So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide. Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.
I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.
So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide. Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.
I wrote a post about this last week that's somewhat related:
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week and that doesn't even get me their cooking section.
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend. that doesn't even get me their cooking section. Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to…
I'm confused, where did you get the impression that he only wants to read the cooking section and nothing from the regular newspaper?
Or do you want him to pay $200 for the general contents + $40 a year for recipes? Is it the same kind of deal for getting business breaking news or yoga tutorials? That seems crazy to me.
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week and that doesn't even get me their cooking section.
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend. that doesn't even get me their cooking section. Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to…
$4 per article for a paper that's $2.50 on newsstands is not a reasonable price.
> But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.
Stop that. The original goalpost clearly says $25-50.
My household still gets a physical paper (the Seattle Times), and a digital version of the same. We subscribe to the NYT and The Economist. That's about our limit for news subscriptions. I'm not going to fork over $10/month to each of the other potential news sites for every article they publish. I have no idea why the Podunk Press and the Suburban Picayune Times even consider that as an option for out-of-area reader…
This is Apple's News+ in the nutshell, so federated subscription service you're envisioning would have to compete with Apple.
I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.
Some good publications are nonpaywalled nonprofits that rely on donations. Not sure you can make that work in every niche, but two examples: https://www.quantamagazine.org/ , https://www.texastribune.org/
Quanta has the Simons foundation behind it. How free is a press if it can only live off the good will of a billionaire?
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week and that doesn't even get me their cooking section.
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend. that doesn't even get me their cooking section. Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to…
It's a reasonable request that I concur with. This sort of piecemeal subscription model is really annoying. The main reason all other streaming services took off was because people didn't want piecemeal cable bundles. Once you pay for a subscription, you should get everything under that banner. No more paywalls. That's a reasonable expectation when seen in the context of other streaming services. Second, if you are pretending to be a tech company offering soft services on the internet, act like one. nytimes is the slowest and most bloated ad/tracking infested site that I visit. It brings firefox mobile to a crawl. This may be one of the reasons why a middleman like apple news may actually work, simply by reducing the friction. If you can make nytimes.com behave like lwn.net, I would pay.
The problem is there is so much content available on the web, but there isn't yet a federated subscription service to support it all. I would pay ~ $5 a month for news access, but I'm certainly not going to pay 2 or 5 or 10 dollars a month for each random site I visit to read their couple articles that may interest me. I just will skip their content.
Sounds like Apple News?
Thats not federated though. It's the opposite. That's a centralized middleman.
So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide. Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.
No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.
So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide. Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.
No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.
Newspapers don't know how to sell properly and it's the users' fault for not buying?