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I think the major newspapers need to get together and start offering umbrella subscription packages. Preferably via something like Scroll, which worked in any w

I think the major newspapers need to get together and start offering umbrella subscription packages. Preferably via something like Scroll, which worked in any web browser via a simple cookie. Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Since the incremental cost of online distribution is nearly zero, this means that the news outlets are leaving money on the table. Make everyone's first subscription cost $10, then provide access to additional papers for 50¢ each. Or use some other type of sliding scale—I'm sure there are numbers that would make sense. The alternatives are either that a major tech company comes along and does it for them (as Apple is attempting), or that all the papers ultimately merge into 2-3 huge outlets. I don't like either of those outcomes.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc have to realize that at $10 per month per paper, almost no one is going to pay for more than a single subscription Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely, and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market that has ad-supported filler.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I edited my post while you were replying—I do know some individuals who have a couple of subscriptions, but not more than that unless it's for professional reasons. Businesses are a different story, and they should be charged accordingly.
  - Cyclone_ 5y ago
    Agreed, the only people I know of that subscribe to multiple publications do it for professional reasons. I only subscribe to WSJ and it's more pricey than others but worth it. I get all the major stories.
  - tyre 5y ago
    I subscribe to the NYT, New Yorker, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and the Atlantic. I don’t know how people think they’ll survive with a tenth of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue? So then what? Publications look for alternative means of supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content towards clickbaiting. Maybe it’s fine not trying to be for everyone when not everyone values them.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      I think you're a major outlier, and that newspapers would get well above three times the number of subscribers. Magazines are a little different since they're more focused, i.e. The New York Review of Books is not a substitute for PCMag. But it's also possible I'm wrong—I certainly have no background on this industry. For example, someone on the TWiT podcast said the reason there's no effective "Netflix for Books" is because the industry is highly dependent on a very small number of "whales" who will buy five books per week.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Even for most people who are regular readers, however defined, a la carte book purchases over the course of a year don't add up to a huge number. Reading most books takes a bigger time committment than most other media. And many who are voracious readers, among others, use libraries. I read at least a middling bit and I'm fine to pay $150/year or whatever and own my books (or "own" in the case of Kindle).
- billytetrud 5y ago
  That's a really shitty outcome tho. Look at how toxicly inaccessible academic papers are. Universities pay exorbitant prices for their students and faculty, and no normal person could every afford it. What we need is a system of pay-per-view+quality news that uses a rating system to determine how much people pay for the article. Imagine a pay scale where users pay x/log(2+x/1000) cents to the service per month (where x is number of articles read, or some similar metric), and the authors/publishers of those articles split that money based on how highly the user rated each article. This would mean that someone reading 10 articles a month would pay 30 cents/mo, someone reading 10 articles a day would pay $9/mo, and someone reading 100 articles a day would pay $40/mo. At the same time, it would mean that users have an incentive to rate articles fairly, since they're charged regardless of their ratings, but better quality articles would get rated higher and get paid out more per view, incentivizing publishers to put out higher quality content and disincentivizing click bait. Ad supported content leads to click bait and emotional manipulation. We are living in the news dystopia and only finding a way to get rid of ad supported content will save us. This happened in the 20s too btw. Those "extra extra read all about it" boys selling newspapers by the headline caused a decrease in news quality too. Subscription news came along and saved us then. Unfortunately, there are too many different news sources to be supported by subscription services without massively fragmenting what people can read (just like video streaming services have massively fragmented what people can watch).
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    I don't think you can charge per article. It makes opening a new article too high-stakes; people don't want to think about spending money each time they click on something, even if the amount they're spending is super small. I'm also concerned that your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe, as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on social media.
    - billytetrud 5y ago
      Just like no one wants to think about spending money each time they turn on a light in their house or take a shower? Yes, it'll be a barrier for people for a week, and then they'll forget about it like everything else we pay for individually. > your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for people who are actually looking to escape their biases, because those people could rate articles more highly if they actually convince them to change their views, or at least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-infuriating way.
donkeyd 5y ago
They're also leaving international money on the table. I would never get a paper version of a US newspaper, but now with digital papers, I would love to read some articles from US papers. I just don't want to have to pick a single one, especially because many of them are local.
- CalRobert 5y ago
  NYTimes has very cheap subscriptions internationally. At least for me, it's €2 a month. Doesn't include cooking though.
MattGaiser 5y ago
NYT and WSJ are probably fine with that, as if you are going to spend money on a subscription, it is probably one of those. So why share any revenue with the smaller papers?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  It's probably one of those major papers (I'd include a few others like The Washington Post) but which one? There is precedent for the major papers working together in markets where it makes sense to do so, see the International Herald Tribune.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The Economist is another for a more international English-speaking audience. FT for European finance. Maybe a more cultural magazine like The New Yorker. But 2-3 is probably the limit for the vast number of people.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  In a revenue sharing scheme, they would be able to command a larger share than the others. With enough people subscribed, it could possibly give them more revenue than the status quo.
numpad0 5y ago
While I agree that $10 umbrella subscription make metric tons of sense even if it was not the only way online newspapers could work, I don’t see competition in it. A whole industry without competitions is generally not a good thing……
- graftak 5y ago
  The fee could be (partially) be distributed amongst publisher based on conversion like articles read, and time spent on that. In theory this would still provide an incentive to compete on quality, similar to music streaming services.
jpalomaki 5y ago
They must take into account the loyal subscribers who are already paying the current fees. Introducing lower prices can mess up with this income stream. It’s not easy to differentiate the product enough to collect maximum money from the both groups. But I do agree with your thinking. For me it would be almost enough if I could get access to just those articles posted on HN for $10/month (across many newspapers and with no risk of falling to some subscription trap).
- ghaff 5y ago
  At which point someone will create another site that provides links to all the major articles (or every article) on all the major sites and how could they not have the same deal?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wolverine876 5y ago
> Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. But if you are the NYT or WSJ, you believe, reasonably, that one of those subscriptions will be for you. I agree generally. Aren't micropayments supposed to solve this problem?
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  WSJ and NyTimes are papers that many people might read both of, they both provide different high end perspectives. USA Today is more like…I’m not really sure why anyone read it. Maybe if they wanted a very drab ultra-produced version of the news that uses more modern fonts, which is sort of the market they were going for on their introduction in the 80s. I don’t see much overlap between the high quality New York papers and USA Today.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    I'm usually reading the 'high quality' publications, but USA Today in the past (I haven't read it in years) had coverage the others lacked. They were (are?) a serious paper. They are also more succinct, which isn't a bad thing - many NYT articles could be shorter.
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    I recall that years ago, USA Today was sort of intended to be a "generic national newspaper". It made sense for places like 'delivery to hotel rooms' where the audience wanted a general national/global news product, but didn't need the 50% of the paper that was local school board meetings and classified ads. With that principle, I always figured that the endgame of the Gannet company would be to make their local papers USA Today with a small local supplement folded in. Maybe the same applies online-- you'll buy usatoday.com for national news, and also subscribe to a local rag. Over time, the local papers may scale back the national/global/wire service stuff.
    - jhbadger 5y ago
      Interestingly, at least for a while (and maybe still in some papers) Gannet used to do the opposite -- they would tuck in a condensed version of "USA Today" into the local papers they owned.
watwut 5y ago
Wouldnt it be anti competitive? The good thing about capitalism is supposed to be competition of products and prices. The cartel/monopoly thing destroys that.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Hm, it's a good question. There's precedent in Hulu (which is another thing I was thinking of), wherein a bunch of the major TV networks got together to create a consolidated outlet. Or the International Tribune.
Pandabob 5y ago
I’d gladly pay for 5-6 digital news subscriptions for $10 per month each. What’s harder to justify for me are the multiple 30-40$ per month subscriptions for sites like FT, Bloomberg and the Information.
wrycoder 5y ago
Normal rate for WSJ is around $40 per month. The starter rate is $20. If you try to cancel, they will renew at the starter rate.
jimmaswell 5y ago
I can't imagine actually paying for access to online articles beyond maybe 25 cents for a week's worth like a newspaper, at most. Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly? Especially with the quality of modern mainstream journalism being what it is.
- demadog 5y ago
  I subscribe to The NY Times because I like reading their articles and I hit the paywall and I find they have some stories no one else does. “Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly?” -> The Times reported a total of 7.8 million subscribers across both print and digital platforms, with 6.9 million coming for online news or its Cooking and Games apps. The company added 301,000 digital customers for the first three months of the year…” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/business/media/nyt-new-york-times-earnings-q1-2021.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/business/media/nyt-new-yo...
demadog 5y ago
Those who can afford multiple subscriptions will, and those who can’t will choose just one. There’s a market for good paid content and there has been for 400+ years. Substack is valued at close to $1B because people will pay for good writing.
0xdeadb00f 5y ago
> Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Agreed. And furthermore, why haven't TV/film streaming services also not realised this. Is it because it isn't true? Do people really pay for Disney+, Netflix, and Hulu all at the same time?
- Aditya_Garg 5y ago
  Most people I know account share. One person gets Netflix, one person gets Hulu etc.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  The content on streaming services isn't a direct substitute in the same way. The Witcher isn't Game of Thrones. The news is the news. Sure some people have specific writers they like, but it's a lot easier to just read a different paper.
rakshazi 5y ago
there is a coil.com as example of such subscription and it even integrated in imgur, twitch and some other services. Never used it, tho. I prefer reading HN comments instead of articles, because news nowadays is huge longrid with only ~10% of usable information in it. I'm not ready to pay $10 for such thing, IMO.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc have to realize that at $10 per month per paper, almost no one is going to pay for more than a single subscription Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely, and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market that has ad-supported filler.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I edited my post while you were replying—I do know some individuals who have a couple of subscriptions, but not more than that unless it's for professional reasons. Businesses are a different story, and they should be charged accordingly.
- Cyclone_ 5y ago
  Agreed, the only people I know of that subscribe to multiple publications do it for professional reasons. I only subscribe to WSJ and it's more pricey than others but worth it. I get all the major stories.
- tyre 5y ago
  I subscribe to the NYT, New Yorker, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and the Atlantic. I don’t know how people think they’ll survive with a tenth of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue? So then what? Publications look for alternative means of supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content towards clickbaiting. Maybe it’s fine not trying to be for everyone when not everyone values them.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    I think you're a major outlier, and that newspapers would get well above three times the number of subscribers. Magazines are a little different since they're more focused, i.e. The New York Review of Books is not a substitute for PCMag. But it's also possible I'm wrong—I certainly have no background on this industry. For example, someone on the TWiT podcast said the reason there's no effective "Netflix for Books" is because the industry is highly dependent on a very small number of "whales" who will buy five books per week.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Even for most people who are regular readers, however defined, a la carte book purchases over the course of a year don't add up to a huge number. Reading most books takes a bigger time committment than most other media. And many who are voracious readers, among others, use libraries. I read at least a middling bit and I'm fine to pay $150/year or whatever and own my books (or "own" in the case of Kindle).
billytetrud 5y ago
That's a really shitty outcome tho. Look at how toxicly inaccessible academic papers are. Universities pay exorbitant prices for their students and faculty, and no normal person could every afford it. What we need is a system of pay-per-view+quality news that uses a rating system to determine how much people pay for the article. Imagine a pay scale where users pay x/log(2+x/1000) cents to the service per month (where x is number of articles read, or some similar metric), and the authors/publishers of those articles split that money based on how highly the user rated each article. This would mean that someone reading 10 articles a month would pay 30 cents/mo, someone reading 10 articles a day would pay $9/mo, and someone reading 100 articles a day would pay $40/mo. At the same time, it would mean that users have an incentive to rate articles fairly, since they're charged regardless of their ratings, but better quality articles would get rated higher and get paid out more per view, incentivizing publishers to put out higher quality content and disincentivizing click bait. Ad supported content leads to click bait and emotional manipulation. We are living in the news dystopia and only finding a way to get rid of ad supported content will save us. This happened in the 20s too btw. Those "extra extra read all about it" boys selling newspapers by the headline caused a decrease in news quality too. Subscription news came along and saved us then. Unfortunately, there are too many different news sources to be supported by subscription services without massively fragmenting what people can read (just like video streaming services have massively fragmented what people can watch).
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I don't think you can charge per article. It makes opening a new article too high-stakes; people don't want to think about spending money each time they click on something, even if the amount they're spending is super small. I'm also concerned that your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe, as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on social media.
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    Just like no one wants to think about spending money each time they turn on a light in their house or take a shower? Yes, it'll be a barrier for people for a week, and then they'll forget about it like everything else we pay for individually. > your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for people who are actually looking to escape their biases, because those people could rate articles more highly if they actually convince them to change their views, or at least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-infuriating way.

donkeyd 5y ago

They're also leaving international money on the table. I would never get a paper version of a US newspaper, but now with digital papers, I would love to read some articles from US papers. I just don't want to have to pick a single one, especially because many of them are local.

CalRobert 5y ago
NYTimes has very cheap subscriptions internationally. At least for me, it's €2 a month. Doesn't include cooking though.

MattGaiser 5y ago

NYT and WSJ are probably fine with that, as if you are going to spend money on a subscription, it is probably one of those. So why share any revenue with the smaller papers?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
It's probably one of those major papers (I'd include a few others like The Washington Post) but which one? There is precedent for the major papers working together in markets where it makes sense to do so, see the International Herald Tribune.
- ghaff 5y ago
  The Economist is another for a more international English-speaking audience. FT for European finance. Maybe a more cultural magazine like The New Yorker. But 2-3 is probably the limit for the vast number of people.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
In a revenue sharing scheme, they would be able to command a larger share than the others. With enough people subscribed, it could possibly give them more revenue than the status quo.

numpad0 5y ago

While I agree that $10 umbrella subscription make metric tons of sense even if it was not the only way online newspapers could work, I don’t see competition in it. A whole industry without competitions is generally not a good thing……

graftak 5y ago
The fee could be (partially) be distributed amongst publisher based on conversion like articles read, and time spent on that. In theory this would still provide an incentive to compete on quality, similar to music streaming services.

jpalomaki 5y ago

They must take into account the loyal subscribers who are already paying the current fees. Introducing lower prices can mess up with this income stream. It’s not easy to differentiate the product enough to collect maximum money from the both groups. But I do agree with your thinking. For me it would be almost enough if I could get access to just those articles posted on HN for $10/month (across many newspapers and with no risk of falling to some subscription trap).

ghaff 5y ago
At which point someone will create another site that provides links to all the major articles (or every article) on all the major sites and how could they not have the same deal?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wolverine876 5y ago

> Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. But if you are the NYT or WSJ, you believe, reasonably, that one of those subscriptions will be for you. I agree generally. Aren't micropayments supposed to solve this problem?

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
WSJ and NyTimes are papers that many people might read both of, they both provide different high end perspectives. USA Today is more like…I’m not really sure why anyone read it. Maybe if they wanted a very drab ultra-produced version of the news that uses more modern fonts, which is sort of the market they were going for on their introduction in the 80s. I don’t see much overlap between the high quality New York papers and USA Today.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  I'm usually reading the 'high quality' publications, but USA Today in the past (I haven't read it in years) had coverage the others lacked. They were (are?) a serious paper. They are also more succinct, which isn't a bad thing - many NYT articles could be shorter.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  I recall that years ago, USA Today was sort of intended to be a "generic national newspaper". It made sense for places like 'delivery to hotel rooms' where the audience wanted a general national/global news product, but didn't need the 50% of the paper that was local school board meetings and classified ads. With that principle, I always figured that the endgame of the Gannet company would be to make their local papers USA Today with a small local supplement folded in. Maybe the same applies online-- you'll buy usatoday.com for national news, and also subscribe to a local rag. Over time, the local papers may scale back the national/global/wire service stuff.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    Interestingly, at least for a while (and maybe still in some papers) Gannet used to do the opposite -- they would tuck in a condensed version of "USA Today" into the local papers they owned.

watwut 5y ago

Wouldnt it be anti competitive? The good thing about capitalism is supposed to be competition of products and prices. The cartel/monopoly thing destroys that.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Hm, it's a good question. There's precedent in Hulu (which is another thing I was thinking of), wherein a bunch of the major TV networks got together to create a consolidated outlet. Or the International Tribune.

Pandabob 5y ago

I’d gladly pay for 5-6 digital news subscriptions for $10 per month each. What’s harder to justify for me are the multiple 30-40$ per month subscriptions for sites like FT, Bloomberg and the Information.

wrycoder 5y ago

Normal rate for WSJ is around $40 per month. The starter rate is $20. If you try to cancel, they will renew at the starter rate.

jimmaswell 5y ago

I can't imagine actually paying for access to online articles beyond maybe 25 cents for a week's worth like a newspaper, at most. Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly? Especially with the quality of modern mainstream journalism being what it is.

demadog 5y ago
I subscribe to The NY Times because I like reading their articles and I hit the paywall and I find they have some stories no one else does. “Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly?” -> The Times reported a total of 7.8 million subscribers across both print and digital platforms, with 6.9 million coming for online news or its Cooking and Games apps. The company added 301,000 digital customers for the first three months of the year…” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/business/media/nyt-new-york-times-earnings-q1-2021.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/business/media/nyt-new-yo...

demadog 5y ago

Those who can afford multiple subscriptions will, and those who can’t will choose just one. There’s a market for good paid content and there has been for 400+ years. Substack is valued at close to $1B because people will pay for good writing.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago

> Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Agreed. And furthermore, why haven't TV/film streaming services also not realised this. Is it because it isn't true? Do people really pay for Disney+, Netflix, and Hulu all at the same time?

Aditya_Garg 5y ago
Most people I know account share. One person gets Netflix, one person gets Hulu etc.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
The content on streaming services isn't a direct substitute in the same way. The Witcher isn't Game of Thrones. The news is the news. Sure some people have specific writers they like, but it's a lot easier to just read a different paper.

rakshazi 5y ago

there is a coil.com as example of such subscription and it even integrated in imgur, twitch and some other services. Never used it, tho. I prefer reading HN comments instead of articles, because news nowadays is huge longrid with only ~10% of usable information in it. I'm not ready to pay $10 for such thing, IMO.