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I think it's fascinating how many people want: - Current, high quality news sources - For free - With no ads Lots of people say the content isn't worth payi

I think it's fascinating how many people want: - Current, high quality news sources - For free - With no ads Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it.

omega3 5y ago
The problem right now is that outside of select few publications you're expected to pay for a low quality content.
- CubsFan1060 5y ago
  I actually agree. But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    To be fair they usually invest some time, energy and/or money into making sure that you want to read it. I don't want to pay for most news, but often I'm baited by an appealing headline. I'm not above being baited and fear of missing out, and they are exploiting this. If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the situation.
- shusaku 5y ago
  Or you pay but you still are bombarded by tracking.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  You're missing the other case. Free content is provided not for informational value but for propaganda purposes. https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-to-new-level/ https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978) And paid-up services still include ads. (Which have higher advertiser value simply because the audience is known and sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)
- tsian2 5y ago
  I think more people might part with their cash if they could fund the topics/proposals they were interested in. Something more like Gofundme and Twitch where people feel like they're directly paying for something to happen.
  - snegu 5y ago
    That's really the idea behind Substack. You can subscribe to the journalists who investigate the issues you are interested in.
teeray 5y ago
It’s not “with no ads,” really. It’s become that because ads are so intrusive now. Static ads, stitched into the page at the edge, with zero tracking would be acceptable by many. Those kind of ads have been around in print newspapers for decades. Ad blocking is in response to poor user experience in the same way that piracy was in response to the poor experience of physically buying a CD that had just one track you wanted.
- CubsFan1060 5y ago
  Maybe where I personally land is that someone who produces content has the right to sell it however they like. The deal we can all make is that you can pay the price for the product and consumer it, or not. In the digital age, there are a lot of people who decide that we get to price the content however we want. We decide that because they are trying to use terrible ads to make money, that we can just go around that and take their content for free. That doesn't fly real well with physical products (This loaf of bread is priced at $1, but I only want to pay $0.50, so I'll just give them $0.50 and take it), but seems to be accepted with products that have infinite free reproducibility.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    The analogy is more like they are out on the public road giving away free loaves of bread along with ad flyers. I take the bread and refuse the flyer. They can put themselves behind a fence, without letting anybody in who doesn't take their flyer. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. They can charge for their bread. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. No hard feelings on my end, it's all fair. But what they cannot reasonably do is give away free bread and then complain that I won't take their ad flyers.
    - Angostura 5y ago
      Aren't you going to get rather hungry?
      - bialpio 5y ago
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I don't mind ads. I mind being tracked as I browse the web and this being called "advertising". Static images as ads would work, wouldn't be blocked by ad blockers, and would be effective as ads.
Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
I want to support a lot of different journalists and publishers but giving 100 journalists $0.5/month each on patreon is impractical and cumbersome. Just like subscribing to a dozen high quality publications would run more per month than my car payment.
ferdowsi 5y ago
To me it's a similar dynamic to the treatment of open source developers. Journalism and open source software are (now) crucial products for the operation of a functioning society but the biggest consumers have no desire to pay for it.
heisenbit 5y ago
I'm willing to pay but I'm not so happy about funding editorial and brand value over and above their fair share compared with reporting. I resent getting locked into a bundle that I have little control about and that despite funding it I will be sold as a product to advertisers (or messages brought to you by a strong but silent editorial hand).
axaxs 5y ago
I never minded ads, until ads started being abusive. Malware, screen takeovers, redirects, etc. If they'd fix the ad problem this could work. I'm surprised ad supported sites haven't demanded better.
- blooalien 5y ago
  Exactly! Not only ad supported sites, but advertisers themselves should be speaking out and fighting back against the abusive advertisers that created a need for adblockers in the first place, too! They did massive harm to their own industry. Instead of helping to fix the problem and calling out those who caused it, the war is turned against the very consumers they're trying to reach with their advertising.
tyingq 5y ago
I'd just be happy if Google didn't index paid content, and if sites like HN wouldn't link to it. Posting links to paid sites is, to me, silly, because chances are that link is effectively dead to the person that follows it. The odds of a random reader (whether from Google SERPS or HN or similar) having a subscription are very low. I don't personally know anyone that has a subscription to the top 10 paid sites, and there's quite a few more than 10. Google used to call the practice "cloaking", and would de-index you if you presented content to its crawler that didn't match what it provided to a visitor. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
- aardvarkr 5y ago
  Just because you don’t subscribe to the time doesn’t mean other people don’t and therefore shouldn’t get to talk about some of their incredible investigations, or discuss a crazy business story in the journal. You and your friends are not the only consumers in the world.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I suppose that works if you and all your friends have an identical list of subscriptions. It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.
    - tzs 5y ago
      > It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion. Some of the most interesting and informative things I've read on HN were comments on articles I did not read. I almost always read the comments before reading the article, and a significant fraction of the time I don't even try to read the article after seeing the comments.
  - slezyr 5y ago
nhffdhnb 5y ago
Yes, well, what exists is a lot of trash for free and a few publications that charge way more than the value they actually offer and in some cases partake in the sleaziest tactics to keep you paying once you signed up. If Reason can send out a physical magazine for $20/yr some of these other news outlets can figure out how to trim some fat and offer a competitive rate.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Reason is propaganda and is subsidised as such.
fullshark 5y ago
Most people say they want this, but they really just want headlines, and occasional in depth reporting on some long tail interest of theirs. Social media / message boards serve this and have taken over for a reason.
crazygringo 5y ago
I mean people can wish for anything. I can wish for a billion dollars. I don't hear anybody actually expecting free news with no ads. Everyone knows journalists need to be paid a salary. So that feels like a strawman to me. But the idea that content isn't worth paying for is more that it's not worth paying for any single news source. I see links to news articles I read from 20+ sources a day. If somebody builds a Spotify for news where you pay $10/mo. and can access 99.9% of news articles including NYT, WaPo, etc., I think a ton of people (most, even?) would have no problem paying for it at all. But I sure as hell can't pay $10/mo. across 20 different sites, and that still covers less than half the sources people regularly link to.
- tyre 5y ago
  I don’t think news sites can survive on the tiny slice of revenue. Musicians make most of their money on live events, so while the content creator is taking a hit compared to more lucrative CD sales, they are still using Spotify as marketing for the real product. Journalism doesn’t have the same revenue stream to fall back on.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    Newspapers in the US collectively had $19.9B yearly revenue in 2020 [1]. ($8.8B advertising + $11.1B circulation.) With a population of 331M, that's $5.01 per person per month, or half the population paying $10/mo. Now obviously you're not going to get half the people in the country to pay, but if you call it $20/mo/household, and compare it to the average $100-150/mo/household people pay for cable TV, I'd news absolutely could survive on numbers like this. It's not "tiny" at all -- it's ballpark. [1] https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/ https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/
hedora 5y ago
I suspect “with no tracking” is more important than “with no ads” for most people. People happily tolerated ads in print media for at least a century. The pivot from display ads to surveillance capitalism is what I hear most (non-tech) people complain about. Also, per-user targeted ads undermine the value of premium ad real estate, letting middlemen (like Google) eat the content producers’ lunch, all while providing minimal value to web sites and consumers. (Yes, they subsidize their “free” services with the revenue they extracted from the publishing industry, but that’s just predatory pricing, with the goal of precluding consumer-friendly computing stacks.)
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I think even the tracking is not an issue for most people. It's just the intrusive nature of the ads. If I'm reading a news story I do not want to have to dismiss a popup/overlay every 30 seconds, have a video suddenly start playing, have a lot of blinking, flashing, and movement in my peripheral vision, have my back button hijacked to show me ads when I try to leave the site, etc. If there were static ads in the margins and a clean readable column of content in the center and no other foolishness I would tolerate that.
tedunangst 5y ago
Also don't want anyone else to pay for it, or link to it, or talk about it.
tshaddox 5y ago
> Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it. There’s nothing fascinating about that. I’d love to drive a very expensive car too, but I don’t want to (can’t!) pay for it. This is basically just the law of demand.
chrisseaton 5y ago
We manage to do this in the UK - it’s subsidised by TV watchers but if you don’t do that you don’t need to pay a penny.
mindslight 5y ago
Why not? That's close to how things were 20 years ago. When you searched any topic, there would usually be a quality hit within the first page of results of someone with vast technical experience writing up their knowledge as a hobby, as plain text or basic HTML. You needed the skill to discern whether the person knew what the hell they were talking about and what was their own bias, but after that you had access to a pretty great stream of information. The influx of money-incentivized noise swamped that out, and now we're left with a continuum from aggregator sites (eg stackoverflow, forums, etc) to just straight up webspam. I'm not saying there is an easy way to get back to where we were, but there is a standard to compare to where all of those qualities existed together. In the present, why would I believe that a news site which demands payment would be any higher quality than the ones who do not? The basic business dynamic is to market to gain a sale, and then deliver the minimal cost product that doesn't violate the expectations. Ultimately it goes back to the fragmenting of authority. You used to be able to trust the NYT or whatever because it was all you knew, everyone else trusted them, and therefore there was little reason to break that lock step, even when they did end up misleading you. But with the modern plethora of voices, there are more opinions to choose from and we can easily see when "authorities" ended up misleading us. If you want quality news sources, this lack of authoritativeness/trustworthiness is the genie you need to put back in the bottle, not simply funding.
tengbretson 5y ago
Well now USA today delivers on 0/3 of those.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Information is a public good, in the economic sense that it's nonrivalrous, nonexcludable, and has low marginal (not fixed) costs of production. In practice, every long-term viable media support model has attached a public good model for distribution to some rents-generating activity. Those inlcude patronage, church tithes (or other contributeions), political organisations, member/donor contributions, and of course advertising. Or taxes. The problem with each funding mechanism is that it is at the least distortionary to the interests of the funder or that funder's controlling body. In the case of advertising, the issues are well known, with a remarkably insightful account coming from the dawn of the modern mass-media and mass-advertising age, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short, highly readable, insightful, and information-packed quick read (it's based on an address given at UC Berkely by the author, himself a magazine publisher). Online at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft Advertising's distortions are its drive to sensationalism (which increases the audience) and an antipathy for publishing anything which might offend the paymasters --- advertisers themselves. Holt quotes John Swinton (anonymously): There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. Philanthropic support leads to donor-influence along largely similar lines (the Tiny Sparks podcast frequently addresses such distortions in the non-profit world: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/ https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/) Other options are that propagandists run media services for their own benefit or interest (RT, Sputnik, Newscorp, OANN, Sinclair), or that "news" simply panders to the minimum viable user, at the lowest possible cost, choking out all but a tiny minority of high-quality services, themselves only affordable to a few. The free market utterly fails information goods, due to the mechanics of the market itself.
AuryGlenz 5y ago
I would personally pay for good, unbiased journalism. Good luck finding that.
- unstatusthequo 5y ago
  Exactly. Seems most of these big media conglomerates are leaning left. And a minority right. And then we look to what as the zero-influence news source? Not sure it can even be a corporation or organization because that’s inherently controlled by some person or persons who have left or right bias. If only there were social news networks…. Oh wait. ;) I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
  - blooalien 5y ago
    > I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ Thanks! You just gave me my new favorite news source.
  - rc_mob 5y ago
    Plz try not to see the world as left/right. The lenses of honest/dishonest and smart/stupid are a much better way to look at the media.
  - tyre 5y ago
    “Left” and “right” is horribly reductive. I don’t know a single person who agrees with everything thrown into those simplistic buckets. Take even the Supreme Court. Multiple “right” judges voted to uphold the ACA and abortion restrictions; things that would certainly be top on the list of “left vs. right”. Pay attention to the specific issues.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      In principle I agree with this but you have to have a certain baseline level of privilege yo even get the choice of choosing D/R in the US. If you’re a minority or marginalized group [1] you’re basically stuck huddling around the Democrats regardless of how you think of their broader views. I’m a super liberal person so it works out for me accidentally but I have libertarian friends who would for sure vote Republican if it wasn’t for baseline existence issues like BLM or gay marriage. Like all actual policy discussions happen within parties because of this. It’s easier to get the Democrats to be a little more conservative than get Republicans to support trans healthcare. [1] in the colloquial usage don’t @ me with X is 49% of the population
syshum 5y ago
I believe this is a direct by product of "rage news", where a newspaper used headlines to illicit an anger response in order to get more views / clicks No one wants to pay a business that angers them all the time, if walmart pissed every customer off in every visit they would go bankrupt Rage Bait has been a mainstay in "journalism" of late in part to the Ad revenue nature of the business, however in doing so they pissed off most of the customers that they now want to pay for their product.
nine_k 5y ago
FTFY: with no obnoxious ads. Also, if there were an easy way to pay for just the article, say, 10¢, most people won't mind. But wherever it exists, it's not easy, and generally the big players are not interested in implementing it, even if it were technically trivial (it's not), because they prefer a smaller but captive audience which pays more (and watches ads).
TX0098812 5y ago
It's mostly about entertainment.
pier25 5y ago
IMO the problem is really committing to a single news source. I'd happily pay for news. I just don't want to pay to, say, the NYT just to read a couple of pieces a week. (Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices) The solution seems to be either micropayments or some form of paid news aggregation. I pay for a Coil[1] subscription which solves micropayments, unfortunately very few sites have implemented it (and no major news sites AFAIK). [1] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
- slipperlobster 5y ago
  > Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices I signed up for a student-priced NYT subscription a while back and realized I didn't really use it. I trudged through their cancellation information and got on their chat. The representative threw everything at me why I shouldn't cancel and they offered me a discounted rate of exactly what I was paying currently. So silly.
  - pier25 5y ago
    If you're outside the US they require you to make a phone call to cancel, it's ridiculous.
    - _delirium 5y ago
      They used to do that for US subscribers too, but California passed a law in 2018 requiring any subscription that is made online to also be cancellable online, so NYT added an online cancellation flow for US subscribers: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/thanks-to-california-a-news-site-or-other-business-now-has-to-let-you-cancel-your-subscription-online/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/thanks-to-california-a-new...
rc_mob 5y ago
USA today is not quality
burlesona 5y ago
There was a moment in the 90s where a lot of good news media met the criteria you list. I think that anchored us on unrealistic cultural expectations.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  I'm not so sure that golden age ever really existed. It was the height of the mass media, and because of this objectivity and the consensus were interchangeable, and no one was held much to account for their inability to comport with reality. The internet gave the layman all the tools they needed to do their own followup on what they were told, and to access new perspectives about it. That's when cracks started appearing.
everfree 5y ago
I read about 2 articles per month from each of 5 news sites. Each site wants me to pay a $10/mo subscription. I'm not paying $50/mo for 10 articles. They need to figure out a way to fix their pricing model as a group.
Spooky23 5y ago
I think paper newspaper ads are great. Hell I used to buy papers at the newsstand in my building or gas station for ads. The problem with my local Hearst paper’s online presence is that there are literally hundreds of irrelevant ads, pop-up videos, 40+ trackers, tabloola or something similar and other junk. That stuff doesn’t go away when you pay. I’m no expert on the metrics here, but since the economics of the online ad market are so awful, and the ads are mostly shit, I don’t understand why the paper can’t sell ads online like they do in print.
systemvoltage 5y ago
You still get ads with NYT, Economist, WSJ, WaPo after getting a paid premium subscription, especially in their mobile apps. I've had to install Pi Hole to get rid of them until they figure out how to encrypt them like Instagram.
Black101 5y ago
I think that you underestimate how people are willing to put some time to bring the truth out ... the current news is broken anyways... look at CNN and FOX.

omega3 5y ago

The problem right now is that outside of select few publications you're expected to pay for a low quality content.

CubsFan1060 5y ago
I actually agree. But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
- Zababa 5y ago
  To be fair they usually invest some time, energy and/or money into making sure that you want to read it. I don't want to pay for most news, but often I'm baited by an appealing headline. I'm not above being baited and fear of missing out, and they are exploiting this. If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the situation.
shusaku 5y ago
Or you pay but you still are bombarded by tracking.
dredmorbius 5y ago
You're missing the other case. Free content is provided not for informational value but for propaganda purposes. https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-to-new-level/ https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978) And paid-up services still include ads. (Which have higher advertiser value simply because the audience is known and sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)
tsian2 5y ago
I think more people might part with their cash if they could fund the topics/proposals they were interested in. Something more like Gofundme and Twitch where people feel like they're directly paying for something to happen.
- snegu 5y ago
  That's really the idea behind Substack. You can subscribe to the journalists who investigate the issues you are interested in.

teeray 5y ago

It’s not “with no ads,” really. It’s become that because ads are so intrusive now. Static ads, stitched into the page at the edge, with zero tracking would be acceptable by many. Those kind of ads have been around in print newspapers for decades. Ad blocking is in response to poor user experience in the same way that piracy was in response to the poor experience of physically buying a CD that had just one track you wanted.

CubsFan1060 5y ago
Maybe where I personally land is that someone who produces content has the right to sell it however they like. The deal we can all make is that you can pay the price for the product and consumer it, or not. In the digital age, there are a lot of people who decide that we get to price the content however we want. We decide that because they are trying to use terrible ads to make money, that we can just go around that and take their content for free. That doesn't fly real well with physical products (This loaf of bread is priced at $1, but I only want to pay $0.50, so I'll just give them $0.50 and take it), but seems to be accepted with products that have infinite free reproducibility.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  The analogy is more like they are out on the public road giving away free loaves of bread along with ad flyers. I take the bread and refuse the flyer. They can put themselves behind a fence, without letting anybody in who doesn't take their flyer. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. They can charge for their bread. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. No hard feelings on my end, it's all fair. But what they cannot reasonably do is give away free bread and then complain that I won't take their ad flyers.
  - Angostura 5y ago
    Aren't you going to get rather hungry?
    - bialpio 5y ago

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

I don't mind ads. I mind being tracked as I browse the web and this being called "advertising". Static images as ads would work, wouldn't be blocked by ad blockers, and would be effective as ads.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago

I want to support a lot of different journalists and publishers but giving 100 journalists $0.5/month each on patreon is impractical and cumbersome. Just like subscribing to a dozen high quality publications would run more per month than my car payment.

ferdowsi 5y ago

To me it's a similar dynamic to the treatment of open source developers. Journalism and open source software are (now) crucial products for the operation of a functioning society but the biggest consumers have no desire to pay for it.

heisenbit 5y ago

I'm willing to pay but I'm not so happy about funding editorial and brand value over and above their fair share compared with reporting. I resent getting locked into a bundle that I have little control about and that despite funding it I will be sold as a product to advertisers (or messages brought to you by a strong but silent editorial hand).

axaxs 5y ago

I never minded ads, until ads started being abusive. Malware, screen takeovers, redirects, etc. If they'd fix the ad problem this could work. I'm surprised ad supported sites haven't demanded better.

blooalien 5y ago
Exactly! Not only ad supported sites, but advertisers themselves should be speaking out and fighting back against the abusive advertisers that created a need for adblockers in the first place, too! They did massive harm to their own industry. Instead of helping to fix the problem and calling out those who caused it, the war is turned against the very consumers they're trying to reach with their advertising.

tyingq 5y ago

I'd just be happy if Google didn't index paid content, and if sites like HN wouldn't link to it. Posting links to paid sites is, to me, silly, because chances are that link is effectively dead to the person that follows it. The odds of a random reader (whether from Google SERPS or HN or similar) having a subscription are very low. I don't personally know anyone that has a subscription to the top 10 paid sites, and there's quite a few more than 10. Google used to call the practice "cloaking", and would de-index you if you presented content to its crawler that didn't match what it provided to a visitor. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

aardvarkr 5y ago
Just because you don’t subscribe to the time doesn’t mean other people don’t and therefore shouldn’t get to talk about some of their incredible investigations, or discuss a crazy business story in the journal. You and your friends are not the only consumers in the world.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I suppose that works if you and all your friends have an identical list of subscriptions. It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.
  - tzs 5y ago
    > It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion. Some of the most interesting and informative things I've read on HN were comments on articles I did not read. I almost always read the comments before reading the article, and a significant fraction of the time I don't even try to read the article after seeing the comments.
- slezyr 5y ago

nhffdhnb 5y ago

Yes, well, what exists is a lot of trash for free and a few publications that charge way more than the value they actually offer and in some cases partake in the sleaziest tactics to keep you paying once you signed up. If Reason can send out a physical magazine for $20/yr some of these other news outlets can figure out how to trim some fat and offer a competitive rate.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Reason is propaganda and is subsidised as such.

fullshark 5y ago

Most people say they want this, but they really just want headlines, and occasional in depth reporting on some long tail interest of theirs. Social media / message boards serve this and have taken over for a reason.

crazygringo 5y ago

I mean people can wish for anything. I can wish for a billion dollars. I don't hear anybody actually expecting free news with no ads. Everyone knows journalists need to be paid a salary. So that feels like a strawman to me. But the idea that content isn't worth paying for is more that it's not worth paying for any single news source. I see links to news articles I read from 20+ sources a day. If somebody builds a Spotify for news where you pay $10/mo. and can access 99.9% of news articles including NYT, WaPo, etc., I think a ton of people (most, even?) would have no problem paying for it at all. But I sure as hell can't pay $10/mo. across 20 different sites, and that still covers less than half the sources people regularly link to.

tyre 5y ago
I don’t think news sites can survive on the tiny slice of revenue. Musicians make most of their money on live events, so while the content creator is taking a hit compared to more lucrative CD sales, they are still using Spotify as marketing for the real product. Journalism doesn’t have the same revenue stream to fall back on.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Newspapers in the US collectively had $19.9B yearly revenue in 2020 [1]. ($8.8B advertising + $11.1B circulation.) With a population of 331M, that's $5.01 per person per month, or half the population paying $10/mo. Now obviously you're not going to get half the people in the country to pay, but if you call it $20/mo/household, and compare it to the average $100-150/mo/household people pay for cable TV, I'd news absolutely could survive on numbers like this. It's not "tiny" at all -- it's ballpark. [1] https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/ https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/

hedora 5y ago

I suspect “with no tracking” is more important than “with no ads” for most people. People happily tolerated ads in print media for at least a century. The pivot from display ads to surveillance capitalism is what I hear most (non-tech) people complain about. Also, per-user targeted ads undermine the value of premium ad real estate, letting middlemen (like Google) eat the content producers’ lunch, all while providing minimal value to web sites and consumers. (Yes, they subsidize their “free” services with the revenue they extracted from the publishing industry, but that’s just predatory pricing, with the goal of precluding consumer-friendly computing stacks.)

throwawayboise 5y ago
I think even the tracking is not an issue for most people. It's just the intrusive nature of the ads. If I'm reading a news story I do not want to have to dismiss a popup/overlay every 30 seconds, have a video suddenly start playing, have a lot of blinking, flashing, and movement in my peripheral vision, have my back button hijacked to show me ads when I try to leave the site, etc. If there were static ads in the margins and a clean readable column of content in the center and no other foolishness I would tolerate that.

tedunangst 5y ago

Also don't want anyone else to pay for it, or link to it, or talk about it.

tshaddox 5y ago

> Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it. There’s nothing fascinating about that. I’d love to drive a very expensive car too, but I don’t want to (can’t!) pay for it. This is basically just the law of demand.

chrisseaton 5y ago

We manage to do this in the UK - it’s subsidised by TV watchers but if you don’t do that you don’t need to pay a penny.

mindslight 5y ago

Why not? That's close to how things were 20 years ago. When you searched any topic, there would usually be a quality hit within the first page of results of someone with vast technical experience writing up their knowledge as a hobby, as plain text or basic HTML. You needed the skill to discern whether the person knew what the hell they were talking about and what was their own bias, but after that you had access to a pretty great stream of information. The influx of money-incentivized noise swamped that out, and now we're left with a continuum from aggregator sites (eg stackoverflow, forums, etc) to just straight up webspam. I'm not saying there is an easy way to get back to where we were, but there is a standard to compare to where all of those qualities existed together. In the present, why would I believe that a news site which demands payment would be any higher quality than the ones who do not? The basic business dynamic is to market to gain a sale, and then deliver the minimal cost product that doesn't violate the expectations. Ultimately it goes back to the fragmenting of authority. You used to be able to trust the NYT or whatever because it was all you knew, everyone else trusted them, and therefore there was little reason to break that lock step, even when they did end up misleading you. But with the modern plethora of voices, there are more opinions to choose from and we can easily see when "authorities" ended up misleading us. If you want quality news sources, this lack of authoritativeness/trustworthiness is the genie you need to put back in the bottle, not simply funding.

tengbretson 5y ago

Well now USA today delivers on 0/3 of those.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Information is a public good, in the economic sense that it's nonrivalrous, nonexcludable, and has low marginal (not fixed) costs of production. In practice, every long-term viable media support model has attached a public good model for distribution to some rents-generating activity. Those inlcude patronage, church tithes (or other contributeions), political organisations, member/donor contributions, and of course advertising. Or taxes. The problem with each funding mechanism is that it is at the least distortionary to the interests of the funder or that funder's controlling body. In the case of advertising, the issues are well known, with a remarkably insightful account coming from the dawn of the modern mass-media and mass-advertising age, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short, highly readable, insightful, and information-packed quick read (it's based on an address given at UC Berkely by the author, himself a magazine publisher). Online at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft Advertising's distortions are its drive to sensationalism (which increases the audience) and an antipathy for publishing anything which might offend the paymasters --- advertisers themselves. Holt quotes John Swinton (anonymously): There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. Philanthropic support leads to donor-influence along largely similar lines (the Tiny Sparks podcast frequently addresses such distortions in the non-profit world: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/ https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/) Other options are that propagandists run media services for their own benefit or interest (RT, Sputnik, Newscorp, OANN, Sinclair), or that "news" simply panders to the minimum viable user, at the lowest possible cost, choking out all but a tiny minority of high-quality services, themselves only affordable to a few. The free market utterly fails information goods, due to the mechanics of the market itself.

AuryGlenz 5y ago

I would personally pay for good, unbiased journalism. Good luck finding that.

unstatusthequo 5y ago
Exactly. Seems most of these big media conglomerates are leaning left. And a minority right. And then we look to what as the zero-influence news source? Not sure it can even be a corporation or organization because that’s inherently controlled by some person or persons who have left or right bias. If only there were social news networks…. Oh wait. ;) I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
- blooalien 5y ago
  > I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ Thanks! You just gave me my new favorite news source.
- rc_mob 5y ago
  Plz try not to see the world as left/right. The lenses of honest/dishonest and smart/stupid are a much better way to look at the media.
- tyre 5y ago
  “Left” and “right” is horribly reductive. I don’t know a single person who agrees with everything thrown into those simplistic buckets. Take even the Supreme Court. Multiple “right” judges voted to uphold the ACA and abortion restrictions; things that would certainly be top on the list of “left vs. right”. Pay attention to the specific issues.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    In principle I agree with this but you have to have a certain baseline level of privilege yo even get the choice of choosing D/R in the US. If you’re a minority or marginalized group [1] you’re basically stuck huddling around the Democrats regardless of how you think of their broader views. I’m a super liberal person so it works out for me accidentally but I have libertarian friends who would for sure vote Republican if it wasn’t for baseline existence issues like BLM or gay marriage. Like all actual policy discussions happen within parties because of this. It’s easier to get the Democrats to be a little more conservative than get Republicans to support trans healthcare. [1] in the colloquial usage don’t @ me with X is 49% of the population

syshum 5y ago

I believe this is a direct by product of "rage news", where a newspaper used headlines to illicit an anger response in order to get more views / clicks No one wants to pay a business that angers them all the time, if walmart pissed every customer off in every visit they would go bankrupt Rage Bait has been a mainstay in "journalism" of late in part to the Ad revenue nature of the business, however in doing so they pissed off most of the customers that they now want to pay for their product.

nine_k 5y ago

FTFY: with no obnoxious ads. Also, if there were an easy way to pay for just the article, say, 10¢, most people won't mind. But wherever it exists, it's not easy, and generally the big players are not interested in implementing it, even if it were technically trivial (it's not), because they prefer a smaller but captive audience which pays more (and watches ads).

TX0098812 5y ago

It's mostly about entertainment.

pier25 5y ago

IMO the problem is really committing to a single news source. I'd happily pay for news. I just don't want to pay to, say, the NYT just to read a couple of pieces a week. (Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices) The solution seems to be either micropayments or some form of paid news aggregation. I pay for a Coil[1] subscription which solves micropayments, unfortunately very few sites have implemented it (and no major news sites AFAIK). [1] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/

slipperlobster 5y ago
> Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices I signed up for a student-priced NYT subscription a while back and realized I didn't really use it. I trudged through their cancellation information and got on their chat. The representative threw everything at me why I shouldn't cancel and they offered me a discounted rate of exactly what I was paying currently. So silly.
- pier25 5y ago
  If you're outside the US they require you to make a phone call to cancel, it's ridiculous.
  - _delirium 5y ago
    They used to do that for US subscribers too, but California passed a law in 2018 requiring any subscription that is made online to also be cancellable online, so NYT added an online cancellation flow for US subscribers: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/thanks-to-california-a-news-site-or-other-business-now-has-to-let-you-cancel-your-subscription-online/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/thanks-to-california-a-new...

rc_mob 5y ago

USA today is not quality

burlesona 5y ago

There was a moment in the 90s where a lot of good news media met the criteria you list. I think that anchored us on unrealistic cultural expectations.

crocodiletears 5y ago
I'm not so sure that golden age ever really existed. It was the height of the mass media, and because of this objectivity and the consensus were interchangeable, and no one was held much to account for their inability to comport with reality. The internet gave the layman all the tools they needed to do their own followup on what they were told, and to access new perspectives about it. That's when cracks started appearing.

everfree 5y ago

I read about 2 articles per month from each of 5 news sites. Each site wants me to pay a $10/mo subscription. I'm not paying $50/mo for 10 articles. They need to figure out a way to fix their pricing model as a group.

Spooky23 5y ago

I think paper newspaper ads are great. Hell I used to buy papers at the newsstand in my building or gas station for ads. The problem with my local Hearst paper’s online presence is that there are literally hundreds of irrelevant ads, pop-up videos, 40+ trackers, tabloola or something similar and other junk. That stuff doesn’t go away when you pay. I’m no expert on the metrics here, but since the economics of the online ad market are so awful, and the ads are mostly shit, I don’t understand why the paper can’t sell ads online like they do in print.

systemvoltage 5y ago

You still get ads with NYT, Economist, WSJ, WaPo after getting a paid premium subscription, especially in their mobile apps. I've had to install Pi Hole to get rid of them until they figure out how to encrypt them like Instagram.

Black101 5y ago

I think that you underestimate how people are willing to put some time to bring the truth out ... the current news is broken anyways... look at CNN and FOX.