7 ms·

How we should pay for newspapers

• sunstone 9y ago
  Well there's Texture, a kind of cable package for magazines, bought by Apple last week. [0] If it works for magazines it could work for newspapers but the tricky part is that it has to be shared ownership and there are a lot more newspapers than magazines. [0]http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/apple-texture-acquisition-1202724105/ http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/apple-texture-acquisiti...
  • DogOnTheWeb 9y ago
    Exactly this. For Spotify to succeed they only needed to get a handful of label conglomerates on board. It could be done, but getting all of the heavyweight newspapers just in the United States to sign up would be a herculean effort. There is consolidation in the industry (particularly among hyperlocals), but it's not as consolidated as major label music.
    • jordanpower 9y ago
      It is! But Hercules lives! Sort of. PressReader (disclaimer, I work there) is doing exactly this. Think Texture, except way more content. We have more than 7,000 titles right now. About half are newspapers. You're absolutely right about the US news brands, though. They've got some good things going on their own already. But, we're working at it. This month, we added Variety, Robb Report, and a bunch of Meredith titles (mostly newspapers). I'm loving this thread, though, you guys. It shows there's a serious interest for what we've got going on at PressReader. Awesome, awesome.
      • DogOnTheWeb 9y ago
        Awesome! Best of luck to your team.
• mfoy_ 9y ago
  I'd sign up for "Spotify for newspapers".
  • pan69 9y ago
    Friends of mine run Inkl: http://www.inkl.com http://www.inkl.com
  • Froyoh 9y ago
    Google News?
  • jordanpower 9y ago
    Try PressReader, my friend. Shoot me a DM on Twitter (@jordanpowpow) and I'll get you started with some free access. If you like it, awesome. If not, that's cool. It's unlimited newspapers AND magazines. 7,000 of them. You can create 'playlists' and set auto downloads. And every time you read something, the publisher gets paid a royalty.
• stcredzero 9y ago
  There should be an ecosystem like YouTube, but for long form text, where individual authors can have subscription relationships with subscribers.
  • samschooler 9y ago
    I think this is what Medium is trying to be. They introduced members only articles a few months ago where a portion of the subscription goes to the author.
  • DogOnTheWeb 9y ago
    That's essentially what Medium is. If you consider that their goal is to get newspapers to publish on their platform, their premium subscription is basically what OP is describing in his post. Edit: Samschooler beat me to it.
  • sethbannon 9y ago
    Check out Substack, they're working on exactly this: https://on.substack.com/p/a-better-future-for-news https://on.substack.com/p/a-better-future-for-news
  • jordanpower 9y ago
    That's super interesting. I think others are right, that's a lot like Medium. But, what about when a reader doesn't really know which author they like. What if they just read the entertainment section of one newspaper, fun stories from some other magazine, and whatever's dominating the news cycle from that national paper somewhere else?
    • stcredzero 9y ago
      What happens on YouTube? People can look at the "home" page and see recommended articles. Also, sites like HN and reddit can link back to articles.
• QasimK 9y ago
  I absolutely agree with one caveat. I think it’s important to be able to read an historical article even though you are no longer paying the subscription. I think there’s subtleties to the subscription model though. Will it really cover all newspapers, even the super expensive and rare ones? The aggregator will get to choose what you could read on its platform. Also, certain articles are likely to be of higher quality, so there should be a good way to “fairly” distribute the subscription that is beneficial for you and humanity. I love Spotify. I think it does the subscription model really well, and I like how it does not restrict you. At least compared to Netflix which is super annoying with its geographic, VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions. I refuse to use Netflix (and Amazon video) because of the pain it has caused. It’s still not perfect because I want to play the songs using my own choice of music player. There are two different services that I know of that might be of interest. The closest service that I have found is Blendle which charges a small amount per article rather than a subscription. The second is the basic attention token which, I think, could be used for this though it is much broader. I haven’t tried either.
  • jacques_chester 9y ago
    > At least compared to Netflix which is super annoying with its geographic, VPN, and increasing DRM restrictions. Netflix has to honour its contracts with media providers, who have been accustomed to regional contracts and blackout clauses for decades.
    • QasimK 9y ago
      Yes, absolutely. However, regardless of the reasons, it when I run into an issue I feel annoyed and it makes me want to not bother.
• lgregg 9y ago
  The only thing I know about in this arena other than prior mentioned in the thread is Civil, a blockchain for journalism payments. I think it's super interesting. https://joincivil.com/ https://joincivil.com/ They're one of the blockchain projects coming out of Consensys.
• tptacek 9y ago
  The problem being that I don't want to read individual newspapers. There are pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or two per month Consider changing your habits. I felt this way before, too. Then I subscribed to the Washington Post and New York Times and weaned myself off news aggregators and CNN.COM, in favor of just scanning the front pages of both. I am blown away by how much better informed I am on most stories than I was before. Something that was easy for me to miss before was that the selection of stories on aggregator sites is itself a form of editorial control. The algorithmic aggregators do a pretty terrible job; the popular vote aggregators... yikes. If you want to read a couple of articles from a lot of different sources, you're going to need to pay somebody to "design the menu" for you. The major newspapers have spent the last century working on that problem, and I'm not sure anyone's really giving them a run for their money. Consider an NYT, WaPo, or WSJ subscription.
  • brucephillips 9y ago
    Popular curation is awful, you're right. But it remains unfortunate that old media still bundles their curation and authoring services. I'd like to see expert curation applied to the entirety of news articles.
    • tptacek 9y ago
      Or you could just pay literally less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month --- with the first months free --- and use your Amazon Prime subscription to get WaPo. NYT all-access is a little pricier; it'll cost you two cups of coffee a month. I'd understand the resistance if you were constantly having to authorize and approve these charges, but really you just sign up and forget about it. I use the subscriptions at least as much as I use Netflix. I am sort of kicking myself for not having set this up earlier.
      • exhilaration 9y ago
        Very interesting, I wasn't aware of this option. Here's the WaPo link: https://www.amazon.com/The-Washington-Post-Digital-Access/dp/B072MHQFJ1 https://www.amazon.com/The-Washington-Post-Digital-Access/dp... Only $3.99/mo. I can't find the New York Times on Amazon, though. I pay $7.50/mo for a digital subscription directly to the Times. A pretty great deal, if you ask me. They run a sale every week or two.
• misterbowfinger 9y ago
  Suuuuuuuuuure, although this will undoubtedly result in newspapers being paid less, not more. Given the currently bleak situations for newspapers, I'd doubt this would work. There's also the issue of unions that have been popping up since DNAInfo got shut down. I don't think they'd support a "Spotify" for news.
• overcast 9y ago
  We need Netflix for newspapers. $10 a month, gives you access to read hundreds of news articles.
  • hollander 9y ago
    There is Blendle, although I can't find a list of newspapers and magazines that they publish.
• hakanito 9y ago
  I think this is a great use case for blockchain and in-browser wallets. I imagine a not too distant future where Newspapers can add a bit of open source code that controls access to their content. If I want to read an article, I pay like 50c to unlock it.
• hokus 9y ago
  How we should pay for the telegraph and the pony express?
• jacques_chester 9y ago
  I've called this model "microsubscription", on the idea that it combines features of micropayment and subscription. It's arguably bundling and it arguably isn't, so I'm going to go ahead with the cool name. Flattr are doing it, Google Contributor was doing it drifted away. Readability used to do it. In fact, so many people have thought of this model that I have kinda lost track. Google Subscriber splits the middle. It's not really a walled garden, but Google's reach and interpenetration of the open internet is so total that it feels and behaves very much like one. I was granted a patent last year on a technical aspect: how to (1) log the visits, (2) let visitors through a paywall, (3) without revealing their identity to the publisher. This is easy (but potentially expensive) if you have a walled garden (Netflix, Spotify, Texture). It's more difficult if you don't. If you want to contact me about it, use jacques@robojar.com.
• snambi 9y ago
  This is exactly what medium is doing.
  • jordanpower 9y ago
    Err...not really.
• peterwwillis 9y ago
  This is the business model of cable TV providers.
• andy_wrote 9y ago
  I like the idea of having a centralized exchange for buyers (readers) and sellers (writers). I would actually prefer it to be variable-fee rather than flat-fee, with buyers paying per article, and the exchange truly playing the role of an _exchange_, taking a commission per transaction. There's still room for publishers, in the form of editing, curation, and financial support - say, funding a correspondent's trip to a war zone. I'd be fine with some of the price, ideally a transparent amount, going to publishers (or labels or guilds or whatever you want to call them). The comparison with Spotify is interesting, because I would prefer Spotify to be this way too, and I say this as someone who uses Spotify very regularly. From my (admittedly non-firsthand) knowledge, Spotify has a kind of swap going on between listeners and artists/rights-holders where they take a fixed stream from listeners and pay variable streams to artists. (Although the variable leg is a percentage of the total fixed payments, so in aggregate Spotify pays a fixed leg and there's never a financial mismatch for them.) At such small payment scales as "price of a song," I don't object to variation in payment being passed through to me. Spotify can take a cut for providing delivery and the app. If I feel like I'm spending too little or too much per month on music, I can scale my use, much like other expenditures in life. My inclination is to feel similarly about print media.
• kenhwang 9y ago
  As somebody who has some insight into the inner thoughts of the revenue departments of newspapers, the suits running newspapers would rather die than accept Spotify for newspaper. We were offering something like $0.20 per article. We ran a small scale test. The users loved it, it allowed the newspapers to monetize users that would otherwise not pay, it let you read the article without a bunch of ads loading slowing down the page. We thought this is great, we're making the digital newspaper experience better and making them more money, this is a wonderful success. They noticed that our product was loved too much by the user that they were cancelling their subscriptions in favor of it. They would rather have that guaranteed $1/month from a subset of their users than rely the unpredictability of hoping the user reads 5 articles a month. And it wasn't just one newspaper, half the top newspapers 15 by circulation said the same thing. Throw in an aggregator service like Spotify on top so the newspapers can't even control the look and feel on top? The idea's dead in the water.
  • jordanpower 9y ago
    Mmmmm. Kind of. That insight is pretty accurate, in my experience (I work for PressReader, disclaimer) and what we're building is basically the Spotify for News. But for real. It took some doing, and we definitely had resistance at first, but we have more than 7,000 newspapers and magazines now. And more every week. Where we've really found success is taking the time to build strong relationships with the publishers. I totally get that they don't want a Spotify-like service to eat at their regular subscribers. So - part of our benefit to them, is the way we let big brands buy access for their customers. That way, newspapers can reach hotel guests, airline passengers, people like that, that they couldn't before. Whatever product you build, you have to consider BOTH the reader and the publishers.
    • kenhwang 9y ago
      It depends on the scale, really. When you only account for a small % of traffic, your impact to subscription revenue is also small, to the point where they can just bucket any cost or revenue loss under the marketing budget. We still integrated with many of them (for years now at this point), with quarterly meetings with their senior management. They limit our integration to some small % of their traffic, undesirable articles, low flight risk users, or low loyalty users. We're letting them control their revenue risks, and they're all just slow, risk-adverse, engineering resource limited, and enjoying the high Trump brought back to the press.
• evmar 9y ago
  Google tried this model some years back (I forget the name). The problem ends up (as always) being around the money. You need to sign up ~all the newspapers for it to be valuable for users (otherwise they're paying $20/mo for access to just a random subset of the news), but the more newspapers you sign up, the more you need to split the user's subscription fee between an increasingly large pool of newspapers. In the post he writes that the papers should get their "fair share", but how do you compute that? If you do it based on pageviews you create an incentive for participants in the program to juice their pageviews, either through low-quality clickbait or technical means like splitting a single article into a multipart series. And so on.