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Isn't that what we have currently? Quality journalism seems hard to pull off with only online ads. Most of it nowadays is supported by subscriptions and/or prin

by pg314 9y ago

Isn't that what we have currently? Quality journalism seems hard to pull off with only online ads. Most of it nowadays is supported by subscriptions and/or print editions. They help subsidize free access to some of the content.

Myrmornis 9y ago
Would you say that, today, most people who read quality journalism do so by paying subscriptions? I'm not sure about that. The Guardian is one obvious exception, but I agree the center-right newspapers have moved to subscription. It's very broken though. The whole idea of paying a subscription for a newspaper is outdated -- it's based on the days when the head of household would select a newspaper and have it delivered to the house before breakfast. Most of the time when I'm reading news online I'm wasting time that I would prefer to be using productively, so there's no way I'm going to pay for that. Additionally, there's so much good free material on the internet that there's not enough incentive to pay for it. I think the major newspapers should accept that the days of a single cathedral-like website for their newspaper where devotees will spend hours are gone; if we could pay a small amount effortlessly on a per-article basis, choosing between many different sources, that might make sense.
- pg314 9y ago
  The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist are all behind partial or full pay-walls. I'm not sure that a subscription is outdated. It still makes sense for a bunch of editors to make a selection of what is news-worthy in their opinion. Leaving it to algorithms to tailor your newsfeed to your exact tastes risks leading to a feedback loop of reinforcing biases. I like The Economist, once a week, the most important news and a bit more in-depth than most newspapers. Their Espresso app seems interesting, but I haven't tried it yet. I don't know if you can fund good investigative journalism with micro-payments. Maybe we haven't seen it yet because there is no good system for micro-payments, but maybe the market just isn't there... My biggest beef with all those newspapers is that they never rethought their product when they went digital. It's just the same content as the print edition, only on a screen. It would be relatively easy to link to sources and more in-depth data supporting the main article, but you hardly ever see that. It's all boiled down to a few simple graphics and tables.
  - Myrmornis 9y ago
    I agree with what you're saying. But I wasn't suggesting having algorithms pick our news items; agree with what you say about reinforcing biases. I'm suggesting that in the modern era, with adults who have grown up with the internet, it doesn't make sense to ask them to pick one source and pay a monthly subscription for it; we are used to an enormous range of quality reading options. Instead I'm imagining a middleman/broker site where one can see story headlines from a large selection of newspapers and pay to read on a per-story basis or via subscription (e.g. a monthly balance but still the newspaper whose story you click on is the one that gets the micropayment). People would happily pay $20 a month or whatever to read $their_desired_monthly_number_of_words of intelligent journalism if they can choose the range of sources from which those words come. But very few will pay 4 x $20 for 4 sources. (replace $20 with whatever's right).

by pg314 9y ago

Myrmornis 9y ago

Would you say that, today, most people who read quality journalism do so by paying subscriptions? I'm not sure about that. The Guardian is one obvious exception, but I agree the center-right newspapers have moved to subscription. It's very broken though. The whole idea of paying a subscription for a newspaper is outdated -- it's based on the days when the head of household would select a newspaper and have it delivered to the house before breakfast. Most of the time when I'm reading news online I'm wasting time that I would prefer to be using productively, so there's no way I'm going to pay for that. Additionally, there's so much good free material on the internet that there's not enough incentive to pay for it. I think the major newspapers should accept that the days of a single cathedral-like website for their newspaper where devotees will spend hours are gone; if we could pay a small amount effortlessly on a per-article basis, choosing between many different sources, that might make sense.

pg314 9y ago
The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist are all behind partial or full pay-walls. I'm not sure that a subscription is outdated. It still makes sense for a bunch of editors to make a selection of what is news-worthy in their opinion. Leaving it to algorithms to tailor your newsfeed to your exact tastes risks leading to a feedback loop of reinforcing biases. I like The Economist, once a week, the most important news and a bit more in-depth than most newspapers. Their Espresso app seems interesting, but I haven't tried it yet. I don't know if you can fund good investigative journalism with micro-payments. Maybe we haven't seen it yet because there is no good system for micro-payments, but maybe the market just isn't there... My biggest beef with all those newspapers is that they never rethought their product when they went digital. It's just the same content as the print edition, only on a screen. It would be relatively easy to link to sources and more in-depth data supporting the main article, but you hardly ever see that. It's all boiled down to a few simple graphics and tables.
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  I agree with what you're saying. But I wasn't suggesting having algorithms pick our news items; agree with what you say about reinforcing biases. I'm suggesting that in the modern era, with adults who have grown up with the internet, it doesn't make sense to ask them to pick one source and pay a monthly subscription for it; we are used to an enormous range of quality reading options. Instead I'm imagining a middleman/broker site where one can see story headlines from a large selection of newspapers and pay to read on a per-story basis or via subscription (e.g. a monthly balance but still the newspaper whose story you click on is the one that gets the micropayment). People would happily pay $20 a month or whatever to read $their_desired_monthly_number_of_words of intelligent journalism if they can choose the range of sources from which those words come. But very few will pay 4 x $20 for 4 sources. (replace $20 with whatever's right).