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This strikes me as a return to the world as it was. The world of "free content" is a relatively new one, 20 years or so? Before that, you paid for a paper if yo

This strikes me as a return to the world as it was. The world of "free content" is a relatively new one, 20 years or so? Before that, you paid for a paper if you wanted one. Of course, before that you didn't have "free fake" news available so readily. Just a brainstorm, but perhaps this is a problem Facebook as the power to address? They want to get into providing content, and they have the resources. And not to toot my own horn here, but I work for a mid-sized library (metro of about 200,000) and we subscribe to every regional newspaper. If someone wants to be better informed, the resources exist.

hackuser 10y ago
> not to toot my own horn here, but I work for a mid-sized library (metro of about 200,000) and we subscribe to every regional newspaper. If someone wants to be better informed, the resources exist. Since you decided to toot, you open yourself to questions: Can local citizens read those newspapers online? Traveling to a building and reading yesterday's news on paper is not realistic and at this point it's an anachronism.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  Understandable, but I guess I was framing it in terms of "the way it used to be". Picking up a paper and reading yesterday's news was the method of delivery for years. If the shift is to put the best news behind a paywall, it seems preferable to read "real" news on paper than fake news. But to answer your direct question, no, they cannot. Our local paper is fairly stubborn about its monitization (refusing to digitize back issues in major library databases such as Proquest), so I'm not optimistic.