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Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
- RickSanchez2600 8y agoI paid for a newspaper and the only thing factual was the cartoons. Fake news has been around longer than the Internet. Look at Supermarket tabloids. Look at all of the journalists being fired now. Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well. Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningitis daughter and she died. They rushed her to the hospital in their van knocking off the rack on top to get her help because they couldn't wait for an ambulance. She died anyway, and they charged the parents even if they did everything correctly to save her. From that day I learned of fake news.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mr_toad 8y ago> Newspaper I paid for reported falsely > they charged the parents So the newspaper just reported the fact that they had been charged? > From that day I learned of fake news. You learned to label things you don’t agree with as fake news.
- Something1234 8y agoI'm more than willing to bet that the newspaper vilified the parents. It seems to be happening more and more frequently.
- RickSanchez2600 8y agoYes the paper vilified the parents who had done nothing wrong. Kick them when they are down sort of thing to sell more papers.
- hopler 8y ago> > had neglected their spinal meningitis daughter
- RickSanchez2600 8y agoThe parents were not neglectful, they took care of their daughter and took her to the hospital as soon as they noticed the trouble. Parents were not charged with neglect until after the article was written saying they neglected their daughter. There was no neglect just dirty laundry.
- WalterBright 8y agoI was involved with a news event that the local news covered once. They got pretty much every fact wrong. It wasn't due to bias (for example, they described the building as a "warehouse" when it was an obvious office building), it was just sloppiness and failure to check any facts. It made me skeptical of news ever since.
- TheOperator 8y agoYou don't really understand how accurate the media is until they report on something you know a lot about. Journalists are generalist laymen with strong incentives to be sensationalist and alarmist. Well researched journalism made by somebody who spent long enough on the story to understand what the hell they're talking about is legitimately rare. Uncommon would be an exaggeration. One of the things that irks me is the rhetoric that Trump-era distrust of the media is somehow undermining democracy or whatever. If you aren't distrustful of the media you are a naive and dangerous fool. I remember the overwhelming majority of US mainstream media pushing the Iraq war with stories that relied on bias and bogus sources. Interviews with officals & experts that had skin in the game. Blind faith in the media is even more dangerous than the also dangerous posture of not paying any heed to what they have to say.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- a-fried-egg 8y agoI don't have the money
- IronWolve 8y agoI do pay, just to alt-media companies that I respect more than the NY Times. MSM won't get my dime while they push political agendas instead and target the opposition.
- aphextron 8y agoDo these alt-media companies have accredited journalists, held to objective professional and ethical standards laid out by journalist organizations? Do they cite credible sources and facts with every article? Because that's what we're losing. The idea that JoeBlowKnowsTheTruth.com holds the same level of accountability, rigor, and seriousness as an actual news organization is what's gotten us into this mess.
- loraa 8y agoSeems like companies like the New York Times doesn't either, so what is the difference. The big MSM companies know they have the power to spread fake news and have a good amount of people blindly believe.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- adamrezich 8y agoHow did the other response to this comment get [dead] within _one minute_ of being posted?
- bayulxc5 8y agoThe account is shadowbanned. (Heads up, loraa!)
- michaelmrose 8y agoSo incoming ban for you too?
- ademup 8y agoI subscribed to a year of Washington Post and received a ton of spam-ish content, notifications, and pleas to renew during the entire period. Lesson learned, cancelled with predjudice.
- standardUser 8y agoI'm a WaPo subscriber (digital) for a few years now and have received virtually no correspondence from them at all, payment-related or otherwise. Did you not unsubscribe to their emails that you didn't wish to receive?
- masonic 8y agoI get at least 3 emails a day from them. The "Post Most" alone comes multiple times a week.
- shadowbannedtoo 8y agoI don't know why Bezos doesn't offer the paper for free? It seems like the Goodwill it would generate might make him wealthier? Or, at least offer it for free to Prime members? In all honesty, when I don't see billionaires giving back; I try to avoid their product. (Yes--I'm on the dislike of the selfish billionaire bandwagon. I know they are easy targets, but just how much money do you need to live a full life? I think about the billions his wife will receive for just being with the man, and don't get it. These people must see how the poor, and homeless are doing, but just don't do much? And I'm sorry, If you grew up in America, and made your wad here; give back to people here. Rant done--waiting for a another Shadowban.)
- dawhizkid 8y agoNot sure about anyone else but every time I read an article about something I'm actually an expert in or few times about myself or a company I've worked for I see at least a handful of factual errors and/or exaggerations that aren't real.
- tivert 8y ago> Not sure about anyone else but every time I read an article about something I'm actually an expert in or few times about myself or a company I've worked for I see at least a handful of factual errors and/or exaggerations that aren't real. News is only the first rough draft of history [1] [2]. Newspapers are definitely not perfect, and they definitely make errors, but there's no better way to get such a breadth of timely, relatively reliable information to a general reader. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Barth#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Barth#Legacy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Graham#%22First_rough_draft_of_history%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Graham#%22First_rough_dra...
- wenc 8y agoI think the news cycle has to do with the quality of news as well. Sometimes it's just impossible to get the proper facts within the first 24h of breaking news. This is why I read weekly periodicals.
- licebmi__at__ 8y agoNot really, I still find lots of errors on recounts of past events. Aside from a few articles, that almost always come from rare good journalists, I don't really see any research on most news media, not for recent events, nor for historical accounts.
- tivert 8y ago> Not really, I still find lots of errors on recounts of past events. Aside from a few articles, that almost always come from rare good journalists, I don't really see any research on most news media, not for recent events, nor for historical accounts. You're looking in the wrong place. You'll find the first rough draft of history in a newspaper, you'll find the final draft in a book (or at least the most polished draft). I often find lots of bugs in software that's been rushed out the door to fill and urgent need, it's the name with newspapers.
- jayalpha 8y ago"The impact on journalism has been clear. Just within the past week, we have seen over 1,000 planned layoffs at Gannett, BuzzFeed and HuffPost" I had never considered the click-bait outlet "HuffPost" as "quality journalism". "We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism." Well, paid journalism is not a guarantee either: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-relotius-reporter-forgery-scandal-a-1244755.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-relotius... Stopped reading after this. Whining does not suit the NYT well. It is an outstanding newspaper and has basically, also thanks to the internet, a world wide audience. It is better prepared to the changing business model as most other newspapers. Whining here about google and facebook is rent seeking.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI dont consider BuzzFeed as quality either. Wishing a meme producing site wasnt sharing the name as whats supposed to be a news site. My other issue is when they dont properly check the source of a story like the MAGA teens whom they claimed were doing things they clearly were not if you saw the full video.... Fake News goes both ways... If the "mainstream" media wont check sources better then they are just as much a part of the problem.
- tanderson92 8y agohttps://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news
- fwip 8y agoBuzzFeed News produces pretty good news reports. It's not the same as BuzzFeed proper.
- function_seven 8y agoWhy BuzzFeed chose to use the same brand to cover such different sites is beyond me. Every time a quality article is linked here, almost without fail there is someone who will comment along the lines of "BuzzFeed is trash, I'm not clicking that" I don't blame them. It's not their fault that the news site decided to share their name with a trash clickbait site.
- pessimizer 8y agoThere is no feature of paying for news that makes it more real. The NYT and WaPo should stop mixing news and editorial and relying on "anonymous administration officials" and intelligence agencies; that would set an example to other outlets.
- standardUser 8y agoUsing anonymous sources is a tried and true practice that has been around since the dawn of journalism. Would you rather news media only report things so inconsequential that everyone involved is happy to be publicly outed?
- yellowapple 8y agoWe need some mechanism to actually authenticate anonymous sources if we expect them to continue to be taken seriously. It's exhausting to be bombarded by article after article that makes all sorts of claims where the evidence consists primarily or entirely of testimony by unnamed sources who may or may not actually exist. It's a "tried" practice, yes, but I have my doubts about how "true" it is in this day and age. I don't pretend to have an actual answer to how we'd build such a mechanism or what it'd look like, but there's a need for it nonetheless. Maybe some trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party that can say "Yes, this unnamed source is legitimate"?
- ardy42 8y ago> It's exhausting to be bombarded by article after article that makes all sorts of claims where the evidence consists primarily or entirely of testimony by unnamed sources who may or may not actually exist. Are you suggesting that reputable newspapers are making up unnamed sources or are too careless to privately confirm that they're real? > I don't pretend to have an actual answer to how we'd build such a mechanism or what it'd look like, but there's a need for it nonetheless. Maybe some trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party that can say "Yes, this unnamed source is legitimate"? It's been invented, and it's called journalism. That trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party is the newspaper itself.
- adamrezich 8y agoIt's worth having ads unblocked on Twitter to get the weekly-or-so NYT ad in the form of a sponsored tweet, click on it, and see that out of hundreds, sometimes thousands of replies to the sponsored tweet, literally zero of them have anything positive to say. Allowing all replies to sponsored tweets to be visible seems like a poor marketing strategy but at least it provides ample entertainment.
- roylez 8y agoPaying does not stop people from lying to you,as long as there is interest in it. The crowd has been manipulated throughout the history, and is destined to be so, because there's interest in it. If you want not to be part of the crowd,use your own discretion, which you cannot outsource,by paying.
- tivert 8y ago> Paying does not stop people from lying to you, as long as there is interest in it. But if you don't pay someone to go out into the world and do the labor-intensive work of investigating the truth, you'll certainly get lies written from the comfort of someone's desk. Lies and opinion are much cheaper to produce than accurate factual reporting, since there's less overhead.
- jcroll 8y agoI pay for the NYT but only after getting a 1 year deal where it works out to $8/mo, after that it jumps to $20/mo. If newspapers want to compete for paid online subscriptions they should be more in line with Netflix and Spotify and be a flat $10/mo
- o10449366 8y agoThe NYT has been on a crusade against FB for the past two years now. No other major news publication has published as many articles on FB as they have. I will never support NYT, not because I support FB, but because they disguise their media campaign as one meant to protect the individual's privacy, when in reality NYT has a very strong monetary incentive to go after FB. These ulterior motives further decay the trust the general public has in news media of all kinds and it's disappointing to see HN gobble up NYT article after NYT article just because FB is unpopular here.
- untog 8y agoAre the articles false? I don't really understand the reasoning here. Facebook is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world now, why should NYT not report on them? One straightforward way for FB to stop this reporting would be to stop doing shady things.
- 8ytecoder 8y agoIt doesn't have to be false. What gets picked for reporting reveals a lot about bias as well. The other thing is the magnitude. Being objective would be to consider the truth, the relevancy and the magnitude of issues. If NYT doesn't like FB, they can give front page coverage to every negative news about FB irrespective of how big the issue is and how many people it affects. It's like raising a sev-1 ticket against a team/project you hate or escalating far and wide every single mistake a coworker makes - it tarnishes the reputation even while being completely truthful with respect to the statement made.
- untog 8y agoBut can the same not be said of every news organisation out there - that they stand to lose at the hands of FB? So who is qualified to report on FB, no one? You're not wrong that NYT would have a motivation to report negatively about FB. But that doesn't automatically mean that is the motive, though. All their reporting I've seen has been notable, and not hysterical. There's been additional good reporting by TechCrunch and ProPublica, I'm not sure how NYT's coverage differs.
- bargl 8y agoI want a service where I can subscribe to journalists not news papers. I want to know that they are getting a portion of my subscription and being successful. I want 0 advertising in this news paper. Where do I get it? Is this something we need to create? I'd love a fact check o meter on each journalist as well, but I think that'd be very open to bias, so I don't know how that'd happen. Anyway, I don't subscribe to newspapers because I don't like their model, not because I don't want to support the journalist. I have no clue if I'm missing a massive part of how the newspapers actually front a lot of money to make journalism better by paying expenses for journalists. I'm no expert on the ins and outs of journalism. I just see a lot of crap reporting that doesn't hold water and I'm tired of reading op-ed pieces falsely labeled as journalism.
- jcroll 8y agoDespite not liking their model do you still read their articles?
- bargl 8y agoYes - but I'm not subscribing to 10 news papers. I try to reference CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, Bloomberg, Guardian, NY Post, NY Times. I will even read some of the alt-left and alt-right stuff as well. I find there are some journalists I'd like to block and never read their trash again from each paper and some I would like to go back to over and over again. (Chris Wallace is a good one) The fact that I can't get consistency from any one of the above is frustrating and I'm not paying 10 bucks a month per newspaper, the most I'll do is turn my ad blocker off. I want to give journalists my money, but I don't want to give a newspaper with a single agenda my money.
- rkagerer 8y agoI can't name many journalists off by heart. I'd like stories (or writers) to be rated based on quality (the way StackExchange does with answers) so that I never have to see the chuff. I don't care if the content comes from a trained journalist or a blogger who happens to be a subject matter expert.
- marmadukester39 8y ago
- everdev 8y agoWhat if we had a way to signify that an article or a publication meets a certain set of journalistic standards (sourcing, fact checking, no opinions, etc.), such that violating those standards would result in a fine. Then it might be easier for a casual reader to differentiate between journalism and opinion.
- cgag 8y agoI don't find the real thing any more valuable than the fake.
- ardy42 8y ago> I don't find the real thing any more valuable than the fake. That's a pretty damning statement to make about yourself.
- hd4 8y agoYeah seems likely. "Want me to stop lying? Pay me to tell the truth then."
- Zaskoda 8y agoI have this idea I share over and over again because I'm not in a position to pursue it. Usually it gets ignored and every once in a while someone says it's brilliant so here's hoping. Crowd source investigative reporting. Focus on supporting the reporter instead of the news network. Build a system that creates a reputation for the reporter and a mechanism to crowd source news that the general public is interested in. I could go on, but then there would be more text for you to read. I guess I could add that cryptocurrencies and blockchain would be useful technologies in a tool like this. (reputation tracking and crowdsourcing)
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoSounds like a promising idea, but without the oversight of a responsible organization and editor these independent journalists tend to devolve into fringe circle-jerk territory. The nature of individual celebrity ensures a slide into pandering to one's fans, regardless of how respectable and worthy that celebrity.
- qp_nn 8y agoI do, broadly, agree with the sentiment. I pay for The Economist, The Financial Times, and the Australian Financial Review. Plus I read BBC and Thompson Routers regularly. If there's something particularly contentious I'll have a look at what the Guardian is saying about it to try and get an alternative perspective. There's definitely a huge bias in almost all news sources. The Economist explicitly states their position on matters, The Financial Times and AFR are much more implicit. The BBC does pretty well on sticking to facts, but now they're appending their stories with opinion pieces from editors. TR does do a very good job of simply fact reporting.
- qp_nn 8y agoThere's a really cool analysis/chart about the reliability of news sources here: http://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-chart-version-3-0-what-exactly-are-we-reading/?fbclid=IwAR35ogM0iy4AEpX_QGUYU5OEz54vkekJ_cPI1kXYUNVRXMbls7_qJl5I0Rw http://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-chart-version-3-0-what-exac...
- DuskStar 8y agoWhy not link to the most recent version? It's currently at 4.0: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoI can't comment on the others, but I'll agree about The Economist. They are hardly without bias, but in general they wear it on their sleeve.
- davidw 8y agoI subscribe to: * https://www.bendbulletin.com/ https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - the local paper. They're the only ones with a reporter sitting through sometimes excruciatingly long city council meetings full of stuff like 'modifications to the sign code' - but also things like zoning reform that may make housing not so horribly expensive. * https://www.washingtonpost.com/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ online - seems to be a decent national level newspaper. You can also get a deal on it via Amazon Prime. * https://www.economist.com/ https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of events around the world, and some more in depth analysis. It's probably too much, but... I feel like these are critical times in terms of being informed and involved.
- justin66 8y agoThis seems like a pretty good pattern, supporting journalism at the local, national, and global level.
- nytLOL 8y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/opinion/saddam-s-bombs-we-ll-find-them.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/opinion/saddam-s-bombs-we...
- tivert 8y ago> A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 20, 2003, on Page A00023 of the National edition You know what an op-ed piece is, right? If you don't, here's a definition: > An op-ed, short for "opposite the editorial page" or "opinion editorial", is a written prose piece typically published by a newspaper or magazine which expresses the opinion of an author usually not affiliated with the publication's editorial board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed
- deogeo 8y agoJust because they put it in the op-ed section doesn't mean they weren't pushing war propaganda.
- nytLOL 8y agoI know what an op-ed is. I guess your point is that they don't fact check op-ed's so it doesn't count? The NYT itself felt it's reporting was bad enough it warranted an apology: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-editor-weapons-of-mass-destruction-or-mass-distraction.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-e...
- jessaustin 8y agoTFA is a NYT opinion piece...
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoThe fact that they published it (or that they didn't publish something) is hard proof of endorsement. If you think it isn't, I can only suggest you have a bizarre concept of reality.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wyqydsyq 8y agoIronically I couldn't read this article about why I should pay for news because their paywall blocked it. The result is I didn't pay and didn't read the article. Seems to be an effective measure if your goal is to reduce clicks and deter readers
- baroffoos 8y agoI pay for news via tax and get usually high quality content from https://www.abc.net.au/ https://www.abc.net.au/
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoLucky you. Seriously, enjoy your good fortune. But paying for something via tax is a pretty weak way of ensuring accountability, which is the entire point behind the concept of voting with your wallet.
- 8ytecoder 8y agoA few complaints I share with the other people in this thread: - It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently. As someone in tech I can clearly see what they get and what they don't. Extrapolating it - it's not at all clear they understand economics or foreign policy or policy impact or environmental concerns and how to address them ...etc. - Bias: every single one of them have bias. The burden is on me to spot bias and think objectively. Why do I have to pay do that? At least present news as it is? I'm not sure if even that would work - there could be bias in what gets chosen for reporting. - The user experience is pretty bad. That I have to use an adblock after paying for the already expensive subscription is ridiculous. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of pixels and tracking embedded in their site. - Big picture: By design, news focuses on the now and misses the big picture quite often and usually by a huge margin. E.g., the relentless focus on petty issues in last election (both major party candidates) and not enough attention at all on concrete policy measures. This extends to privacy issues (Facebook and the like) until it's too late. Wars/conflicts, foreign policy, long term economics. For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier.
- sosborn 8y ago> At least present news as it is? This is exceptionally difficult. My favorite example is choosing which photo to run for a story. Let's say a photographer take photos of Trump at an event. He has a photo of Trump smiling, a photo of Trump frowning, a photo of Trump scowling and a photo of Trump laughing. Which one is correct? They are all technically correct because they happened, but they all convey different tones, some of which will be completely inappropriate in the context of the story it runs with.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoExactly. There was a very famous image of the UK miner's strike, at the battle of Orgreave, 1984. Another photographer captured the same scene that day. They give a very different impression. Both images compared: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/06/photographers-scrum-winning-image-picture https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/06/photogr...
- SubuSS 8y agoThe news as a written medium is losing traction: youtube rules the next generation (anecdotally from what I see with my daughter & friends). I wouldn't mind paying youtube premium channel if I can get a truly centrist opinion pieces, factual reporting and random excerpts into topics like science/philosophy/comedy/culture. Sadly afaic again, most of the 'online' content is way too left (or the worse option: way too right). What I wouldn't give for a bbc like channel in the US that runs 1-1.5 hrs every day of content. Any recommendations?
- dexen 8y agoTim Pool. He's got both a news channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/Timcasts/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/Timcasts/videos) and an Op-Ed channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe02lGcO-ahAURWuxAJnjdA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe02lGcO-ahAURWuxAJnjdA).
- normal_man 8y agoThe guy who marches in all the Nazi rallies under the guise of being a "journalist," cool.
- ramsss 8y agolmao, your brain must be irreparably damaged if you think Tim Pool is an example of fair unbiased journalism.
- ddingus 8y agoFrankly, NYT is spot on. Media in the US has consolidated to a handful of players, who have many conflicts of interest. These result in a big business bias in media today. It's rare to get news and commentary written from the labor point of view, and that's needed a lot more than financial expansion of entities like the NYT. Progressive minded people should simply start to fund labor centric media and compete with the big money majors. I'll bet that competition goes pretty well, and some of that can be seen in TYT today, largest online news and opinion entity there is, by views. TYT owns under 35-40, operates on a mix of AD revenue and membership income to avoid having those same conflicts of interest, and that allows it to differentiate nicely from the usual players.
- edoo 8y agoI want to see a browser plugin or web service that uses natural language processing to highlight both the claims of fact and opinion in different colors on the article you are reading.
- headsoup 8y agoIn my likely naive view, this seems quite simple: create quality and unique content and people will pay a price reflecting that. Make the 'base' service free, but offer a better 'tier' (or whatever) as a paid service (Q&A with journos, a free journal, ability to filter and tune news feed, etc) There are many ideas and almost all the better ones don't likely involve pay-walling the site (either for all or after XX articles)...
- raz32dust 8y agoI am not sure paying for news will make it reliable. A subscription-based newspaper also has some of the same constraints as an ad-based one. Eventually it will pander to its subscription base. I think it would only make it even worse, if anything, since metadata about the reader would be even more easier to know when you are logged in.
- hopler 8y agoYou need to buy a paper whose subscribers want to be pandered to with real news.
- my_first_acct 8y agoDepends on the reader base. If the goal of the readers is to obtain proof that their favorite politicians are great, and that their opponents are evil and stupid, then that's what the paper will provide: entertainment plus reinforcement. But I like to think that there are still readers out there who want to know what is really happening, so that they can make educated guesses as to what will happen next. Presumably these readers want these insights in order to make money, which suggests that papers oriented to investors and business executives are the most likely to provide information that is actually predictive, rather than reinforcive. The problem is that papers of this sort are also the most likely to charge hefty subscription fees, and put up strong paywalls.
- fromthestart 8y agoI don't think paying for news is going to change the fact that all journalism has basically turned into activist journalism. By definition that comes with a slant. The worst part though is that in it's ubiquity, I don't think anyone realizes that it's happened. There just isn't much objectivity left in journalism from any source. It's hard to expect unbiased news when journalists inject their opinion into everything because they think they're fighting the good fight.
- KiDD 8y agoSurprised this article isn't behind the paywall also :P
- notatoad 8y agoI currently have a paid subscription to both NYTimes and WaPo. I barely use either. Going to a newspaper website and clicking on headlines that sound interesting is simply not an experience that i'm interested in. I'd much rather read articles that have been filtered through some sort of social aggregator, whether that's facebook, twitter, reddit, or HN. And given how news spreads on those sites, i'm probably not alone here. But as long as "fake news" is all free, and "serious journalism" is hidden behind a paywall it's hard for it to compete with the viral effect of free stories on any aggregators. If the NYTimes wants people to read their content, they need to make it discoverable, not lock it away.
- burtonator 8y agoI run a search engine / crawler company: http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/ We index news sites, among other sources. The situations here is really a horrible situation for content aggregators and search engines and how they related to news sites. First, say you do pay for the NYTimes. If they nail a story, some other paper is just going to run it... and with fair use they can pretty much cover most of the story. So why would someone pay the NYTimes when you can get it elsewhere? Now you could say that the NYTimes should lock up their data behind a paywall but that can't stop fair use. IT also stops content aggregators and search engine and there's a lot of potential in building derivative apps with the data. I think at some point we might want to look at public funding of these institutions similar to PBS paid for with some sort of tax on companies like Google which actually utilize the content. There have been various proposals for this in the UK but they've all flopped. Basically package licensing deals that just never worked.
- jjtheblunt 8y agoNY Times is about as fake as you could possibly pay for.
- baking 8y agoDuring the 2016 election the NY Times was harping on Clinton's e-mails daily yet completely neglecting the growing evidence of Trump's Russian collusion. I think they are part of the problem.
- euske 8y agoI can't help but drawing a parallel between the news industry and software industry here. People hate paying for software for a reason; an expensive solution is not necessarily better, and there are tons of unscrupulous business practices in the software industry. Furthermore, most people can't discern quality software and bad software (especially when it comes to invisible elements like reliability and security). The same goes for news organizations. We (at least some of us) don't know what's quality journalism, and even in a reputable news organization there's some shady part. We've lost faith to them and thought that we deserve something better. I don't know. I'm paying for NYT for now as well as paying for crappy software that I sometimes use grudgingly. Maybe it's an age thing, but I can't go radical and dump everything just yet. I feel that our new system (whatever it will be) isn't going to be drastically better than the current ones.
- PlasticTank 8y agoJournalists and news agencies begging for money, telling us how much we need them. I guess now the shoe is on the other foot things look a bit different. As they said to coal miners, your industry is a dinosaur, it's time to try something new. #learn2code
- culot 8y agoCareful with that hashtag, that kind of hate speech will get you banned from Twitter.
- lazzlazzlazz 8y agoI would love to pay for real news, but I can't find anyone making it consistently. The New York Times at its best produces "mostly believable" if slightly confused material, and at its worst outright propaganda.
- jccalhoun 8y agoWant me to pay for real news? Be worth paying for. 90% of "news" (like everything else) is crap that isn't worth supporting. I am not inclined to subsidize the good things by paying for bad things. That being said, I do wish google or some other search engine would get better about favoring original sources rather than other sites that just take stories and rewrite them. I hate seeing a headline to a story only to find out that it is just re-reporting what some other site reported. Often it is a game of telephone where site A rewrites a story from site B that rewrote a story from site C. If a search engine could find a way to return the original site first then it would help highlight original reporting and make re-reporting less worthwhile.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoIt seems like The NY Times could do this by separating tiers. Let me subscribe to the magazine, which has good long-form journalism, separately from the breaking news daily machinations that the average person doesnt need to pay attention to.
- culot 8y agoI think most commenters here are missing the point of this op-ed: it's not to convince people to pay for news content, it is to promote legislation that allows the author's News Media Alliance to form a cartel that is exempted from anti-trust regulations, so they can try to force Facebook and Google to pay them directly. His organization spends of a lot of time over these past couple of years railing against Google and Facebook, and take note that the true target of this article is not consumers of news, but Facebook and Google. The author of the article, David Chavern, since he took over the reins of the News Media Alliance, has argued that media cross-ownership rules are antiquated, that greater consolidation of news firms would be beneficial to citizens. "A new op-ed from trade association News Media Alliance’s president and CEO David Chavern dismisses the contributions of leading tech services and argues publishers should form a cartel and extract rents by implementing controversial new regulations. In reality, though, leading tech services have taken great steps to empower publishers in the Internet Age, while the “cartel solution” would do little to bolster innovation." link: https://springboardccia.com/2019/02/01/nmas-cartel-solution-little-bolster-innovation-news/ https://springboardccia.com/2019/02/01/nmas-cartel-solution-...
- barnesto 8y agoum, the NYT has a pay wall and still puts out fake news each and every day, so...
- wtmt 8y agoIf paying for the real thing meant they were priced appropriately (there are many facets to this) and didn't shove tons of ads and didn't track users, it has a chance of working. Take Ars Technica as an example (I'm not a subscriber). Its paid subscriptions neither show you ads nor have a single tracker (it did take some time to get there though). For people in a country like India, where print newspapers (that have ads) can be bought for a whole month for about ₹150 or so (a little more than $2), subscriptions to foreign sources are quite expensive. Absurdly, there are newspapers in India that charge more for the digital edition (compared to print), while still showing plenty of ads and having the benefit of adding trackers! (Example: The Hindu) Unless mainstream news outlets improve their business models and the user experience, I for now have very less sympathy for them. The fact that Facebook and Google are a lot more worse for everyone is why I even have sympathy for these organizations in the first place.
- jammygit 8y agoI'll look into them, thanks! Edit: found this writeup that exicitly states no tracking for subs. Thanks again for mentioning them! https://arstechnica.com/staff/2018/03/ars-pro-now-free-of-trackers-for-subscribers/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2018/03/ars-pro-now-free-of-tr...
- jccalhoun 8y agoReading the comments here, I am surprised that so many comments are saying that the New York Times and mainstream media in general are fake news. I'm no fan of the NYTimes (I think it is too much filler and not enough substance) but I'm curious as to what commenters think is real news or what makes the NYTimes fake news.
- princeb 8y agoreal news is what people believe news should be - truthiness and all that.
- msmExample 8y agoMost recent fake news example: MAGA hat kid.
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoWhat an outlet chooses to report on (or not to report on) can be of much greater significance than the details therein presented.
- phreack 8y agoDidn't the NYT have the dark pattern of being one-click subscribe, yet made you fill forms and emails and physically call them to unsubscribe? (At least up until a few months ago, last I heard) Stuff like that is an absolute deal breaker and turns lots of users away from subscriptions entirely, before even talking about article/content quality.
- jammygit 8y agoCancelling an Amazon account takes about an hour of redirects and customer retention chats and emails. I decided not to subscribe to some papers for that reason yesterday
- Dylan16807 8y agoWhat do you mean by "cancelling an account"? The last time my prime subscription expired they just let it happen, has that changed? Or do you mean deleting an account, which is completely different from cancelling a subscription?
- zorked 8y agoThat is indeed a huge problem. I would happily pay hundreds of monetary units a month for journalism, but I want to be able to stop when I want. There's also the awful "1,99 a month!" line of advertising that only tells you it's actually 39,99 after you click. I might actually be willing to pay that price, but not after being made a fool. Also, if you work in media, sell me a completely frictionless day pass. Without the need to create an account. Sometimes I just want to read that one series that I found interesting, and it's not worth 29,95 and the hassle of maintaining another account and unsubscribing later.
- ahakki 8y agoI subscribed to the NYt via iTunes. There you can remove the subscription just as you would any other (eg Apple Music).
- dman 8y agoI do pay for news, however one request I have for news providers is a greater emphasis on presenting news from all sides. Over the last 4-5 years most news providers have picked a political side (to a much greater extent than I recall in the past). This is true in both countries for which I follow news (India and the US). Given an event I can predict the coverage that venues will give it. This is troubling to me, and I have to visit multiple news providers (And at times augment that by reading comments on relevant subreddits). I would really like some reputed news organizations to try to pitch a "big tent" and try to get a diverse set of opinions on the news of the day. While we are at it - please ignore data that long form journalism is dead, the current race to the bottom leads to nowhere. The people who value understanding the world enough to want to pay for it also value understanding the nuance and the multiple perspectives - these are hard to capture in a single paragraph. Do not design your product for the lowest common denominator. Lastly - please drop the clickbait ads on your websites that you run to augment your income. These ads often contain fake news, and by association they lessen the credibility of your organization in my eye. In short - respect your audience, build a premium product that is worth subscribing.
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- throwaway9d0291 8y agoI'm living in Switzerland at the moment and I really appreciate swissinfo.ch (don't know much about the other sources because I only speak English). For example take a look at the news for their upcoming vote: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-depth/vote-february-10--2019 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-depth/vote-february-10--2019 They have numerous articles on the issue (urban sprawl) and unmodified opinion pieces from people on both sides of the issue.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoI would appreciate less emphasis on pretending to cover news from several angles. By doing so they imply that both sides are equally valid even when they're not. For instance I've seen them bring on a climate change denier to give the "other side" on a climate change story; anti vaxxers, et cetera. It's particularly bad when one side is willing to lie.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rurcliped 8y agoI'd be happy to pay. I don't because I object to the NYT privacy policy: "we gather ... a history of the pages you view ... We automatically combine this collected log-information with other information we collect about you ... We have a legitimate interest in disclosing or transferring your personal information to a third party in the event of any reorganization, merger, sale, joint venture ...." I'd pay double or triple their current price if they announced support for anonymous access backed by frictionless anonymous payment.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoSeeing how many people struggle to pay for every day things and live paycheck to paycheck, I doubt the majority will ever pay for news. News is interesting, but not enough to pay for it. Most of the time the cover is skewed one way or another - too negative, biased. Personally, I can live my whole life not knowing what happens outside my personal circles, who blew up what and what apple did today to google.
- kakarot 8y agoThe unfortunate reality is thus: The internet has created a zero-cost distribution platform, and "news" platforms which exploit irrational emotional responses in order to further an agenda will always exist. If quality news is gated by a paywall, there exists a cutoff with respect to salary beneath which quality news is inaccessible. Even if some could afford it and choose not to, there still exists an informational membrane between two classes of people. This system inherently couples poverty with less education. That is unacceptable! The playing field must be even for all, and the same knowledge should be accessible by all citizens who wish to participate politically. There exists a concept in Game Theory called Perfect Information [0]. To quote Wikipedia, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred. If we don't maintain a system which facilitates perfect information, then most people beneath this socioeconomic membrane will follow the path of least resistance and end up subscribing to free platforms which exist to exploit them. Remember, if the product is free... And if we allow this to happen, then we create ideological chasms between socioeconomic classes, which leads to distrust and prevents cohesive inter-class political activity. This hurts the lower class the most, as they must rely on human resources more than financial resources in order to exact meaningful change within their lifetimes. It may be that the only solution is a network of journalist cells and news organizations which are paid for by public donations, university funding, tax money, fundraising, and any and all ethical means of revenue collection which still allow the product itself to be free. As most browsers of Hacker News are surely Open Source enthusiasts, it would be very beneficial to take the time to gain a deeper understanding of why you appreciate Open Source software, the benefits it has both to empower the individual and society as a whole, and what mechanisms must exist to ensure such a system continues to exist. If you can identify these root concepts, you can then generalize them and try applying them to your understanding of the news distribution model and the future of journalism, and perhaps you might uncover new insights. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information
- webninja 8y agoMake all required college textbooks free! /s I like your post but free news at a high quality level isn’t sustainable. Even charities need donors.
- sqldba 8y agoI recently started paying for The Australian / Wall Street Journal. It's garbage. Utter, complete garbage. I've been reading it daily online for the past week and it's 99% political opinion nonsense. (I'm not referring to anti-Trump or anything, it's actually anti-opposition in Australia; for America it just seems to attack "the left").
- sirwanqutbi 8y agoThe irony is NY Times have probably paid Hacker News to promote this article here. Besides that, what makes you think news is more accurate if its paid for ?
- janimo 8y agoWant to stop amateur-level, easily-debunked and low budget fake news? Pay for the real thing coming from established sources /s Seriously, fake news has not been invented in the past three years, it was just 'democratised' with the help of twitter and facebook. The large majority of publications, even reputable ones like the NYT, have contributed to the spread of false information and knowingly mislead the public more than once.
- smsm42 8y agoI've just been reading this: https://quillette.com/2019/01/30/the-death-of-a-dreamer/ https://quillette.com/2019/01/30/the-death-of-a-dreamer/ Basically, a story of a person driven to suicide by biased, sensationalized and unfair coverage. To say it doesn't make me sympathize with the members of the outlets committing the deed is a large understatement. While I understand that not everybody in the press is like that, such things are considered totally acceptable, and people doing this would probably be then welcomed to work in any other press outlet. Until the time that producing such baloney has real consequences enforced by the people in the industry, I would have very little sympathy for them complaining about declining respect - and declining money that comes with it.
- nitwit005 8y agoI wish I could pay more fine grained subscriptions. If I get a local newspaper, much of the content is national or international news, and sports. I don't want any of that from them. I already have a New York Times subscription and I'm not into sports. The ideal service I see is something that bundles a local news source with a national and international news source.
- blablabla123 8y agoFake news is nothing that emerged with Facebook, it's much older, oftentimes the yellow press has been accused of doing it. Sometimes even established media outlets involuntarily produce fake news by not doing enough research. So eventually I started reading a lot of non-mainstream media (that was not alt-right ;)) and I found it to be very well researched and it happened to be for free. For specific topics there are also good blogs and websites of political advocacy and research organizations. Sorry NYT, but your content is not that life important and awesome. I might be biased because I'm not from the U.S.
- dangerface 8y agoNews has always been funded with advertising the cost of the newspaper was just a nice bonus. I pay for it by giving you my eye balls. Journalists just got sloppy and started money grubbing is all.
- veddox 8y agoHm, I thought the claim that newspapers are funded by advertising was wrong, but apparently you're right after all - at least historically: - https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html - https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_events/how-will-journalism-survive-internet-age/varian.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_eve... However, in the last few years, a switch to a greater subscription income has taken place (see first link above, also here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation-and-revenue-fall-for-newspaper-industry/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation-...).
- mscasts 8y agoWhy would I pay for a media that humiliates me, writes biased articles and tells me that I am a bad person because my political views differ from theirs? I am actually kind of glad that the media landscape is changing, because they way it has been has been terrifying. I'm not american, so I can't speak for new york times but the layoffs in the shit-media that was buzzfeed and others like it is just good news. I'd rather see a world without a news media than with them being the only option. But I do pay, for alt-media.
- bshoemaker 8y agoYou do understand that the people laid off at Buzzfeed were not the people at the Buzzfeed media side of the house, they were actual reporters on the Buzzfeed news side?
- warp_factor 8y agoThe shaming of half of the country by some of the mainstream medias such as the NYT is definitely part of the reason why they are losing it in the long term. I politically mostly agree with the NYT, but I can't stand their morale high ground with the continuous shaming of the other side of the aisle.
- mscasts 8y agoIt's just not the NYT, really. It is most of the media companies. I don't live in the US but here it's even worse because it's all one-sided. At least you guys have options.
- edpichler 8y agoIn Brazil we have Nexo. They are doing a very good journalism: https://www.nexojornal.com.br/ https://www.nexojornal.com.br/ PS: I also like The Guardian.
- kaolti 8y agoI understand no one likes change, especially businesses. But complaining and trying blame and shame your audience because your business model is no longer viable is laughable. It is on THEM to figure what is next for journalism. That's not to say their point is not perfectly valid about fake news, it is. It's that the attitude of telling us it's our fault and we should change our ways is already a losing mindset.
- atc 8y agoThe traditional way companies are forced to re-imagine/change is by consumers threatening the existence of incumbents by voting with their wallet. Guess what? In the global journalism landscape we now find ourselves, that really means _paying for nothing at all_ because _everything's free_. If good journalism (i.e. not fake news) == people being payed to spend good time on a story, i.e. quality > quantity, then what's going to fix things other than cold, hard cash?
- todarrenrowse27 8y agoCorrect it should stop, fake news always wastes the public time, this is the only publicity stunts for getting attention.
- speeder 8y agoNYT hired a person that is openly racist and tried to turn long form story about a Chinese woman in tech into family drama clickbait that risked making that woman get killed by the government. NYT can whine all they want, but until they stop producing fake news themselves no reason to pay... If all papers produce such low quality biased content, I prefer the free ones, at least there is more honesty there about what I am getting for what I pay for.
- speeder 8y agoFor the downvoters: why? Miss Jeong explicitly writes racist stuff on Twitter, and endangered the life of a Chinese person when she was working at Vice, it is a story that is not hidden, or controversial, the facts are easy to verify, so why the downvotes?
- josteink 8y ago> Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing Obviously NY Times has a stake in this, so no need to go further into that angle. The problem "regular" media is facing today is increased scrutiny w.r.t. neutrality. They're simply not reporting neutrally. I'm by no means a Trump-supporter (not even American), but when I consistently see traditional media re-reporting internet rumours as truth every time they have the possibility to add a "Look at how bad Trump and his supporters are"-angle... And then often later shown to be wrong, even traditional media is portrayed as spreading fake news. Because they are! Need an example? How about this very recent incident with MAGA teens and the intervening Indian? This was worldwide reported by "traditional" media as an anti-Trump story. No checks. No verification. And it was all fake. So tell me again. Why should I trust them more than, for instance Info wars? Both sides are clearly partisan.
- bashwizard 8y agoThanks for the tip NYT. I won't pay you anything.
- heyjudy 8y agoTRNN, Economic Update, Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, Phily D, Chris Hedges, Journeyman Pictures, Thom Hartmann, The Jimmy Dore Show, Paul Beckwith (climate). I watch either CBS or NBC about once a month to laugh and smh at corporate BS/lack of journalistic integrity prostituting itself with somatic entertainment, propaganda, a lack of understanding and a lack of well-researched nuance. The only viable form of news is user-/no strings grant-supported. Ad-supported inevitably loses its soul. There's no getting around the reality that ad-supported is fundamentally journalistically unethical and readership immoral.
- davidhyde 8y agoI think we need to give professional journalists the benefit of the doubt and assume they studied journalism at university and the fact that what they learned is the correct way of doing journalism. Just like computer scientists go to university and learn how to write software properly. What I think happens in reality is that people with no journalism training call the shots by setting the budget and direction in these news agencies. This introduces the bias these journalists have training to actively avoid. Must be very frustrating for them. Of cource, just like software developers with no formal training, there are plenty of news writers with no formal training either. And just like developers, these journalists can self learn proper journalism themselves or hack it and give a bad name to other journalists.
- malvosenior 8y agoYou can follow these journalists directly on Twitter and see that they have amazing bias that they are not ashamed about promoting. After all, the NYT hired someone who has hundreds of anti-white, anti-male tweets to be on their editorial board and to act as their head technology editor. Whatever they learned in school is taking back seat to pushing an agenda.
- nindalf 8y agoOnly one publication passes the Gell-Mann test for me, and I pay for it. Nothing else comes close. Definitely not NYT. Just yesterday I came across an article in NYT that was hilariously wrong. I've spent all my working hours in the past year and a half on it, whereas the journalist spent maybe a couple of hours on it. They drew the most outlandish conclusions from the snippet of data they looked at. Very disappointing because it erodes the trust I have in that publication. If they could be so wrong about something I know about, what's the guarantee they're right about anything else?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI don’t see how paying for news would have any effect on fake news, unless people start to believe that only paid-for news can be accurate or trustworty. That is a chilling and terrifying idea. Even if I pay for news, a lot of other news and non-fiction content is still freely published. As long as people believe some free news is trustworthy, there will be an incentive to create fake news.
- gdrulia 8y agoWhat I fail to understand so far is the pricing of the news. Do newspapers really earn tens of dollars/pounds/euros per month per user? I want to pay for the news, but any website I like charges a 2 digit numbers per month, and that is when you subscribe for a year. The way I see it, I should be able to pay them for ads I wont see, maybe some collateral, but current pricing in my mind doesn't reflect reality. What am I missing in this picture? Please help me understand.
- Armisael16 8y agoYou simply don’t understand how much it costs to run a decent newsroom. Online ads have never been enough to cover costs.
- indigochill 8y agoAnother thing that's sort of been a pebble in the shoe of both journalism and education (I mean, at some level they -should- be doing similar things, right?) is that they don't necessarily make it easy for readers to find original sources. A counterexample: if I want to know about the origins of our understanding of geometry, Euclid's Elements is a pretty solid place to start. Or Newton's Principia for physics. Now let's look at a news topic like climate change. Give me data I can dig through for myself. I'm sure it's available, but it's not something you'll usually see journalists directing their readers to. Of course, most readers aren't equipped to use the data if they did have it, so on a practical level it makes some sense not to bother including it. But this raises a deeper question: is your Average Joe Citizen (who is not an engineer, but maybe a barista, salesman, banker, etc) equipped to have an opinion about climate change at all? We take for granted incredible access to information, but outside our professional specialty most people rely on other people to tell them what to think, and those people may be accredited by other people, with various biases, agendas, traditions, etc all the way up. And even with the people who are working directly with data, there are occasionally political pressures on them to arrive at certain conclusions (diet research in particular is infamous for this). All that said, I do believe in the value of journalism to educate. But I think a journalism worth paying for will look more like educational material than the journalism we have today.
- TarpitCarnivore 8y ago> But this raises a deeper question: is your Average Joe Citizen (who is not an engineer, but maybe a barista, salesman, banker, etc) equipped to have an opinion about climate change at all? This comes off pretty condescending. What makes an (assuming computer) engineer any more capable of reading & comprehending reports than a barista or banker?
- indigochill 8y agoYou're right. I would edit my post since it's incorrect to imply an engineer would be any more capable in the example I chose. But apparently I can't any more.
- loraa 8y agoIronically written by the New York Times.
- growlist 8y agoI do pay - for The Spectator, which stands increasingly alone as a voice of reason in a sea of insanity.
- lwhi 8y agoWe need a Spotify for journalism. I don't want individual subscriptions, but I'd be happy to pay once.
- gpvos 8y agoI'm not sure if Spotify is the right model, but maybe the newspapers can make some reciprocal arrangements? I pay for a quality newspaper in my own region/country, and with that subscription I would also like to be able to view a number of articles on other newspapers' websites, more than not-logged-in users, but less than full subscribers of those other newspapers (say, 30 articles per month), maybe not completely ad-free but at least without obnoxious or tracking ads.
- sleepysysadmin 8y agoIronically posted on the NYTimes? I think what's happening isn't that suddenly they are posting fake news, but rather it has been fake news all along. Tons of celebrities have said how they've been misquoted or otherwise smeared by news for a very long time. What's different today is that everyone has a smartphone where they can verify the facts of the story and discover that the news is fake. The journalism crisis is self-created because they have been pushing a fake narrative and are now getting caught. Worse yet, in the face of getting caught they double down on going even further into their false narrative.
- 50656E6973 8y ago>Worse yet, in the face of getting caught they double down on going even further into their false narrative. This is the common predictable behavior of compulsive liars
- egberts1 8y agoNope. It’s all about the quality of journalism. If the Board Of Editors Of MyPressNewsInc can’t keep bias down, then they shouldn’t deserve a business model.
- azangru 8y agoNo thank you. I’d rather go to Hacker News for news.
- gyvastis 8y agoHow desperate must they be to write such a thing.
- agumonkey 8y agoThis says a thing or two about society. - economy aims at making money, not being good - what you pay for is people caring for other people (by integrating facts into valuable knowledge)
- buboard 8y agoWant to hear what you want? Pay for the real thing. It s fake news that paid news are better. Advertising allows publishers to not pander to specific audiences.
- 50656E6973 8y ago>Advertising allows publishers to not pander to specific audiences. Advertising driven business models force the company to pander to their advertising overlords
- jm4 8y agoNot exactly true that advertising allows publishers not to pander to a specific audience. A couple times every year we see advertiser boycotts demanding some host be fired because he or she said something a part of the audience didn’t like. Ad supported news is a real shit show. It’s what got us CNN and Fox. They’ve effectively segmented the audience so people hear what they want to and tightened up the demographic for ads. They have to keep people watching and clicking so they can serve up another ad. How do you do that? Get them fired up over some controversy on a regular basis and tell them what they want to hear in between controversies.
- jmcmichael 8y agoThis implies that only people who have the means and desire to pay for accurate news will get it. Given that accurate information about the world, our society, and its politics is required for making accurate decisions about how to vote and spend one's time and money, shouldn't we start treating journalism as a public good and funding it independent of anyone's ability to come up with a business model that will work?
- mscasts 8y agoMy country (Sweden) has a state-sponsonsored news outlet. It is one of the most biased ones. Several other countries in Europe has the same model and it just doesn't work.
- jmcmichael 8y agoYeah, state-sponsored news has its own problems. The state should probably be the main focus of news organizations. Having the State, target of journalists' investigations, hold the purse strings is perhaps an even bigger problem than the market. I think there might be a solution where state funds support a local-news system, where the funds are institutionally separated from influence - maybe similar to how the Fed is supported by the State yet remains politically separate from it (ideally). There are institutional structures beyond the state and market that can produce public goods.
- fukshime 8y agoI want Google and Facebook to dictate to people what is fake and what's not.. they knows best and they care about us. They would not lie or be evil
- Amygaz 8y agoI stopped paying for news because they are biased (one sided like others mentioned in this post), they are shallow, narrow, and lazy. Most news outlets now simply spin a news report from the same single source. So I don’t see why I should pay someone who is not really doing anything, and whatever it is doing, it isn’t good.
- funkythings 8y agoOh really? Will it stop fake news about the Covington Highschool kids? Sure, they were no angels, but most articles were simply wrong for stating they harassed the native american guy. He went into their crowd. Furthermore, the black israelistes were completely ignored, even though they said the most horrendous thigns that entire day.
- stevespang 8y agoNEVER.
- subpixel 8y agoThe local news angle here is particularly important - it's the weakest link in our information chain and it decides elections. I'm a broken record on this, but I think Craigslist should connect local classified services to a new local journalism project. DNA Info is dead now, but if there were 500 DNA Infos, with reporting funded handsomely from Craigslist revenues, we could really fight against fake news from the bottom up.
- therealforsen 8y agoThe issue with most news outlets is that they're either mainstream ones that are liberal echo chambers, or conservative upstarts which reactively go just as far in the other direction. Imagine a news organization where every level of every department had to have a 50/50 split between registered Republicans and Democrats. I think that would prevent bias from overrunning the outlets like it has today.
- nemacol 8y agoI signed up for NYT and canceled the next day. After becoming a paying customer they do not remove the ads from apps, pop ups on the website, etc etc. I was annoyed so I decided to cancel. The cancellation process was also quite annoying. Couldn't just do it through a form, I had to chat or call. I was on hold in the chat room for 35 minutes before someone got on and asked me what I wanted. At that point I was quite annoyed. The person in chat was perfectly friendly and handled the rest of the cancellation process swiftly. I am happy to pay for content but I'll be damned if I am going to pay and still be subjected to popups and ads between every paragraph.
- chris_wot 8y agoI just subscribed and added an ad-blocker. If I wanted to cancel, I'm not going to be able to call though, as I live in Australia. I thought there were laws in some states of the U.S. that meant you have to be able to unsubscribe through a form though?
- zht 8y agoI'm confused, why can you not call a US number from Australia? Is it prohibitively expensive?
- projectramo 8y agomight also be the time difference. You'd have to wake up pretty early to catch 5pm.
- OJFord 8y agoIn the UK it would certainly be _annoyingly_ expensive, given I'm calling because I want to stop spending money on whatever. I'd expect a connection fee + ~£1/min + rate they charge an American caller, and you know you're going to be kept on hold for ages. It's bad enough calling to complain/cancel a local company - I've paid several pounds a time; I certainly avoid it if at all possible, and would more so with an overseas company.
- chris_wot 8y ago
- ugydyd 8y agoLol, ok nyt as you post state depatment propaganda to support us military action in Latin America. I hate the NYT and their sanctimonious bs while they support coups and dictators around the world.
- Zecar 8y agoWant to get people to pay for the real thing? Offer it instead of pushing agendas and narratives and telling people what to think.
- warp_factor 8y agoExactly. What we need is: - Fact based journalism. - A clear list of sources that we can check ourselves. - No biases in the choices of titles in order to sell a predefined narrative. - No ads in order to keep outside interests of dictating narratives.
- webninja 8y agoWithout clearly defined ads, the articles themselves become the ads. Advertorials. I agree with your other points but be careful what you wish for because you just might get something worse.
- warp_factor 8y agoI cannot think of a single mainstream provider that is worth paying for nowadays. What I would like is some neutral fact based news. Without titles implying that one side is better than the other. (If you want an example, open CNN and read any headline about Trump). Such a Fact based news organization doesn't exist anymore. Ever since the 2016 elections, each outlet had to dig deeper into their partisan trenches. Since then I get my information from a mix of reading multiple news outlets, together with some independent long form podcasts that don't have as much an agenda as mainstream newspapers.
- normal_man 8y agoI mean, you can be non-partisan and objective and STILL write "negative" headlines about Trump, because so much of what he does is hateful, baffling or otherwise negative.
- warp_factor 8y agoThat's where I disagree. taking a negative stance on Trump IS taking a side. What I would like is for the journalist to report the fact and let us reader chose if it is negative or positive. The facts can include the views of external people giving their views on it (as long as it is clearly documented in the sources that it is the views of someone external). But if the journalist himself takes a side, then all bets are lost.
- normal_man 8y agoHere are the Trump-related headlines on CNN right now: Trump says he's on same page as intel chiefs after insulting them Erin Burnett: Tapes don't lie, but Trump ... Even some Republicans balk as Trump targets US spy chiefs None of those would violate your criteria, but any reasonable person would say they are negative. At some point you just have to accept reality and stop expecting news outlets to bend over backwards trying to make it seem like both sides are the same.
- warp_factor 8y ago
- dirtylowprofile 8y agoLast year I subscribed to both NY Times and Wired. But when I tried to cancel, I was taken into a chat with a NY Times representative. Why is not that easy to unsubscribe with just a click of the button.
- jasonvorhe 8y agoThen give me a subscription model where I can access content from x, y and z for a fixed fee. If I need multiple accounts and subscriptions, I couldn't care less. It's that simple.
- suff 8y agoThe NY Times piece is advocating against itself: http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/18/presidential-forecast-updates/newsletter.html http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/18/presidential-...
- mbostleman 8y agoI find it interesting how Fake News has two definitions depending on which of the two culture bubbles it comes from. On one side it refers to all out fabrication by a source that exists purely to spam social media feeds. The other side refers to more of a lugenpresse - legitimate news organizations that technically use facts, but cherry pick them in a way that presents a pre-determined narrative. Ironically, to this side, the NYT is one of the top poster children of their definition of Fake News.
- dilap 8y agoYeah, popularizing the term "fake news" was a an impressively epic own-goal by traditional media. And while I do agree that MSM fakeness mostly comes in the form of "technically facts, mischaracterized and cherry-picked," there is also a lot of just straight untruths as well, but laundered through anonymous sources. The effect is the same, in that you come away believing untrue things. E.g., this is fake. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-held-secret-talks-with-assange-in-ecuadorian-embassy?CMP=twt_gu&__twitter_impression=true https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel... And this: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i... Another form of fakeness is "honest" mistakes (that always seem to coincidentally play into some popular narrative) that are hyped in headlines, but then only quietly corrected later, e.g., stuff like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-hackers-penetrated-us-electricity-grid-through-a-utility-in-vermont/2016/12/30/8fc90cc4-ceec-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html?utm_term=.a67f2090d08b https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russi... So the casual reader will be left believing lots of untrue things, as they catch the headlines and miss the corrections.
- malvosenior 8y agoEven after corrections the fake stories from mainstream media still "stick" if they have the proper political value. There are people in this thread still insisting that the Covington High School kids surrounded and intimidated a native elder even though that story was retracted and the media that pushed it is now being sued for libel.
- vasilipupkin 8y agothe problem with this whole line of reasoning is what is really "news". Example: I am happy to just wait for results of Mueller investigation and I have no desire to pay for play by play dribble of leaks that are technically newsworthy but I just don't care about.
- perfunctory 8y agoIf anyone is interested in ad-free journalism consider thecorrespondent.com. I am not an affiliate, just a customer. I believe it's crucial for journalism to be independent of advertising revenue.
- mahart 8y agoPeople are more willing to pay to have their own views and beliefs confirmed to themselves over factual reporting.
- gjsman-1000 8y agoNYT hasn't done quality journalism in a while. They exclude stories, twist facts in very obvious ways, and have become obsessed with Trump-hatred to the point that the Trump-haters need their own newspaper.
- Dumblydorr 8y agoThis is just incorrect,they have many fantastic stories. If you think they're obsessed with trump hatred, you probably need to step back and think historically. Whatever your thoughts on the man, there is no question he is a historically unique and extremely polarizing figure, could you expect any left of center outlet to not get triggered by his behaviors? Their readers crave this content, it drives readership, it drives subscriptions, it's just logical that they cover him negatively so often.
- t0astbread 8y agoThis is generally a good idea but what about the people who can't afford to pay for news? Do they not deserve to know what's going on? I'm not aware of what the general consensus on this is and how it's handled but I think objective news (both local and international) are a basic right of citizens of a country.
- t0astbread 8y agoThe obvious solution would be to fund newspapers with tax money but would that work in every country?
- webninja 8y agoHow will the newspaper companies pay their writers and website developers then? If their English majors were paid any less, they’d be on food stamps like most of Walmart’s employees.
- nhn_account 8y agoI read NYT with javascript=disabled. No ads, no paywall, great loading time.
- drdeadringer 8y agoAs a somewhat parallel to "fake news vs real news, pay for it", some folks involved in the production [and likely the distribution] of pornography have associated "ethical porn" with paying for porn. They derided the "tube sites" for obvious reasons. Personally, I've heard of this stance more from certain porn actors than production houses if that's of any consideration, but I'm not blind. And no, I have no idea what "fake porn" might be, if such a thing exists.
- rurban 8y agoSays the most egregious fake news distributor on earth. Right today they launched the ultimate "Venezuelans are starving, humanistic intervention needed" attack on their oil: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/world/americas/venezuela-voices-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/world/americas/venezuela-... When you ask Venezuelans onsite they'll shake their heads in disbelief about the third US-backed coup attempt in this decade, and the press lies. This time also backed by the EU.
- hnuser355 8y agoI read very little news except a print version of economist I’m subscribed to
- Mikho 8y agoThe problem is that journalists do not understand the basic concepts of economics. The news is non-rival non-excludable public good like air or sunshine. By its nature news itself can not have a price. A journalist does not add any value when writes about some other people doing something and this is being public knowledge. Previously this type of information technically differentiated paper they sold. So, people paid for the differentiated paper. Not for the news per se. Internet provided free distribution and there is no more paper to sell. Hence, nothing to pay for. Exactly the same happened to the music industry when it was selling plastic--CDs--differentiated by music bits on it. When distribution digital become free and people stopped buying CDs the industry collapsed and only Spotify revived it with an innovative business model. And now people pay for easy access, for service, not for the music. So, for the press, it is only specialized information and analysis are worth paying for. It's unique POV or data that adds value should really have a price. Just news is a loss leader to attract an audience in this equation. Exactly the same like Stratechery, for example, publishes free weekly posts and podcast to get the audience to pay for daily analysis. When the press, in general, understand basic economic forces, it will be able to be sustainable. Readers do not need a gazillion of bloggers calling themselves journalists that write basically exactly the same news about an event or device that require effectively zero experience except typing. The price for this is exactly zero. This is a marketing expense to attract users for the real thing. But there are not so many outlets that produce that real thing. Most produce instant junk news that has zero value and think that this should make a living.