the idea that paid news sources are some unique arbiters of truth is dangerous
Please Pay for Your News
31–40 of 123 posts
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#32I personally would love to pay for my news (in a sense I try to do that by regularly donating to Wikipedia as I think it's a fantastic open-source-esque news source) My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be my inability to trust but I see multiple issues: 1. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased…
> My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. Non-biased news never existed and will never exist as objective truth never existed. However that doesn't mean that all new is necessarily "partisan."
I would love to see a study done to answer if modern news papers has become more partisan compared to the past. While perfect objectivity is not likely, I can imagine such study showing that news organizations where more political independent in the past with fewer political donations, fewer ties to political parties, and with a more diverse reader base over the political spectrum. The later was for example studied for the 2016 and a very tiny portion of US news media showed a diverse reader base, with most having the wast majority of readers in one political camp. If we had a similar study for say 1950 we could compare.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#33I tried, except, everywhere I looked, they promoted Op-ed pieces with equal billing and authority as traditional investigative reporting. Washington Post, NY times seemed liked the "best" based on track record for investigative reporting on politics and international coverage (with a US focus) but I cancelled both after a year. Open to suggestions... Edit: Also NYTimes cancelation process is AOL levels of hostile. Th…
Why not just ignore the op-eds? Or are you saying you would prefer NO news to news with op-eds?
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#34As difficult as this trade-off for business is, I prefer to financially support journalism that isn't compromising its values by using third-party ads. The journalism that rejects advertising is the virtuous journalism that most deserves our dollars.
In that case, how do you support journalism?
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#35For diversity of opinions, can also try the independent individuals on Youtube with their own news channel. Yes, do try support them, too if you consume their content.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#36If a business has to beg customers to pay, maybe they should step back and re-evaluate the value that they are purporting to offer and the methods with which they are offering it.
It's an odd problem. What newspapers have done historically with respect to reporting on local politics is almost unquestionably a social good. It's also inarguable that they've done so as businesses, funded by advertising for the most part. That has worked because people wanted to pay a little bit (each) to read them and advertisers were willing to pay a lot (in aggregate) to reach those readers.
So what's changed? Advertisers are less interested in the medium itself. Meanwhile, readers have built a very low estimate of the value of journalism.
But what is that estimate based on? Suppose that as citizens we all accepted that local political reporting was absolutely vital to our society, and that without it we would face an unmitigated wave of corruption and worse. How much would we each pay to avoid that?
I understand that people don't accept that news journalism is that vital, and that this affects their estimate of the value. But are they correct?
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#37I don't mind paying for news, but almost all news websites would keep track of what I read if I do that, and it's easy to figure out a person's political biases from their reading habits.
I'm curious, how do you get your news in a way that lets you bypass the tracking? Why not continue to get your news that way and just subscribe to ensure the news continues to exist?
I mostly get my news through RSS feeds (I have a small Python script that makes use of readability-lxml to convert partial RSS feeds -- the kind that most news websites provide -- into full feeds).
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#38I'm working on this with https://intrgr.com.
We look for the field on any article we aggregate for their payment request id https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request.
In the near future, the article owners will then be paid a portion of the reader subscription corresponding to their share of the total readership.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#39I'm paying for news. It's mandatory to do it in Germany and I'm really grateful for that. Especially in times like we live in today. It's a great basis for my daily and necessary dose of news. All those extras like good documentaries on media portals are bonus and only hindered by the private media restricting unlimited availability of those materials. Everything beyond that has pretty much grown into either a quite…
You are paying for bad news. The quality of the forced state TV in Germany is not great.
No analysis, just giving politicians a platform for their uninformed propaganda. The main objective is to program the population to keep working without complaining. Bread and circuses.
If you want facts or background, get the Financial Times.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#40I disagree. Don't pay for the news.
I might pay for Netflix or HBO. If one is insufficiently entertaining, I won't. It makes sense for Netflix/HBO to compete on producing the most entertaining and addicting product, and I know that's exactly what I'm paying for.
If news agencies are funded by having more subscribers, they'll also be incentivized to produce the most entertaining and addictive content.
The value of news is not in telling me what I want to hear, nor you what you want to hear, it's in telling us what we need to hear but don't want to. You & I might both be high-minded enough to pay for news that bores us or offends us - but I hardly expect the typical person to do so.
I don't have a better suggestion - but a per-article paywall, or even a subscription, leads to the same clickbait sensationalist rot that advertiser-supported news suffered.