-defined level of access at publications B,C and D, with a fixed part of the subscription fee divided amongst peers. The exact level of access would have to be well-defined of course, to prevent abusive strategies, but it could be something noticeably below "home subscription" (not ad-free perhaps?) but clearly above the free tier.