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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.
The title is confusing click bait and the article content is garbage... "intrusion attempt"? "master key"?
> Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt
Your local library probably provides content for free if they subscribe to news services, paid for with your tax dollars. Paywalls are just a tax on those too stupid to go to one. Newspapers never made their money from subscriptions or from selling papers on the street. What kept newspapers in business was classified ads, which was disrupted as a revenue stream when Craigslist came around.
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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.
I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier. An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and…
Taler should allow anonymous payments, which means a possibility of one fix to the present model: you can read the news without the news reading you.
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.
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.
edit: apparently you have to use apple devices? oh heck no, what were they thinking?
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People, through their actions, have proven they want free and easy sensationalism. Not in-depth investigative reporting. You can't really just sell into that.
The popularity of investigative journalism podcasts from NPR, Gimlet, ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting, etc. seem to disprove this theory. Outside of a few exceptional pieces the typical content on print "news" sites is utter garbage. The pressure to have a bunch of different columns publishing multiple stories a day seems like it really drives the quality down. All the super cool long-form investigativ…
Pretty sure sites like buzzfeed and other tabloid news would more popular than the sites which you mentioned.
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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?
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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.
I don't think that paying a monthly subscription gets me news that is any less fake or higher-quality than what I can find from non-paywalled sources. I guess I'm a "credulous moron".
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I don't think that paying a monthly subscription gets me news that is any less fake or higher-quality than what I can find from non-paywalled sources. I guess I'm a "credulous moron".
Are claiming that the Breitbart News (free) and the NYT ($$) are of equal quality?
(I do subscribe to a few magazines though, just not newspapers.)