11 ms·

It's hypocritical for people here to dismay about the fall of print journalism and long-form writing, when every article from a paid source is followed by a htt

It's hypocritical for people here to dismay about the fall of print journalism and long-form writing, when every article from a paid source is followed by a https://archive.is/xyz https://archive.is/xyz link.

triyambakam 3y ago
I'm not convinced. I would gladly pay per article but I don't want a subscription. I noticed this on Canva. I wanted to use a non-free resource there and I was able to just buy it without subscribing. How awesome.
- jrumbut 3y ago
  The incentives of paying per article aren't great though. Instead of one article covering a school board meeting it gets split into one article per speaking, an article in cover why the meeting happened, an article on when they'll meet next, one interviewing the attendees, etc. It's a tricky problem.
  - throwawaylinux 3y ago
    A farmer could also sell their apples cut in progressively smaller pieces. Produce worse articles, get less money and customers for them.
    - jrumbut 3y ago
      The thing about that, is that a lot of farmers own their farms. It takes many years to create a new orchard and there's only so much land suitable for the purpose. New content vendors can spring up over night, even ones doing real news or expensive trips or whatever National Geographic (or any other outlet) is into these days. And now these writers don't even have the miniscule security of at-will employment. They are going to respond readily to incentives because there is nothing tethering them to a way of doing business. They have no anchor so they will sail any way the wind blows. When you have the security of actually owning land and equipment or having an employment contract you can sit back and think about stuff like professionalism and integrity. As it is, fewer writers are in the position to turn down demands that they churn out crappy little dopamine hits as fast as possible.
      - throwawaylinux 3y ago
        > The thing about that, is that a lot of farmers own their farms. It takes many years to create a new orchard and there's only so much land suitable for the purpose. I don't know why you say that is the thing about that, or what the implications of it being the thing are. Substitute farms and apples for any product or service. A candy bar or a bottle of beer.
        jrumbut 3y ago
        I am saying you can't substitute any product or service. The way that a product or service is produced is relevant. I'm producing free content that's competing for your attention with National Geographic right now. If I wanted to make a beer that competed with your favorite beer it would take months (at least) and a substantial investment before the first bottle arrived at a store near you. Additionally, competition has different effects on different products. You can compete with educational content by making content that is more educational. You can also compete with it by making content that is less educational but more fun. The specifics really matter here.
        throwawaylinux 3y ago
        And I'm saying you can. Splitting up articles is pretty equivalent to watering down beer or making smaller candy bars or selling apples in quarters for the purpose of this.
Panzer04 3y ago
It's unfortunate - the issue is in the age of the internet people read news from many different sources. Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader. I'm surprised there hasn't been some kind of payment aggregator for news - eg. pay some amount for articles from a number of different sources. I imagine there's some business reason that has prevented such a thing from being introduced.
- dilippkumar 3y ago
  > Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader. I used to subscribe to The Information. They had really high quality content consistently. But then they got greedy and introduced an even more expensive plan and moved a bunch of features to that more expensive plan, and what’s left in the lower tier (but still hundreds of $$) subscription is kinda crap. I’m not sure I want to renew my subscription this year.
  - ryanSrich 3y ago
    I noticed a decrease in the quality of their content as well. I did the entry level deal back when they offered 3 months for a $1 (I think that was the price - you used to be able to find it in Jessica’s Twitter bio). I got hooked and bought an annual subscription. But after they jacked the price up, and also started writing content that felt a bit too opinionated I bailed.
  - whakim 3y ago
    I used to work at The Information. The owners are extremely wealthy, and were constantly pushing to charge more, more, more. The recent subscription changes didn't surprise me in the slightest.
- HDMI_Cable 3y ago
  One good idea I've had (that anyone here is welcome to take, I'm not going to attempt it) is a sort of micro-payments model for news. Like, for example, if I want to read an article from NYT, through some sort of browser extension, I pay them a small fee (let's say 5 cents) for access to that article with no ads. Each website can set their own 'fee' to read their articles, and at the end of the month I can 'settle' the bill with the extension. Either that, or I pay some flat fee to the service and they pay articles a flat fee, like Spotify.
Forgeties79 3y ago
I use archive often to avoid links breaking tbh
jrflowers 3y ago
I like those links because it lets me read stuff that I would never, ever in a million years have paid to read.
osigurdson 3y ago
I can’t see why a Spotify like model wouldn’t work for text. Buy a monthly subscription, read as much as you want, and have the monthly fee distributed pro rata.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  The Spotify model doesn't really work for music though, unless you're a mega star who probably doesn't need the money. While something is better than nothing, but I don't think Spotify pays the bills for most artists, especially when the pot is not evenly distributed.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Who are we talking about here? More total money is spent on music now due to spotify. And the money has never been that widely distributed. What small artists did better before Spotify?
    - llbeansandrice 3y ago
      It’s not viable for journalism bc music artists have other avenues of revenue like touring and merch. The point is that even Taylor Swift doesn’t make very much money from Spotify. What other sources of revenue does journalism have? It’s not like the NYT is going to make a few million going on tour.
      - osigurdson 3y ago
        Spotify has a lot of revenues with millions of users at $10 - $20 per month. Perhaps they give very little to artists but I’m not sure it is necessary to operate. If artists had no other ways to make money, I suspect they would pay more as otherwise the system wouldn’t work.
    - osigurdson 3y ago
      I agree. I spend far more that I used to because of the option to listen to anything I want.
autoexec 3y ago
print journalism and what passes for articles on the internet are very different things. Our family had a subscription to the magazine for generations. Great stories by actual journalists and amazing photos from people who traveled the globe to catch them. I don't see a lot of archive.is links here leading to websites where globetrotting journalists are capturing the imagination of millions of people. I see a lot of badly edited articles about tweets though. Not that everything behind an archive.is link is trash, but it is very very different. It seems like a lot of quality paper publications wanted to get into the whole online thing and the quality didn't survive the transition. Maybe because the medium doesn't allow for it. People don't interact with websites the same way. Maybe low effort content made enough ad money that companies just shifted their attention there instead.
cybersol 3y ago
Am I the only one who would pay micro transaction fees to read specific high quality articles? I guess so since so many companies just died instead of trying that model.
- marttt 3y ago
  In my (Tiny East European) country, all the main outlets have tried this. Eventually, one had to pay close to the price of a whole printed issue to read a single article online. By now, essentially all outlets have ditched this model, pushing readers towards monthly subscriptions. Might be different in the US, considering its scope, but around here, this "buy me a coffee" type model just doesn't seem to work.
ramraj07 3y ago
I can authoritatively say that the business model sucks as well. They have to be tripping to think I’ll pay the amounts any of these subscriptions ask for. Pretty much every publication should ask for a third of what they do if they want to even justify the value they provide in this day and age. I have continued to pay for my nytimes subscription because they never stopped my student discount. I’m perfectly happy with the value nytimes gives me for 4 bucks a month. I’d not pay 10 though. But I use nytimes a lot. Any other publication dare not ask more than a buck a month.
zagrebian 3y ago
It should be noted that in National Geographic’s case, all content that is included in the print magazine is also available completely for free on the website. I still pay for the print magazine because the reading experience is better. I guess I’m old school. The latest issue: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/issue/june-2023 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/issue/june-2023
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  The very first article in that link is pay walled
  - vuln 3y ago
    The first 5 articles!
  - zagrebian 3y ago
    Hm, nothing is paywalled for me. I’ve been reading articles on both my laptop and phone while not signed in. I guess the paywall is applied only to some countries.
bluepod4 3y ago
Correct. Also hypocritical when the title trolls come out of the woodworks and people upvote them.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  What's a title troll?
  - bluepod4 3y ago
    Someone must know what I mean, hence the downvote lol
  - lifeonlars 3y ago
    Someone who reads the title and posts flamebait based on it without reading the article or knowing what the more interesting aspects of it might be.
    - bluepod4 3y ago
      Yep.
wolpoli 3y ago
I was under the impression that historically, ads inside newspapers and magazines paid the bills, not subscription revenue.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Historically, (roughly), ads paid for the newspaper content and subscriptions (and newsstand sales) paid for the physical paper and distribution. But advertising rates have also gone way down (and classified ads, which were a huge money-maker, are basically gone) so it's not really comparable.
vuln 3y ago
I’m not paying for the clickbait, mate.
makestuff 3y ago
Yeah people hate ads, and are tired of having a monthly subscription to everything. The aggregators where you pay per article never seem to catch on. I really don’t know what the solution is for people who like to read several different news sources. Back in the day the paper worked since you only subscribed to that one news paper, but no one can afford to subscribe to cnn, Bloomberg, nat geo, CNBC, etc…
- jmharvey 3y ago
  As I recall, back in the day (90s) my family subscribed to a regional daily paper, a local weekly paper, National Geographic, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, Smithsonian magazine, various kids magazines depending on age (e.g. Highlights, Boys Life, etc), MIT Technology Review, and a few industry-specific publications. In addition to that, we'd frequently stop by a newsstand or bookstore to pick up other periodicals if there was an article we were interested in, or if we had extra time to read that week. The idea of halcyon days when all you needed was a single subscription is a myth. If you wanted regional news plus some pool reports from Washington, Wall Street, and somewhere in Europe, then sure, a single subscription would do. But if you liked to read several different news sources, you paid for several different news sources.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Will corroborate; family was subscribed to many newspapers and magazines when I was a kid. NatGeo included. They all slowly got culled, though. Why? Because the content kept getting worse, and when it came time to deliberately renew one it simply wasn't worth the effort nor the money. People don't pay for journalism because journalism went to shit.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      > People don't pay for journalism because journalism went It's a vicious circle really.
rebeccaskinner 3y ago
I have yet to find a publisher who offers an ad-and-tracking free subscription tier, and I don't pay for ads.
tshaddox 3y ago
That’s because this is a link aggregator website where you share a link and people discuss the content at that link.
gcanyon 3y ago
- Bookstores - Encyclopedias - Newspapers - Radio - Television - Cable TV And dozens (hundreds) of other industries have been/are being consumed by the internet/computer technology. We can miss them, wish them to continue, but change is inevitable.
hulitu 3y ago
I don't read paywalled news either on HN or on other sites except one weekly volumn. Why i don't pay for it ? Because the rest of the newspaper is filled with propaganda crap, so it is not worth it. National geographic is this magazine writing about exotic people and places. Too bad the exotic people and places are destroyed to maximize profits.
Dalewyn 3y ago
[flagged]
- sofixa 3y ago
  > woke Define woke please, because I struggle to make a link between "woke" and the examples you shared about European folk tales and Nigerian stories. And it's not like it's something new, I remember reading about some Amazonian tribe's folklore as a kid in National Geographic.
  - martin8412 3y ago
    Well, in this particular case, it's European folk tales put into a different context by some Nigerian artist. It would probably be more suitable for an art magazine. There's nothing about Nigerian folk tales in it. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/yagazie-emezi-nigeria-fairy-tales https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/yagazie-e...
runamok 3y ago
I mean how would one rtfa to be able to discuss it cogently on a news aggregator site like this? Do you subscribe to a dozen news sources behind paywalls? I had a natgeo sub for years growing up. I really wish micro payments were a thing where I could pay $20 a month and not hit upteen paywalls and they would all get a piece of that monthly cost.
silverpepsi 3y ago
Am I the only one? I read news very casually, when I hit a paywall I just walk away. I checked so many times, and no one ever offers it within my parameters Would gladly pay $1 or do a 5 pack for $5-6 with a 1year use expiration. They usually want $5 for one article or else expire credits in a month and charge $9. Just makes no sense to me, I'll get a pay per view rental on Amazon instead with my money and be entertained for 2 full hours. (I don't have Netflix or similar.)
matheusmoreira 3y ago
You mean the biased, agenda-pushing traditional media? I'm not paying a cent to be influenced by propaganda. If anything, they should pay me to read their crap if they want me to be influenced by it. The fall of these "journalists" will be a net good for the world.

triyambakam 3y ago

I'm not convinced. I would gladly pay per article but I don't want a subscription. I noticed this on Canva. I wanted to use a non-free resource there and I was able to just buy it without subscribing. How awesome.

jrumbut 3y ago
The incentives of paying per article aren't great though. Instead of one article covering a school board meeting it gets split into one article per speaking, an article in cover why the meeting happened, an article on when they'll meet next, one interviewing the attendees, etc. It's a tricky problem.
- throwawaylinux 3y ago
  A farmer could also sell their apples cut in progressively smaller pieces. Produce worse articles, get less money and customers for them.
  - jrumbut 3y ago
    The thing about that, is that a lot of farmers own their farms. It takes many years to create a new orchard and there's only so much land suitable for the purpose. New content vendors can spring up over night, even ones doing real news or expensive trips or whatever National Geographic (or any other outlet) is into these days. And now these writers don't even have the miniscule security of at-will employment. They are going to respond readily to incentives because there is nothing tethering them to a way of doing business. They have no anchor so they will sail any way the wind blows. When you have the security of actually owning land and equipment or having an employment contract you can sit back and think about stuff like professionalism and integrity. As it is, fewer writers are in the position to turn down demands that they churn out crappy little dopamine hits as fast as possible.
    - throwawaylinux 3y ago
      > The thing about that, is that a lot of farmers own their farms. It takes many years to create a new orchard and there's only so much land suitable for the purpose. I don't know why you say that is the thing about that, or what the implications of it being the thing are. Substitute farms and apples for any product or service. A candy bar or a bottle of beer.
      - jrumbut 3y ago
        I am saying you can't substitute any product or service. The way that a product or service is produced is relevant. I'm producing free content that's competing for your attention with National Geographic right now. If I wanted to make a beer that competed with your favorite beer it would take months (at least) and a substantial investment before the first bottle arrived at a store near you. Additionally, competition has different effects on different products. You can compete with educational content by making content that is more educational. You can also compete with it by making content that is less educational but more fun. The specifics really matter here.
        throwawaylinux 3y ago
        And I'm saying you can. Splitting up articles is pretty equivalent to watering down beer or making smaller candy bars or selling apples in quarters for the purpose of this.

Panzer04 3y ago

It's unfortunate - the issue is in the age of the internet people read news from many different sources. Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader. I'm surprised there hasn't been some kind of payment aggregator for news - eg. pay some amount for articles from a number of different sources. I imagine there's some business reason that has prevented such a thing from being introduced.

dilippkumar 3y ago
> Subscribing to a single source just isn't worth it unless you are a truly regular reader. I used to subscribe to The Information. They had really high quality content consistently. But then they got greedy and introduced an even more expensive plan and moved a bunch of features to that more expensive plan, and what’s left in the lower tier (but still hundreds of $$) subscription is kinda crap. I’m not sure I want to renew my subscription this year.
- ryanSrich 3y ago
  I noticed a decrease in the quality of their content as well. I did the entry level deal back when they offered 3 months for a $1 (I think that was the price - you used to be able to find it in Jessica’s Twitter bio). I got hooked and bought an annual subscription. But after they jacked the price up, and also started writing content that felt a bit too opinionated I bailed.
- whakim 3y ago
  I used to work at The Information. The owners are extremely wealthy, and were constantly pushing to charge more, more, more. The recent subscription changes didn't surprise me in the slightest.
HDMI_Cable 3y ago
One good idea I've had (that anyone here is welcome to take, I'm not going to attempt it) is a sort of micro-payments model for news. Like, for example, if I want to read an article from NYT, through some sort of browser extension, I pay them a small fee (let's say 5 cents) for access to that article with no ads. Each website can set their own 'fee' to read their articles, and at the end of the month I can 'settle' the bill with the extension. Either that, or I pay some flat fee to the service and they pay articles a flat fee, like Spotify.

Forgeties79 3y ago

I use archive often to avoid links breaking tbh

jrflowers 3y ago

I like those links because it lets me read stuff that I would never, ever in a million years have paid to read.

osigurdson 3y ago

I can’t see why a Spotify like model wouldn’t work for text. Buy a monthly subscription, read as much as you want, and have the monthly fee distributed pro rata.

candiddevmike 3y ago
The Spotify model doesn't really work for music though, unless you're a mega star who probably doesn't need the money. While something is better than nothing, but I don't think Spotify pays the bills for most artists, especially when the pot is not evenly distributed.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Who are we talking about here? More total money is spent on music now due to spotify. And the money has never been that widely distributed. What small artists did better before Spotify?
  - llbeansandrice 3y ago
    It’s not viable for journalism bc music artists have other avenues of revenue like touring and merch. The point is that even Taylor Swift doesn’t make very much money from Spotify. What other sources of revenue does journalism have? It’s not like the NYT is going to make a few million going on tour.
    - osigurdson 3y ago
      Spotify has a lot of revenues with millions of users at $10 - $20 per month. Perhaps they give very little to artists but I’m not sure it is necessary to operate. If artists had no other ways to make money, I suspect they would pay more as otherwise the system wouldn’t work.
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    I agree. I spend far more that I used to because of the option to listen to anything I want.

autoexec 3y ago

print journalism and what passes for articles on the internet are very different things. Our family had a subscription to the magazine for generations. Great stories by actual journalists and amazing photos from people who traveled the globe to catch them. I don't see a lot of archive.is links here leading to websites where globetrotting journalists are capturing the imagination of millions of people. I see a lot of badly edited articles about tweets though. Not that everything behind an archive.is link is trash, but it is very very different. It seems like a lot of quality paper publications wanted to get into the whole online thing and the quality didn't survive the transition. Maybe because the medium doesn't allow for it. People don't interact with websites the same way. Maybe low effort content made enough ad money that companies just shifted their attention there instead.

cybersol 3y ago

Am I the only one who would pay micro transaction fees to read specific high quality articles? I guess so since so many companies just died instead of trying that model.

marttt 3y ago
In my (Tiny East European) country, all the main outlets have tried this. Eventually, one had to pay close to the price of a whole printed issue to read a single article online. By now, essentially all outlets have ditched this model, pushing readers towards monthly subscriptions. Might be different in the US, considering its scope, but around here, this "buy me a coffee" type model just doesn't seem to work.

ramraj07 3y ago

I can authoritatively say that the business model sucks as well. They have to be tripping to think I’ll pay the amounts any of these subscriptions ask for. Pretty much every publication should ask for a third of what they do if they want to even justify the value they provide in this day and age. I have continued to pay for my nytimes subscription because they never stopped my student discount. I’m perfectly happy with the value nytimes gives me for 4 bucks a month. I’d not pay 10 though. But I use nytimes a lot. Any other publication dare not ask more than a buck a month.

zagrebian 3y ago

It should be noted that in National Geographic’s case, all content that is included in the print magazine is also available completely for free on the website. I still pay for the print magazine because the reading experience is better. I guess I’m old school. The latest issue: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/issue/june-2023 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/issue/june-2023

nonethewiser 3y ago
The very first article in that link is pay walled
- vuln 3y ago
  The first 5 articles!
- zagrebian 3y ago
  Hm, nothing is paywalled for me. I’ve been reading articles on both my laptop and phone while not signed in. I guess the paywall is applied only to some countries.

bluepod4 3y ago

Correct. Also hypocritical when the title trolls come out of the woodworks and people upvote them.

khazhoux 3y ago
What's a title troll?
- bluepod4 3y ago
  Someone must know what I mean, hence the downvote lol
- lifeonlars 3y ago
  Someone who reads the title and posts flamebait based on it without reading the article or knowing what the more interesting aspects of it might be.
  - bluepod4 3y ago
    Yep.

wolpoli 3y ago

I was under the impression that historically, ads inside newspapers and magazines paid the bills, not subscription revenue.

ghaff 3y ago
Historically, (roughly), ads paid for the newspaper content and subscriptions (and newsstand sales) paid for the physical paper and distribution. But advertising rates have also gone way down (and classified ads, which were a huge money-maker, are basically gone) so it's not really comparable.

vuln 3y ago

I’m not paying for the clickbait, mate.

makestuff 3y ago

Yeah people hate ads, and are tired of having a monthly subscription to everything. The aggregators where you pay per article never seem to catch on. I really don’t know what the solution is for people who like to read several different news sources. Back in the day the paper worked since you only subscribed to that one news paper, but no one can afford to subscribe to cnn, Bloomberg, nat geo, CNBC, etc…

jmharvey 3y ago
As I recall, back in the day (90s) my family subscribed to a regional daily paper, a local weekly paper, National Geographic, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, Smithsonian magazine, various kids magazines depending on age (e.g. Highlights, Boys Life, etc), MIT Technology Review, and a few industry-specific publications. In addition to that, we'd frequently stop by a newsstand or bookstore to pick up other periodicals if there was an article we were interested in, or if we had extra time to read that week. The idea of halcyon days when all you needed was a single subscription is a myth. If you wanted regional news plus some pool reports from Washington, Wall Street, and somewhere in Europe, then sure, a single subscription would do. But if you liked to read several different news sources, you paid for several different news sources.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Will corroborate; family was subscribed to many newspapers and magazines when I was a kid. NatGeo included. They all slowly got culled, though. Why? Because the content kept getting worse, and when it came time to deliberately renew one it simply wasn't worth the effort nor the money. People don't pay for journalism because journalism went to shit.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > People don't pay for journalism because journalism went It's a vicious circle really.

rebeccaskinner 3y ago

I have yet to find a publisher who offers an ad-and-tracking free subscription tier, and I don't pay for ads.

tshaddox 3y ago

That’s because this is a link aggregator website where you share a link and people discuss the content at that link.

gcanyon 3y ago

- Bookstores - Encyclopedias - Newspapers - Radio - Television - Cable TV And dozens (hundreds) of other industries have been/are being consumed by the internet/computer technology. We can miss them, wish them to continue, but change is inevitable.

hulitu 3y ago

I don't read paywalled news either on HN or on other sites except one weekly volumn. Why i don't pay for it ? Because the rest of the newspaper is filled with propaganda crap, so it is not worth it. National geographic is this magazine writing about exotic people and places. Too bad the exotic people and places are destroyed to maximize profits.

Dalewyn 3y ago

[flagged]

sofixa 3y ago
> woke Define woke please, because I struggle to make a link between "woke" and the examples you shared about European folk tales and Nigerian stories. And it's not like it's something new, I remember reading about some Amazonian tribe's folklore as a kid in National Geographic.
- martin8412 3y ago
  Well, in this particular case, it's European folk tales put into a different context by some Nigerian artist. It would probably be more suitable for an art magazine. There's nothing about Nigerian folk tales in it. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/yagazie-emezi-nigeria-fairy-tales https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/yagazie-e...

runamok 3y ago

I mean how would one rtfa to be able to discuss it cogently on a news aggregator site like this? Do you subscribe to a dozen news sources behind paywalls? I had a natgeo sub for years growing up. I really wish micro payments were a thing where I could pay $20 a month and not hit upteen paywalls and they would all get a piece of that monthly cost.

silverpepsi 3y ago

Am I the only one? I read news very casually, when I hit a paywall I just walk away. I checked so many times, and no one ever offers it within my parameters Would gladly pay $1 or do a 5 pack for $5-6 with a 1year use expiration. They usually want $5 for one article or else expire credits in a month and charge $9. Just makes no sense to me, I'll get a pay per view rental on Amazon instead with my money and be entertained for 2 full hours. (I don't have Netflix or similar.)

matheusmoreira 3y ago

You mean the biased, agenda-pushing traditional media? I'm not paying a cent to be influenced by propaganda. If anything, they should pay me to read their crap if they want me to be influenced by it. The fall of these "journalists" will be a net good for the world.