5 ms·

This looks like a good idea on the surface but there is one factor which is easy to forget but still very important. If you have a subscription with a news site

This looks like a good idea on the surface but there is one factor which is easy to forget but still very important. If you have a subscription with a news site instead of paying for articles individually you might not read articles you would have read otherwise. I often find myself enjoying articles much more than I would have anticipated just considering the title. If a per-article business model will become the norm the clickbait-problem will undoubtedly get worse. Deeper and less catchy articles will fade from media outlets which hurts the industry as a whole. That's one of the benefits of streaming services in the music industry. Nowadays it's much easier to discover artists which deviate from the mainstream because you don't have to spend any extra money to discover a new artist. I think this is healthy for the music scene and I suspect the same is true for journalism. Also if you have a subscription you are probably going to read more articles than if you would have to purchase every article individually even if it's less expensive to do so. People reading less is hardly a desireable goal.

reducesuffering 5y ago
But with a music subscription like Spotify, you've got the whole catalog to browse at $10/mth. If I want a 90% complete catalog of journalism, what is that $200/mth across them all?
- _delirium 5y ago
  Apple News+ is trying to build that, one subscription for $10/month. This is the current list of who they include: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic. It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though, who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
  - baggy_trough 5y ago
    The content menu is decent. Unfortunately the UI for Apple News+ is bad enough to make the service a no-go.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    With Apple doing the bundling, the content will only be available in the Apple News app, which is Mac and iOS only. Even worse, the Mac app does not let you print or even select text. It's taking web content and making it as un-web like as it can. I can't even share the article to Pocket! I subscribe to the NYT and Globe & Mail. I print articles I want to read to PDF (or save as a SingleHTML file) and have them auto-synced to my tablet. This gives me a permanent copy of the article that supports annotation. I'm never going to go the bundling route.
  - eddyg 5y ago
    Came here to say Apple News+ has been quite excellent. If you get to a paywalled WSJ article on the web, you can often use the “share” icon to “Open in Apple News” and read it just fine.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    That list of Apple's partner publications does reflect a bias though. For example the news/politics section contains more lean-left and left biased sources from All Sides (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings) than it does lean-right and right-biased sources. I am guessing a number of right-biased sources either aren't welcome on Apple's platform or don't feel comfortable partnering with them. Given that Apple's own content policies implement a progressive bias (for example on trans issues), and since they have a long history of censorship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple), I am not sure how people can trust such a service to fairly represent all views or provide a diversity of viewpoints. And this is the exact problem with this sort of bundle - it centralizes something that is better handled in a decentralized way, and the platform owner then gains power that they can abuse. The GP comment mentioned Spotify, and they suffer from the same issue. They entered the podcast market, acquired Joe Rogan's show as an exclusive, and then immediately proceeded to censor vast swaths of content based on their employees' ideological biases (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-spotify-removing-shows/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-spotif...).

reducesuffering 5y ago

But with a music subscription like Spotify, you've got the whole catalog to browse at $10/mth. If I want a 90% complete catalog of journalism, what is that $200/mth across them all?

_delirium 5y ago
Apple News+ is trying to build that, one subscription for $10/month. This is the current list of who they include: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/ It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic. It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though, who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
- baggy_trough 5y ago
  The content menu is decent. Unfortunately the UI for Apple News+ is bad enough to make the service a no-go.
- rchaud 5y ago
  With Apple doing the bundling, the content will only be available in the Apple News app, which is Mac and iOS only. Even worse, the Mac app does not let you print or even select text. It's taking web content and making it as un-web like as it can. I can't even share the article to Pocket! I subscribe to the NYT and Globe & Mail. I print articles I want to read to PDF (or save as a SingleHTML file) and have them auto-synced to my tablet. This gives me a permanent copy of the article that supports annotation. I'm never going to go the bundling route.
- eddyg 5y ago
  Came here to say Apple News+ has been quite excellent. If you get to a paywalled WSJ article on the web, you can often use the “share” icon to “Open in Apple News” and read it just fine.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  That list of Apple's partner publications does reflect a bias though. For example the news/politics section contains more lean-left and left biased sources from All Sides (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings) than it does lean-right and right-biased sources. I am guessing a number of right-biased sources either aren't welcome on Apple's platform or don't feel comfortable partnering with them. Given that Apple's own content policies implement a progressive bias (for example on trans issues), and since they have a long history of censorship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple), I am not sure how people can trust such a service to fairly represent all views or provide a diversity of viewpoints. And this is the exact problem with this sort of bundle - it centralizes something that is better handled in a decentralized way, and the platform owner then gains power that they can abuse. The GP comment mentioned Spotify, and they suffer from the same issue. They entered the podcast market, acquired Joe Rogan's show as an exclusive, and then immediately proceeded to censor vast swaths of content based on their employees' ideological biases (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-spotify-removing-shows/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-spotif...).