6 ms·

What is the problem with news? Why aren't people willing to pay for it?

• imzadi 3y ago
  I don't think the issue is that people aren't willing to pay for it. The problem is, there aren't currently good options for paying for it. If I go to a news site and it is paywalled, I just leave. I am not going to subscribe to every single newspaper. If I could easily pay for today's paper (not an individual news story or a full subscription) without giving up all my persona info, I would probably buy 2 - 3 papers a day from various sources.
  • alistairSH 3y ago
    $40/year for the WaPo and you can pay with PayPal or Apple. You don’t give them any more money than any other online vendor.
    • bawolff 3y ago
      That price point seems high. For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.
      • lupire 3y ago
        It is high because most people don't want to pay for a share of news. They'd rather watch TV, and not even the best TV. If you want the best, you need to pay for Max and Disney and Apple and Amazon and the rest.
        • bawolff 3y ago
          And if you want the best news you have to pay for more than WaPo. Besides, if you actually like to read why would you be buying washington post? People who like to read usually aren't going into 5 minute long shallow articles, they are getting a book on the topic.
      • dhfbshfbu4u3 3y ago
        I guess if you don’t read that is true.
      • alistairSH 3y ago
        That’s the plan with ads. If you don’t want to sit through annoying ads, it’s $180/year. Either way, producing quality journalism costs money. And I’m ok paying a reasonable fee for it. :shrug:
        • bawolff 3y ago
          Yes, but creating tv/movie is much much more expensive.
• ca7 3y ago
  I'm not willing to pay for someone else's slanted takes. There are websites that provide that for free (e.g. Reddit).
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    Yeah lots of people don't really want to just read the news, they want to discuss it. Most people on reddit have stopped opening news article links entirely since there's always a comment or two that summarize it without having to wade through the sludge of ads and autoplaying videos, or worse, wasting your time reading the first sentence and then getting hit by a paywall. News sites are one of the most user hostile places on the internet.
• aetherson 3y ago
  Because people don't value it. I mean, seriously, that's the reason. Back when newspapers were healthy, basically there was all this stuff that was bundled with the actual news that was of more immediate utility to people: classifieds, movie reviews, comics, coupons. And there was less competition for people's leisure time. News is now in a very competitive leisure time landscape and is debundled from stuff that's of high value, and most people just don't care that much about news. They'll read it when it's around but they won't pay for it. The ones who are willing to pay for it mostly just subscribe to the New York Times because in a nationalized news environment why not go for the biggest producer.
  • internetter 3y ago
    Completely agree with all this, though my take away is that there's a big vicious cycle of adblockers and paywalls where they keep getting worse. I can't afford to subscribe to every newspaper I read. All the local (and smaller national) papers should unionize and make one subscription for something like $20 a month
    • adrr 3y ago
      Isn't that apple news+?
      • whycome 3y ago
        The publishers didn't do that and it's Apple-only.
        • internetter 3y ago
          And you still see ads
          • paulcole 3y ago
            There’s nothing wrong with paying for content and still seeing ads.
• reissbaker 3y ago
  Journalism quality has tanked, and social media acts as some degree of (free+fast) competition, furthering the death spiral.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question. Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of random people on the interwebs. Race to publish before competition means there's no time for editorial review of simple things like grammar and coherent thoughts let alone accuracy, so lots of FUD can be spread very quickly as "news". Those well thought out articles are also considered too long and boring and get reposted on socials as TL;DR as if it were their own thoughts. We used to make fun of the microwave generation with "I want it now" type comments. Now, it's I need it in less than 140chars, or I'm scrolling past it. The death spiral you describe is like a train wreck that you can do nothing about.
    • whycome 3y ago
      The most infuriating thing is that an article can take absolutely any stance on an issue simply by cherry picking tweets to go along with it. News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the funny thing about this payment arrangement that publishers want is that they are not paying any of those tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves curating the info.
      • dylan604 3y ago
        Why would you pay someone for a tweet? They posted it for free. Collecting tweets isn't journalism. Asking the user for more than 140 chars about what they are witnessing along with multiple others would then be closer to journalism. Tweets are just people self identifying who journalists could be interviewing. The interview allows for follow up to the tweet.
• philipkglass 3y ago
  Facts are not copyrightable, so the meat of a story spreads quickly and with very little money changing hands. One subscriber to the Los Angeles Times can legally and immediately share the factual essence of an article via social media, personal web site, email, or anything else. From there it can be reshared indefinitely. Only people who really want to read the original reporting in full will pay to subscribe to the LA Times. There used to be regional/temporal barriers in place before the Web was popular; newspapers had geographically limited distribution and it took time to print a new edition. One newspaper "scooping" another by one day was all it took to get people to buy the one-day-earlier publication. Also, 20th century newspapers collected significant revenue from classified advertising, people buying the paper just to get a weather forecast, and other kinds of information distribution that really didn't have anything to do with investigative news. The Web unbundled all that (weather.gov, Craigslist, etc.) and the only remaining strength of newspapers was producing original reporting. Which, unfortunately, was never all that profitable on its own even before you get to the "facts are not copyrightable" issue that I mentioned in my first paragraph.
  • nickpsecurity 3y ago
    “Facts are not copyrightable” Does anyone have any good pages on that which go into how to extract facts without copyright infringement? And for purposes of creating independent, educational works from those facts?
    • Alpha3031 3y ago
      Sure. Copyright is something that Wikipedia has to deal with, so there's a guide for contributors (which also links to the article on the relevant legal doctrine) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing#Substantial_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing#S...
• bawolff 3y ago
  The value proposition in the internet age is too low to demand the price neccessary to support it. This created a race to the bottom in order to keep the lights on. This further degraded the value of the product. This caused people to value it less, and so on. The end result is reputable news sites became clickbait and eventually people stopped caring. There is still a market for in depth journalism, and we see a rise in that sort of things. There are plenty of youtube channels doing documentary-like videos on current events. That is journalism. The journalism that is dying is the stuff concentrating on breaking news. If its shallow its outcompeted by twitter. If its higher quality but still racing to the headline, its outcompeted by wikipedia. The fact is the competitors to breaking news journalism are cheaper and higher quality.
• CM30 3y ago
  In simple terms; lots of competition and much of it is free. If you want basic breaking news, it's all over social media (often from the news sites themselves). If you want sports, tech, gaming, music, entertainment, art or other hobby style news, it's literally on two million websites and forums and YouTube channels specifically made for that one topic, and usually done better than in a newspaper. So while you could say a decent chunk of the replacement content is worse than what traditional news outlets could offer, it's at least free and exists by the bucket load, meaning the incentive for paying for it is nonexistent for most of the population. Meanwhile the more niche stuff is both free and done better elsewhere, so RIP anyone making money off that anymore. To make things tougher, getting advertisers to pay for it is becoming a lost cause too, since again, they can advertise in places where metrics and tracking options are better. They'll get way more bang for their buck on social media than they will trying to market on a news site or in a classifieds section or what not.
• bombcar 3y ago
  Because as much as people like to pretend different, news is a form of entertainment. Everyone loves reading stories that confirm everything they already know. Big real news spreads like wildfire, but news as it is consumed is entertainment.
• scelerat 3y ago
  I think very few people ever "paid for news" -- the newsroom of most publications have always been highly subsidized by advertising and classifieds, and perhaps newstand sales. Google (and others) and Craigslist (and others) quickly dominated advertising and classifieds in the early 2000s, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper on a train
  • jrpt 3y ago
    The circulation subscriptions were a substantial part of their revenue, however you're right that ads were even larger. I don't think it's fair to say few people ever paid for it though. Subscriptions were important too.
• jrpt 3y ago
  I think a lot of people are willing to pay for journalism, but it has to be journalism above and beyond the basic info that you can get for free online. The basic news is commoditized and freely available online, and that's what a lot of traditional newspapers are competing with. However, paid industry journalism like The Information is something people are willing to pay for - or get their companies to pay for at least. Also, I think traditional newspapers should position themselves so they're not competing with the lowest common denominator of basic info, however due to cutbacks, most newspapers are in essence not doing very much in depth journalism anymore, which means they are unfortunately positioning themselves as competing with any other source of news.
• CivBase 3y ago
  Many people are willing to pay for news. Enough that it will keep coming in excess. Just not enough to sustain the scale and production values of yesteryear. Plenty of independent journalists are out there doing just fine and even some of the big outlets have adjusted effectively. But in the internet age we don't need hundreds of outlets all reporting on the same stories 24/7 - especially when most of those stories have no impact on the viewers/readers. The market is simply adjusting and the old establishment is going down kicking and screaming.