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

Making the news available at no cost is a victory

sltrib.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 141 posts

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#71

Post by pydry »

oersted wrote: post #66
vslira wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts: Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in. Maybe a liberal, democratic state…

Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio). The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues. A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is p…

The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.

The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#72

Post by mcmcmc »

kanelincoln wrote: post #14
mcmcmc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading. The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.

Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?

I think it’s an indicator of demand which shows comparative value in the context of household spending. If you have enough money to cover your basic needs and then some, but you choose to put that extra money towards something else, that reveals a preference for that thing over other products/services you could choose to purchase.

If you only want something when you don’t have to pay for it and would never actually buy it even if you had the budget, then yeah I would contend you don’t actually want it. You’re just taking it because it’s there, and you can.

“Free” services are fundamentally anticompetitive markets, which can work if it’s a non-profit or government service. When it’s a for-profit business you get perverse incentives and network effects concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller pockets, extracting it from users instead of an exchange of no value with customers.

For-profit free news is the problem.

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#73

Post by lanfeust6 »

droolboy wrote: post #15

As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.

There's an element of that, but it also exists alongside Postmedia and plethora of other online news media sources. It doesn't serve to replace everything, and as in all cases, getting news from more than one source is necessary to counteract bias and distortion.

All of which to say there are some things that CBC reports on pretty well. I does scrutinize the govt at times, albeit selectively (like everyone else). Maybe the problem people have with it is that it's a public service that has a clear liberal bias.

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#74

Post by afavour »

conception wrote: post #67
afavour wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That model doesn't really work, unfortunately: https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-... It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.

This is a different model though. This is a single site doing micro transactions which I agree doesn’t work. But a global/general one doesn’t exist and probably would be fine. It would have the same friction as adding moves on a phone game or whatever and reload minimums would handle the fees.

Again, it’s been tried. Look at Scroll or Blendle. They failed.

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#75

Post by jvalencia »

boplicity wrote: post #43
idle_zealot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests? Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.

Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible. This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your wor…

There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#77

Post by michaelchisari »

Cider9986 wrote: post #65
afavour wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That model doesn't really work, unfortunately: https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-... It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.

The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information. The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay. If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.…

Acquiring and managing crypto is its own form of friction though.

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#78

Post by frumplestlatz »

boplicity wrote: post #52
superxpro12 wrote: post #2

The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries? If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?

Don't try to be "objective" or "impartial." That's an impossible task, and anyone claiming to do so is being dishonest. Instead, own your biases. Make them explicit and public. That way people can understand were you're coming from, and take that into account. There will always be bias in any reporting. It's better to make it visible than to pretend it doesn't exist. This means having a clear perspective and "owning"…

Anyone arguing for “owning your bias” is trying to justify using media to influence instead of inform.

We can never be perfectly unbiased, but we can certainly try. We dedicated entire higher education programs to the process of doing exactly that — it was called journalism.

Re: Making the news available at no cost is a victory

#79

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

boplicity wrote: post #43
idle_zealot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests? Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.

Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible. This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your wor…

> Many people think you should avoid having bias.

What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers. That's the way forward to getting more accurate, critical coverage of interests we dislike.

We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.

Post reply on HN