8 ms·

This. Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period su

by f055 9y ago

This. Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat. Somehow, when the respected newspapers moved to the web, they forgot that, and kept pumping ads like crazy. This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content - these two don't mix. Consequently, this eroded quality journalism, investigative, explanatory view of the world (and let's face it, TV could never replace that void, as they are solely relying on ads to survive). And then, a lot of bad things happened with peoples' opinions and understanding. I am glad many outlets are now seeing the correct path. The best news source in Poland nowadays is a wealthy, but niche, "Dziennik Gazeta Prawna" ("Daily Law Newspaper") with great, balanced content on serious issues - that relies mostly on subscribers. The best English periodical I have found is Foreign Affairs, also a very subscriber-focused outlet. Note that both of these seem to offer much better content in their paper issues than online.

ghaff 9y ago
My understanding is that paid subscribers (and newsstand sales) largely went into paying for printing and distribution while ads paid for basically everything else. Therefore, I expect that part of the thinking was that ads by themselves could pay for digital content creation and delivery. It's also the case that most people assume that an outsized percentage of costs goes into the physical copy of things. At one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively. Finally, there just aren't that many pubs that can really command a viable subscription price online--or really any at all. That the WSJ, NYT, and apparently the Guardian can isn't necessarily a recipe for a broader subscription model.
- asfdsfggtfd 9y ago
  > in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively. By effectively you mean steadily declining sales as people return to printed books.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    The decline is fairly small on a percentage basis and the reasons are debated--although it's definitely happened. A fairly sharp increase in audiobooks seems to be one reason. I suspect that people have also figured out that eBooks are good for some materials and not for others. Once you get away from books that are mostly flowing plain text, fiction in particular, eBooks don't generally work nearly as well. I haven't seen pricing given as a major factor. Used books certainly compete with the eBook back catalog but they aren't usually counted under physical book sales.
    - asfdsfggtfd 9y ago
      I suppose anecdote is not the singular of data. But my family, friends and I have largely rejected e-books based on price. I read a lot.
- Nursie 9y ago
  >> t one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively. I still get miffed when the e-book costs more than the paper copy. It's not like I expect them to be free, but when I'm buying the same product without the physical distribution, I would expect it to be <= the paper price.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I'm not sure how common it is but I agree with your basic point. Physical distribution is actually surprisingly a surprisingly small part of the cost of most books but unless there's some very funky royalty agreement or whatever in place, there's no reason for eBooks to cost more.
    - Nursie 9y ago
      I see it relatively often - it's just as often the other way around, of course. Sometimes it's that way at launch, sometimes afterwards (I presume because physical stock is taking up warehouse space and needs to be shifted. I presume there's a built in convenience premium with e-books and the market has discovered you don't need to discount them. Meh, it's just another small way in which the world refuses to make sense!
wjnc 9y ago
Totally agree. Even my favorite subscription (The Economist) had a time where I as a subscriber felt too much content was given away for free online. They luckily turned that back and kept the ecosphere going.
- psergeant 9y ago
  The number of ads in The Economist is pretty irritating for paid content
drinchev 9y ago
Note that Guardian is successful, because of "supporters" and not >subscribers<. It's different than WSJ, where they lock the content, until you pay. The Guardian way looks more like the Wikipedia one.
- aleph_naught 9y ago
  I really like the wikipedia model, but I know it wouldnt work for every outlet. I’ve contributed more to public radio and wikipedia than any other news service subscription. Ideally, nytimes/wapo/economist would be completely open, and one would be able to ‘donate’ with a single press of the apple pay button. I prefer that over yet another username password combo + subscription + app echo system I need to maintain. Or best of both worlds: single click of apple pay button sets a cookie for 30 days of access; sends a courtesy reactivation email with a link in case you clear your cookies.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    The big worry is that this doesn't work for local news at all. The nitty gritty details of governance happen at the local level - municipal and state/provincial legislatures. Journalism on that stuff doesn't scale.
    - inetknght 9y ago
      Where's the proof that it doesn't scale to local level?
    - disantlor 9y ago
      but local ads on local content are legitimately useful and the only type of display ad i’ve ever clicked on.
    - bondolo 9y ago
      It is working in my community. http://www.berkeleyside.com/ http://www.berkeleyside.com/ has run a (very modest) profit for the last two years and continued to expand. Their focus is the greater Berkeley area; a population of about 350,000. It is a more educated and well-off population than national averages. The revenue split is 65-35% between supporters and advertising. They've also recently done a direct public offering of stock allowing for $800K in investment. Local news, supported locally is possible.
beojan 9y ago
> This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content The same problem exists with paid subscribers / buyers. Just compare the circulation numbers of British tabloids to those of high quality British newspapers (which don't really exist anymore. Even the Independent and (to a lesser extent) the Guardian have moved toward pandering to their audience.)
bryanlarsen 9y ago
Back in the day, a typical newspaper made about 80% of it's revenue from advertisers (including the classifieds), and about 80% of its costs were printing & distribution. So free Internet distribution should have been 80% of the revenue at 20% of the cost... :)
- jopsen 9y ago
  There is probably not as much money in ads as there used to be. In the good old days there was no alternative to print media ads. Today there is so much more ad space available.
  - kristineberth 9y ago
    Nearly all the revenue in ads has now been captured by Google and Facebook, which is the far greater challenge for publishers.
  - giobox 9y ago
    The money is definitely still there in ads, and growing nicely! As others have pointed out, Google and Facebook have hoovered up the lion's share of the new revenue for themselves, which is arguably starving off the wider ad-supported ecosystem in many ways.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  How much have production costs dropped from print to the web? I'm guessing it's not 80%, but it should be a fairly substantial amount.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  How much were the classifieds pulling in before in that 80%, do you know? I know classifieds used to be huge. Craigslist could probably pull in multiple billions a year in profit and 10 figures in revenue if they went for revenue a lot more. Company value would probably be close to eBay level.
mtgx 9y ago
Also, unlike ads, which make you chase page views at all costs, paid subscribers will incentivize you to keep writing quality content, otherwise they will quit. Even if they sign-up because of a few sensationalist articles, they will eventually get bored with them, when they'll realize that 9 times out of 10 the headlines are just clickbait.
guelo 9y ago
If you make your content only available for paid subscribers than it doesn't get talked about. If you don't get talked about you lose the importance of being the so-called "newspaper of record". And if you don't get talked about you lose the new subscribers that come from word of mouth. In the old days there was just a few options available in a city and a handful of national papers. Today there is an almost infinite selection of available content. They also had the classifieds. This allowed business models that are not possible today.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > If you make your content only available for paid subscribers than it doesn't get talked about This doesn’t seem to apply to the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal.
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    Having a market catering to an older, richer, and more data driven niche has it's advantages. They are subject to some the same pressures as newspapers, but likely will gain effect at a later time frame then more general newspapers. They also deliver data that is more niche, and less likely to be delivered by alternate channels.
VeejayRampay 9y ago
Also, individuals paying for a subscription have no effect on the editorial line of a given newspaper. There's been a case recently in France where a billionaire was involved in the infamous Paradise Papers. Some newspaper wrote a lengthy piece about it and it turns out said billionaire pulled 600.000 euros of ads from the outlet a few weeks later. Totally coincidental of course :) That cannot really happen with actual subscribers. They can pull their subscription en masse if the editorial line doesn't please them, but they cannot endanger the livelihood of the newspaper as one fell swoop like that.
- combatentropy 9y ago
  37Signals said the same thing about applications. Better to have 10,000 users at $30 per month than 100 at $3,000 per month. If a single customer is paying a lot, then you are tempted to make whatever changes they ask for to your application, and it's harder to stand up against featuritis or illogical design.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Basecamp example is good but they do veer a bit away in terms of pricing. The price is too low still for any customer to have pull, but at $100/month, it also leaves out a lot of people. Not sure if there's a point in any of this. I guess I'm just adding on. Since the saying still works if $30 or $100 a month.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Mind, it would really help if I could get the newspaper I actually want delivered to where I live. Call me snooty, but I want to read the New York Times, not the Boston Globe. The Globe isn't local enough for those of us living outside Boston proper, but it just doesn't have the national- and global-scale content of the Times.
dalbasal 9y ago
I agree that content quality and revenue source are related in this way. There are bunch of analogies online, that I think help fill out this picture. Youtube “monetisation” spawned a bunch of clickbait-driven spam. Patreon produced good quality content, acting on the same platform, at the same time. This is somewhere between a subscriber and supporter model. A lot like some newspapers. Almost a natural experiment. In terms of operational scale, patreon’s “creators” are kind of similar to journalists. It takes similar sums to support the work, and they’re on similar timescales. This makes me think a similar model might work for journalism, though maybe not for newspapers. Podcasting is another possibly useful comparison. Very little clickbait (earbait?) ever crosses my radar. Podcasts are usually ad supported, but there’s still no way to SEO or clickbait your way to a win. To succeeds a podcast needs subscriptions, usually free. Even @ free, the need to attract a dedicated subscriber base encourages the same sort of focus on the same audience. Slow & steady growth. Win more subscribers than you lose… This example is messier, but I think it shows that the rules are rules of thumb. Basically, the path to success needs to depend on quality for quality to be likely. Subscribers are generally quality sensitive. I dunno how to formulate a principle exactly, but it feels like there is something here somewhere.
- teemu47 9y ago
  I've been working on making this model for journalists a reality https://www.demotico.com https://www.demotico.com. So far, I haven't found excited journalists but that may just be me being a poor marketer.
digi_owl 9y ago
Sadly at this point i wonder if "clickbait" is ingrained into the corriculum. I see even national broadcasters adopt such headlines, even though they do not rely on ads to fund their services.
gumby 9y ago
> Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat. [Citation required]. In the era of paper newspapers advertisers were the bulk of revenue. Hi subs were needed to show advertisers that the publication was worth advertising in. It's not like the idea of CPI is a new one!
b0rsuk 9y ago
As far as Polish media go, I really like: oko.press - the best investigative journalism in Poland. They proclaim to focus 2/3 of their coverage on ruling party and 1/3 on the rest. Time will tell if they are honest with that. The strategy makes sense, because government has the most power. wp.pl - while it has very clickbaity headlines, it's surprisingly balanced when it comes to point of view. Polish political scene and society is currently very polarized. I determined that wp is quite balanced by the fact that they cover both opposition and ruling party news. They carry articles critical of both ruling party and opposition. Make no mistake, WP is a tabloid, but it also has occasional very long articles and interviews, and those are quality journalism. On the other hand, they reprint kremlin propaganda from rt.com like Ukrainians who crucified children in Donbas without fact checking. The bottom line is I use wp.pl for quick news (it acts as a front guard) and oko.press for fact checking. As far as paper newspapers, Angora is my favourite. It shamelessly reprints articles from not just Poland but often from foreign papers, and it's interesting to read about Poland from a foreign point of view.
- f055 9y ago
  I had high hopes for oko.press but since they seem to have 3/3 negative coverage of the ruling party, and not in an investigative way, but kind of sensational in headlines, I got disappointed. But Angora is an outlet I forgot about but remember very positively, I need to check it out again.
  - b0rsuk 9y ago
    Press has no duty to be positive towards anyone. Critical thinking is what they do and they're very good at it. They often criticize the government, but they stick to facts and check their facts. Surely you don't blame them for pointing out falsehoods ? Why don't you instead blame people who lie ? Whenever an opposition member makes a false statement they point it out too.
dom96 9y ago
Slightly off-topic, but I just went on http://www.gazetaprawna.pl/ http://www.gazetaprawna.pl/ and was rather turned off by the auto-playing video/audio (that I could not find the source of).
- f055 9y ago
  Hmm I use a browser that disables auto play by default. I bet there’s an add-on for that.
ouid 9y ago
in a society with such dramatic wealth inequality, subscription can never be a viable business model for journalism. If you aren't charging people more based on how much they have, You're not going to be able to make it up on quantity, since most people have zero disposable income. Donations, however, scale with the inverse of the "marginal utility of money". Even though donations are completely voluntary, because they scale with wealth, at some level of wealth inequality, they become more profitable than a subscription service at any price point. (ad revenue also ostensibly scales with wealth, but not as well, since consumption doesn't scale very well with wealth)
kakwa_ 9y ago
I completely agree. Here in France, there are few truly independent newspapers, all the big ones like Le Monde, Liberation, Le Figaro are owned by billionaires like Niel, Drahi or Dassault. It's quite dangerous as it breaks the independence of these newspaper (for example Niel declared in 2011: "When journalists are bothering me, I buy a share of their fucking newspaper, and they leave me alone"). It's quite dangerous. The quality of these newspaper also tends to go to "click-baity" contents and it's really annoying. A few years ago, I interviewed for a position at Le Monde (as a sysadmin, not as a journalist), and from what I understood, there was rampant tensions in the redaction between those coming from the web publication and those coming from the "paper" one (the two were historically separated), no wonders... They still reveal major scandals from time to time (ex: Le Monde and the Panama Papers), but it is rarer than it used to. Fortunately there are a few independent newspapers, the 2 main ones in France being "Le canard enchaine", which is still "full paper", no website (it's a weekly however), and the other one being Mediapart, which is an online only, ads free, subscription based newspaper. I subscribed to Mediapart a few years ago. It was at the time a complete emotional reaction after Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. But more than 2 years later, I still subscribe to it, and keep reading it daily. One of the big dimension of why I keep paying for it (it's around ~10 euros/month) is that it's a way to support a free and independent press (the other being simply to stay informed). There is clearly room for an independent and quality press. It doesn't take that much subscriptions to maintain a decently sized newspaper, 100 000 subscribers at 10e/m gives you enough revenue to sustain around 100 employees. The press is a powerful counter balance of the political. It should remain that way. It will if a somewhat large number of individuals agree to pay for it.
dreamfactored 9y ago
US and UK publishing businesses are radically different in subscription revenues. They have traditionally made up a tiny proportion for UK publishers.

by f055 9y ago

ghaff 9y ago

My understanding is that paid subscribers (and newsstand sales) largely went into paying for printing and distribution while ads paid for basically everything else. Therefore, I expect that part of the thinking was that ads by themselves could pay for digital content creation and delivery. It's also the case that most people assume that an outsized percentage of costs goes into the physical copy of things. At one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively. Finally, there just aren't that many pubs that can really command a viable subscription price online--or really any at all. That the WSJ, NYT, and apparently the Guardian can isn't necessarily a recipe for a broader subscription model.

asfdsfggtfd 9y ago
> in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively. By effectively you mean steadily declining sales as people return to printed books.
- ghaff 9y ago
  The decline is fairly small on a percentage basis and the reasons are debated--although it's definitely happened. A fairly sharp increase in audiobooks seems to be one reason. I suspect that people have also figured out that eBooks are good for some materials and not for others. Once you get away from books that are mostly flowing plain text, fiction in particular, eBooks don't generally work nearly as well. I haven't seen pricing given as a major factor. Used books certainly compete with the eBook back catalog but they aren't usually counted under physical book sales.
  - asfdsfggtfd 9y ago
    I suppose anecdote is not the singular of data. But my family, friends and I have largely rejected e-books based on price. I read a lot.
Nursie 9y ago
>> t one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively. I still get miffed when the e-book costs more than the paper copy. It's not like I expect them to be free, but when I'm buying the same product without the physical distribution, I would expect it to be <= the paper price.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I'm not sure how common it is but I agree with your basic point. Physical distribution is actually surprisingly a surprisingly small part of the cost of most books but unless there's some very funky royalty agreement or whatever in place, there's no reason for eBooks to cost more.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    I see it relatively often - it's just as often the other way around, of course. Sometimes it's that way at launch, sometimes afterwards (I presume because physical stock is taking up warehouse space and needs to be shifted. I presume there's a built in convenience premium with e-books and the market has discovered you don't need to discount them. Meh, it's just another small way in which the world refuses to make sense!

wjnc 9y ago

Totally agree. Even my favorite subscription (The Economist) had a time where I as a subscriber felt too much content was given away for free online. They luckily turned that back and kept the ecosphere going.

psergeant 9y ago
The number of ads in The Economist is pretty irritating for paid content

drinchev 9y ago

Note that Guardian is successful, because of "supporters" and not >subscribers<. It's different than WSJ, where they lock the content, until you pay. The Guardian way looks more like the Wikipedia one.

aleph_naught 9y ago
I really like the wikipedia model, but I know it wouldnt work for every outlet. I’ve contributed more to public radio and wikipedia than any other news service subscription. Ideally, nytimes/wapo/economist would be completely open, and one would be able to ‘donate’ with a single press of the apple pay button. I prefer that over yet another username password combo + subscription + app echo system I need to maintain. Or best of both worlds: single click of apple pay button sets a cookie for 30 days of access; sends a courtesy reactivation email with a link in case you clear your cookies.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  The big worry is that this doesn't work for local news at all. The nitty gritty details of governance happen at the local level - municipal and state/provincial legislatures. Journalism on that stuff doesn't scale.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    Where's the proof that it doesn't scale to local level?
  - disantlor 9y ago
    but local ads on local content are legitimately useful and the only type of display ad i’ve ever clicked on.
  - bondolo 9y ago
    It is working in my community. http://www.berkeleyside.com/ http://www.berkeleyside.com/ has run a (very modest) profit for the last two years and continued to expand. Their focus is the greater Berkeley area; a population of about 350,000. It is a more educated and well-off population than national averages. The revenue split is 65-35% between supporters and advertising. They've also recently done a direct public offering of stock allowing for $800K in investment. Local news, supported locally is possible.

beojan 9y ago

> This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content The same problem exists with paid subscribers / buyers. Just compare the circulation numbers of British tabloids to those of high quality British newspapers (which don't really exist anymore. Even the Independent and (to a lesser extent) the Guardian have moved toward pandering to their audience.)

bryanlarsen 9y ago

Back in the day, a typical newspaper made about 80% of it's revenue from advertisers (including the classifieds), and about 80% of its costs were printing & distribution. So free Internet distribution should have been 80% of the revenue at 20% of the cost... :)

jopsen 9y ago
There is probably not as much money in ads as there used to be. In the good old days there was no alternative to print media ads. Today there is so much more ad space available.
- kristineberth 9y ago
  Nearly all the revenue in ads has now been captured by Google and Facebook, which is the far greater challenge for publishers.
- giobox 9y ago
  The money is definitely still there in ads, and growing nicely! As others have pointed out, Google and Facebook have hoovered up the lion's share of the new revenue for themselves, which is arguably starving off the wider ad-supported ecosystem in many ways.
CaptSpify 9y ago
How much have production costs dropped from print to the web? I'm guessing it's not 80%, but it should be a fairly substantial amount.
skinnymuch 9y ago
How much were the classifieds pulling in before in that 80%, do you know? I know classifieds used to be huge. Craigslist could probably pull in multiple billions a year in profit and 10 figures in revenue if they went for revenue a lot more. Company value would probably be close to eBay level.

mtgx 9y ago

Also, unlike ads, which make you chase page views at all costs, paid subscribers will incentivize you to keep writing quality content, otherwise they will quit. Even if they sign-up because of a few sensationalist articles, they will eventually get bored with them, when they'll realize that 9 times out of 10 the headlines are just clickbait.

guelo 9y ago

If you make your content only available for paid subscribers than it doesn't get talked about. If you don't get talked about you lose the importance of being the so-called "newspaper of record". And if you don't get talked about you lose the new subscribers that come from word of mouth. In the old days there was just a few options available in a city and a handful of national papers. Today there is an almost infinite selection of available content. They also had the classifieds. This allowed business models that are not possible today.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> If you make your content only available for paid subscribers than it doesn't get talked about This doesn’t seem to apply to the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal.
- dv_dt 9y ago
  Having a market catering to an older, richer, and more data driven niche has it's advantages. They are subject to some the same pressures as newspapers, but likely will gain effect at a later time frame then more general newspapers. They also deliver data that is more niche, and less likely to be delivered by alternate channels.

VeejayRampay 9y ago

Also, individuals paying for a subscription have no effect on the editorial line of a given newspaper. There's been a case recently in France where a billionaire was involved in the infamous Paradise Papers. Some newspaper wrote a lengthy piece about it and it turns out said billionaire pulled 600.000 euros of ads from the outlet a few weeks later. Totally coincidental of course :) That cannot really happen with actual subscribers. They can pull their subscription en masse if the editorial line doesn't please them, but they cannot endanger the livelihood of the newspaper as one fell swoop like that.

combatentropy 9y ago
37Signals said the same thing about applications. Better to have 10,000 users at $30 per month than 100 at $3,000 per month. If a single customer is paying a lot, then you are tempted to make whatever changes they ask for to your application, and it's harder to stand up against featuritis or illogical design.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Basecamp example is good but they do veer a bit away in terms of pricing. The price is too low still for any customer to have pull, but at $100/month, it also leaves out a lot of people. Not sure if there's a point in any of this. I guess I'm just adding on. Since the saying still works if $30 or $100 a month.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

Mind, it would really help if I could get the newspaper I actually want delivered to where I live. Call me snooty, but I want to read the New York Times, not the Boston Globe. The Globe isn't local enough for those of us living outside Boston proper, but it just doesn't have the national- and global-scale content of the Times.

dalbasal 9y ago

I agree that content quality and revenue source are related in this way. There are bunch of analogies online, that I think help fill out this picture. Youtube “monetisation” spawned a bunch of clickbait-driven spam. Patreon produced good quality content, acting on the same platform, at the same time. This is somewhere between a subscriber and supporter model. A lot like some newspapers. Almost a natural experiment. In terms of operational scale, patreon’s “creators” are kind of similar to journalists. It takes similar sums to support the work, and they’re on similar timescales. This makes me think a similar model might work for journalism, though maybe not for newspapers. Podcasting is another possibly useful comparison. Very little clickbait (earbait?) ever crosses my radar. Podcasts are usually ad supported, but there’s still no way to SEO or clickbait your way to a win. To succeeds a podcast needs subscriptions, usually free. Even @ free, the need to attract a dedicated subscriber base encourages the same sort of focus on the same audience. Slow & steady growth. Win more subscribers than you lose… This example is messier, but I think it shows that the rules are rules of thumb. Basically, the path to success needs to depend on quality for quality to be likely. Subscribers are generally quality sensitive. I dunno how to formulate a principle exactly, but it feels like there is something here somewhere.

teemu47 9y ago
I've been working on making this model for journalists a reality https://www.demotico.com https://www.demotico.com. So far, I haven't found excited journalists but that may just be me being a poor marketer.

digi_owl 9y ago

Sadly at this point i wonder if "clickbait" is ingrained into the corriculum. I see even national broadcasters adopt such headlines, even though they do not rely on ads to fund their services.

gumby 9y ago

> Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat. [Citation required]. In the era of paper newspapers advertisers were the bulk of revenue. Hi subs were needed to show advertisers that the publication was worth advertising in. It's not like the idea of CPI is a new one!

b0rsuk 9y ago

As far as Polish media go, I really like: oko.press - the best investigative journalism in Poland. They proclaim to focus 2/3 of their coverage on ruling party and 1/3 on the rest. Time will tell if they are honest with that. The strategy makes sense, because government has the most power. wp.pl - while it has very clickbaity headlines, it's surprisingly balanced when it comes to point of view. Polish political scene and society is currently very polarized. I determined that wp is quite balanced by the fact that they cover both opposition and ruling party news. They carry articles critical of both ruling party and opposition. Make no mistake, WP is a tabloid, but it also has occasional very long articles and interviews, and those are quality journalism. On the other hand, they reprint kremlin propaganda from rt.com like Ukrainians who crucified children in Donbas without fact checking. The bottom line is I use wp.pl for quick news (it acts as a front guard) and oko.press for fact checking. As far as paper newspapers, Angora is my favourite. It shamelessly reprints articles from not just Poland but often from foreign papers, and it's interesting to read about Poland from a foreign point of view.

f055 9y ago
I had high hopes for oko.press but since they seem to have 3/3 negative coverage of the ruling party, and not in an investigative way, but kind of sensational in headlines, I got disappointed. But Angora is an outlet I forgot about but remember very positively, I need to check it out again.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Press has no duty to be positive towards anyone. Critical thinking is what they do and they're very good at it. They often criticize the government, but they stick to facts and check their facts. Surely you don't blame them for pointing out falsehoods ? Why don't you instead blame people who lie ? Whenever an opposition member makes a false statement they point it out too.

dom96 9y ago

Slightly off-topic, but I just went on http://www.gazetaprawna.pl/ http://www.gazetaprawna.pl/ and was rather turned off by the auto-playing video/audio (that I could not find the source of).

f055 9y ago
Hmm I use a browser that disables auto play by default. I bet there’s an add-on for that.

ouid 9y ago

in a society with such dramatic wealth inequality, subscription can never be a viable business model for journalism. If you aren't charging people more based on how much they have, You're not going to be able to make it up on quantity, since most people have zero disposable income. Donations, however, scale with the inverse of the "marginal utility of money". Even though donations are completely voluntary, because they scale with wealth, at some level of wealth inequality, they become more profitable than a subscription service at any price point. (ad revenue also ostensibly scales with wealth, but not as well, since consumption doesn't scale very well with wealth)

kakwa_ 9y ago

I completely agree. Here in France, there are few truly independent newspapers, all the big ones like Le Monde, Liberation, Le Figaro are owned by billionaires like Niel, Drahi or Dassault. It's quite dangerous as it breaks the independence of these newspaper (for example Niel declared in 2011: "When journalists are bothering me, I buy a share of their fucking newspaper, and they leave me alone"). It's quite dangerous. The quality of these newspaper also tends to go to "click-baity" contents and it's really annoying. A few years ago, I interviewed for a position at Le Monde (as a sysadmin, not as a journalist), and from what I understood, there was rampant tensions in the redaction between those coming from the web publication and those coming from the "paper" one (the two were historically separated), no wonders... They still reveal major scandals from time to time (ex: Le Monde and the Panama Papers), but it is rarer than it used to. Fortunately there are a few independent newspapers, the 2 main ones in France being "Le canard enchaine", which is still "full paper", no website (it's a weekly however), and the other one being Mediapart, which is an online only, ads free, subscription based newspaper. I subscribed to Mediapart a few years ago. It was at the time a complete emotional reaction after Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. But more than 2 years later, I still subscribe to it, and keep reading it daily. One of the big dimension of why I keep paying for it (it's around ~10 euros/month) is that it's a way to support a free and independent press (the other being simply to stay informed). There is clearly room for an independent and quality press. It doesn't take that much subscriptions to maintain a decently sized newspaper, 100 000 subscribers at 10e/m gives you enough revenue to sustain around 100 employees. The press is a powerful counter balance of the political. It should remain that way. It will if a somewhat large number of individuals agree to pay for it.

dreamfactored 9y ago

US and UK publishing businesses are radically different in subscription revenues. They have traditionally made up a tiny proportion for UK publishers.