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Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
- dheera 6y ago> Reuters.com will remain free for a preview period, but will require users to register after five stories. Yeah, how do they know you viewed 5 stories? Block cookies or clear cookies on exit and they have basically no way of knowing. Use an VPN to the EU and they have to comply with GDPR as well so they can't fingerprint you. (Or use AMP if they offer it. Sometimes that helps circumvent paywalls.)
- EMM_386 6y ago> Yeah, how do they know you viewed 5 stories? Block cookies or clear cookies on exit and they have basically no way of knowing. Require a login to view the server-rendered page? Use browser fingerprinting? There are ways beyond clients clearing cookies to have the server render a page.
- listenallyall 6y agoOr, just don't be a dick. You can easily, and legally, leave a restaurant without leaving a tip -- but most people don't because they feel it is appropriate to support the waitstaff financially. It's not hard to sneak into the back door of a movie theater, but most people don't because they realize it's the same as stealing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- runawaybottle 6y agoEh, I’m fine with it. Free is stupid and for kids, and mostly social media and YouTube have them covered. We all have jobs because people pay for things.
- dkdk8283 6y agoI’m not. Journalism is now infotainment. Return to factual unbiased un-opinionated reporting and I may reconsider.
- rossjudson 6y agoThe only way out that I can see is to follow particular authors, not particular media. Find a set of authors you trust, who deserve your attention. Ignore everything else.
- amazing_stories 6y agoThat's basically Substack, right? There is a lot of buzz around it right now. I haven't formed an opinion, I see a lot of potential good and bad in that model.
- hellbannedguy 6y agoExactly what newspaper is worth a monthly subscription? (I should have worded this differently. I did not mean it to be aggressive. I'm just wondering what news source is worth a monthly subscription at this point in history? And no on The Economist. My question is for every HN'er.)
- ipsum2 6y agoReuters used to be the gold standard (in my view) of objective, un-opinionated journalism. Not sure what changed in the last 2-3 years. Now they heavily editorialize titles and miss important facts in order to sway readers. Also lol: > A Reuters spokeswoman declined to comment on the investment figure. Reuters journalist contacting a Reuters spokesperson to get a statement.
- HenryKissinger 6y agoFrom: john.arbuckle@reuters.com To: communications-office@reuters.com Title: Request for comment Body: Hi Bob. I'm writing a piece on the paywall. Do you have a quote for me? Best, see you at the cafeteria later. - John
- bigdict 6y agoYeah hey John, can't you see I'm eating? Sometime later, okay?
- blueyes 6y agoMost people misunderstand how news organizations work. Reuters was a "gold standard" because they enforce a division between the business side that makes money, sells ads, and cooks up a business strategy, from the journalists who are shielded from those concerns as they attempt to report objectively. In many good news organizations, the two sides of the organization barely know each other, work on different floors, and do not share a cafeteria. So yeah, you get situations where a spokesperson for the business side refuses to comment for the news side (all news orgs cover their owners poorly if at all, including other orgs like Bloomberg). Reuters has been running a distance second to Bloomberg in both financial news and data for well over a decade. It is a much older organization, and got its start when the British had an empire. You could say it covered the empire that covered the world. I doubt that it has gone from "gold standard" to opinionated journalism in the last 2-3 years. In fact, the quality and veracity of its copy and reporting always varied from topic to topic, country to country. This narrative of media decay is a weird euphoric recall for better days that did not exist. The press was always flawed. But now we attack it more amid the information chaos of social media.
- cryptoz 6y agoThe interesting take I've seen about this is that disinformation and lies are free to consume en masse, but current events and real facts cost money. I understand Reuters' need to make money, but with all the quality journalism and news costing money per view, we should expect further problems arising from disinformation.
- dehrmann 6y ago> current events and real facts cost money And people have made it clear they don't value this.
- HenryKissinger 6y agoQuality journalism will become a commodity for the wealthy. Reputable news platforms are moving behind paywalls, while propaganda/quasi-propaganda networks remain free. This is bad for society, for politics, and in the long term for our way of life. It is not reasonable to expect the average person to validate the news they see on low quality news platforms by cross checking with other sources, even if quality sources were free, which they are increasingly not. I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the budget. As the Trump years have shown, misinformation and the distortion of facts can have real life, hard consequences. Trump owes his 2016 victory to 80,000 votes in three states. How likely is it that his democratic opponent would have won had the social media storm of combined conservative-Russian propaganda been a degree or two lower? Extremely likely. Four years later, half a million Americans have died because of Covid-19. This would not be the case if the 2016 election had turned out differently. To circle back to the original topic. The paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
- booleandilemma 6y agoThe paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people. Even paper newspapers had to be paid for though. And who’s going to pay for those quality journalists writing the quality journalism?
- HenryKissinger 6y ago1: The government. 2: A benevolent wealthy individual taking profits out of his private investments, like Bezos is paying for Blue Origin, his rocket company. The former is by far preferable.
- hinkley 6y agoRupert Murdoch is half the reason we’re in this mess.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoUp until now Reuters has had some of the most shockingly invasive banner ads I've ever seen, exploiting every CSS and Javascript trick in the book to force its ads (quite successfully) past all major ad blockers. They'll have to compete with AP News, which remains free at https://apnews.com https://apnews.com, and has a much nicer site.
- gundmc 6y agoAP News has been my go-to source for the last year or so. But over that time I've noticed it seems to be down or not handing requests properly a staggering amount of time.
- systemvoltage 6y agoAP News is the gold standard. If AP News get allured by investors, we're done folks. It's a wrap, let's go home. Journalism would be dead. Please put a donate button. I am happy to chip in $50 year to keep this thing alive. Anyone execs here working at AWS, Azure or GCP? Can we get AP News some decent hosting, yall? Edit: Apparently, they're adtech: https://www.ap.org/en-us/services/advertise-with-us https://www.ap.org/en-us/services/advertise-with-us
- blueyes 6y agoThe AP is a newswire that sells its feed to newspapers. The best way to support it is by subscribing to a newspaper.
- throwawaysea 6y agoI’m not so sure. I think AP itself is subject to the same institutional capture and biases that have swept the rest of the journalism industry. You can see the cracks in their “gold standard” in the All Sides article about how they rated them (still Center but with reservations): https://www.allsides.com/blog/updated-media-bias-ratings-associated-press-and-ap-fact-check https://www.allsides.com/blog/updated-media-bias-ratings-ass... You can also see AP’s bias in their stylebook and guidelines on how to describe certain events - for example when do they use the word “riot” instead of “protest” or when should they label something as a “crisis”. The creeping bias at AP has been covered a few different times by other news outlets - here’s a random article I pulled from Google on the same: https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/aps-orwellian-push-to-change-the-news/ https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/aps-orwellian-push-to-change-t...
- totetsu 6y agoI stopped following them when they downgraped their rss feeds
- de6u99er 6y agoOut of principle, I don't pay for payealls. I wish there was a filter where I can exclude paywalled links.
- chupchap 6y agoWhy?
- de6u99er 6y agoBecause a couple of years ago, showing a couple of non-invasive ads was a good enough business for everyone. Now I have to pay for content, my data gets collected and sold, and I get personalized ads LOL Maybe it's because the move into the public cloud is more costly and decision makers are incapable to admit they made a mistake.
- blueyes 6y agoDo you believe that news media should sell data about you and your behavior to advertisers? Or do you believe that the news should simply be free?
- de6u99er 6y agoPaying to get through a oaywall doesn't mean they don't collect and sell your data. Quite the contrary. They actually know who you are, they know your bank account/credit card, ... I am not willing to share this data with media agencies.
- walrus01 6y agoAll I see is more people going to trustworthy non profit broadcast/journalism outfits like Deutsche Welle.
- TameAntelope 6y agoI'm as empathetic as anyone to the loss felt here, but I genuinely have no answer to the question of how Reuters can otherwise sustain itself, if not by charging. I'll be paying. I don't like it, but I like a world without Reuters even less.
- throwawaysea 6y agoPersonally I like to support news with subscriptions. I do so across the political spectrum, both so I’ll be better informed and so we can have high quality news from each worldview, free from bad incentives, instead of noise on all sides. So far, I’m not sure that subscription models have successfully prevented bias in either left or right leaning news media, so I’m not sure it’ll help here either. But it is probably worse to not have subscriptions at all and have either an unprofitable or ads dependent news industry. We’ve already seen how activist can campaign against advertisers and bias corporations in these last few years, and the same could happen to tenured that outlets like Reuters. So even if it isn’t the whole solution, it may help in part, and for that I’ll subscribe and support it if they stay true to the sacred role of neutral journalism.
- RGamma 6y agoThere really needs to be some sort of 0-/1-click micropayment system for at least journalism (or better yet the web) to complement subscriptions. I think such things have been attempted unsuccessfully thus far :( It's simply not feasible for me to subscribe to every quality publication I see online for reading a few articles here and there. (Note that such a system could presumably be gamed and would need oversight, curation and responsible use.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gralx 6y agoReuters' news service is a division within Thomson Reuters that complements much more profitable divisions. As such, I can't imagine this paywall addresses any question of sustainability. For a financial, accounting, and legal services company like TR, it helps to have a popular mouthpiece from which to champion your agenda. I suspect this move is less about profits and more about prestige and market norms - Financial Times, Wall St Journal, Bloomberg, etc., all gun for business readership behind paywalls, and so why shouldn't Reuters? And it's not expensive compared to the very expensive journals and newsletters (e.g., mining industry research journals, newsletters like Gartner's, TR's own products) subscribed to by major financial institutions.
- chrisbolt 6y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053
- taylorfinley 6y agoI've been using Brave since the redesign of firefox mobile, initially on android and shorty after on my laptop too. I came for the built-in ad blocking but have come to really love their alternative to the paywall/advertisers/user-data monetization schemes. Advertisers can purchase unobtrusive text ads or new-tab background image ads. Users can choose to see either of those ad streams or not, and can choose how frequently they'd like to see them, in return they are compensated in BAT (basic attention tokens). BAT get their value because ads on the platform can only be purchased in the token, all of which are already minted and in circulation. Websites like Reuters can opt in to receiving micro transactions from each brave user in exchnage for the content viewed. Contributing for content is optional, and you can set the split how you like, or turn ads off entirely. I turn them off when I'm coding, but have them on when I'm just reading hn or wikipedia. Over time, if adoption grows, the value of the audience will too, so there is speculative value in the token, which creates a feedback loop incentivizing more and more users to switch to Brave. I hope it can be a real business model for monetizing content soon.
- listenallyall 6y agoWill HN respect the paywall, or will outline.com links start appearing in every comment thread originating from a reuters.com story?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DoreenMichele 6y agoThe news industry has been suffering for a long time now and most writers make a pittance. Local papers are going out of business right and left, which actually is harmful to democracy and local politics, and a lot of stuff is written by freelancers rather than staff. It hurts the quality of the writing. I don't know how to solve it, but it's a genuine problem. If we value this kind of work, we absolutely must find some means to make it pay adequately. People use as blockers, etc, and the industry is just bleeding out. It's hurting all of us.
- timbit42 6y agoThey need to add options for people to pay per article.
- jwilber 6y agoI’m curious what HN people view as the gold standard of journalism. For my part, I pay for The Economist and, until a few months ago, the NYT (I’ve seen their quality in reporting and practices as a company drop consistently over the last few years, so had to pull the plug, though I absolutely love all of their interactive work).
- ChrisArchitect 6y ago[dupe] Discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053
- choward 6y agoAll that's really left is independent journalism. However, those are under attack by big tech and the mainstream media.