4 ms·
there's a reason print media is going out of business. to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not goi
by megaman8 8y ago
there's a reason print media is going out of business.
to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month subscription to read a single article.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoI've kept thinking that if I could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't.
- manigandham 8y agoThey can already make plenty of money out of you from ads. Far more scalable and efficient, and 0 active work for you to do.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> they'd make a lot of money out of me No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
- dman 8y agoBut then they would have to write something good.
- usr1106 8y ago> could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't. The Guardian has it. But they are an exception. On the other hand I tried to make a paper subscription of the Guardian [1]. Despite searching for an hour, I could find no way how to order the paper. Maybe another case of rejecting the customer willing to pay, because nobody could possibly want that service... Should have called them, but they weren't open at the moment. [1] for my daugther who wants to prepare for her English exam. Freshness of the news is less an issue than having it it in a comfortable format for studying. She hates that many of her school books are only online today. Online could have some advantages, but most implementations by school book publishers are rather poor.
- zamadatix 8y agoI think that's more to do with paper delivery not having enough profit margin and not so much them just making it difficult for you to give them money. They do paper deliveries in the London area and global shipments of the international weekly version but other than that they are all online like a lot of news organizations have been lately. Both of these are easy to find and subscribe to online.
- zulrah 8y agoHave you tried https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/ you can read wsj articles there
- the_duke 8y agoActually, all you need is https://outline.com https://outline.com . ;)
- brockwhittaker 8y agoAgainst TOS, this just further worsens the situation for newspapers. :(
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kkarakk 8y agoand that's a good thing
- megaman8 8y agoyes, but the links we always see here on hackernews are for their normal wsj site.
- acdha 8y agoOr the flip side, how they treat paying customers. I cancelled my New Yorker account because I got tired of getting the sleazy “Second Notice” envelopes which look like a bill but are in fact just telling you that you can save a few percent by extending your subscription. I mean, I value paying for journalism but there are plenty of alternatives which don't have the ethics of a used car salesman.
- megaman8 8y agothat's exactly why I cancelled my print subscriptions to both car and driver and road and track. I can't stand those. Whoever is creating those, really needs to be fired.
- Aaargh20318 8y agoOur local newspaper's publisher has a service where they have a website with the most interesting articles from all the local papers they publish. I wanted to check out if it's worth it for me to subscribe to this, so I was looking for how much this costs.. turns out the only way to get access to it is sign up to get a stack of waste paper in your snail-mail box every day. Guess I'll stick to reading the daily free samples.