7 ms·

I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer diff

by rawfan 6y ago

I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month. Go.

rvz 6y ago
Apple News+?
5etho 6y ago
and how much you think journalists should earn? 10k/yr?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Newsrooms probably pay for too many things. You could probably get most opinion for free, lifestyle content for next to nothing, etc. The weekly jobless claims articles could be handled by cheap content mills. A lot of columns like personal finance and restaurants could easily be purchased freelance on the market. The Huffington Post demonstrated that non-investigative content can be had for free. So there should probably be far fewer middle skill journalists.
  - hootbootscoot 6y ago
    But this is the same "race to the bottom" rhetoric that justified the entire "disruption" to the music and publishing industries that gave us Netflix and Amazon, respectively. I'm less and less convinced that we are doing the world any service by demonetizing all content and cutting the heads of all tall talent, hence the authors presumption of a sort of public UBI or other non-private-sector basis as a condition to liberating the content. The IP systems certainly are byzantine and punitive towards actual free information flow, as outlined in the article. However, if one approaches this as a typical Free Market Libertarian American (tm), as the author expressly does NOT, one arrives at different economic conclusions, and basically, journalism will not survive the complete demonetization of all content for ONE reason: content will become even more corruptly tied to out-of-band payment than is currently the case. why bother writing articles against the big bad polluter, when you can get paid to write apologism for them?
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Having run a newsroom, there is some very small truth in this. But the old motto of "you get what you pay for" is still true. The free stuff is uncontrollable - and is usually cloaked (or not so cloaked) advertising. There's lot of "free" stories on the wire, but if your paper just runs wire stories then it ruins its reputation. And the reputation is what attracts advertisers. In the end, you have to pay people to write good stuff. And that costs money. However, Journalists do have to get over themselves. The days of journalists being the only people with a voice are long gone and never coming back.
freddie_mercury 6y ago
Why do you assume that $20 is enough to support multiple newspapers? That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business. On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources.
- CM30 6y ago
  Don't many services that cost far more than journalism to produce charge $20 a month now? Netflix is $13, Disney+ is $7 a month, Xbox Game Pass is $10 a month... And those movies, TV shows and games cost many millions of dollars to produce. Why is journalism so much more expensive when journalists likely aren't earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and spending millions on investigations?
  - kappuchino 6y ago
    On comparison: Take the movie "die hard". Since its creation 1988 (i feeld old) it has been rewatched time and time again and been paid for by nearly every channel and streaming service. Now look at an newspaper edition from christmas day 1988. Yes, it still costs less, but you would agree that it was already "old news" a couple of days after and rereading it is not really worth something to you, is it? One invisible cost in journalism is research and failure. I had a boss who humorously said "just research things that we will print", but in my area of experise in journalism - data and investigative reporting - more or less half of the research is a dead end, isn't interesting enough or has issues that make reporting unadvisable. Yes, sports has a better qouta, but has also taken over by bots writing the articles. Also: Can we agreee, that independence can only be achived with decent pay? It is an issue in other areas of work as well, but this is not about those. Journalists need to be paid well and (mostly) independent of their output or you already weaken/poison the base for independent news. And this scales more than you think. Now multiply this to have competition in journalism (like, gasp!, multiple newspapers/mags on the newsstand for one city) and it gets really, really expensive. All that cost was hidden when the only way to locally advertise was in paper (before the internet).
hugh-avherald 6y ago
The problem with a model like Netflix for journalism is that it will take the same path Netflix did.
- cbar_tx 6y ago
  you mean get into the fictional entertainment business?
specialist 6y ago
Hard pass on algorithmic recommenders. I have always wanted human curation, filters, opinion.
- mmm_grayons 6y ago
  More importantly, news is the last place I want to be fed more of what I like.
listenallyall 6y ago
The absolute worst posts on HN start with "I just want..." and then selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. Anyway, you've described a cable bundle model, not Netflix's model.
- bena 6y ago
  "Just". If I could get rid of that word, I would. "Just" is the tip of the iceberg. It often means the speaker has no idea how to implement or what it would take to implement.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Good point. There are a fair number of words and language forms that are often "tells" of how the person saying them conceptualized and overly simplifies complex scenarios.
- sqrt17 6y ago
  > selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse. The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.
- mmm_grayons 6y ago
  A customer saying, "My reservation price for the following good is $X." is not selfish. Information is easier to access and so, whether you agree with it, people are willing to pay less for information (including newspapers). We've seen many other "information services" get much cheaper due to this demand. The news media have simply been slow to change.
- hinkley 6y ago
schnable 6y ago
This is Apple News+ I think?
alpineidyll3 6y ago
In raw dollar terms this would undoubtedly >2x-3x the capital available to journalism as an industry. People who say (truthfully): "journalism needs more money" need to confront the reality that the current biz model doesn't work. Either we coerce Google news to tithe like Australia just did, or something like this sounds like a better solution than just letting journalism die.
mythz 6y ago
You likely want Apple News+ [1] at just under $10 USD /mo - a single cost for a la carte access to a large pool of publications, basically the only premium subscription model that's going to be able to gain mainstream adoption. [1] https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  The difference is that it doesn't just work in my browser. I easily pay $20 USD per month to not have to be shown a paywall when I click a link from HN, but that isn't what is being offered. I don't want to have to use their app. I like my browser.
- awalton 6y ago
  No, what I want is Google Reader back. And I know I'm far, far, far away from being alone on this. Just give me the text, not the videos and the horrible formatting and poor font choices and all of that bullshit - I'd gladly pay for it, if it still existed. May it rest in peace.
  - brendoelfrendo 6y ago
    Google Reader was just an RSS reader, and there are plenty of those available, both free and paid. RSS doesn't get you past pay walls, though.
    - awalton 6y ago
      That's like saying "Google is just a search engine" and ignoring the fact that "to google" is now an English verb and the rest of the impact it has had on information availability in the world. Reader was a synthesis of open web culture - it offered a hub of reading multiple streams of content in one formatted location, and it did so with the support of one of the largest companies on the earth with the ability to use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted. Google could have been the 800 pound gorilla of news publications a decade before Apple News even tried. But they just, threw it away. That's what I want back - I don't care if it's RSS or some new fancy JSON-backed article exchange protocol - the transport layer and reader app itself is largely meaningless to me; the simple elegance of being able to read the news in one location without some designers notion of layout and overzealous marketers' idea of ad coverage, and having it be quick is much more powerful. No more 2-10MB garbage landfills to serve 20kb of textual information. No more fighting to make the content work on mobile - RSS was inherently responsive and accessibility-friendly. The technological idea of federated content have largely died because Google decided it didn't want to support them, and nobody else - not Microsoft, not Apple, nobody - stepped up to take the mantle. It had a technological problem for Google - the fact that you could pick another reader meant that there was no instinctive centralization on Googles' service, unlike situations like AMP where they're literally the man in the middle. And while Instant Articles and AMP are trying to fill that market gap, more often than not what I find replacing it is Twitter, which is comically filled with horrible misinformation and terrible sourcing practices that make it a haven of misinformation instead of... news. And that's a real damn shame.
chadcmulligan 6y ago
Not sure how available this is elsewhere but I get press reader access for free through the state library in my browser. It has a lot of papers and magazines (though the interface isn't the best)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by rawfan 6y ago

rvz 6y ago

Apple News+?

5etho 6y ago

and how much you think journalists should earn? 10k/yr?

MattGaiser 6y ago
Newsrooms probably pay for too many things. You could probably get most opinion for free, lifestyle content for next to nothing, etc. The weekly jobless claims articles could be handled by cheap content mills. A lot of columns like personal finance and restaurants could easily be purchased freelance on the market. The Huffington Post demonstrated that non-investigative content can be had for free. So there should probably be far fewer middle skill journalists.
- hootbootscoot 6y ago
  But this is the same "race to the bottom" rhetoric that justified the entire "disruption" to the music and publishing industries that gave us Netflix and Amazon, respectively. I'm less and less convinced that we are doing the world any service by demonetizing all content and cutting the heads of all tall talent, hence the authors presumption of a sort of public UBI or other non-private-sector basis as a condition to liberating the content. The IP systems certainly are byzantine and punitive towards actual free information flow, as outlined in the article. However, if one approaches this as a typical Free Market Libertarian American (tm), as the author expressly does NOT, one arrives at different economic conclusions, and basically, journalism will not survive the complete demonetization of all content for ONE reason: content will become even more corruptly tied to out-of-band payment than is currently the case. why bother writing articles against the big bad polluter, when you can get paid to write apologism for them?
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Having run a newsroom, there is some very small truth in this. But the old motto of "you get what you pay for" is still true. The free stuff is uncontrollable - and is usually cloaked (or not so cloaked) advertising. There's lot of "free" stories on the wire, but if your paper just runs wire stories then it ruins its reputation. And the reputation is what attracts advertisers. In the end, you have to pay people to write good stuff. And that costs money. However, Journalists do have to get over themselves. The days of journalists being the only people with a voice are long gone and never coming back.

freddie_mercury 6y ago

Why do you assume that $20 is enough to support multiple newspapers? That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business. On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources.

CM30 6y ago
Don't many services that cost far more than journalism to produce charge $20 a month now? Netflix is $13, Disney+ is $7 a month, Xbox Game Pass is $10 a month... And those movies, TV shows and games cost many millions of dollars to produce. Why is journalism so much more expensive when journalists likely aren't earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and spending millions on investigations?
- kappuchino 6y ago
  On comparison: Take the movie "die hard". Since its creation 1988 (i feeld old) it has been rewatched time and time again and been paid for by nearly every channel and streaming service. Now look at an newspaper edition from christmas day 1988. Yes, it still costs less, but you would agree that it was already "old news" a couple of days after and rereading it is not really worth something to you, is it? One invisible cost in journalism is research and failure. I had a boss who humorously said "just research things that we will print", but in my area of experise in journalism - data and investigative reporting - more or less half of the research is a dead end, isn't interesting enough or has issues that make reporting unadvisable. Yes, sports has a better qouta, but has also taken over by bots writing the articles. Also: Can we agreee, that independence can only be achived with decent pay? It is an issue in other areas of work as well, but this is not about those. Journalists need to be paid well and (mostly) independent of their output or you already weaken/poison the base for independent news. And this scales more than you think. Now multiply this to have competition in journalism (like, gasp!, multiple newspapers/mags on the newsstand for one city) and it gets really, really expensive. All that cost was hidden when the only way to locally advertise was in paper (before the internet).

hugh-avherald 6y ago

The problem with a model like Netflix for journalism is that it will take the same path Netflix did.

cbar_tx 6y ago
you mean get into the fictional entertainment business?

specialist 6y ago

Hard pass on algorithmic recommenders. I have always wanted human curation, filters, opinion.

mmm_grayons 6y ago
More importantly, news is the last place I want to be fed more of what I like.

listenallyall 6y ago

The absolute worst posts on HN start with "I just want..." and then selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. Anyway, you've described a cable bundle model, not Netflix's model.

bena 6y ago
"Just". If I could get rid of that word, I would. "Just" is the tip of the iceberg. It often means the speaker has no idea how to implement or what it would take to implement.
- mistermann 6y ago
  Good point. There are a fair number of words and language forms that are often "tells" of how the person saying them conceptualized and overly simplifies complex scenarios.
sqrt17 6y ago
> selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want. if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse. The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.
mmm_grayons 6y ago
A customer saying, "My reservation price for the following good is $X." is not selfish. Information is easier to access and so, whether you agree with it, people are willing to pay less for information (including newspapers). We've seen many other "information services" get much cheaper due to this demand. The news media have simply been slow to change.
hinkley 6y ago

schnable 6y ago

This is Apple News+ I think?

alpineidyll3 6y ago

In raw dollar terms this would undoubtedly >2x-3x the capital available to journalism as an industry. People who say (truthfully): "journalism needs more money" need to confront the reality that the current biz model doesn't work. Either we coerce Google news to tithe like Australia just did, or something like this sounds like a better solution than just letting journalism die.

mythz 6y ago

You likely want Apple News+ [1] at just under $10 USD /mo - a single cost for a la carte access to a large pool of publications, basically the only premium subscription model that's going to be able to gain mainstream adoption. [1] https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

3pt14159 6y ago
The difference is that it doesn't just work in my browser. I easily pay $20 USD per month to not have to be shown a paywall when I click a link from HN, but that isn't what is being offered. I don't want to have to use their app. I like my browser.
awalton 6y ago
No, what I want is Google Reader back. And I know I'm far, far, far away from being alone on this. Just give me the text, not the videos and the horrible formatting and poor font choices and all of that bullshit - I'd gladly pay for it, if it still existed. May it rest in peace.
- brendoelfrendo 6y ago
  Google Reader was just an RSS reader, and there are plenty of those available, both free and paid. RSS doesn't get you past pay walls, though.
  - awalton 6y ago
    That's like saying "Google is just a search engine" and ignoring the fact that "to google" is now an English verb and the rest of the impact it has had on information availability in the world. Reader was a synthesis of open web culture - it offered a hub of reading multiple streams of content in one formatted location, and it did so with the support of one of the largest companies on the earth with the ability to use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted. Google could have been the 800 pound gorilla of news publications a decade before Apple News even tried. But they just, threw it away. That's what I want back - I don't care if it's RSS or some new fancy JSON-backed article exchange protocol - the transport layer and reader app itself is largely meaningless to me; the simple elegance of being able to read the news in one location without some designers notion of layout and overzealous marketers' idea of ad coverage, and having it be quick is much more powerful. No more 2-10MB garbage landfills to serve 20kb of textual information. No more fighting to make the content work on mobile - RSS was inherently responsive and accessibility-friendly. The technological idea of federated content have largely died because Google decided it didn't want to support them, and nobody else - not Microsoft, not Apple, nobody - stepped up to take the mantle. It had a technological problem for Google - the fact that you could pick another reader meant that there was no instinctive centralization on Googles' service, unlike situations like AMP where they're literally the man in the middle. And while Instant Articles and AMP are trying to fill that market gap, more often than not what I find replacing it is Twitter, which is comically filled with horrible misinformation and terrible sourcing practices that make it a haven of misinformation instead of... news. And that's a real damn shame.

chadcmulligan 6y ago

Not sure how available this is elsewhere but I get press reader access for free through the state library in my browser. It has a lot of papers and magazines (though the interface isn't the best)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]