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

Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

whatsnewinpublishing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 229 posts

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#201

Post by riffic »

waqf wrote: post #193
riffic wrote: post #171

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.

I think you mean that paywalls are rent-seeking on those who lack time (or some other resource) to go to a public library.

That's a much better way to phrase this idea, thank you.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#202

Post by lbatx »

david_ar wrote: post #195
liability wrote: post #124

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'm curious as to when this mythical age of widespread access to "real news" existed. George Orwell dated it to at least 80 years ago ("History stopped in 1936")...

There's a huge difference between biased or inaccurate coverage and flat out made up stories. The NYT publishes very few of the latter. Fake news sites publish 100% of the latter. That's a pretty significant difference.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#203

Post by smudgymcscmudge »

vulpes wrote: post #145
kabdib wrote: post #91

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.

If only there were a service like Apple News+ except for newspapers instead of lifestyle magazines.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#204

Post by flukus »

hyperbovine wrote: post #149
liability wrote: post #124

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.

> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.

The problem is how much of their model is built on giving away their product for free, they want all the benefits of being open and free to access (in googles index, shared on sites like HN) but they also want to be closed to non-subscribers, the two are mutually exclusive and they need to pick one.

Either way I consider this a solved problem with the BBC and/or PBS model, news is an important public service and shouldn't be left up to commercial behemoths.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#205

Post by geofft »

hyperbovine wrote: post #149
liability wrote: post #124

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.

> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.

The product of good journalism is investigation, reporting, and insight. What news organizations sell is a writeup. This is a mismatch. I'm interested in paying for the ideas, not the prose.

When, say, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Stormy Daniels hush money last year, everyone else re-reported it soon after. If you had a Journal subscription you got the news slightly sooner; otherwise, wait a tiny bit and every news organization from VICE to Breitbart has their own story about it too. Paying for the original source makes you feel good about supporting journalism, but that's it.

It's rather like the companies who produce a high-quality open-source product with a medium-quality cloud-hosted offering and then blame open source when Amazon also offers their high-quality product in the cloud. If the interesting and valuable part of your work is freely copiable and you're only charging for a delivery channel that anyone can provide, I feel bad for you but I'm entirely unsurprised your business model isn't working out.

Perhaps one answer, as with some open source code, is to see journalism as a social good in itself, worth supporting as an activity even if we don't have a way to turn its output into a profitable product. Perhaps another is, like other open source, to find people who have a commercial need for good journalism and have them subsidize it in the process in some way.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#206

Post by dehrmann »

echelon wrote: post #108
rayiner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.) A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

> The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store. That's a great point and speaks to a true danger with this model. I imagine content publishers could distribute their content across multiple distributors if they existed, though I imagine the market would only support a handful of competitors. > Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that appl…

> Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested.

I think they're thinking of DMCA radio licensing. This is what Pandora, not Spotify uses/used, and why you can't play specific tracks on Pandora.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#207

Post by mcny »

m463 wrote: post #194
beatgammit wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier. 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.

Taler from what I understand does not require full details to be shared with the tax man, only agregates. That being said I don't think taler is anonymous at all.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#208

Post by profalseidol »

beatgammit wrote: post #161
hyperbovine wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe Brave and BAT. I believe they already have the system up and running but not fully.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#209

Post by scarface74 »

rayiner wrote: post #92
echelon wrote: post #76

Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors. The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishe…

Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.) A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

There is no compulsory license for on demand music streaming where you can choose what songs you want to listen to and when. The compulsory license was for streaming radio stations where you can’t choose the exact songs you want to listen to like Pandora.

Proof? A radio can play any music it wants to and an artist/record label can’t stop them as long as they have a license. An artist can stop Spotify from including them in their music library.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#210

Post by david_ar »

lbatx wrote: post #202
david_ar wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to when this mythical age of widespread access to "real news" existed. George Orwell dated it to at least 80 years ago ("History stopped in 1936")...

There's a huge difference between biased or inaccurate coverage and flat out made up stories. The NYT publishes very few of the latter. Fake news sites publish 100% of the latter. That's a pretty significant difference.

My point is that people have been making the same complaint for a very long time, even back when people paid for news printed on sheets of paper.

"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."

--- George Orwell, 1942

Post reply on HN