11 ms·

I like the idea of subscriptions, and I do think they have more of a chance than advertising as far as being a sustainable way to make money for ads goes, but t

by CM30 11y ago

I like the idea of subscriptions, and I do think they have more of a chance than advertising as far as being a sustainable way to make money for ads goes, but they won't be the future of journalism as a whole. Why? Because to a certain degree, the majority of standard journalism simply isn't commercially viable. I mean, look at the kind of articles most news sites run. Just plain old news, few if any opinions, only valuable because it's a somewhat quick way of finding out what's going on. How are subscriptions going to work for that? Why would anyone pay for plain old news when social media sites and aggregators (like Hacker News and Reddit) give you the same information for nothing? If you purely want to know what the latest Apple product is, when a new game will be released, what two celebrities got married or who won the football game, then why pay for an article about it? It's already all over the internet for nothing, thanks to people willing to post about that stuff for free. This subscription thing only works for fields where news is difficult to report (say, from a war zone) or where the author's opinion/insight itself is valuable (read, not entertainment/gaming journalism). Unfortunately, this makes up a far lower percentage of journalism than some people like to believe.

mercer 11y ago
Edit: while I could remove this comment in 'shame' over posting it before reading the article (written by the cofounder of, uh, The Correspondent), I'll just leave it up... I agree that low-quality journalism will have difficulty applying the subscription model, but personally I won't mourn their disappearance. I stopped actively reading most main-stream newspapers a long time ago. The Correspondent, on the other hand, a Dutch online newspaper, is doing pretty well with subscriptions. Their approach (and tagline/motto) is to go 'beyond the whims/delusion of the day' by only publishing a few good articles a day, instead of the deluge of articles, often rewritten Reuters/AP items giving you piecemeal, context-less updates on different issues. Their approach is about having a number of correspondents, each in charge of a theme that the staff considers important, or that the readers have suggested (https://decorrespondent.nl/correspondenten https://decorrespondent.nl/correspondenten for a list, google translate should give you an impression of the various themes). Quite often pieces by guest writers are published too, but usually still under one of these themes. Quite often they'll publish a series of articles, diving into one topic, or write an article as a response to reader feedback (one example being the Operation Easy Chair, which they also published in English and as an eBook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789987). So far they seem to be doing pretty well, which is amazing considering that it's (almost) entirely in Dutch, and entirely reader-supported. I think they're working on an English version as well. One could argue that it only works because their audience mostly consists of educated readers with a decent income, but I'd argue that 'non-educated' readers would often be better of with little to no news instead of the crap they're presented with through the low-quality papers. And if demand for such news is large enough, people will end up willing to pay for it when it's gone. Finally, there's acceptable news coverage provided on public broadcast as well. This will suck for many journalists, but I wouldn't be surprised if the decent ones will be happy with whatever alternatives pop up. Most decent journalists I know are miserable at the papers they work for, for various reasons. The Wire's last season, while perhaps a bit too slanted against mainstream newspapers, does a pretty decent job outlining many of the problems.

by CM30 11y ago

mercer 11y ago

Edit: while I could remove this comment in 'shame' over posting it before reading the article (written by the cofounder of, uh, The Correspondent), I'll just leave it up... I agree that low-quality journalism will have difficulty applying the subscription model, but personally I won't mourn their disappearance. I stopped actively reading most main-stream newspapers a long time ago. The Correspondent, on the other hand, a Dutch online newspaper, is doing pretty well with subscriptions. Their approach (and tagline/motto) is to go 'beyond the whims/delusion of the day' by only publishing a few good articles a day, instead of the deluge of articles, often rewritten Reuters/AP items giving you piecemeal, context-less updates on different issues. Their approach is about having a number of correspondents, each in charge of a theme that the staff considers important, or that the readers have suggested (https://decorrespondent.nl/correspondenten https://decorrespondent.nl/correspondenten for a list, google translate should give you an impression of the various themes). Quite often pieces by guest writers are published too, but usually still under one of these themes. Quite often they'll publish a series of articles, diving into one topic, or write an article as a response to reader feedback (one example being the Operation Easy Chair, which they also published in English and as an eBook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789987). So far they seem to be doing pretty well, which is amazing considering that it's (almost) entirely in Dutch, and entirely reader-supported. I think they're working on an English version as well. One could argue that it only works because their audience mostly consists of educated readers with a decent income, but I'd argue that 'non-educated' readers would often be better of with little to no news instead of the crap they're presented with through the low-quality papers. And if demand for such news is large enough, people will end up willing to pay for it when it's gone. Finally, there's acceptable news coverage provided on public broadcast as well. This will suck for many journalists, but I wouldn't be surprised if the decent ones will be happy with whatever alternatives pop up. Most decent journalists I know are miserable at the papers they work for, for various reasons. The Wire's last season, while perhaps a bit too slanted against mainstream newspapers, does a pretty decent job outlining many of the problems.