3 ms·

My take is that previous attempts were "how can we get news readers to pay", and current attempts are "what news do people who pay for news want". And in gener

My take is that previous attempts were "how can we get news readers to pay", and current attempts are "what news do people who pay for news want". And in general, if you pay for news, you want opinionated voices you can deeply trust, and whose bias you're familiar with. That's not possible on an aggregated news platform, since that by its nature will try to be all things to a fairly large group of people - you need a mass audience to pay for all the writers. Individual writers can afford a smaller audience. (Which also means they can avoid giving away much content to regularly draw an audience) What that means for large-scale/expensive reporting is an interesting question, because the independent model doesn't work for that almost by definition.

cjbest 6y ago
I think this is right. > whose bias your are familiar with I This is fair, but there is a positive version which is "whose worldview you understand, and find interesting/valuable" Every person and organization comes with some kind of bias - even if part of that bias is "try to be clear eyed and tell the truth". The advantage of subscribing directly to writers is that you get to choose explicitly who you want to trust, and having done so the writers' incentive is to keep that trust. As a writer, you get to make your own bet about what work is important, you get paid in proportion to the value you create, and only your readers can fire you.
- clairity 6y ago
  while your description of the phenomenon may be somewhat accurate for some subset of news consumers, the implication that this is a reasonable position is disturbing. truth and trust do intertwine deeply in the subconscious, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our conscious brains to disentangle them when it leads us astray. we should seek a variety of reasonable perspectives, especially including differing ones to our own. trust the reasonable, even if disagreeable. that's what get us to truth, not a flight to homogeneity. and that's the lament here--it's getting harder and harder to find reasonable perspectives because every media outlet, even the venerates like nytimes, are leaning hard into partisanship and tribalism.

cjbest 6y ago

I think this is right. > whose bias your are familiar with I This is fair, but there is a positive version which is "whose worldview you understand, and find interesting/valuable" Every person and organization comes with some kind of bias - even if part of that bias is "try to be clear eyed and tell the truth". The advantage of subscribing directly to writers is that you get to choose explicitly who you want to trust, and having done so the writers' incentive is to keep that trust. As a writer, you get to make your own bet about what work is important, you get paid in proportion to the value you create, and only your readers can fire you.

clairity 6y ago
while your description of the phenomenon may be somewhat accurate for some subset of news consumers, the implication that this is a reasonable position is disturbing. truth and trust do intertwine deeply in the subconscious, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our conscious brains to disentangle them when it leads us astray. we should seek a variety of reasonable perspectives, especially including differing ones to our own. trust the reasonable, even if disagreeable. that's what get us to truth, not a flight to homogeneity. and that's the lament here--it's getting harder and harder to find reasonable perspectives because every media outlet, even the venerates like nytimes, are leaning hard into partisanship and tribalism.