6 ms·

To be honest, I never appreciated the scale of the NYT until I read those revenue numbers. $500 million in digital media revenue is nothing to sneeze at. I won

To be honest, I never appreciated the scale of the NYT until I read those revenue numbers. $500 million in digital media revenue is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder if at some point in the future, there will be a reaction to this push for a subscription-based news model. Perhaps a website who's value proposition is that it only focuses on news, with no clickbait articles and titles.

secabeen 10y ago
The challenge there is to build up the infrastructure to do so. Real news gathering takes staff in offices around the world, relationships with residents and officials, etc. etc. Otherwise, all you end up being is an AP feed.
- grey-area 10y ago
  Traditional news-gathering certainly did, but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. The current system is of course doomed... However I think there's a gap here to do something radically different, global and paid for with subscriptions (from those who broadcast and companies who want aggregate data about fashion trends for example, or weather reports based on individuals reporting it).
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket If you want 10 shallow disconnected sources of information from the fringes then that works. If you want someone who knows where to go, who to talk to, and how to actually build out a story then you still need journalists.
    - grey-area 10y ago
      Journalism, in spite of protestations to the contrary, has too often been a shallow gloss on half-understood ideas and a rushed frenzy to be first to print - to parachute in a correspondent to an unknown city/culture/subculture and expect them to understand it and not impose their prejudices on it while writing a story under time pressure is really expecting too much, and the results are often anything but insightful. The time pressure also regularly results in breathless stories without context and incomplete timelines with no closure and no revisiting the topic after the storm has passed. We can do better. Context and commitment and a large amount of original data is important in understanding information and people on the ground provide that (even if sometimes their view is limited, sometimes amongst them you'd find the best person to write the story of x). There are of course big problems with this flood of information, but it is now there (instantly, from anywhere on the globe), and it wasn't before. That changes everything. I do think there is value in having all that information, of course you still require a separate level of aggregation, analysis and perhaps narrative (Who will provide that? I think there is the opportunity), but the OP was talking about getting the data, that's now easy, the hard part is making sense of the firehose of data, which traditional journalism is ill-equipped to do given its emphasis on owning the story and speed to press. There is value in constructing a narrative based on the facts but the old business models of a news factory which 'makes news' and gets it to the public first in order to sell advertising are irrevocably gone now, they just haven't realised they are obsolete yet, and are scrabbling around for ways to adapt their old news-gathering infrastructure to this new world.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. Is that why I see numerous people live blogging every city council meeting or random discussion forum on a possible new law? Yeah, 20k people will post that they're at the inauguration and thought that X had an ugly dress or Y looked unhappy... but that's hardly useful.
  - jrockway 10y ago
    News and investigative journalism are two different things. If you want some barely-discernable pictures of what the cops are up to in some neighborhood, the citizens with cameraphone model works fine. But there is more than just reporting single facts, sometimes you have to chain a bunch of information together to build a worthwhile story. I think that's what professional journalists are focusing on. When the NYT figured out that Trump wasn't paying any taxes, they didn't go find someone on Twitter that took a picture of him not paying any taxes. They had to dig through thousands of pages of boring legal documents to figure it out. That's a full-time job, not really something a lot of hobbyists are going to get into.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      > But there is more than just reporting single facts ... And facts are tricky things. They can be easily manipulated, either by the people in the 'photo' or by the person who took it.
rjtavares 10y ago
I think the future is micro payments. I don't want to pay for a magazine, I want to pay for quality articles, wherever they come from.
- lbotos 10y ago
  In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    Iirc Blendle let's you ask for a refund after you finish reading.
  - rjtavares 10y ago
    Quality of the publication/author, recomendations, and relevance of the subject matter. It's a proven model: it's the same way I determine quality movies or books before I pay for them.
- ttcbj 10y ago
  Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time. Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content. [1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275-million-1201397.php http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...
  - noobermin 10y ago
    Are there any other stories about micropayments? I keep hearing how micropayments are going to change the internet, but here we are years later and no such service seems to be getting notability.
pmyteh 10y ago
There are a few subscription-based news models which run like this. Mediapart in France is one of the most prominent: hard news values, subscription-only, online. I work at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is doing a lot of work in this area; the Digital News Project reports are interesting: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/page/digital-news-project http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/page/digital-news-... I've recently authored one of these reports looking specifically at digital-born news media in Europe, which is particularly focused on the diversity of non-advertising focused news business models.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Has anyone found a way to finance serious news that is both sustainable and open. I fear the subscription model limits the best, 'real' news to the few who can and will pay for it, and keeps that news out of the online conversation. EDIT: What about micropayments? (See this comment for more on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 )
  - pmyteh 10y ago
    Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). For serious, sustainable and open [edit: and not ad-supported: some are trying to get that to work sustainably for serious news], there are two models out there: The first is traditional public service broadcasting (such as the BBC, or the German ARD). As these are funded by a compulsory public levy, they don't need either advertising or subscriptions, and have no need to exclude using a paywall. This model adapts from television to Internet news very well. The second is something donation-based. Some organisations are trying to fund reporting using either public donations (e.g. Krautreporter), foundation support (e.g. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), or a mixture (e.g. Correctiv). It's difficult to scale, though.
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      > Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). Blendle [1]? I guess it depends on how you define 'work'. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
pm90 10y ago
I'm a loyal NYT subscriber and I've suggested to them that I would be most willing to pay more for my subscription if they could please remove all ads. Did not get a response from them though.

secabeen 10y ago

The challenge there is to build up the infrastructure to do so. Real news gathering takes staff in offices around the world, relationships with residents and officials, etc. etc. Otherwise, all you end up being is an AP feed.

grey-area 10y ago
Traditional news-gathering certainly did, but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. The current system is of course doomed... However I think there's a gap here to do something radically different, global and paid for with subscriptions (from those who broadcast and companies who want aggregate data about fashion trends for example, or weather reports based on individuals reporting it).
- serge2k 10y ago
  > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket If you want 10 shallow disconnected sources of information from the fringes then that works. If you want someone who knows where to go, who to talk to, and how to actually build out a story then you still need journalists.
  - grey-area 10y ago
    Journalism, in spite of protestations to the contrary, has too often been a shallow gloss on half-understood ideas and a rushed frenzy to be first to print - to parachute in a correspondent to an unknown city/culture/subculture and expect them to understand it and not impose their prejudices on it while writing a story under time pressure is really expecting too much, and the results are often anything but insightful. The time pressure also regularly results in breathless stories without context and incomplete timelines with no closure and no revisiting the topic after the storm has passed. We can do better. Context and commitment and a large amount of original data is important in understanding information and people on the ground provide that (even if sometimes their view is limited, sometimes amongst them you'd find the best person to write the story of x). There are of course big problems with this flood of information, but it is now there (instantly, from anywhere on the globe), and it wasn't before. That changes everything. I do think there is value in having all that information, of course you still require a separate level of aggregation, analysis and perhaps narrative (Who will provide that? I think there is the opportunity), but the OP was talking about getting the data, that's now easy, the hard part is making sense of the firehose of data, which traditional journalism is ill-equipped to do given its emphasis on owning the story and speed to press. There is value in constructing a narrative based on the facts but the old business models of a news factory which 'makes news' and gets it to the public first in order to sell advertising are irrevocably gone now, they just haven't realised they are obsolete yet, and are scrabbling around for ways to adapt their old news-gathering infrastructure to this new world.
- MBCook 10y ago
  > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. Is that why I see numerous people live blogging every city council meeting or random discussion forum on a possible new law? Yeah, 20k people will post that they're at the inauguration and thought that X had an ugly dress or Y looked unhappy... but that's hardly useful.
- jrockway 10y ago
  News and investigative journalism are two different things. If you want some barely-discernable pictures of what the cops are up to in some neighborhood, the citizens with cameraphone model works fine. But there is more than just reporting single facts, sometimes you have to chain a bunch of information together to build a worthwhile story. I think that's what professional journalists are focusing on. When the NYT figured out that Trump wasn't paying any taxes, they didn't go find someone on Twitter that took a picture of him not paying any taxes. They had to dig through thousands of pages of boring legal documents to figure it out. That's a full-time job, not really something a lot of hobbyists are going to get into.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > But there is more than just reporting single facts ... And facts are tricky things. They can be easily manipulated, either by the people in the 'photo' or by the person who took it.

rjtavares 10y ago

I think the future is micro payments. I don't want to pay for a magazine, I want to pay for quality articles, wherever they come from.

lbotos 10y ago
In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Iirc Blendle let's you ask for a refund after you finish reading.
- rjtavares 10y ago
  Quality of the publication/author, recomendations, and relevance of the subject matter. It's a proven model: it's the same way I determine quality movies or books before I pay for them.
ttcbj 10y ago
Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time. Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content. [1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275-million-1201397.php http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...
- noobermin 10y ago
  Are there any other stories about micropayments? I keep hearing how micropayments are going to change the internet, but here we are years later and no such service seems to be getting notability.

pmyteh 10y ago

There are a few subscription-based news models which run like this. Mediapart in France is one of the most prominent: hard news values, subscription-only, online. I work at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is doing a lot of work in this area; the Digital News Project reports are interesting: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/page/digital-news-project http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/page/digital-news-... I've recently authored one of these reports looking specifically at digital-born news media in Europe, which is particularly focused on the diversity of non-advertising focused news business models.

hackuser 10y ago
Has anyone found a way to finance serious news that is both sustainable and open. I fear the subscription model limits the best, 'real' news to the few who can and will pay for it, and keeps that news out of the online conversation. EDIT: What about micropayments? (See this comment for more on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 )
- pmyteh 10y ago
  Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). For serious, sustainable and open [edit: and not ad-supported: some are trying to get that to work sustainably for serious news], there are two models out there: The first is traditional public service broadcasting (such as the BBC, or the German ARD). As these are funded by a compulsory public levy, they don't need either advertising or subscriptions, and have no need to exclude using a paywall. This model adapts from television to Internet news very well. The second is something donation-based. Some organisations are trying to fund reporting using either public donations (e.g. Krautreporter), foundation support (e.g. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), or a mixture (e.g. Correctiv). It's difficult to scale, though.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    > Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). Blendle [1]? I guess it depends on how you define 'work'. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

pm90 10y ago

I'm a loyal NYT subscriber and I've suggested to them that I would be most willing to pay more for my subscription if they could please remove all ads. Did not get a response from them though.