4 ms·

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 I'm not sure that a subscription is outdated.

by 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 I'm not sure that a subscription is outdated.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

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).